Everything #government touches turns to #shit 💩 In South Africa, that statement is literal.

#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.

#Eugen von #Böhm-Bawerk did more damage to socialist economics than any government commission ever managed. Working in Vienna in the 1880s and 1890s, he dismantled the labor theory of value with surgical precision, showing that capital goods derive their worth from future consumer goods, not from the hours workers spent producing them. His capital theory was the real achievement. Time matters in production. A fisherman with a net catches more fish than one with bare hands because someone sacrificed present consumption to build the tool. Interest is the price of time itself; it compensates the saver for waiting. Governments that suppress interest rates through central banking don't abolish this premium. They hide it, distorting the entire structure of production until the inevitable crash forces you to pay the bill anyway. Böhm-Bawerk also destroyed Karl Marx personally, publishing his 1896 critique "Karl Marx and the Close of His System" with the quiet confidence of a man who had already won. Marx's three volumes of Capital contained internal contradictions Böhm-Bawerk traced systematically, brick by brick. He served as Austrian Finance Minister three separate times and resigned each time over deficit spending. Intellectual integrity from a government official: rare then and rarer now.

Prices are not decorations. They are compressed information, carrying signals from millions of buyers and sellers across a global economy, telling producers where resources are desperately needed and where they are wasted. Without private property in the means of production, no genuine price signal exists. Every Soviet planner, every Maoist commissar, every 1970s British nationalization czar faced the same wall. They lacked the math to allocate steel between hospitals and railways, not because they were stupid, but because the calculation is literally impossible without real prices emerging from real exchanges. Venezuela's government fixed food prices in 2011. Grocery shelves emptied within three years. Knowledge is dispersed. The farmer in Kansas knows his soil, his equipment, his neighbors' labor availability. No committee in Washington holds that knowledge. Ever. Centralizing decisions destroys the very feedback loops that make coordination possible, and you pay for that destruction in shortages, misallocation, and stagnation.

#Carl #Menger did what no economist before him had managed: he located value inside the human mind rather than inside the object being traded. Vienna, 1871. His Principles of Economics landed quietly, then detonated slowly across the discipline. Before Menger, economists tortured themselves trying to explain why diamonds cost more than water when water keeps you alive. Menger dissolved the paradox in a sentence. Value is marginal and subjective. The tenth glass of water you drink today carries almost no value to you; the first glass you drink after three days without it carries everything. The object does not contain the value. You assign it, based on your circumstances, your preferences, your next most pressing want. This wrecked the labor theory of value completely, clearing the ground for honest price analysis. Prices, Menger showed, are not arbitrary signals or social constructs. They are compressed information about millions of individual valuations, each person acting on knowledge no central planner could ever collect. Bureaucrats in Brussels and Washington still haven't absorbed this. They control prices and watch shortages materialize on schedule, baffled every time. Menger built the foundation. Everything built on it since has held.

GOOGLE MAPS SHOWS YOU STREETS. THIS WEBSITE SHOWS YOU THE MOVIE SCENES FILMED ON THEM. it's called Movie Scene Map → moviescenemap.com 15,716 real filming locations. 166 countries. one map. click any pin. see what was filmed there. search any movie. see every place it was shot. Game of Thrones castles in Croatia. Breaking Bad streets in Albuquerque. Lord of the Rings hills in New Zealand. the well from The Dark Knight Rises at Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur. the Woman in Red fountain from The Matrix in Sydney. the best part is how fast your brain starts using it wrong. you open it to search one movie. then you search your city. then your hometown. then the place you went on vacation. built by one anonymous guy who goes by Flightmussy. just a website that lets a normal person see where their favorite movies were actually made. open tab. search your city. see what movies got filmed near you.

Lithuania is tightening inspections of Russian grain moving through the port of Klaipėda after some stevedoring companies resumed handling the cargo, Agriculture Minister Kęstutis Mažeika said

#Canada Needs an Economic Overton Window Reset Canada’s economic debate has become strangely moralized. Raise a conventional question about investment, productivity, manufacturing, energy, deficits, or trade, and the response is too often not an argument but an accusation: un-Canadian, Trumpian, MAGA, anti-worker, anti-public service. That is how the Overton Window closes. The Overton Window describes the range of ideas considered respectable in public debate. In Canada, it increasingly excludes economic realism, not because the evidence is absent, but because the language of patriotism has been captured by the assumption that more government spending is synonymous with national strength. It is not. The private sector creates the wealth that finances the public sector. Businesses invest, hire, export, innovate, and pay the taxes that sustain health care, pensions, infrastructure, defence, and social programs. Government has an indispensable role, but it cannot indefinitely distribute wealth that the economy has failed to produce. It is politically expedient to blame Canada’s current economic predicament on Donald Trump. Tariffs, trade threats, and American protectionism create real risks and deserve a serious response. But Trump did not create the Canadian industrial-policy failures that weakened our competitive advantage. He did not create years of weak business investment, slow permitting, costly regulation, inadequate infrastructure, unaffordable housing, poor productivity growth, or the habit of responding to every structural weakness with another subsidy. Nor did Trump hollow out Canadian manufacturing on his own. China’s entry into the World Trade Organization reshaped global trade, and Canadian industry absorbed a significant adjustment shock. Research has found that rising Chinese import competition was associated with substantial Canadian manufacturing job losses between 2001 and 2011. Recognizing that fact is neither extremist nor xenophobic. It is an economic observation. The United States is confronting two long-running vulnerabilities: its massive debt burden and the erosion of parts of its manufacturing base. That is what lies behind the renewed American emphasis on tariffs, procurement rules, reshoring incentives, subsidies, strategic supply chains, and national-security industrial policy. Canada may object to particular measures and should defend its interests firmly. But retaliation against this modern Hamiltonian turn is not a long-term dominant strategy. The United States retains the world’s deepest capital markets, the reserve currency, enormous energy resources, global technology leaders, a vast domestic market, and military power. Betting Canada’s economic strategy on Trump losing the Mid-terms is wishful thinking. This is a generational economic pivot. Canada needs a modern Hamiltonian agenda of its own: not blanket protectionism, but national capacity. That means competitive taxes, faster permits, reliable energy, infrastructure that gets products to markets, deeper capital markets, selective strategic procurement, and a country open to productive foreign investment. Economic sovereignty is not achieved by announcing more programs in Ottawa. It is achieved when Canada can attract capital, build things, develop its advantages, and finance its own ambitions. Our relationship with the United States remains central. Canada should not seek economic detachment from its largest market; it should seek to become indispensable to North America, as a supplier of energy, critical minerals, food, electricity, advanced manufacturing, and trusted technology. Calling these arguments un-Canadian is not a rebuttal. It is an attempt to place them outside the Overton Window before Canadians can judge them on their merits.

Anthropic plans to release ipo prospectus in late September, sources say

I am the holdout

#Disney’s new CEO Josh D’Amaro eliminates gender neutral language, brings back “Ladies and Gentlemen” and fires 1,000 employees in an effort to restore “common sense culture”.

🚨 🇮🇷 #Iran is down to two months of gasoline and can no longer afford its own smugglers -One senior Iranian official put the country's fuel reserves at roughly a two-month supply -Three senior sources say the regime is now too cash-strapped to pay the premium that sanctions evasion costs, leaving its front companies, unregistered tankers and smuggling networks all but useless -Tehran is importing gasoline because its refineries were hit and there is no money to repair them -The rial has fallen from about one million to the dollar to over 2.2 million in a year -Official inflation runs at a 69.9% twelve-month average, with food, beverages and tobacco rising nearly twice as fast -Unemployment stands at 9.1%, and the average monthly salary of $125 covers under a third of basic household costs -The UAE, one of Iran's largest trading partners, cut all financial dealings on August 19 -Vance says China has been much more responsible than Iran on the pressure campaign, ahead of Xi's White House visit this month Iran survived 45 years of sanctions by paying middlemen, and for the first time the middlemen cost more than the regime has. That is real pressure, and it should be credited. What it has produced so far is hardliners in every security post, missiles at four countries this week, and a government that put the pain on households on purpose. Two months of fuel is a deadline for Tehran's people. Whether it becomes one for Tehran's decisions is the question sanctions have never answered anywhere. Source: New York Post / Writer: Daniel

#Bitcoin #Fixes #This #Matrix #Morpheus

Waller: premium for US government debt may be fading

Nscale targets initial GPU deployment starting H2 2027 in Barstow, Texas; deal for $3.5 billion of compute with intent to expand beyond $6 billion

The circle of life in politics. They ignore their voters, do the bidding of their masters while in office, then when they lose the next election they get rich.

US Treasury Secretary Bessent: China engages in financial repression on its savers.

US Diesel At Pump Nears April War High As Global Refining Crisis Deepens

Barrick Mining Corp. is considering delaying its plan to take its North American gold business public until next year, a source says Why delay IPO when heavy US consensus is gold is going lower next 6-12 months? Wouldn’t you want to sell as much as possible, as soon as possible? Unless they have information that suggests it is NOT going lower next 6-12 months…