Best Of

Musk justifies falling GDP:

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1895512451342299292

A more accurate measure of GDP would exclude government spending.

Otherwise, you can scale GDP artificially high by spending money on things that don’t make people’s lives better.

For example, you could shift everyone who is building cars to working at the DMV. That would result in no cars and a much worse standard of living, but GDP would appear to be the same

Well, here's the thing Mr Musk: those people the government spends money on, they spend money on things too. And those people pay taxes.

So, when government spending is cut, private sector GDP falls too. (And there are myriad knock on effects: government employees and contractors no longer able to make mortgage payments, means that house prices fall, mean that all people save more, and that the implied rent component of GDP drops too.)

It turns out modern economies are quite complex. And -yes- we should cut wasteful government spending (and over time there's probably quite a lot of it), but to think that going in and taking an axe to spending does not have an impact on *all* of the economy demonstrates a quite extraordinary naivete.

Sky report on Zelensky and Trump discussion not going well apparently !!!

Trump - Zelensky gambling with World War 3

Trump to Zelensky - you ether do a deal or we are out

Vance accuses Zelensky of being "disrespectful".

And this is the main thing with Trump - any issue boils down to not showing him sufficient respect, which is abject grovelling most of the time (hence creatures like Vance trying to enforce servility even from a Head of State who, though needing to be subservient given his position, still deserves respect in turn).

It is my experience that people who cry about being disrespected the most are usually the ones showing the least respect to others. Same thing with a lot of the time with civility.

Vance is a shit.