the recurrent line that has always stuck out to me, "name any issue and i'll tell you how cars make the problem worse", is extremely true because once you See cars you cannot unsee them.

Someone sent my mom an internet order of cheese. We stepped through the likely causes in probability order: scam, bug, weird marketing campaign, (failed) hack, before reaching "poorly labeled gift," which turned out to be correct. I don't love the culture we've built.

I used to think the main economic political axis was how high you set the discount rate, but right now I think it's whether your view of wellbeing is absolute or relative.

The implication that web software shipped in 2015-2025 prioritized perfection would be ROFLMAO funny if it hurt a bit less. For that matter, implying that its design constraints could conceive of perfection, or ever stand on a hill where they could glimpse perfection on the horizon...

Blocking every account that insists on reposting Trump may be the only remaining option.

There's a Sterling book ("Islands in the Net" IIRC) where what's left of the US uses a huge obsolete navy ship to respond to a geopolitical incident, *because* it's slow and ineffective. Its use pushes domestic news for a week without doing a real act of war.

There's a whole political axis around whether the cool part of a battleship is "battle" or "ship."

10 notable books on conservation and the environment published in 2025

As an American, I hope we're still allowed to travel internationally by 2030, so we can at least go see what the future we opted out of could have been like :(

one of the best arguments against a tax policy that allows for a robust billionaire class is that it ensures a concentration of both power and wealth in the most deeply incurious people on the planet

Merry Christmas! (to those who celebrate, plus anyone flexible in their opportunities for merriment)

You've called out the most important fact about GDP, which politicians of both colors need to be constantly reminded of. It's just total spending Higher prices? GDP growth. Need to rebuild from a disaster? Growth Spending twice as much for the same stuff means economic success, as measured by GDP

Being a politically active Democrat is an exercise in desperately trying to improve conditions for Republican voters, because that's much better than the option where everyone is unimaginably screwed, and almost nobody with any power gives serious consideration to things you actually care about.

Seems accurate to me. Our near-term challenge is more likely to be surviving in a failed state than surviving under effective fascism.

The current crop of robber barrons are, as a whole class, a ZIRP

All prices and price trends in housing are always a crisis. It's just a question of whether it's a crisis for renters or rentiers. It's a reliable heuristic that anything good for rentiers is bad for everyone else in every other sector of the economy, and vice versa.

The entire american "free speech" panic was about elites being criticized, which is why anyone who ever took it seriously should be ignored forever

"How y'all feeling out there?" "Really!? Y'all should tone it down. Have considered appealing to right-leaning moderates, and more importantly billionaires?"

I did suggest the Trump admin would issue letters of marque, but I was mostly joking. Silly of me. Piracy it is, then (or at least privateering). Arr.

I'm a Bozone guy, but likewise. Tester was a good representative of his purple state (to a fault, sometimes, IMO :) We worked hard to keep him, but eventually national media poisoning caught up.

Me: how should I think of this? Mathematician: would you say you are very familiar with diffeomorphisms in non-Riemannian geometries or merely the standard amount of familiar?

And so checked out Google Scholar. Now on my profile it doesn't appear, but somwhow on Nelli's it does and ... and ... omg, IT'S BEEN CITED 42 TIMES almost exlusively in papers about AI in education from this year alone... scholar.google.com.vn/citations?vi...

I know the proliferation of references to non-existent papers, powered by genAI, is getting less surprising and shocking but it doesn't make it any less potentially corrosive to the scholarly knowledge environment.

Power's out. Today the islanding solar system and battery backup have something to do. Heat pumps are amazing. We have mostly overcast sky. Solar is running at <15% capacity, but that's enough to both run central heat and charge the batteries.

It's getting to the point where if I see something I've bought for years advertised on the internet, I feel like I have to figure out how to live without it, since it must be a scam now.

Would you rather go to parties than starve kids to death? Yeah, me too. It's why we aren't billionaire material.

"Enshittogenic policy environment" 🤌

The US Navy is now a cabal of pirates, in a literal sense. They murder the shipwrecked and hijack ships to steal their cargo.

The 10% guaranteed profit on past spending (or in MT, on assessed value of maintained assets) for utiliy monopolies is so obviously stupid people won't believe me when I tell them about it. These companies are paid to make the grid more expensive.

Flood warnings (for MT in December) continue

I just deleted 900 emails. A dozen required clicking on to scan briefly and/or file. 3 required responses. One of those was most likely a mistaken send (by a human). There were thousands more that filtered to spam or were blocked. These were just "real" mail.

More than anything else classism is that if you lose your company half a million you get fired, but if Zuck loses Meta 77 billion he gets paid $28 million. Meritocracy doesn't fail due to DEI, if fails becaues we can't ever let a rich nimrod suffer consequences for any level of screwup.

I'm sure some conservatives still believe in democracy, equality, fair dealing, and the rule of law. They're just Dems at this point. We hear their voices asking Dems to move right every day. They see that as more viable than asking the GOP to uphold those ideals.

One of the top political questions on my mind is how many young GOP are really literal, devoted, out-of-the-closet Nazis, and how many are doing youth rebellion: trying to find any way to offend and shock a culture that's too jaded and/or permissive to be shocked.

To some extent, I think Republicans themselves believe Murc's Law. If you run on "the Government is fundamentally bad and will turn anything it touches to shit" for long enough, you end up having a hard time imagining good things for the government to do.

A minor but blatent example: Influential voices directed at young men who aren't getting laid are directly rewarded with money and political power when young men don't get laid. This has predictable effects on the quality of their advice.

Our culture is good at reaching the outcomes it incentivizes, but suicidally bad at choosing which outcomes to incentivize. In most cases where we're collectively doing cruel, evil, self-destructive things, leaders and instigators are doing exactly what they were paid or otherwise rewarded for.

Currently dorking out over this graph about child mortality with my brother. Just mind boggling to take in.

Ding

Rohrschach test headline

Specifically, this article includes the only definition of "elite" that matches MAGA's use. An elite is a person who uses system-2 thinking. If they make $40K a year working 2 jobs with no authority, they are still Elite if, and only if, they apply active attention to their thought process.

Good take josephheath.substack.com/p/populism-f...

Some times, a simple solution to a complex problem exists, it's just a matter of understanding that the complex problem exists because the incentives are all wrong for the source of the problem. Fix the incentives.

This is the underlying truth the Abrahamic faiths are pointing at when they talk about being damned to Hell for eternity.

Yes, I do

Companies are a top example of conservatives who hate government transfer payments they are the main beneficiaries of. Government programs from SNAP to education to roads and power grids are de-facto subsidies that help companies avoid paying their real costs.

this is true for basically all tradeswork, employers aren’t willing to pay enough for the training to make it worth it

If discovery of a load of written evidence changed anything they'd all already be locked up.

GOP: "We don't solve problems, but if you ask really nicely, we might stop actively worsening them and claim that's a solution"

I'm not sure what the future of the Democratic party is, but we can be certain it's not listening to the New York Times. That way lies only death.