one video is tragedy. a thousand videos is just noise.

it’s weird how inured we’ve become. reliberation day is kind of a big deal, if we don’t TACO our way out of it very quickly. do we just presume we do? how much do China’s controls on rare earths matter in either case?

if you’re talking about your political party as a “brand”, you’ve already lost the thread, if not the election.

feudalism is when you must do as the most pathetic people you encounter demand because they have the power to have you murdered.

pleasantly surprised that here in Florida my wife and i were able to get COVID boosters without new formalities, attestations of comorbidities, etc. just signed up at CVS like last year.

sometimes i think contemporary christianity is to christ like the twenty-dollar federal reserve note is to andrew jackson.

kind of fun that frog is now both a fascist-adjacent and antifascist-adjacent icon.

slippery little guy, that one!

how will rare-earth scarcity intersect with data center build? might it be a meaningful bottleneck?

if you oppose the administration and call them fascist, what does that make you?

we used to be forward-looking but now we are forward-fearing and obsessed by retrofutures. https://flipboard.com/@theverge/the-verge-5hobbaa8z/-/a-rJaMAFsqQxW8IiJcluZ67w%3Aa%3A43611565-%2F0

All else equal — ceteris paribus, as the economists say — if you were to just grab that expensive watch from the jewelry store counter and walk out the door, you'd be better off.

Only all else would not be equal.

Lots of data-centric political punditry is basically "grab the watch".

“we could call this a more muscular, socialism-inflected version of antitrust. Rather than (or in addition to) playing constant legal whack-a-mole against market concentration, the government steps in directly and creates the competition it wants, either through subsidies or outright state-owned firms. This antitrust model has led to by far the most effective attack on fossil fuel power in history: the rise of ultra-cheap renewable energy.” @ryanlcooper https://prospect.org/economy/2025-10-07-socialist-case-for-antitrust/

“In smaller courses, the difference in the quality of course discussion where 70 percent of the students have done 50 percent of the readings and one in which 20 percent have done 10 percent of the readings is obvious in the same way that a cold Coke tastes different than lukewarm spit. The former is no Chablis, but it is more palatable.” @profmusgrave https://musgrave.substack.com/p/a-post-literate-society-is-a-too ht @RebeccaSpang

i hope they stop murdering people there. i am rooting for that.

“It’s true that Bush did more to infringe on civil liberties than Trump did in his first term, but if Trump had been president on 9/11, he probably would have put the country’s entire Muslim population in internment camps.” #MattYglesias https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-authoritarian-menace-has-arrived

people underestimate the power of mere annoyance in politics. often people just vote against the people they consider more annoying.

in a dystopian society, billboards would be dominated by ads for personal injury and divorce lawyers. radio (they’d call it “podcasts”) would be constantly hawking supplements, CBD, and psychotherapy.

as a peacemaker, i am perfectly willing to accept your absolute surrender.

the entrenchment of a gerontocratic political leadership globally suggests life extension research may have social costs its enthusiasts and funders have not reckoned with. for much of the world, the finitude of leaders’ natural lifespans represents the public’s best hope for change.

i’d like to hear more about generative AI tools developed and deployed outside of the United States or China.