
Centrist Dad, fond of Corrib Waterpolo, Mayo GAA & Connacht Rugby. Passionate about Galway Tech - all opinions my own. #andacyclist
Galway
Joined April 2013
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Joe Smyth retweeted
We need more nuclear power. Its time for the Irish government to put nuclear in the infrastructure plan. It's essential for energy security fir future generations.
Need a crumb of hope about Europe on a Saturday?
Belgium has gone from rapidly closing and destroying its entire nuclear fleet (half of its power before 2023) to quickly relicensing and returning a few of them to the grid.
PM @Bart_DeWever is trying to save as many as he can.
Interesting response in an interesting thread.
Replying to @Margot_Vernier
I worked in a field that sometimes involved talking to commercial pilots from all over the world. They would comment that when an Airbus plane crashes it’s almost always a mechanical error and when a Boeing plane crashes it’s almost always a pilot error.
Joe Smyth retweeted
My post about Hitler and the far right got millions of views. Clearly, it hit a nerve. So today I'm going to show you, step by step, why the notion of "far right" as it's used in France makes almost no sense. And why the people who wield it are usually the last ones who should be lecturing anyone.
Let's start with the only question that matters: what makes a political system work or fail? To a very large extent, it's the economy. A country that produces wealth, that lets its citizens create, trade and build, stays standing. A country that destroys that collapses, no matter how beautiful its slogans are.
And in economics, there are really only two worldviews.
The first is collectivism. The idea that the State knows better than you. That it must plan production, set prices, run companies, decide what you earn, what you buy, and eventually what you think. The individual is just a cog serving a grand collective project: the class, the nation, the race, the people.
The second is freedom. Capitalism, property, individual liberty, individual responsibility. The idea that millions of people creating value for one another produce infinitely more prosperity than an office of planners, however brilliant they may be.
Now look at the list of the great totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. Stalin: total planning, forced collectivization, millions dead. Mao: the Great Leap Forward and the deadliest famine in human history. Pol Pot: money abolished, cities emptied, nearly a quarter of Cambodia's population exterminated. Mussolini, the man who coined the word fascism: "Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State." And Hitler, leader of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, whose program proclaimed "the common good before individual good." He subjected the entire German economy to State plans: the Four-Year Plan, frozen prices and wages, unions dissolved into a single state labor front, industrialists producing whatever the regime decided.
Their flags were different. Their designated enemies were different. But the machinery was the same: the individual doesn't exist, only the collective matters, and the State decides everything.
Why does it always end in totalitarianism? Because collectivism doesn't work. And when a system doesn't work, it has only two options: admit failure or force people. They always choose force.
Ludwig von Mises proved it as early as 1920: without free prices, without a market, a planner simply cannot know what to produce, how much, or at what cost. He is flying blind. A planned economy isn't a less efficient version of the market. It's an impossibility.
Friedrich Hayek drew the political conclusion in 1944 in The Road to Serfdom, a book he dedicated "to the socialists of all parties." One chapter is titled "The Socialist Roots of Naziism." Another, "Why the Worst Get on Top." For Hayek, controlling the economy isn't controlling one sector among others. It is "the control of the means for all our ends." Whoever controls your bread controls your life. Then your speech. Then your thoughts.
Milton Friedman put it his own way: a society that puts equality before freedom ends up with neither.
So we know exactly what works. It's not an opinion. It's a century of real-world experiments. Listen to the Austrian school, Mises and Hayek, with Friedman from Chicago alongside them: economic freedom, limited government, individual responsibility.
And this is where we get to the great accusatory inversion. Part of the left-wing press spends its time screaming fascism. Why? Because the fascism fantasy is the best way to never talk about the track record of their own ideas. Deep down, they know: if their collectivist program were applied all the way, it wouldn't work, because a collective economy cannot work. And an economy that doesn't work always ends up having to coerce, surveil and ban. In other words, it becomes exactly what they claim to be fighting. The real heirs of totalitarian logic are not the ones being pointed at.
So who gets called "far right" in 2026? People who want safe cities. People who want to keep their culture. People who just want to live a peaceful life, raise their kids, and not have to board up their shop every weekend. People who want the law to apply to everyone.
If that's the far right, then the word no longer means anything. And maybe that was the point.
Joe Smyth retweeted
In yesterday's Irish Times, Mary Robinson, who served as Ireland's president from 1990 to 1997, likened attempts to stop Sally Rooney "expressing support for Palestinians" to the demonisation of opponents of apartheid. She called Faber's decision to stop selling Rooney's books in the UK "a very worrying constraint and repression."
To be clear, Faber's decision was not about Rooney expressing support for Palestinians. In August 2025, also in the Irish Times, Rooney wrote that she intended "to use the proceeds of my work, as well as my public platform generally, to go on supporting Palestine Action and direct action against genocide in whatever way I can." Palestine Action is a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK. Faber says the law now prevents it from passing Rooney's UK earnings to her, and that selling her work there without paying her would be "unconscionable." Therefore, it reached a voluntary agreement with Rooney to withdraw her books from British bookstores.
While Robinson shows great concern for Rooney, another woman's name appears nowhere in the article, that of Police Sergeant Kate Evans.
In August 2024, Palestine Action activists attacked an Elbit Systems site at Filton, near Bristol. Sgt Evans was on her knees, trying to handcuff a female activist, when Samuel Corner, a 23-year-old former student at the University of Oxford, hit her from behind with a sledgehammer. In the judge's words, she "did not have any chance of seeing or escaping the blow."
Evans suffered multiple fractures to her vertebrae. For months, she was unable to drive, shower, or dress herself. Almost two years later, she has not returned to full active duty, is still receiving medical treatment, and has been unable to retain her rank as a sergeant. She still experiences panic attacks during the night, and her parents and children fear for her safety.
In June, Corner was convicted of inflicting grievous bodily harm on Sgt. Evans and jailed for over seven years. The judge described "extreme and gratuitous violence against a vulnerable police officer" and noted that Corner "has never even said sorry." In her victim impact statement, Sgt. Evans said that Corner had attempted to "justify his actions with baseless and offensive claims that [she] was complicit in genocide".
Rooney's defenders will say she supports damage to property, not violence against people. But Filton shows how that distinction blurs when activists arrive armed with sledgehammers and police are summoned to stop them. Rooney pledged her platform and her earnings to the terrorist group the year after the Filton attacks, but I can find no record of her ever even mentioning Sgt. Evans.
Robinson is right to condemn "thuggery and intimidation" by far-right agitators, and right to defend the rule of law. But the rule of law exists to protect everyone equally. Standards shouldn't change when people are engaging in thuggery, intimidation, and violence for a cause she favours. Sympathy is also not a limited resource, and it can stretch beyond celebrity novelists to a police officer who has lost far more to Palestine Action than some book royalties.
irishtimes.com/ireland/2026/…
Joe Smyth retweeted
Shocking number of people just taking the Russian aggressor on face value and this statement as proof of some conspiracy to drag Ireland into an emerging global conflict.
I am going to take apart the statement below, and I hope it will counter this blatant disinformation.
⚡️ Statement by the Embassy of Russia in Ireland (October 23, 2026)
The much-publicised discussion in Ireland of the issues with the “Triple Lock” legislation and Irish neutrality includes continuing references to Russia made by the leaders of the Irish government, which contain unfounded allegations, as well as misrepresentation of the way the UN Peacekeeping mechanism works.
In the course of the debate in the Dáil on October 21, Helen McEntee, the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, and Defence, strongly objected to the current “Triple Lock” legislation on the grounds that it presumably allows Russia, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, “to have a say over which peacekeeping missions we can send our troops to”, or even to veto Irish participation in such missions, and that ostensibly does not sit well with the Minister who believes that Russia is “attacking European member-states, including Germany, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Poland”.
We strongly believe that any decisions on the matters of neutrality or any other policy matters are sovereign issues to be discussed and decided solely by the Irish government and the Irish people. At the same time, it is obvious that such decisions – whatever they are – should not be made under false assumptions, which is exactly the case with the Minister’s statements. Contrary to her assertions, the UN Security Council does not vote on what countries take part in a peacekeeping mission – its composition is agreed in the course of multilateral consultations conducted by the UN Secretariat and the interested UN member-countries. Also, there is no known record of Russia being against Ireland’s participation in any UN peacekeeping mission. Consequently, the allegations by Minister McEntee are reprehensible and misleading, grossly distorting the substance and the meaning of procedures provided by the UN Charter.
❗️In the same manner, the Minister’s speculations over Russia’s “attacks” on the EU countries are totally baseless, dangerously provocative and unacceptable. This kind of rhetoric is unthinkable for any responsible member of a government.
It is regrettable that the Irish government has chosen to deliberately question the workings of the UN – despite its much-advertised commitment to the central role of the UN in the international order – with the aim to promote domestic policy agenda. It is also incumbent upon Irish leadership to realise that exercises in Russophobia cannot make up for a serious failure in its approach to relations with Russia and issues of peace and stability in Europe.
Joe Smyth retweeted
When Ireland joined Nato's Partnership for Peace a quarter of a century ago the neutrality fetishists claimed it amounted to the end of neutrality. It never arose in national discourse again. Exactly the same will happen in relation to the triple lock.
Former soldier Declan Power in today's Independent.
Who is this Bot representing?
Replying to @RobGilbey
FF had approx 20% of the electoral vote before they changed thier manifesto to include serious reform of the triple lock
They had NO mandate
Tell me you don’t understand representative democracy without telling me you don’t understand representative democracy.
Replying to @Mupper41 @stevenconlon
When it affects the safety, security, future of an entire population and country, it can't be left to 80 treacherous shitstained arseholes to decide
The real reason why there wasn't a referendum is because the dail ballsacks knew what way that would go
An important thread if you want to understand the actuality of the Triple Lock bill, not the fantasies being thrown around.
#TripleLock
Joe Smyth retweeted
There are calls for a referendum to write the triple lock, or neutrality itself, into the Constitution. I’d urge caution. Constitutional wording is hard to change, and if it’s drafted badly it could leave the Defence Forces unable to act when we most need them to.
Joe Smyth retweeted
I am going to try and assist people in understanding what the Defence (Amendment) Bill 2026 means: what goes, what changes, who decides and who doesn't and what accountability there is (besides the ballot box). If there is a FACTUAL error please let me know.
The Serbo-Russian bots are out in force in the replies here. @X can you investigate why all the replies to people stating that the Triple Lock is nonsense have so many weird replies?
Not inaccurate:
Security called me at 6:12 AM today.
"Patch every PHP server immediately."
I asked what happened.
"Two critical vulnerabilities. Remote code execution. No authentication required."
Cool.
How many PHP servers do we have?
According to inventory: 12
According to reality:
Nobody knows.
We found one running WordPress.
Three running old internal tools.
One under someone's desk.
Two inside vendor appliances.
A forgotten employee directory from 2016.
And a server named:
PHP-OLD-DO-NOT-TOUCH
Naturally, that one runs payroll exports.
Then we found a PHP 5.6 box.
I asked who owned it.
The documentation said:
BRIAN.
Brian left in 2019.
We called Brian.
He said:
"Oh wow, that's still running?"
Excellent.
By 8 AM, leadership joined the incident call.
CEO:
"Can hackers actually get in?"
Security:
"Potentially yes."
CEO:
"Without a password?"
Security:
"Yes."
CEO:
"Then why do WE need passwords?"
Not the lesson.
Finance asked if we could wait until the weekend to patch because downtime affects revenue.
Security explained that the alternative was letting strangers execute code on our servers.
Finance asked for a cost comparison.
At 9:17, someone suggested temporarily taking the vulnerable websites offline.
Marketing refused.
"Our campaign is live."
So for the next hour, the company officially decided maintaining a landing page for 20% off webinar registration was more important than preventing remote server takeover.
We finally patched everything we could find.
Then our scanner discovered another PHP server.
Hostname:
TEMP-PHP-2014
Uptime:
4,512 days.
Nobody knows what it does.
Nobody owns it.
Nobody can shut it down.
But every time we block network access, the warehouse stops printing shipping labels.
Security has classified it as critical infrastructure.
It is running PHP 5.4.
The vulnerability has existed longer than half our employees.
The emergency patch took four hours.
Finding out what PHP actually runs took eleven.
The internet isn't held together with code.
It's held together with servers everyone is afraid to turn off.
Joe Smyth retweeted
Replying to @MaryLouMcDonald
FACT CHECK: the Triple Lock is not neutrality. It's a 1960 amendment to the Defence Acts governing overseas deployments. Neutrality appears nowhere in the Constitution and has never been written into Irish law at all
Amending an Act requires no referendum. #IrishDefenceThoughts
Joe Smyth retweeted
Nope. It can only recommend, not authorise. These recommendations are not legally binding, and the General Assembly cannot compel action.
Joe Smyth retweeted
It was literally in the Fianna Fail election manifesto.
Fine Gael: 'We will work to ensure that Ireland is prepared to address these challenges independently while also collaborating with our allies'
Removing the Triple Lock gives us independence.
Cousin marriage is bad because of genetic issues due to consanguinity. It also reinforces tribalism. Trying to say it’s fine because it’s widespread in failed states like Pakistan and Somalia is an absolutely diabolical stance in guidance to our teachers.
An NCCA report claims that cousin marriage is common within the Irish Traveller community, but adds that this is not unusual because marrying your cousin is "a cultural norm" in many societies like Pakistan and Sudan.
gript.ie/ncca-cousin-marriag…
Taxes on unrealised gains are incredibly dumb. The second order effects always outweigh the perceived gains.
this California wealth tax thing is just incredible.
so in October 2025, a California healthcare union proposed a "one time" 5% tax on any billionaire's wealth. the ballot measure will be voted on next month. In early December 2025, California announced that it would be a retroactive tax if passed, applying to anyone with CA residency as of Jan 1, 2026. The objective is to pay for Medi-Cal, California's incredibly dysfunctional healthcare system. (which also functions as a glorified welfare apparatus, but that's a discussion for another time).
polls reveal that the CA electorate is split around 50/50 on the tax, but prediction markets only give Prop 40 a ~23% chance of passing (there are competing measures on the ballet that would nullify it).
there are 200 billionaires in CA, worth collectively somewhere between $2.3 and $2.6 trillion. 5% of that is around $100b, accounting for a small amount of attrition. proponents of the tax forecasted a significant windfall, assuming only a 10% departure rate.
supporters thought they were being clever with the retroactive concept. no billionares would leave CA in the few short months between the tax being proposed and the residency cutoff date, without the tax even having passed yet, right?
well as it turns out, they did.
a new paper [1] from two academics at Stanford called "The Net Present Value of the California Billionaire Tax Act", argues that not only did more billionaires leave due to the proposed tax than its proponents expected, but that the value of the tax, if it does pass, is actually negative.
proponents of the tax only assumed 10% avoidance, that is, only 10% of the taxable base of targeted billionaires would leave CA within the very short Oct-Dec 2025 window. Jaros and Rauh, the Stanford academics, find that a lower bound of 28.6% of the taxable base managed to leave.
just based on known departures, those departures total $577b in net worth, or $28.8b in potential tax lost. this of course does not capture everyone (many left without announcing their departure), so the authors normalize to departure rates estimated from other wealth tax events, and apply other discounts for litigation, arriving arrive at a figure of only $28-$36b in forecasted tax revenues.
but this isn't all! all of the income taxes paid by the departed billionaires are also forsaken. the authors estimate that CA billionaires pay $3.3- 5.8b in annual income taxes. they assume a midpoint of $2b lost in annual collections from departed billionaires. the net present value of that lost income stream is -$68.9 billion.
so when you add it all up you get:
+ $30b one-time tax windfall (estimated)
- $69b in present value of lost future income taxes
= - 38.9b overall net present value of the tax
of course, this analysis is highly estimate driven. the authors simulate the parameters 100k times and find a negative NPV of the implemented tax 85 percent of the time.
and if the tax doesn't pass, which it's not looking like it will, California still ended up losing at least $577b in departed net worth, and they have permanently poisoned the well with entrepreneurs who will now worry about future wealth taxes.
[1]: nber.org/system/files/workin…


































