regulation has it costs, but if you go by journalism, which disproportionately presents extreme cases, you'll overstate them. regulation has profound benefits too. that there's lots of room for improvement doesn't render the regulatory state a catastrophe. see #KevinDrum https://jabberwocking.com/yeah-america-can-still-build-stuff/
perhaps i'm mistaken, but i don't think the outpouring of support for luigi reflects affluenza or post-materialist politics.
although, yes, even people with awful health insurance do have a wide variety of sushi options these days.
this by @mattyglesias is very good. https://www.slowboring.com/p/four-years-later
Text: If I were to say, “It’s irresponsible to back Trump regardless of your views on taxes and energy because he’s an authoritarian menace,” these people would say I’m being a hysterical lib. But if I were to say, “It’s fine to vote for Trump while still strongly disagreeing with what he did around 1/6, I’d just like to hear you say that in public,” the response would be that everyone knows it’s best to avoid Trump’s bad side. If you’re not willing to voice criticism of the president, even while generally supporting him, because you’re afraid of retaliation, that seems at least a little bit like Trump is an authoritarian menace. I have concerns! And what I would love more than anything is for Trump supporters in the business world or at conservative nonprofits to set my mind at ease, not by arguing with me about whether Trump is an authoritarian menace, but by showing me that they don’t fear him and can offer pointed, vocal criticism of his conduct and strong condemnation of these potential pardons.
small frivolous expenses — i don’t wanna touch burritos let’s go back to avocado toast — don’t indicate the purchaser is either wealthy or foolish. they can be chosen because, despite their frivolity, they are immaterial relative to big sources of financial stress and deliver pleasure worth the small cost. 1/
humans don’t reveal lexical preferences for what finger-waggers deem essential first to frivolities only if income remains. this includes the preferences of the finger waggers whose excess income only lets them pretend their preferences are unhumanly hierarchical. /fin
if, during a war, you are going to decide which side is a villain by which side’s spokespeople speak tendentiously and in bad faith, you will find nearly always that all sides are the villain.
try not to slide into defending other people's caricatures of your views.
how long before OnlyFans and similar are overtaken by AI fake characters run by twenty-something mostly male hustlers and we have a strange analogue of the “cultural appropriation” debate of the 2010s?
correlation is not causation, necessarily. but sometimes it is. but the arrow of causality may go in the direction opposite what you presume. so often what people think are means are ends, and vice versa.
There’s a lot of continuity between Obama’s unwillingness to go hard against banks because it would have “required a violence to the social order, a wrenching of political and economic norms” and Merrick Garland.
( see @ryanlcooper https://theweek.com/articles/950908/obama-pretender )
capitalism at its best is basically caging the devil in a boiler to drive society’s steam turbines. which can be an amazing source of energy. low carbon too!
but never forget you have to keep that motherfucker in the cage.
every day we have a 1:11, a 2:22, a 3:33, a 4:44, a 5:55. 6:66 would be the first transgression.
i’m thinking of opening up an adulting rink.
a social media site should amplify negative content during Democratic administrations but deboost it in favor of positive, beautiful, or informative content during Republican administrations.
A good post by @noahpinion on the hazards of formulaic means of describing or comparing the size and strength of economies. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/how-do-we-measure-whether-chinas
"a government that wastes least governs suboptimally… fear of waste shuts down useful experiments… if you learn from mistakes, you have to make mistakes to learn… you need…a surplus… time and resources to train, improve, and innovate." @profmusgrave https://musgrave.substack.com/p/government-needs-to-waste-more
"The thing about joining a revolution is that eventually the eddies of radicalism and reaction get mixed up. You might think that you’re leading a counter-revolution against radicalism, only to be surprised when your allies suddenly sharpen the guillotine for you." @profmusgrave https://musgrave.substack.com/p/unleashing-the-cultural-counter-revolution
"anything that isn't rigged in their favor feels like it's broken to them!" @anildash https://www.anildash.com/2025/01/04/DOGE-procurement-capture/
you know, wages are just lower in less developed countries. https://mas.to/@meganL/113773125042966193
both Mastodon and BlueSky are by reputation “left” / “liberal”. maybe Mastodon is more “left” and BlueSky “liberal”?
i now mostly crosspost, and find myself more worried about blowback to my views on BlueSky than on Mastodon, which i find interesting.
there’s a strain of unreconstructed proud prosperous not-so-left liberalism much more prominent there than here.