So closely were pineapples linked to wealth and luxury that they were soon used as designs on dishes, fabrics, furniture, and even buildings. Because a pineapple on the dinner table meant that the lady had spent a lot of money, its shape was often used to welcome guests on things like bedposts, hand towels, candlesticks, and front doors.

Near the equatorial plantation, pineapple goods were preserved in a way that made them last longer on store shelves. Middle-class cook books started to include recipes for dried or crystallized pineapple and booze made from pineapple.

In cold Europe, growing pineapples was more of a hobby for the rich than a real form of farming. In the beginning, it took a lot of work and money to grow even a few pineapples each season. In 1723, to grow a plant at Chelsea Garden, huge buildings heated by stoves were needed. Ten years later, the gardeners at the Palace of Versailles were able to make one. Over the next 70 years, English aristocrats built warm glass "pineries" on their country estates, but most of them didn't do a good job of growing fruit in them.

At the beginning of the 18th century, pineapples were grown on British-owned farms in Jamaica. Slaves from Africa grew and picked the fruit in very harsh conditions.

Enterprise-level production was also popular in Hawaii. Land and labor were cheaper, but this came at a cost to the native Hawaiians. People from Europe and Asia came, ready to plant and pick fruit to sell abroad.

Like some other fruits, pineapple doesn't get sweeter or riper after it's picked, and picking them young so they can make the trip makes them taste worse. Due to shorter shipping times, more fruits were able to reach big markets in good enough condition to sell. This gave some places, like Hawaii, an added competitive edge.

By the end of the 19th century, someone was sure to bring the most advanced canning technology to the place where pineapples grew. A few companies tried to do it. Finally, the fruit could be given in a state that was close to fresh and didn't have a lot of damage or go bad. But because the US put a high tax on Hawaiian goods, canneries couldn't make money. One by one, the first companies failed.

When the US took over Hawaii in 1898, a 22-year-old businessman named James Dole arrived soon after. He was a great pineapple farmer, but it would have been hard for him not to be in those conditions. He was called the "Pineapple King" because he used machines to peel and process pineapples (it is said that his machines could process 100 pineapples per minute) and had a better trade relationship with the US than his peers.

For a short time, Hawaii controlled the market, especially when it came to selling pineapples. This is why we now use the word "Hawaiian" to mean "includes pineapple." Hawaii used to grow 80 percent of the world's pineapples, but now it only grows less than 10 percent. The Dole Food Company is still one of the biggest pineapple growers in the world, but the original plantation is now a tourist site with a pineapple theme. It is the second most visited place in a state where tourism is the biggest business. The most visited place is the WWII memorial at Pearl Harbor.  

In the past 20 years, pineapple production has moved to Costa Rica, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, which have the right mix of good weather and low prices. Even though some people think the wages on farms are low, growing and processing pineapples are usually the best jobs for those who take them. This is more than we can say about the colonial and slave eras, when the fruit was, for some reason, much more expensive.

Now, a lot of machines are used in the pineapple business. A week before harvest, chemicals that make fruit bloom are added to crops. These are the same chemicals that ripe bananas give off. Refrigerated shipping containers on ships, planes, and cars make it possible for fresh pineapples to be sent all over the world without much damage or spoilage. Grocery shops sell a lot of fresh, whole pineapples, pineapple that has been cored and cut up, and canned and dried pineapple. If you want to try pineapple today, you can get it for less than a dollar almost anywhere in the world.

Pineapples used to be the ultimate luxury item, but now almost everyone can get them thanks to changes in industry, specialization, and moving to areas with slightly better conditions for growing pineapples. When the most famous goods of the past become common and cheap, we can always thank specialization and market innovations.

The Road To Hell is Paved With ‘Good Intentions’

What these activists who don't get out much don't understand is that their green absolutism makes inequality worse. Do they know what is being done to give them all the batteries they need?

Slavery and making kids work.

No, I'm not going too far. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), so-called "artisanal" miners work in very dangerous conditions to mine cobalt and nickel, which are important parts of the batteries used in electric cars like Teslas, Fords, and VWs. Men, women, and children scrounge for food in unbearable heat and die when mine shafts fall while the militias who "recruited" them from villages all over the country don't care. At most, these slaves are paid one or two dollars a day for their hard job.

This is the reality of the mines that produce cobalt for your electric cars ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/AnT6jSP547

— FEE (Foundation for Economic Education) (@feeonline) May 25, 2023

Siddharth Kara, a fellow at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health, looked into these mining activities and said, "Cobalt is toxic to touch and breathe, and hundreds of thousands of poor Congolese people touch and breathe it... All of the young moms with babies on their backs were breathing in this dangerous cobalt dust. There is no way to tell the difference between cobalt dug by an industrial digger and cobalt dug by women and children with their bare hands.

There are about 40,000 children working in these dangerous mines. Some of them are as young as six.

What a waste of "clean energy."

Even scarier is the fact that these operations can't be found in official reports because of local corruption and gray-market business practices. This makes it hard to know how many people are forced to work in these dangerous conditions.

Now, even though these businesses are illegal, they are common all over the country and get a lot of money from outside sources. It is thought that Chinese business firms backed by the Chinese government own about 70% of the mining operations in the Congo. So, not only do we have questionable business practices and unsafe work conditions in areas with a lot of poverty, but we also have a multibillion-dollar industry that directly helps a government that is known for killing people.

That doesn't seem fair to me.

See No Evil, Hear No Evil…

Even when faced with these obvious violations of human rights, the west has been very quiet about the issue. You don't see any famous leaders protesting the making of batteries like these, do you? At the end of this violent supply chain, Congolese people of all ages are forced to dig toxic cobalt veins. Some of them die or get hurt very badly while doing this. At the end of the day, it's these people who help make EVs in the west.

We get nothing but silence from the old media and leaders. How can they say that putting all transportation in America on electric vehicles (EVs) will make our racist country more fair when their own policies directly help modern-day slave outfits in Africa?

Those at the bottom of the economic ladder have to pay for their 'educated' whims. Why should it matter to the rich? All of this institutional abuse is happening in a country far away, where no one can see or think about it. It doesn't matter because it's there. This kind of "progress" is what lawmakers want, no matter how many Ford electric cars they sell.

Henry Hazlitt said, "The bad economist only sees what's right in front of him; the good economist also looks further." The bad economist only looks at the short-term effects of a plan. The good economist also looks at the long-term and secondary effects. The bad economist only looks at how a policy has affected or will affect one group. The good economist also looks at how the policy will affect all groups.

That's what's going on. Lawmakers and business leaders don't think about how their actions will affect people in the real world. They are pushing for "equitable" standards as a PR stunt to get better ESG scores, but they are ignoring the real life-or-death effects of "green" laws.

The Economic ‘Experts’

“Prior to 1970, Keynesians believed that the long-run level of unemployment depended on government policy, and that the government could achieve a low unemployment rate by accepting a high but steady rate of inflation.”

Figure 1—Inflation and Unemployment in the 1960s

As you can see, as inflation increased the unemployment rate fell. This is exactly what Keynesians predicted with the Phillips curve. But there was a problem. This didn’t last forever. Look what happened in the 1970s.

Figure 2—Inflation and Unemployment in the 1970s

The Lucas Critique

Still, there are a lot of news stories about how children are supposedly being used in the workplace. Last month, a story about how McDonald's restaurants hire people made people worried about two 10-year-olds who were at a Kentucky McDonald's after midnight. They turned out to be the children of the night manager, who they were visiting.   

Other McDonald's owners and some Dunkin Donuts shop owners have recently been fined for hiring 16- and 17-year-olds for more than nine hours a day or asking them to work past 10:00 pm, among other things. The real question in these situations is who should be in charge of what the teen does. Why should the government stop a 17-year-old from working at McDonald's until 10:30 p.m. if her parents agree?

Proponents of youth employment laws say that the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which was passed in 1938, put an end to child labor in the US, and that if the government hadn't stepped in, young kids would still be working in factories and other places. In the developed world, this kind of child labor stopped when the economy got better because of free markets, not because of government rules.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, most children who worked in places like mills did so because they were poor. As the country got richer and the average income per person went up, parents were able to take care of their families without depending on their children's jobs.

Robert Whaples, an economist at Wake Forest University, says, "Most economic historians agree that this [FLSA] law was not the main reason why child labor went down and almost went away between 1880 and 1940." Instead, they say that development and economic growth led to higher wages, which gave parents the freedom to keep their kids out of work.

This is still happening in poor countries today. No matter what the government does, child work goes down as the average income per person goes up.

Thanks to the great economic health of our country, most kids don't have to work. The things that state lawmakers did today to make it easier for teens to get jobs are smart ways to make it easier for teens who want to work. No one, teen or adult, should ever be forced to work. We have rules against forced labor that have been around for a long time. The current plans to give more teens access to jobs are based on the idea that people should be able to trade freely in a free labor market.

In Wisconsin, for example, lawmakers proposed a bill that would allow younger teens to serve alcohol in restaurants. This is currently illegal, which can make it hard for these teens to get work in restaurants. A similar law was just passed in Iowa, which also lets 14- and 15-year-olds work up to six hours a day instead of just four during the school year. Ohio lawmakers want to let 14- and 15-year-olds work until 9 p.m. instead of 7 p.m., all year long, as long as their parents and schools agree. And earlier this year, Arkansas lawmakers passed a bill that says 14- and 15-year-olds no longer need work permits.

Getting rid of hurdles to work for teens doesn't mean taking advantage of them. Instead, it gives them more power. When I was in high school, my first job was as a cashier in a drugstore. Outside of home and school, it was exciting to meet so many new people and learn about different points of view. Getting a job as a teen is a big step in life and a good way for young people to gain skills and confidence on their way to becoming adults. It can also level the economic playing field by letting teens with less money buy the goods and tools that teens from wealthier homes often get as gifts.

We should try to get more teens to work and make it easier for them to do so, so that more young people can enjoy the financial independence and emotional satisfaction that work gives.

This is especially true now, when figures on employment show that the number of teens who are working is at a record low. In 1979, nearly 58% of 16- to 19-year-olds had jobs. This number has been around 35 percent since 2010. During the school year, teens are less likely to work because school and events like school take up most of their time. However, teens are also less likely to work during the summer.

People worry a lot about how much kids use social media, but it could be that many teens don't have many other ways to spend their time. Teens can't work and are getting kicked out of public places like malls, so it's not surprising that more of them hide behind computers and social media.

By making it easier for teens to get jobs, they could have healthier, more real interactions with the people in their communities and learn important skills that will help them no matter what road they choose in life.

In every country that has moved toward socialism the phase of the development in which socialism becomes a determining influence on politics has been preceded for many years by a period during which socialist ideals governed the thinking of the more active intellectuals. In Germany this stage had been reached toward the end of the last century; in England and France, about the time of the first World War. To the casual observer it would seem as if the United States had reached this phase after World War II and that the attraction of a planned and directed economic system is now as strong among the American intellectuals as it ever was among their German or English fellows. Experience suggests that once this phase has been reached it is merely a question of time until the views now held by the intellectuals become the governing force of politics.

Hayek did not mean smart or even educated people when he said "intellectuals." What he meant by "secondhand dealers in ideas" was people whose job, vocation, or obsessive hobby was to talk about and analyze the ideas of others and advocate for one or more of these great systems to be put into place. Intellectuals always do things because they think it will lead to good things. Autocrats may use ideas to get power, but intellectuals are true supporters. This is why thinkers are good at what they do.

How does someone become a "intellectual?" Hayek says that their position or part in society as a broker or intermediary gives them a big advantage when it comes to spreading ideas that seem to come from a reliable source. He says that what he means is:

journalists, teachers, ministers, lecturers, publicists, radio commentators, writers of fiction, cartoonists, and artists,” but also professionals, “such as scientists and doctors, who through their habitual intercourse with the printed word become carriers of new ideas outside their own fields and who, because of their expert knowledge on their own subjects, are listened to with respect on most others. (emphasis added)

Robert Nozick wrote the famous essay "Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?" nearly fifty years later. It's worth reading the whole thing, but the main point can be summed up in one name: Al Czervik, the poor but wealthy real estate developer from the movie "Caddyshack." (If you don't know what I'm talking about, watch this short movie).  Nozick says that thinkers have always been nerdy kids who did well in school. People like Al Czervik were sitting in the back of the room and playing cards. But now they run their own businesses and sell cars or real estate. Any system that rewards people for being businesses instead of getting good grades and helping the teacher clean the erasers after class is obviously unfair.

Intellectuals think that experts and technocrats like themselves (or how they think of themselves) will be in charge in a socialist government. In fact, the smart people are wrong in two ways: First, people who make things worth having should get paid more than people who can quote "great thinkers" word for word, especially now that we have GoogleTM. But even more important, there isn't a single case in the history of real socialist governments, which run countries, that makes us think that anyone other than violent thugs and dictators will be in charge. Hayek said that "the worst get on top" in socialism. The smart people are rounded up and killed.

Still, thinkers are smart, that much is true. Why do they fall for this seductive horse over and over again? The other day I was listening to Bob Dylan when I suddenly realized that I had heard some of his words a thousand times but never really understood them. Dylan asks in "Blowin' in the Wind," a song he wrote in 1963, "Yes, and how many times must the cannonballs fly | Before they are banned for good?"  How will you stop people from using cannonballs if no one has any?

The answer seems to be that the good people, the smart people, and the thinkers will have the cannonballs and make sure that the rest of us don't use them.  Libertarians tend to think that everyone has the right to defend themselves. thinkers, on the other hand, think that the problem will be solved if everyone loses the right to defend themselves and power is given to thinkers. And since capitalism spreads power among the many people who get rich, it needs to be replaced with a system that keeps power in fewer hands.

What it comes down to is this: in capitalism, wealth is the power to get things and services that I want. This kind of power is not "zero sum," because Al Czervik, you, and I can all have it. Al Czervik might have more money than you or me, but we can all be rich.

But intellectuals like socialism, which turns the causal line around. Under capitalism, having money gives you power and lets you buy what you want. But under socialism, having power gives you money. Party apparatchiks and technical functionaries have a lot of power over how things are made and how they get to people. But political power, which is what I mean by "power," is always a zero-sum game. If the intellectual class has it, you and I don't. And Al Czervik drives a trash truck because he insulted a smart person in fourth grade, and the smart person told his father, who was the party boss. When businesses are owned by the government and run by the government, comparing standing becomes important. If I'm strong, then you're not. Socialism is a way to make people jealous because it is based on the idea that "elites"—"people who are educated, like me"—will come out on top.

It is Shafarevich's most important and memorable work outside of mathematics. It is called The Socialist Phenomenon, and it should be considered a classic among the many, definitive attacks of socialism. My copy, which I bought in 1981, is full of marks and notes where I wanted to remember important ideas.

The first 200 pages of the book talk about socialist ideas and experiments throughout history, from Plato and Greece to Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and the Inca culture in South America. The part of the book about the Incas can be read in a good way. The Incan country didn't last long because it couldn't defend itself against a few hundred Spanish. However, it may have been the most regimented and centralized society the world has ever seen.

Shafarevich talks about socialism in the last third of the book, which is about 100 pages. He makes a strong case that "at least three parts of the socialist ideal—the end of private property, the end of the family, and socialist equality—can be derived from a single principle: the suppression of individuality."

Socialism comes in many different forms, but in its purest form, it offers "the greatest possible equality." Shafarevich says this is the height of hypocrisy and delusion because socialism offers "a strict regimentation of all of life, which would be impossible without absolute control and an all-powerful bureaucracy that would create an incomparably greater inequality."

People take part in life as unique, thinking, acting people, not as parts of an unrecognizable collective blob. "Cultural creativity, particularly artistic creativity, is an example," says the author. The Last Supper was not painted by Italians during the Renaissance. Leonardo da Vinci did. "And when socialist movements are growing, the call to destroy culture becomes louder and clearer," Shafarevich says.

Socialism is inherently against culture because it wants to replace individual effort with top-down rules that fit everyone. Its centralized, ordered plan is a death sentence in the end, because "people and animals cannot live if they are reduced to the level of cogs in a machine." Shafarevich says:

[A]ll the aspects of life that make it attractive and give it meaning are connected with manifestations of individuality. Therefore, a consistent implementation of the principles of socialism deprives human life of individuality and simultaneously deprives life of its meaning and attraction…it would lead to the physical extinction of the group in which these principles are in force, and if they should triumph through the world—to the extinction of mankind.

In the end, the unity that socialism promotes is a mirage. There is no "blob" that can think and act. No one else does. So the so-called "collective" comes down to some people having control over other people. So, socialism is cannibalism that is driven by theory. Shafarevich basically told the world this over 50 years ago, but people still don't get it.

At least, we should thank him for telling us on the 100th anniversary of his birth.

It’s almost impossible for someone to stay focused during the entire shift, say eight hours. The actual productivity will almost always be less than the total allocated time. This is a human limitation. You can adopt ways to increase productivity, but you can’t eliminate non-productive time altogether.

However, the effects of the recent AI boom have reached workplaces as well. Several startups are working on AI applications that let employers maintain stricter control over how employees perform in workplaces. These systems stay connected to the mainframe in real-time with the help of high-speed internets like Quantum Fiber internet and track users’ cognitive abilities. Here’s how technology is making it happen and raising potential concerns about privacy invasion.

AI to Track Workplace Productivity

Emotive is an AI-oriented company focusing on creating enterprise solutions for attention management. They recently unveiled their latest MN8 model, which essentially looks like earbuds. It can track a person’s emotional and cognitive functions with the help of two electrodes and send it to an external source in real time.

They’ve also partnered up with SAP SE to create a focus determination interface. This will analyze the focus, attention, and stress levels of employees in real time and share them with the employees and their supervisors. They claim that it will help employees be more attentive to what they’re best “able to handle at that moment.”

The company’s president, Oliver Oullier, presented a hypothetical case where an employee who has to attend a lot of back-to-back meetings comes to their desk and is reviewing some documents. MN8, with the help of those earbuds, will monitor the Alpha brain wave activity. Since higher alpha power is associated with less attention, and lower alpha power with more attention, it’ll generate a prompt to let the user know. It’ll say something like do you want to short walk or do a guided meditation to regain your focus.

Alternatively, it also allows employers to get a profile of each employee and compare them across teams. This will help them find solutions to optimize the productivity of their workforce.

Classifying the Type of Activity

If you’re thinking that you can evade this by doing something else [1]. After all, the software can only track if someone is paying attention to something or not, and if you’re paying attention to a social media app on your phone, then you should be okay. Well, no.

Bavarian State Ministry for Education and Culture’s research concluded that it is possible to monitor the type of activity the employees are engaged in. They did this with the help of electroencephalogram (EEG) technology. They can now discern central tasks like programming and development from peripheral tasks like documentation, and meta tasks like browsing the internet.

Admittedly, it’s still in its nascent phase. But, it won’t be long before enough data is available to establish a baseline for productive and non-productive tasks. Then, they’ll also have the option to tailor it to their specific workload, and all the employees’ data will be available to assess in real time.

Headband that will Nudge You Each Time You Wander off

MIT Media Lab developed a system “AttentivU” which measures the cognitive activity of a person with the help of a headband. It comes with a scarf that provides haptic feedback to the user when they wander off. They concluded that people who received a haptic alert would shift their focus back on the task at hand. This resulted in increased productivity among people who got the alert vs those who didn’t.

Privacy Concerns

Such inventions have also generated privacy concerns because of their potential for misuse. Media Lab’s group also expressed concerns by saying that hopefully no one is made to wear this. If some company decides to make it a mandatory requirement for its employees to wear such equipment when they don’t want to, that would be a serious breach of privacy.

Conclusion

The whole point of such technology is currently contingent on the fact that some people will voluntarily want to participate. However, the main concern remains what if a company decides to force people to participate in such activities? That’s a question these companies are unable to answer. It’s not like that hasn’t happened before. Rio Tinto’s Hail Creek mineworkers refused to wear SmartCaps because of privacy concerns in 2015.

Therefore, we, as humans, need to make sure that such technology isn’t imposed on anyone, and remains a voluntary choice.

OpenAI founder Sam Altman, creator of ChatGPT (TechCrunch/Flickr)

Savreux and other AI trainers have devoted countless hours to improving ChatGPT and other OpenAI systems. In addition to labeling images and making predictions about the text that these AI systems should produce next, they also provide crucial training data. This important job pays $15 per hour and up, with no benefits.

“We are grunt workers, but there would be no AI language systems without it,” said Savreux, who has worked for tech startups like OpenAI. “You can design all the neural networks you want, you can get all the researchers involved you want, but without labelers, you have no ChatGPT. You have nothing.”

In the area of artificial intelligence, where the focus is on technological advances and the researchers who made them, this hard work is often overlooked. Sonam Jindal, who is the Partnership on AI's program lead for AI, jobs, and the economy, says, "A lot of the talk about AI is very positive. But we're leaving out a big part of the story: that this still depends a lot on a lot of people.

AI contract work is often unpredictable and anonymous. Employees are hired by either the company directly or by a third-party vendor that specializes in temporary hiring or outsourcing, and they work under written contracts. Tech companies usually save money because these workers don't get perks like health insurance. However, this could put the workers at risk.

The Partnership on AI has asked that contract AI workers get fair pay and better working circumstances. DeepMind, which is part of Google AI, is the only tech company that has publicly agreed to follow these rules so far. "Many people have seen how important it is to do this. "The problem now is getting companies to do it," Jindal said.

 

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Dylan Mulvaney (@dylanmulvaney)

After roughly two weeks of debate, Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth issued a mea culpa of sorts, asserting that the company “never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people.”

“We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people. We are in the business of bringing people together over a beer,” Whitworth’s statement read in part.

“My time serving this country taught me the importance of accountability and the values upon which America was founded: freedom, hard work and respect for one another,” he continued, contending he is focused on “building and protecting our remarkable history and heritage.”

“I spend much of my time traveling across America, listening to and learning from our customers, distributors, and others,” Whitworth added. “Moving forward, I will continue to work tirelessly to bring great beers to consumers across our nation.”

pic.twitter.com/oyyfPzd1FM

— Anheuser-Busch (@AnheuserBusch) April 14, 2023

While conservatives — including Donald Trump Jr. and Charlie Kirk — pointed out that Anheuser-Busch actually has a history of donating to conservative causes and supporting some Republicans, such as Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) in the last election cycle, Bud Light sales have reportedly continued to drop.

According to reports, the boycott has resulted in a major cut in Bud Light sales among Pittsburgh-area beer distributors. According to TribLive, Myrna’s Brewery Outlet, for example, typically sold 200 cases of Bud Light per week. That figure dropped to 40 cases last week.

Central Bank Divide and Control

The Guardian says that central bankers have a word for this kind of mass scapegoating: "Greedflation."

So, the fact that central bankers printed trillions of dollars and gave them to states, bankers, and, surely by accident, the rich at the fastest rate in 50 years had nothing to do with double-digit inflation.

So much so that, as of last year, one in every four pounds and almost one in every three dollars had been made in the past three years.

So, the lenders say, "Well, that was just a bunch of luck." What's really going on is that people have become greedy for some strange reason. You see, they weren't greedy before, but now they are, and this needs to stop.

The beauty of the "Greedflation" story is that it not only avoids blaming central banks for their systemic theft, but it also pits the masses against each other while the rich use central banks to steal money.

They are very honest about it: A few weeks ago, the European Central Bank asked on Twitter, "What really causes inflation? Earnings or profits?"

Get it, voter? Is it the greedy business people on the right or the greedy workers on the left?

They do this because if they can get half of the country to blame the other half, the bankers and politicians who really caused the problem can't be blamed. While we fight, they can go back to taking our life savings and hopes for the future.

It makes you wonder if Americans, Britons, and Europeans aren't really trying to kill each other. That maybe we all agree the system is broken, but our leaders do everything they can to make us fight with each other.

This divide between the masses has been going on for a long time, at least since the Federal Reserve was created and since Western governments took on an activist role that turned them from responsible guardians of the common good—fixing potholes, dredging ports, the "night watchman" state—into existential political footballs in the service of the elite that could be used against the masses.

During the last financial crisis, they used this plan to perfection. They took the right-wing Tea Party and the left-wing Occupy Movement away from the bankers who had just stolen from the country and turned them against each other. They'll definitely try again.

And what do you have to do with it? Make do with less, take one for the team, and fight your neighbor so that the rich can keep stealing from all of us and our children.

The Mother of All Greed: Government

So, what makes inflation happen? Yes, this is greed, but it's government greed. In the form of printing trillions of dollars to buy votes and bribe people to accept lockdowns and other forms of authoritarianism.

Then, when people were hurt by the resulting inflation, central bankers around the world raised interest rates to crush the private economy. By getting rid of the rest of us, they keep the door open for record deficits.

We lose our jobs so that governments can keep spending money, buying votes, and rewarding their friends and backers.

The answer is simple. In fact, shrinking the government is so easy that it will never happen. Reduce deficits to zero and use the money saved to get rid of the bureaucrats and regulators who are holding back job creation, innovation, and small companies, which are becoming more and more rare.

This could be done as soon as tomorrow by central banks. By standing up and telling their leaders, "No more." No more trillion-dollar debts being paid for by the central bank, and no more crushing the people to make ends meet for the central bank.

There's no chance that this will happen, of course. Not until people ask for it, either because they are angry or because they are desperate.

One might hope people do get angry. Before they can't lose anymore.

“These numbers are staggering,” according to an April 23 report from Insights Express, a beer-focused newsletter. “Right now this is an extremely difficult scenario for Anheuser Busch, the Bud Light brand and for AB distributors.”

Officials at the company are said to have punished two executives for giving the go-ahead for the Mulvaney ads.

The Wall Street Journal shared a chart that showed how sales of Bud Lights were going down while sales of Coors Light and Miller Light were going up:

Bump Williams Consulting

Rasmussen polled 1,041 people on April 18 and found that sales would go down. A poll found that 54% of Americans want to stop drinking Bud Light. This includes 53% of men, 57% of white respondents, 66% of Republicans, and 57% of people under the age of 40. About one-third of people in each income group say they "strongly support" the boycott.

This shows how strongly Americans disagree with the elites who back Mulvaney's transgender ideology, which wants to get rid of the popular and helpful differences between men and women and boys and girls in society and the law. This would give government officials and their political friends a lot of chances to use the resulting civic conflicts and personal harm to their economic and political advantage.

Other companies that hired Mulvaney to sell beauty, clothing, and hygiene goods for women have been boycotted because of the beer boycott.

Maybe he’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline 💄

The new face of Maybelline, ladies! pic.twitter.com/rx0EdvOlP3

— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) April 24, 2023

Introducing the new face of MAC Makeup… pic.twitter.com/M6j8jVKfxa

— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) April 24, 2023

Old Dylan vs New Dylan.

Exact Same Act! pic.twitter.com/pN1Os0kTAp

— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) April 23, 2023

Trans Activists and Drag Queens trashed a women’s restroom at The University of Mexico last year, covering it in graffiti and filming themselves inside.

This was an attempt to force the university to make the women’s restroom gender neutral. Some of the graffiti written in… pic.twitter.com/9KX6aZzsT4

— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) April 23, 2023

Analysts warned that U.S. military support for Ukraine has pushed U.S. military stockpiles to "dangerously low levels." https://t.co/IgOfzlbXeD

— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) October 2, 2022

Pentagon planners are concerned about the supply running out, so the Army is now planning to invest billions in munitions sites around the nation in what it considers its most important overhaul in 40 years.

The United States has given Ukraine weaponry and equipment worth more than $35 billion so far.

To speed up delivery to Ukraine's front lines, the Pentagon has withdrawn ammunition for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, precision aerial bombs, TOW guided missile systems, AT-4 anti-armor weapons systems, anti-tank mines, and demolition munitions.

On March 21, 2023, in the midst of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian forces fire with a D-30 artillery towards Russian positions close to Bakhmut, eastern Ukraine. Getty Images (SERGEY SHESTAK/AFP)

The help stems from the President's ability to use existing U.S. military stocks under the Presidential Drawdown Authority.

The 155 mm shell, along with sophisticated air defense systems, long-range missiles, and tanks, is one of the most frequently requested and supplied items.

According to AP, the rounds are essential to Ukraine's battle since they enable the country to hit Russian locations up to 20 miles away with a highly destructive munition.

An 155 mm M795 artillery projectile during the manufacturing process at the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant in Scranton, Pa., Thursday, April 13, 2023. One of the most important munitions of the Ukraine war comes from a historic factory in this city built by coal barons, where tons of steel rods are brought in by train to be forged into the artillery shells Kyiv can’t get enough of — and that the U.S. can’t produce fast enough. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

“Unfortunately, we understand that the production is very limited and it’s been more than a year of war,” Ukraine parliamentary member Oleksandra Ustinova said at a German Marshall Fund media roundtable in Washington on Monday. “But unfortunately we are very dependent on 155.” the AP reports then makes clear the trouble that lies on the horizon:

But even with higher near-term production rates, the U.S. cannot replenish its stockpile or catch up to the usage pace in Ukraine, where officials estimate that the Ukrainian military is firing 6,000 to 8,000 shells per day.

In other words, two days’ worth of shells fired by Ukraine equates to the United States’ monthly pre-war production figure.

The Beau Biden Foundation, named for their late son, got the most money, which was $5,000.

The National Fraternal Order of Police Foundation also got money from them.

And they gave money to their church in Wilmington, St. Joseph on the Brandywine.

Biden's income has been going down over the past few years. In 2021, Biden's first year as president, they reported an income of $610,702.

In 2019, the Bidens said they made almost $1 million thanks to book sales, talks, and the fact that he taught at the University of Pennsylvania and she taught at Northern Virginia Community College.

The pay for the president is set at $400,000. Dr. Biden, on the other hand, still teaches at a community college.

She is the first first lady who worked while living in the White House.

Last year, Dr. Biden was paid $82,335 to teach.  

In the past, Biden was one of the poorest people in the United States. Senate at age 29, when he was chosen.

He took the Amtrak to get to and from Washington because he couldn't afford to buy a place there. area. 

In a press statement on Tuesday, the White House said that the Bidens' tax returns from the last 25 years are now available to the public.

Donald Trump broke with custom by not making his tax returns public while he was running for president and while he was president.

Democrats in Congress tried for years to get Trump's tax returns. In December, before Republicans took over the House, the House Ways and Means Committee gave them six years' worth.

In 2022, both Vice President Kamala Harris and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff said they made $456,918.

At a tax rate of 20.5%, they paid $93,570 in federal income tax.

They also paid $17,612 in California income tax, and Emhoff, who works at Georgetown University's law school, paid $9,697 to the District of Columbia.

Harris and Emhoff gave $23,000 to charity in 2022, which was a little more than the Bidens gave.

The pay of the vice president is set at $235,100 per year.

Tuesday was the last day to pay federal taxes for this year.

Kittyhawk Flyer

"Sebastian wanted to make money," said a former co-worker. Larry didn't care. He had nothing to gain financially." The mood at work was clearly tense, which made it hard for people to figure out what was most important.

Kittyhawk first worked on the Flyer, which was a single-seat electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) craft that could be flown by people with only an hour of training. Even though the demo day at Lake Las Vegas in 2018 got good press, the Flyer had major limitations and safety problems.

"Despite these problems, the day at Lake Las Vegas seemed like a breakthrough," said a former employee. "But it was also the beginning of Flyer's end."

After the Flyer project was put on hold, Kittyhawk turned its attention to other projects, such as Heaviside, an autonomous flying car, and Feather, a research and development lab that looks into radical ideas. As rivals like Joby Aviation and Archer Aviation made progress, the eVTOL market started to heat up, and the company found it hard to find a clear market and use for its vehicles.

"The sudden switch from practical, iterative work on Heaviside to back-to-the-drawing-board ideas worried many employees, who saw it as a step in the wrong direction for a company that had already canceled several projects," a former employee said.

Because Larry Page's involvement and impact at Kittyhawk were becoming more random, employees often had to figure out what his "big questions" meant and change their focus.

A former worker said, "We'd work our asses off on something, and then Larry would say, 'Oh, it was just an idea.'"

As the closing date got closer, the mood in the company got worse. Even though Larry Page kept giving orders, the business couldn't make Page's dream of a commercially successful flying car that would completely change the industry a reality.

A former worker said, "Larry had a lot of good ideas, but he didn't seem to hire people who could make them happen." Another former worker said that the people Page hired were "brilliant and maybe disruptive," but none of them were able to meet Page's high expectations.

Read more at Business Insider here.

Donald Trump Jr called on conservatives to end their boycott of Budweiser and Anheuser-Busch as many on the right have expressed outrage at the company for partnering with a transgender woman.

The former president’s son spoke on his show “Triggered With Don Jr.”

“I’m not for destroying an American, an iconic company for something like this,” he said.

Well, I guess I don't agree with Don Jr. on everything. I'm not calling for the boycott to stop. I don't "call" for things. No one would listen if I did. And even if they did listen, I wouldn't like having that much power.

My question is this...

Then what?

Who cares if Dylan Mulvaney, who is an adult, wants to live his life as a female who prances around like a surprised reindeer? Yes, he does minstrelsy to make fun of women. Even though I don't like it, it's a free country. He is also a victim in a way. If everyone treats him like a child, he will never get the psychological help he needs.

Who cares if Bud Light wants to market its beer to drag queens, transvestites, and transsexuals?

Now, if Bud Light did a Disney and put a transgender person on a box of crayons or something else for kids, that would be a different problem. But it was a beer can.

Americans have lived well with transvestites, transsexuals, and drag queens for as long as I can remember. Go be gay. Go act like you're a girl. Cut off your John. Doesn't matter. Before he started trying to get kids to like him, I didn't mind RuPaul. Too Wong Foo (1995), Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and John Waters are some of the movies we've seen. Some Like It Hot and Bosom Buddies came close, but they were not as good.And then...

Too many of these perverts went to war with us and tried to get our kids to do sexual things.

Then things started to change.

That's when the fight started.

It all began with Nazis and groomers.

We were suddenly threatened because we didn't believe biological and science lies about being born the wrong sex or switching sexes by magic.

All of a sudden, we were picked on because we didn't think it was okay for grown men in high heels to use the same bathroom and locker room as our girls.

Cheaters claimed to be women so they could win sports trophies, and we were told to clap.

Worst of all, we are supposed to keep quiet while drag queens publicly flirt with and play with the sexuality of people who are too young to consent.

We are even supposed to be okay with using puberty blockers and surgeries to forever change the bodies of children. This is something that would have happened in a Nazi concentration camp.

But when it comes to "live and let live," I have a big red line that you can see from space.

I don't care what free-willed people do with their lives. What companies do has nothing to do with me. I do not care. I don't care as long as they don't pick on me or other kids.

I would never put a cross-dresser on a beer can.

But I would also never force a beer company to choose someone to sell its beer who I didn't like.

I won't let the corporate media and the Democrats get me to cross my red line. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, if my neighbor wears a dress or a beer company advertises a guy in a dress, it doesn't hurt me. It doesn't steal from me or hurt me.

P.S. Shares of Anheuser-Busch are up 6.3% for the month.

If this sounds crazy, that’s because it is. I have no idea whether DeSantis believes any of it, or even knows what a central bank digital currency is or what it would do (more on that later). And it’s possible that he’s taking this stand out of general paranoia.

But Krugman doesn't think that DeSantis's resistance to a CBDC from the Fed is just based on paranoia. Krugman thinks that instead, big Republican donors are using anonymous money to hide their bad plans, which is good for them. As Krugman wraps up his piece, he says:

[These considerations] tells us what DeSantis’s attack on central bank digital currency would actually do. It wouldn’t protect the rights of Floridians to buy gas or guns; instead, it would protect the ability of wiseguys to evade taxes, launder money, buy and sell illegal drugs, and engage in extortion.

But hey, I guess thinking that money laundering and extortion are bad things is just another example of the wokeness that DeSantis is trying to kill.

As usual, Krugman's cocky arguments fall apart when they are looked at closely. First of all, my academic colleague Jonathan Newman pointed out that the Fed study Krugman linked to in his piece talked about how a CBDC could be a threat to privacy. In the words of the Fed study:

In other words, Ron DeSantis isn't the only one who knows a CBDC could be used to invade people's privacy. The Federal Reserve knows it, too.

On top of that, we have seen in recent past how political goals can be used to hurt monetary freedom. For example, the Canadian government froze the funds of Canadian truckers who were protesting Covid's practices, and many Americans had their donations stopped in the same way.

"Civil asset forfeiture" is another scary example of what could happen if a CBDC is used. Over the years, many drivers have been pulled over for a routine traffic stop. During these stops, the police have taken thousands of dollars in cash and held it until the driver could show he wasn't a drug dealer, which could take months. For example, Jerry Johnson, a businessman from Phoenix, had $39,500 in cash that he planned to use to buy a truck, but the cops took it from him at the airport. Even though Johnson had never been charged with or guilty of a crime, he did get his money back after two and a half years.

Suppose that the Federal Reserve sets up a CBDC based on how civil asset seizure works. All transactions would be kept on the Fed's ledger, where "suspicious" trends could be looked for by AI bots. And, just like what happens now with real money, the government could freeze a person's account until he or she could show his or her innocence, which would be hard to do without money.

The important thing to know is that a CBDC doesn't have to be like "FedCoin," which requires a MetaMask wallet and is only for people who are good with technology. In a recent podcast show, George Gammon told Cole Snell and me that all people would have to do is switch their checking accounts to the Fed. As long as people's checking account deposits were liabilities on the Fed's balance sheet, that would be a digital money issued by the central bank. They would still be "dollars," but the Fed would have full control. There wouldn't be a middle level of private business banks that compete with each other.

Krugman and his frequent partner Dean Baker unintentionally confirmed Gammon's fears when they said that it would be great if people could skip the middleman and bank directly with the Fed, but those greedy bankers would never let it happen. No matter what they say, Gammon is right. If most Americans had bank accounts directly with the Fed, it would have almost complete power over their lives, especially if cash is phased out.

Krugman says that DeSantis and others who warn about a CBDC are crazy, but they're not. They're just drawing the obvious conclusions from history. The Federal Reserve was founded in 1913 to smooth out changes in the business world and calm down the financial sector. After 16 years, the stock market crashed, which led to the Great Depression. Since then, every time they say they've fixed something, another problem happens.

We don't trust the government or central banks with the news or science, and we shouldn't give them power over money and banking either. Entrepreneurs need to find ways to handle cash and build up capital that aren't the same as what they've always done. Here at infineo, we are doing our part, and we ask anyone who is interested to take a look.

“I’ve always thought of AI as the most profound technology humanity is working on. More profound than fire or electricity or anything that we’ve done in the past,” said the Google CEO.

Pichai said regulation was necessary to prevent some of the negative impacts of AI technology.

“There has to be regulation. You’re going to need laws…there have to be consequences for creating deep-fake videos, which cause harm to society.”

The success of consumer-facing AIs like OpenAI's ChatGPT and image-generating AIs like Midjourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion has helped AI technologies grow quickly. This has led to a lot of dramatic predictions about the future, and at least one well-known AI researcher has said that AI will kill off all humans.

One expert 60 Minutes talked to said that some ways of thinking about AIs today, like calling them "sentient," are wrong.

“They’re not sentient. They’re not aware of themselves,” said the AI researcher, James Manyika. “They can exhibit behaviors that look like that. Because keep in mind, they’ve learned from us. We’re sentient beings. We have beings that have feelings, emotions, ideas, thoughts, perspectives. We’ve reflected all that in books, in novels, in fiction. So, when they learn from that, they build patterns from that. So, it’s no surprise to me that the exhibited behavior sometimes looks like maybe there’s somebody behind it.”

Manyika said that technologies like GPT from OpenAI and Bard from Google are Large Language Models (LLMs). They process a huge amount of human language and use that to guess what kinds of answers people want.

“It tries to predict the most probable next words, based on everything it’s learned,” said Manyika. “So, it’s not going out to find stuff, it’s just predicting the next word.”

Elon Musk tells Tucker Carlson that federal government agencies had access to people’s Twitter DMs.

pic.twitter.com/5DrC8Sj42Z

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) April 16, 2023

During the chat, Musk talked about how he felt when he found out that the government had access to Twitter. "I couldn't believe how much the government was able to see everything that was going on on Twitter," Musk told Carlson. "I didn't know that." Carlson asked Musk if this also applied to direct texts, to which Musk gave a firm "Yes."

Musk, who just recently started the AI company X.AI, talked more about what worries him about the latest developments in AI technology. He stressed that AI is much more dangerous than problems like bad aircraft design, upkeep, or production, or bad car production, and that it could destroy humanity. Musk went on to explain his point of view by saying, "It has the potential to destroy civilization, no matter how small you think that chance is. It is not a trivial possibility."

The business owner also gave a word of warning about how quickly AI is improving: "The speed at which AI is improving is something that society should pay close attention to. It's very important that we make rules and laws so that nothing terrible happens."

The interview also talked about problems between Musk's Twitter and National Public Radio (NPR), a news group that doesn't make money. Twitter put a "state-affiliated media" label on some media sites that get some money from the government. In response, NPR said last week that it would stop posting on the social media site.

The "state-affiliated" label was later taken off Twitter and changed with "government funded" after the move got a lot of negative feedback. White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre defended NPR's position as an independent news organization. She said, "Anyone who follows their coverage can see that they are, in fact, an independent news organization. Their drive to fair reporting and honesty as journalists are proof of their independence."

Musk's claims that the government can read Twitter users' direct messages and his worries about the dangers of AI show how important it is to keep talking about privacy, technology, and how it affects society.

Read more at the Hill here.

1. “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” $87 million.

2. “The Pope’s Exorcist,” $9.2 million.

3. “John Wick: Chapter 4,” $7.9 million.

4. “Renfield,” $7.8 million.

5. “Air,” $7.7 million.

6. “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves,” $7.4 million.

7. “Suzume,” $5 million.

8. “Mafia Mamma,” $2 million.

9. “Scream VI,” $1.5 million.

10. “Nefarious,” $1.3 million.

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