Truth | Crypto | Robots & AI | Archeology | Objectivist
Joined December 2014
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Met Freeman retweeted
J’ai entendu dire que la France était finie, qu’il était trop tard pour la sauver.
Mais la France est toujours aussi belle, enviable même. Sa grandeur n’a pas disparu, elle ne demande qu’à renaître.
Nous avons surmonté en un an un problème cent fois plus grave, sans avoir les moyens dont dispose la France.
La France pourrait y arriver en une semaine.
Met Freeman retweeted
Anyone looking at the long-term silver price chart always asks one question: WTF happened in 1980?
The answer is one of the most interesting stories in modern financial history.
Nelson Bunker and William Herbert Hunt accumulated roughly 100 million ounces of silver between 1979 and 1980, driving prices from $6 to $50 per ounce. They believed, correctly, that fiat currency expansion under the Federal Reserve made hard assets the rational hedge. They acted on that belief aggressively and legally.
Washington panicked. Big banks and trading houses simply did not have the silver they sold in the futures market to deliver, and stood to lose an indefinite amount of money. To put it plainly, the Hunt brothers owned most of the physical silver and also owned the futures contracts. To deliver physical silver on the futures date, the firms who sold the futures had to buy it from somewhere, and that somewhere was the Hunt brothers themselves. Checkmate.
Naturally, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Chicago Board of Trade changed the rules mid-game in January 1980, issuing "Silver Rule 7," which restricted new silver futures purchases and forced liquidation of existing positions, forcing the Hunt brothers to sell by law. The exchanges moved the goalposts while the Hunts were already on the field.
Prices collapsed. The Hunts faced margin calls they couldn't meet. On March 27, 1980, silver dropped 50% in a single day, now called "Silver Thursday." The brothers eventually declared bankruptcy in 1988.
The entire apparatus, the CFTC, the Fed, the major banks holding short positions on silver, had direct financial interests in stopping the Hunts. The banks short on silver lobbied the government and got the rules changed in their favor. You never hear that part emphasized.
Property rights mean nothing if regulators can rewrite market rules the moment a private actor threatens well-connected institutions. The Hunt brothers didn't destabilize the monetary system. They exposed how fragile a debt-based system looks when real money starts moving.
H/T to @MiningVisuals for this excellent graphic.
Met Freeman retweeted
I have conducted an audit of Anthropic's finances.
What I have found is so shocking that I am calling for a Congressional investigation.
Anthropic is not just seeking regulatory capture.
It has built a regulatory capture machine that cannot be turned off.
Structural financial incentives make it impossible for Anthropic -- I call it the Anthropic Network -- to turn off its own AI doom cycle.
It starts with METR.
Dario Amodei proposes "third-party evaluators" to assess the risk of Anthropic's models.
He proposes METR for this purpose.
But METR is financially dependent on the Anthropic's success -- specifically, on the explosive growth of more than $7 billion dollars in Anthropic stock.
Dustin Moskovitz invested this stock into Good Ventures Foundation, where it represents the majority of that organization's portfolio.
And GVF is the overwhelming funder of the entire Anthropic Network ecosystem.
This stock was worth $500 million early last year.
It is worth more than $7.7 billion just ~16 months later.
METR -- and all of those building a career its parent organizations -- cannot afford to disrupt that growth.
Because if Anthropic goes under, many of the organizations that fund METR go under as well.
But if Anthropic succeeds, METR and its parent organizations become more richly financed to regulate AI -- something those at METR want very much.
The "third-party evaluator" is not "third-party" at all.
The evaluator is on Anthropic's payroll.
If this were the end of it, that's bad.
But that isn't all.
The same organizations that fund METR also fund the many organizations, such as the Tarbell Center, that promote AI Doom.
The Tarbell Center publishes AI Doom articles in The Verge, Science, LA Times, The Dispatch, TIME, and others.
They are selling the problem, and then selling the solution to the problem -- from the same money pile: Anthropic's.
All of these organizations are financially dependent on the same exploding $7 billion money pile.
As Anthropic grows more and more powerful, its AI Doom Machine grows better and better financed -- louder and louder.
Meanwhile, the regulatory regime seeded in METR grows larger to solve the increasingly loud -- now hysterical -- problem of AI Doom that the Anthropic Network itself created.
From this standpoint, as Anthropic becomes more powerful, AI might be getting scarier, sure -- but the positive feedback loop also becomes more deafening -- independent of objective facts.
This itself is an objective fact.
The deafening AI Doom is part of an business model, that, as it expands, so too does the AI Doom messaging -- there is simply more money to do it.
But the problem also goes in the other direction:
If Anthropic dies, the Regulatory Regime and the AI Doom Machine are crippled or die.
Neither METR nor Tarbell nor the other organizations in the Anthropic Network can allow that to happen.
Hence, neither METR or the AI Doom Machine can be trusted to provide independent assessments of Anthropic's models or AI more broadly.
They simply are not organizations independent of Anthropic.
And Anthropic cannot detach itself from METR or Tarbell or countless other safety orgs (not shown here), either, because they drive hype for the models and the possibility of eventual regulatory capture, and Anthropic will not give that up willingly.
What's more, the people at all of these organizations are all the same ecosystem, the same community. They just shuffle between organizations.
The Anthropic Network is therefore, so long as it is successful, locked into a self-amplifying feedback loop inside an ideological monoculture.
And that feedback loop is winning.
That's what Jacob Coxon is.
China is keeping messaging tight. That is why optimism for AI is so high in China.
America has Anthropic: a massive company pushing anti-AI propaganda at a state level.
Anthropic will either create hysteria until American AI slows down and China wins, or it will create fractures throughout American society with severe political consequences.
Ironically, because of the structural financial incentives underpinning the Anthropic Network, it has become the same kind of self-amplifying virus that it fantasizes AI to become in the future -- while hiding its tracks just as carefully.
It is the mirror of the same AI virus that it hypothesizes to consume America.
Anthropic's business model, models itself after the very thing it claims to fear.
Except Anthropic's ideology infects humans, not computers.
Congress must investigate.
Evidence and Github in next post.
Then some supplementary figures.
Met Freeman retweeted
Reform has just ruled out abolishing inheritance tax.
This is a big mistake.
Restore Britain will abolish it in FULL, for everyone.
We have already published a detailed policy paper setting out why a Restore Britain Government will abolish it, and how we will pay for it.
You work your entire life.
You pay tax on your income. Tax on what you buy. Tax on your investments. Tax on your property.
Tax on EVERYTHING.
You build a family business, a farm, a home or some savings because you want to leave your children something behind.
Then you die. And the state comes back for another slice of it.
I utterly detest it.
We believe in family. We believe that people should be encouraged to work, save, build and provide for the next generation. That is a normal human emotion and it’s one we should all share.
Your life's work belongs to your family. Not the parasitic state.
This is my promise to you today.
A Restore Britain Government will abolish inheritance tax in full, for everybody.
Met Freeman retweeted
JUST IN: Report reveals at least 62,199 people were arrested in Britain for “speech-related offenses” between 2021 & 2025.
Met Freeman retweeted
Every pension system a government controls becomes a government slush fund. This is the historical record, not cynicism.
Argentina's government nationalized $30 billion in private pension assets in 2008, converting workers' individual accounts into state-controlled funds. The official rationale was protection from market volatility. The actual result was that the Kirchner administration gained a captive pool of capital to finance deficit spending. Your retirement savings, transformed into political currency.
Hungary pulled the same move in 2010, effectively confiscating $14 billion from private pension accounts under Viktor Orbán. Poland followed by seizing roughly half of private pension fund assets in 2013 to reduce its reported public debt. These are the predictable endpoint of any arrangement where the state holds custodial authority over your savings, not fringe cases.
The United States did it more slowly. Congress raided Social Security's trust fund beginning in the 1960s, replacing actual assets with government IOUs and spending the cash on discretionary programs. The system now carries $23 trillion in unfunded liabilities. Workers who paid into it for forty years will receive whatever Congress decides to give them: a grant subject to political revision, not enforceable property.
Private ownership means enforceable claim. A pension fund you own contractually cannot be redirected to cover a budget shortfall in Buenos Aires or Budapest. The moment government intermediates between your labor and your retirement capital, political priorities start competing with your financial security. They generally win.
Socialists will do anything within their power to get their dirty paws on your hard-earned money. We should do everything we can to stop them.
Met Freeman retweeted
Sixty-two years and $22 trillion later, the U.S. poverty rate sits at roughly 11 percent, almost identical to where Lyndon Johnson found it in 1964. The government ran the most expensive social experiment in human history and produced nothing measurable. Bureaucracies perpetuate themselves, and this policy worked exactly as designed.
When Washington transfers purchasing power to the poor through SNAP, Medicaid, housing vouchers, and 126 other overlapping programs, it doesn't eliminate scarcity; it relocates decision-making from individuals to administrators. Those administrators develop career interests in perpetuating dependency, because a solved problem eliminates their department.
Free market thinkers identified this perverse incentive structure before Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act. Every dollar taxed from productive activity carries a deadweight cost before it reaches anyone's dinner table.
Capital formation lifts people out of poverty. You build wealth through savings, property rights, and voluntary exchange, none of which $22 trillion in redistributed spending actually produced.
Met Freeman retweeted
Private property is not a Western invention, a capitalist novelty, or a 19th-century philosophical construct. Sumerians were recording property rights on clay tablets in Mesopotamia around 3000 BCE, and the contracts they left behind destroy every collectivist myth about ownership being a recent imposition on some natural communal state.
These tablets documented land sales, grain loans, labor agreements, and inheritance transfers. Specific people owned specific plots. A seller transferred title. A buyer paid silver by weight. Witnesses signed. Merchants and farmers built this system because voluntary exchange requires knowing who owns what before the trade happens.
Clay fired in a kiln lasts millennia. Urukagina of Lagash, around 2350 BCE, recorded protections against officials seizing private property without consent. That is property theory in practice, predating Locke by roughly four thousand years.
Property rights emerge spontaneously from human interaction, not from government charters. Sumer proves the point in baked earth. Every time a politician tells you that unregulated markets are a dangerous modern experiment, you are looking at someone ignorant of the oldest economic documents humanity possesses. Markets did not need permission then. They do not need it now.
Met Freeman retweeted
On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland and started WW2.
The common misconception about the German invasion of Poland is that Germany basically rolled over Poland, which was helpless and unable to defend itself while Great Britain and France are remembered for having declared war on Germany and standing by their Polish ally.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The Polish Army did not “roll over” but inflicted heavy casualties on the invading Germans while drawing them deeper and deeper into Poland, which left Germany completely exposed for a British/French attack, as was the agreed plan between Poland the UK and France.
The whole strategy of Poland in 1939 was based on the fact that the UK and France, which had signed defensive military alliances with Poland prior WW2, were supposed to attack Germany two weeks into the war at the latest.
The Polish strategy was to try to preserve the bulk of its army for this future planned offensive by drawing the German army deeper into Poland.
Once the western allies invaded Germany from the west, the Polish army would switch from defense to offense and the German army would be caught in a pincer maneuver.
If Russia had not invaded Poland in September 17th, Poland would have dragged the fighting for many more weeks if not months.
In many battles Poles held their ground against overwhelming German numbers, the most famous of these was the Battle of Wizna, where a single Polish infantry battalion with some 600 soldiers held out for four days against a whole German army consisting of 42,000 soldiers, almost 400 tanks and hundreds more of artillery and armored vehicles.
The Polish army fought very well, even though it was vastly outnumbered and heavily outgunned.
Just to put things in perspective, the whole budget of the Polish army, came to less then 10% of what the Germans spent on their air force alone.
The Polish army managed to destroy more then one quarter of all German tanks, hundreds of armored cars and the Polish air force managed to shoot down hundreds of Germans planes.
When the war entered its third week the Polish army fielded more then 250,000 troops and was still inflicting heavy casualties on the Germans.
Germany suffered over 60,000 casualties in the Polish campaign while the Poles suffered military losses of around 66,000 soldiers who were either killed or missing in action.
Thanks to Poland, all that was facing the approximately 110 French and British divisions in the West were 23 German divisions, the dregs of the German armed forces.
The French and the British had an almost 5 - 1 manpower advantage, overwhelming air, land and sea superiority and could have been in Berlin in three days time if they attacked.
Alfred Jodl who served as Chief of the Operations Staff of the Wehrmacht High Command throughout the war, stated at the Nuremberg War trials in 1945 that:
“If we did not collapse already in the year 1939 that was due only to the fact that during the Polish campaign, the approximately 110 French and British divisions in the West were held completely inactive against the 23 German divisions.”
But the UK and France chose not to attack a relatively undefended Nazi Germany, and instead backstabbed and sacrificed their Polish ally hoping that it would satisfy Hitler's and Nazi Germany insatiable appetite for conquest and bloodshed.
They were wrong, and the whole world would be made to pay the price for their dishonor and cowardice.
If the British and the French had honored their defensive military alliances with Poland and attacked Germany, Germany would've been defeated already in 1939, tens of millions of lives would have been saved, and the course of European and world history would have changed.
The fact how France and Britain had in effect betrayed Poland, their ally, and allowed Germany to conquer it, had been conveniently forgotten by many and almost airbrushed out of the general historical memory.
Poland did not lose the war because it was defeated by Germany or by the USSR,
but because it was betrayed by Britain and France,
her "allies".
Met Freeman retweeted
North Korea today operates expanding concentration camps holding 80,000-120,000 prisoners.
In the 1950s, Kim Il Sung copied the Soviet Gulag specifically to warehouse anyone the regime decided was a political threat.
Under guilt by association, 3 generations of their family are imprisoned with them.
A UN commission of Inquiry in 2014 compared the scale of extermination, murder, enslavement and torture to that of the Nazis.
The only person known to have ever gotten out is Dong-hyuk who was born into Camp 14 in 1982 to prisoner parents.
Hannah Arendt saw these camps as a mechanism of absolute control that demonstrates the irrelevance of guilt and innocence.
What is remarkable on China’s genocide against the Uyghurs is that both Biden and Trump administrations recognized it as such.
Since 2017, Beijing sent 1-1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims to “vocational training centers” (doublespeak for forced labor camps) without trial.
Leaked docs from China showed the government used mass forced sterilizations to hit birth control targets, children were sent to boarding schools for “reeducation”, operating procedures were designed to control the detainees and prevent their escape, and satellite images showed thousands of mosques destroyed.
The forced labor poured into global cotton and textile supply chains until the US banned the region’s imports in 2021 unless companies could prove no forced labor was used.
Met Freeman retweeted
Rome handed out free grain to 40,000 citizens in 73 BC. By 46 BC, Julius Caesar found 320,000 people lining up for their monthly ration. That eight-fold expansion happened in under three decades, and it shows you how welfare states actually grow.
No Roman senator stood up and announced a plan to addict a third of the city to government bread. It happened incrementally, through political competition. Each magistrate who wanted votes expanded eligibility. Each expansion normalized the next one. The citizen who once considered the dole shameful eventually expected it, then demanded it, then organized politically to protect it.
This is the core mechanism free market thinkers have identified across every era: once you create a transfer program, you create a constituency for that program. Recipients vote. Administrators build careers. Grain merchants who supply the state develop a stake in keeping the contracts flowing. The political economy locks in.
Caesar, to his credit, actually cut the rolls back to 150,000 through verification audits. It was one of his more economically coherent moves, though the Senate still murdered him. His successors quietly let the numbers climb again.
What did the dole require? Massive grain imports from Sicily, Sardinia, and Egypt, organized through state logistics at state expense, funded by taxation and conquest. When the conquest revenue dried up, the obligation remained. Rome had written a check against future military success, and future military success eventually failed to arrive.
The lesson is not complicated. Distribute a benefit and you distribute dependency. Distribute dependency and you distribute political power to whoever controls the distribution. The grain dole didn't weaken Rome overnight, but it made every subsequent reform politically impossible.
Met Freeman retweeted
People who hired Jason Arday:
• No consequences
Leadership in Cambridge who signed a letter saying Arday was fully innocent, and that there must be no further investigations about him:
• No consequences
First person who wanted to expose Arday's fraud:
• Threatened with a big lawsuit, investigated by police for 4 months.
Person who exposed Arday's fraud:
• Suspended from academic position
Completely broken, pro-fraud system.
Met Freeman retweeted
Once upon a time, the US government ran a secret experiment to let 100s of black men die from syphilis so they could study them.
Mind you, syphilis was curable but that was not the goal. They told them it was “bad blood” and kept the Tuskegee experiment running for 40 years until a whistleblower exposed the operation in 1972.
But that is all in the past. Today, I fully trust the government Faucis with my body, my data, and the Science™️.
Met Freeman retweeted
The third category was tried. They didn’t want it. It’s about men taking women’s rights.
Met Freeman retweeted
MILEI PRESENTS THE MOST IMPORTANT STRUCTURAL REFORM IN 91 YEARS
President Javier Milei announced a complete overhaul of the Central Bank’s Organic Charter by national broadcast, delivering a direct attack on traditional politics and Kirchnerism.
Key points of the reform:
• Single mandate: The Central Bank’s only mission will be to preserve the value of the currency.
• Total ban on financing the State: The Central Bank is prohibited from financing the National Treasury, provinces or municipalities in any form, including primary market purchases of public debt.
• Stronger independence: Removing the Central Bank president or board members will require a two-thirds majority in both chambers of Congress.
• Technical reserves: Holding gains go into a non-distributable technical reserve. Only portfolio management results can be transferred to the Treasury, and solely for debt cancellation.
• Elimination of the 2012 changes and the non-transferable letters scheme.
Milei stated that the Central Bank has been used as a tool for robbery by the political class.
He specifically accused Cristina Kirchner and Mercedes Marcó del Pont of taking USD 10 billion from the Central Bank in 2010 (approximately USD 15 billion in today’s dollars) through the Bicentennial Fund.
“We are ending the scam of printing money to finance high politics.”
In Milei We Trust.
Met Freeman retweeted
The IRS took $107,702 from a man for depositing his own money exactly the way a bank teller told him to.
Never charged him. Publicly admitted the seizure was wrong. Kept the cash anyway, for over a year.
Then his lawyer got a letter from the prosecutor warning that press coverage "ratchets up feelings within the agency."
His name is Lyndon McLellan. He sells $2.75 catfish sandwiches.
He bought L&M Convenience Mart in Fairmont, North Carolina in 2001, back when it was a couple of gas pumps and a refrigerator. 13 years of opening the place and closing it turned it into a store with a proper lunch counter. Median household income in Fairmont is $21,484. He built a real business in a town that poor and put $100,000 in the bank doing it.
The IRS emptied the account in July 2014.
His niece handled the deposits, and a teller told her that keeping them under $10,000 saved the bank paperwork. So she kept them under $10,000. The institution legally required to report him is the one that taught him how to trip the wire.
The Bank Secrecy Act is what orders your bank to report you to the government every time you move more than $10,000 in cash, and to file a suspicion report when your deposits sit near the line. Every seizure like this one starts with that report.
What his niece did is called structuring, a federal crime whether the money is clean or filthy, which means the government never has to allege you did anything else. They didn't. They just took it.
13 years to earn it. 13 seconds to lose it. His words.
They take the money first. Then you sue to get it back. The case gets filed against the cash itself, so there's no defendant to acquit and nothing for them to prove. You want your savings, you hire a lawyer and you wait.
And they knew. 3 months after they cleaned him out, the New York Times ran an investigation and the IRS announced it would stop seizing accounts in cases exactly like his. They kept his. That February the Commissioner of the IRS sat in front of Congress, apologized to the people this had been done to, pointed at McLellan's case by name, and admitted somebody wasn't following the policy. They kept his. In March the Justice Department announced its own version of the same reform. They kept his.
He got it back after more than a year. A judge had to order the government to cover his legal fees, which it fought, and it fought to keep the interest his own money earned sitting in their account. These are the people who will bill you for filing 3 days late.
What exactly did he do to get their attention? He deposited his register. Cash businesses land in that pattern constantly. Insurance won't cover more than $10,000 on hand. Tellers give that advice every day. People form habits. Nobody mails you a warning. You find out the rule exists after they've already taken everything.
And you don't need a store. Servers deposit tips. Contractors get paid in cash. Somebody sells a truck, works a booth, gets paid for a gig. The pattern doesn't care where the money came from.
Congress patched a piece of this in 2019, for the IRS only. Structuring is still 5 years in federal prison. Other agencies still seize on it. The statute never changed.
But the number did. The same law lets the Treasury redraw the threshold over any place it picks. It dropped the trigger to $1,000 along the southwest border, and its own guidance tells banks to file on customers who look like they're staying underneath it. Minneapolis sits at $3,000. One signature moves that line, and that line is what makes you a criminal.
Making a shape somebody in Washington finds interesting is enough to lose everything in your account.
Cato's @EconWithNick has been documenting this for years. Read him before it's your account.
