Word of the day: Dysphemism — the substitution of a disagreeable, offensive, or disparaging expression for an agreeable or inoffensive one https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dysphemism

via @Alon

the arc of history bends toward the heat death of the universe.

Why have sentiment indicators broken from past stable relationships to other macroeconomic variables?

✅ Great Q! A genuine puzzle!

Why is the public mistaken, ungrateful even, when in fact the economy has been objectively good?

❌ Bullshit. There’s no such thing as an “objectively good” economy.

the kid always complains that he has no free time even though he spends hours video gaming. it’s what he wants to do with his free time, but it’s an activity that doesn’t psychologically register as free time to him. he often describes it as “grinding”.

just to be edgy, some airline ought to start selling “epstein class” tickets.

"Those in power may pretend not to know where the present political trajectories are taking us, but they seem to sense that they’ll have to hide." #OlufemiOTaiwo https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/a-year-of-magical-thinking/ ht @jbouie

One common definition of democracy (I’m sorry I don’t offhand know the attribution) is “democracy is the system under which political parties lose elections”. I think that needs to be augmented, “along with free entry of political parties able to meaningfully contest elections”.

an irony of the Iran War is it was perpetrated in hopes of a color revolution but by governments who’d drained all color from everywhere else in the world and mocked any hope for it as folly.

you think he must have all the answers but if he made us in his image then he too must be in a state of existential confusion.

@mhjohnson@noauthority.social @Phil@freeatlantis.com a lot is buried in the phrase “the wisdom to know the difference”. what might be wise from a psychological perspective might not be wise from a moral perspective.

@Phil@freeatlantis.com It’s the habit of mind. You can’t always fix the bad things you know are happening, you should be judicious and not make things worse from moral vanity, but at the same time you should never concede to resignation or denial, you should always be thinking about whether there isn’t some way you could make a contribution that wouldn’t make things worse or arrogate prerogatives that are not yours. but in practice it’s very difficult to keep that up in a serious way. instead you numb.

@Phil@freeatlantis.com knowing about bad things and shrugging them off in learned moral helplessness makes one worse. it’s not just the knowing but the retreat to inaction, even though inaction might objectively be better than any alternatives it is obvious to consider.

we are made worse people by every bad thing we know about, but treat as just the way it is. yet it is far from clear that we and the world wouldn’t be made even worse by the more obvious things we might try to do about it.

“Americans have to reacquaint themselves with constitutional thinking — with the idea that we, the people, make constitutional meaning. To the extent that the Supreme Court claims broad authority to say what our Constitution means, it is in large part because we have given this authority to them through our indifference.” @jbouie https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/06/opinion/callais-voting-rights-act-discrimination.html

@artcollisions that depends how the subsidies are structured! universal subsidies can diminish incentives (think what a UBI would do with respect to incentives to put up with bad working conditions).

incentives matter. that's why we need to dramatically reduce them.

Higher education would be better if the people who participate in it, both as students and as educators, were there, on the terms they are there, because they affirmatively choose it rather than in order to pursue instrumental derivative goals.

The humans are always stirring up trouble with one another for really dumb reasons.

@eyesquash the reason we want to take money out of the economy so the stae can spend money without inflation or requiring very high interest rates. taking the money of the rich out of the economy doesn’t do much about that ‘cuz they weren’t spending it anyway. (you’d have to take a whole whole lot away before it’d have any real effect through their investment choices. either the investments are small relative to their net worth, or they bring along banks and others to limit their risk.)

My low volume, confirmed-subscribers, single-click-to-unsubscribe newsletters are getting rejected by Apple (me.com / icloud.com / mac.com e-mail addresses).

554 5.7.1 [CS01] Message rejected due to local policy.
Please visit https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204137.

Anyone have experience resolving this?