sometimes you lose touch with it in the confusion of the quotidian. but then all of a sudden clear and pure the stupidity shines through, blinds you and leaves you breathless.
i wonder whether, given the publicness of bluesky’s backend, it wouldn’t be possible to define some kind of break-glass backstop, by which one could move ones history to “lifeboats” in the fediverse, capturing and reconstituting exodus-participating portions of your social graph?
“you can be ground to dust, and the echoes of your ghost will be used by your grandchildren to justify new atrocities. the death of your babies will be used to explain why someone else’s babies must die.” @phillmv http://okayfail.com/garden/theyre-going-to-build-camps.html
[new draft post] Plutocracy as a positive ideal https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/11/19/plutocracy-as-a-positive-ideal/index.html
“A central pillar of American democracy is that no man is above the law. But Mr. Trump isn’t an ordinary man.” https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/15/opinion/trump-criminal-cases.html ht @jbouie
// well then. which truths do we hold self-evident?
Action Needed: Your balance is now past due
are you a warrior for free speech, patriot?
meritocracy failed, so we're trying meretrocracy.
i think the public remains broadly in denial about how dangerous John Roberts’ decision in Trump v United States is.
the mighty fuck around, the meek find out.
funny how the people who claim it’s “the groups” that make it so democrats don’t win somehow seem less exercised by the people who make it possible for them to do all the good and ill they do. https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/07/26/if-i-were-the-plutocracy/index.html
even while he is standing for reelection, he is still the sitting president.
Lina would’ve won.
@rieyin The US allows certain drugs to be sold inside the United States, where the same drug is also sold in, eg, Canada. The drug might be produced by the same manufacturer, in the same plant, for both countries.
But if you try to bring that first-sold-in-Canada drug across the border, the US imposes its steep “tariff” in the form of legal risk.
The arrangement, like a tariff, protects the ability of sellers inside the US to charge much higher prices than prevails elsewhere. 1/
@rieyin But a tariff is charged based on where the manufacture took place, but with pharma, the “charge” comes by virtue of where the drug was first (legally) sold. /fin
the more you protect from foreign competition on strategic grounds, the more essential it is you ensure a brutally competitive industry domestically.
we're usually better at the first half of that than the second, unfortunately.
one way to think of it is we have huge effective tariffs on pharma products *first sold elsewhere* regardless of where they are produced.
it seems to me people in the US don’t love this. we maybe feel a little ripped off by comparison to our neighbors.
years from now, where you least expect it, there will be sightings of dark brandon.
politicians draw the lesson being dickish is the superpower but it only works for a very special kind of dick.
“it was a lie,” he quietly admitted to himself, “but at least it was an honest lie.”
“you say you are an honest man, but *have* you read the terms and conditions?”