facebook began with a mission to connect the world and ends with a mission to dissolve all connections in slop.

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.)

i feel suddenly like we're on our own. https://mastodon.social/@WarnerCrocker/113738214901242023

@order i think (but am not sure!) regulation has caught up with that in the US, credit card companies are not allowed to enforce their traditional prohibition on differential pricing.

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.

claims like Mississippi is richer than France because GDP per capita aren’t the zinger you think. they just (correctly!) undermine the notion that GDP per capita is a good measure of prosperity.

how does the electrical power utilization of generative AI compare with that of bitcoin?

a thing no microblogging platform offers, but all should: a hidden by default but click-to-revealable space for attributions of claims made in the post. just links, excluded from the character limit. many posts make factual claims that strike me either wrong or extraordinary, no way to tell which.

is DOGE going to be politically sustainable at this point under its proposed leadership?

an irony of the mad-white-guy H1B debate is that the fix most in their interest is to make the visas more generous — eliminate the tight attachment to continued employment which means visa-holders accept worse conditions than native-born would to ensure continued status.

you know the Democratic Party is the party of fairness, because whenever they have to decide who their leaders should be the question they ask is “whose turn is it?”