Freddie DeBoer says nice things about my sister's book. https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/2024-in-review
am i crippling my child's future life chances by discouraging narcissism and mendacity?
Organizing leadership by seniority is an important part of the incumbency bias of US Congressional elections.
Voters understandably choose representatives that will have influence over representatives who will not. Under seniority-based leadership rules, only incumbents have influence.
"I was just following market forces" is the new "I was just following orders"
assuming we are right (i'm pretty sure we are right!) that Dittman is Musk, i don't know what to do with an epistemological environment in which one of the world's most powerful men and most prominent speakers does this.
Screenshots of X posts by Elon Musk meming mockery of people who think Adrian Dittman is Elon Musk, quoting followers asserting believing this apparently true claim is false is an "IQ test", ie to be smart one must believe the lie.
This transaction has timed out and must be restarted.
the game was not fair but still you’ve been checkmated.
can we (are we?) preemptively develop vaccines against H5N1 flu that would at least reduce its severity should it breakout as a human pandemic?
facebook began with a mission to connect the world and ends with a mission to dissolve all connections in slop.
fox news is not free speech.
it’s not fox news’ viewpoint that renders it not free speech. it is the intersection of viewpoint undisciplined by epistemological guard rails and reach. the bigger you are, the duller you must be, because you have obligations to fairness and caution.
note this is completely inconsistent with a world in which reach is a function of attracting eyeballs through entertainment or outrage.
if your requirements for a free society are inconsistent as a practical matter with its survival as a free society, you might want to reconsider those requirements.
people imagine that causality goes from free speech to a decent society, but it’s much more accurate to understand it as a decent society makes tenable free speech. 90s-era freewheeling speech norms were made tenable by shared epistemological institutions that were biased but broadly functional.
it’s how you get to live to 100. https://mas.to/@NunavutBirder/113739517177492647
isn’t this contract basically the structure of an assassination market? obviously not accusing anyone. but do we think contracts like this are okay?
(i’m not sure on what prediction market this allegedly traded.)
Price graph of a prediction market, “Will Jimmy Carter die in 2024?” showing contracts declinjng from 80¢ to almost worthlessness since Aug, then spiking to $1 today.
i feel suddenly like we're on our own. https://mastodon.social/@WarnerCrocker/113738214901242023
if you let the data speak for itself, you’ll hear only lies.
@jp_koning on how accurate data about euro-denominated traffic over the SWIFT network might lead one to conclusions 180° off from what’s likely going on.
https://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2024/12/someone-is-wrong-on-internet-about.html
it’s amazing how nostalgia can turn even mildly annoying aspects of the quotidian into things i now pine for.
the MAGA Civil War is when Georgia secedes from Massachusetts.
i’m glad more places are offering cash discounts, to help expose and wean us from the credit card fee racket, but i wish they’d also offer debit card discounts, inexpensive without the inconvenience of carrying cash.
so much of what we’ve called growth has come from blowing up what was once free and ordinary, then restoring a poor facsimile thereof for a price. we can talk to our families over zoom. what a novelty.