VW

I don’t know if China is going to invade Taiwan, but I can’t help but notice all the people who said Russia wasn’t going to invade Ukraine in 2022 and then shrugged or justified it when it did are saying China won’t attack or shrugging and justifying it now.

If a lobby can buy an election, it's not a democracy, period. And if an evil lobby can buy an election, it's far worse than any form of autocracy. Let that sink in.

The FT Weekend thesis was essentially that humanity is becoming more antisocial & narcissistic & that is all thanks to the rise of social media & increasing digitalization of life. So shut it off. If you spend your weekend looking at your phone & social media, you are divorced from reality & becoming more antisocial.

Countries get the cabinets they pay for. Singapore pays its Foreign Minister about S$1.1m, around US$800,000. The salary is benchmarked to 60% of the median income of the top 1,000 Singaporean earners. That is why you can get Vivian Balakrishnan, former eye surgeon and hospital chief executive, implementing @karpathy's external brain idea (link below). The speech shows deep understanding of AI and fills one with confidence about Singapore's future. The UK Foreign Secretary earns roughly £165,000: the MP salary plus a ministerial salary of about £67,000. The ministerial part is frozen since the crisis and is down by roughly a third in real terms since 2010. This is what a junior Magic Circle lawyer earns. Spain pays its ministers around €85,000. So you do not get a surgeon who has run hospitals. You get a party loyalist who has never run anything.

The biggest myth is that China plays the long game and "think in terms of centuries". Just to name a few recent counter-examples: the disastrous one-child policy, abrupt ending of COVID-zero, and the crack-down on tech firms.

No smoking gun, but the preponderance of evidence points to smartphones, not economics, as the culprit for the global drop in fertility: • In the US and UK, births fell first and fastest in areas that got 4G earliest • Birth rates were stable in the US, UK and Australia until 2007; in France and Poland until 2009; in Mexico and Indonesia until 2012; in Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal until 2013-15 Each of these inflection points matches local smartphone adoption (see picture). • The younger the age group, the sharper the drop. • in-person socialising among young adults is dropping. In SK, by 50% in 20 years • Sexual dysfunction is higher among heavy social media user • Effect is largest in culturally traditional societies — Middle East, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa • Decline holds across countries hit hard by GFC 2008 and those not hit, fast-growing and not growing. Excellent again @jburnmurdoch. ft.com/content/fba35e…

Ladies and gentlemen, the revenge of the PIGS officially begins - France's 10Y yields are now higher than Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain.

Can we all just admit that trump is being outplayed by every other leader across the globe and the United States has become a laughing stock as a result?

President Xi giving Trump rose seeds after him and Melania destroyed the White House rose garden with a giant concrete slab is unbelievably petty and I love it.

Ground beef just hit $7/lb. nationwide. And Trump is talking about selling American farmland to the Chinese government. MAGA is dead. It was a big grift.

BREAKING: Take a look at Trump's trades. You can see a large majority of the millions traded were recently in the new year, and especially after the Iranian war.

Here’s how Trump talks to democracy — and how he talks to authoritarianism. And this man is the President of the United States.

It's almost as if Trump bankrupted American farmers with tariffs just so the Chinese government could buy up the farm land at discounted prices. Hmmm.

I haven't seen anyone mention that El Salvador ditched Bitcoin as an official currency because no one was using it and it was costing them hundreds of millions

The most corrupt administration of all time.

CHINA TRIP RESULTS CHINA GETS: Endless praise, trade concessions, support for purchasing US farmland, 500k student visas, AI chips, Iran oil softening. USA GETS: A Boeing order (non-binding) half the expected size & vague promises to buy soybeans. Art of the Deal?

The Epstein files were legally supposed to be released 146 days ago. If citizens ignored court orders and federal law for 146 days, they’d be in jail. When the government officials do it, nothing happens.

Just to put it out there, but if you sold $59M in non-existant phones and just shrugged, you'd be in jail.

You killed 175 little girls in a double-tap strike meant to kill all survivors. Don't talk to me about God. Your "god" is satan.

You know what the CRAZIEST thing about the Hantavirus is? The Epstein Files are still largely unreleased, heavily redacted and no one has been arrested over them.