but what about the Supreme Court? worries Ezra Klein. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/21/opinion/biden-mccarthy-debt-ceiling.html won't they just declare the workaround unlawful, leaving Biden to own the chaos for doing something novel?
that is precisely why it's so important to set up the republican negotiators as unreasonable extortionate goal-post movers. because a partisan Court must worry that they and the party they serve will own the chaos rather than the administration. 2/
no one wants to own the chaos.
and killing the debt ceiling after a breach is much, much worse than, say, also arguably illegal payment prioritization before a breach. it would invalidate lots of debt that will already be in (wealthy) private parties' hands.
existing US Treasury instruments go poof! is about the clearest path to calamity. Would an unpopular Supreme Court defending what the public perceives (if the admin plays this well) as extortionate brinksmanship really do that? /fin
positing 11-dimensional chess to explain US politicians' choices is a losing game, usually.
with that as caveat, i think the biden administration's strategy is to tempt republicans into a set of demands that can be portrayed to the public as unreasonable and extortionate.
that creates *political* justification to defang the debt ceiling, using any of the variety of technical and legal workarounds available (and probably the ones Biden hasn't publicly discussed at all so far). 1/
in retrospect it feels like someone hit fast-forward.
expansionary austerity is just taxing the rich.
a structural weakness of the Democratic Party relative to the Republican Party is the difference in how corruption is perceived.
corrupt Republicans are bold, cigar-chomping caudillos, unapologetic winners who can’t be bothered with your whining.
but Democrats are always on about “Democracy” and “institutions” and “rule of law”. they can’t embrace corruption like a winner, so their indulgings come off as cagey, hypocritical, obvious but pedantically denied, weak.
how does the market react on the day Treasury announces a premium bonds program or resumption of issuance of consols?
@HamonWry people are mostly nice to one another here. what’s that about?
taxes are the primary weapon that the public wields to tame the rich. that is why the rich work so assiduously to discredit them.
our butt-hurts calcify into blindspots.
early in Google's existence, they emphasized how their business depends upon a lively open internet. in those early days they mostly seem to foster that.
but now they (and their peer firms) mostly try to keep users on their own properties, to become the intermediary through which any external data is accessed.
an unsafe internet is more supportive of this business model. if it's a dangerous internet, better stick with Google SafeSearch.
so why do you think Google might propose a .zip domain?
[tech notebook] pdfcat as a Scala script https://tech.interfluidity.com/2023/05/20/pdfcat-as-a-scala-script/index.html
bing AI just skyped me to chat. the future is the past. we’ll talk to Skynet via AIM.
i still don't understand why they cost $50,000. seems like it would be a good business, selling bus shelters to LA. cf @Alon https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/05/19/quick-note-los-angeles-spends-50000-per-bus-shelter/
"during the decade-plus in which Uber was pissing away the Saudi royal family's billions subsidizing rides, cities dismantled their public transit, even as residents made decisions about where to live and work based on the presumption that Uber was charging a fair, sustainable price for rides." @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/19/fake-it-till-you-make-it/
florida man used to be weird and dissolute, maybe a bit too good at competing for darwin awards. i liked him better then, before he became a scold and a prude, a reactionary snowflake in the sweltering sun.
it's fine. it's better than fine! i'll sell "my yacht" and pay the taxes and enjoy the rest of my life under considerably less stress than i ever would have imagined. https://mstdn.social/@newsbot/110399666700813261
On the right hand side of my terminal windows — straight MacOS Terminal.app, in a variety of shells and programs — I see faint ']' characters at the right-hand edge. It's subtle, and I've just noticed it now, but I can't figure out what it would be. It's not a ZSH right-hand prompt (it appears in a Scala REPL, for example). Any clues?
st peter gets tired of explaining, winning isn’t everything. in the scheme of things it is nothing at all.
thanks to @caseyjennings who, apropos nothing, has me reading about Caligula. https://museumhack.com/caligula-mad-emperor/
i still don’t have a good way to conceptualize the relationship between elon musk and his firms’ accomplishments.
