he was always an innovator in transportation — electric cars, rocket ships, hyperloops — but now he’s really outdone himself, inventing the 24-hour train wreck.
sometimes i take heart that the future may be weirder than we can possibly imagine.
if this is a problem, the solution is called “taxes”.
cf #JeffStein https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/09/03/us-debt-deficit-rises-interest-rate/
you talk like it’s a bad thing, rich people being above the law. it’s a powerful incentive to produce!
“A home is lost twice: first when you leave it and then again when you return.” #MihretSibhat https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-09-02/queer-lgbtq-ethiopia-touch-sexuality-identity-united-states
(via Technology As Nature http://www.technologyasnature.com/touchy-4/)
it’s harder for people to figure out what they’re for than what they’re against.
it’s not just AI generated bullshit.
i fear a lot of “lifehacks” and other human “influencer” content on tiktok, youtube, insta etc is similarly optimized to draw your attention with little concern with the consequences if you are enthusiastic enough to actually take the advice.
Without context.
what if the secret to a good life really is just doing everything that your spam emails advise?
burning man used to have kind of an exclusive vibe but thanks to climate change it’s been democratized.
"Defining Bidenomics" — a Polycrisis/JFI panel (Ted Fertik , Daniela Gabor, Tim Sahay, Daniel Denvir) https://www.phenomenalworld.org/interviews/bidenomics/
it's weird how the economic right is obsessed with the problem of free-riding on the benefits side, but not on the tax side.
(defund the IRS! they cry, ensuring those who cheat can free-ride upon those who pay.)
sometimes people have a hard time distinguishing giving effect to their resentments from virtue.
“trafficking” increasingly just means transportation for purposes you don’t like. cf https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/09/01/texas-abortion-highways/ ht @ZhiZhu
TIL rclone exists. What a very useful tool. https://rclone.org/
“The attraction of cryptocurrency investment for VCs is the way List And Dump Schemes provide much faster liquidity than developing a startup to the point of IPO or acquisition” #DavidRosenthal #DSHR https://blog.dshr.org/2023/08/prof-hilary-allen-on-venture-capital.html
“when it comes to redistribution, views about fairness are divided into two: ‘redistribution from’ and ‘redistribution to’… Cavaillé…argues that the way most people think about fairness when thinking about taking away is rather different to fairness when giving to others… attitudes about ‘redistribution from’ tend to go along economic left/right lines, but attitudes about ‘redistribution to’ are more correlated with socially liberal or conservative mindsets.” @sjwrenlewis https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2023/08/attitudes-towards-redistribution.html
back in the eighties, our parents told us that it wasn’t even music. they told us it was a rhyme spree.
putting things into perspective, tracking the different relative urgency and intractability of problems and helping us organize to prioritize, is more useful but not nearly engaging as portraying every problem as a threatening catastrophe.
in this way, any form of engagement-based journalism does violence to our collective capacity to act intelligently, no matter how sincere individual journalists are about their mission and the awfulnesses they uncover and report.
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