Die at age 5 (because I contracted scarlet fever) I'd make a bet that most of the people responding to this post would do something similar.

Data-driven post-rationalization!

Remains of the Day (if it has to be from primary school, probably The Chocolate War)

you do not tax billionaires to fund universal healthcare. you, yes you the person reading this, and everyone you know, pay more in taxes to fund universal healthcare. you tax billionaires to take away a gun that Elon Musk is pointing at your head.

I am doing a lot of thinking, these days, about structural/constitutional reform, and yeah, I keep coming back to... it feels like our vision of the good life is unbelievably cramped and narrow?? Both collectively and individually. It takes more than merely *political* philosophy to fix this

There are some very good candidates for MT district 1!

The political future of the US will likely be determined by the next two Dem primaries. Either we elect candidtaes who will take power back from billionaires, or we let Dems turn into Reaganite GOP, funded by, and legislating for the billionaires.

I don't love having to provide accommodations to people because they spent $90K buying a special needs vehicle, and it can't be expected to do normal car jobs.

That’s normally what it takes to get people to take the step from “I’m in traffic” to “I am traffic“ The big problem is huge parts of the US and Canada aren’t just car centric, they’re actively hostile to other forms of transport and we’ll have to essentially restructure society to change that.

Profit motive sometimes promotes bad results. Never more so than on the internet. I think if we could make it impossible to make money by writing things on the internet, the 'net would start doing more good than harm again.

I find the ads containing the phrase "that you deserve" ever more disturbing, as the evidence that whoever wrote that copy must think I deserve to be scammed into poverty by any means available mounts to irrefutable levels.

So much this! The rich don't play by the rules, so why should we allow them to remain free and rich? There are many good reasons for the rest of us to play by the rules, including "the rules are our main defense against a ruthless criminal owner class. Without them, we are screwed"

Also good for us

Maybe you think numerical Python traumatized you, but I bet it traumatized Travis Oliphant more

One consequence of gerrymanderring is that most districts will have closer margins, so abyone in the "my vote doesn't count" camp (on either side of the aisle) is now more wrong. If a few % of non-voters become voters, they can turn a gerrymander into a backlash.

. @dscc.bsky.social sent me a text message claiming it was a survey about 2028 candidates. It was actually a link to a web form to sign a petition. This form didn't display or link to the text of the petition, it just wanted to collect names and phone numbers for an undisclosed purpose.

I love that Trump computes percent change backwards, so RFK has to pretend that's the right way to do it, but RFK also can't do math, so he computes percent change both backwards AND with a random factor of 0.1 thrown in (600->10 => 600%)

Thank a plant today

This applies to more than gerrymandering. The GOP will fight to the death for anything that gives them asymmetric advantage. If we want *any* element out of our culture, Dems have to be willing to use it enough that the GOP doesn't think they'll lose an advantage by removing it.

One of the great ironies in an age of irony is that the USA will collapse in large part because we used state intervention to prevent a capitalist market from responding to technological change.

It's unfortunate that a reliable way to identify a new EV model in a parking lot is that the door handles are a reification of the will to attempted murder.

I'm pro-nulear-power these days, but I still have a major concern about it. If nukes become a near-monopoly on power, the supreme court will rule that irradiating a major metro once in a while has to be legal, because restricting that would harm power provider profits. Exact same logic as this ⬇️

All consumers want this. All sellers know it. Although they lie about wanting to please customers, nearly all of them will screw their customers to make tansactions stickier. They get away with it because there's no effective demand pressure in our economy. People don't refuse to pay.

“The Bullshit Asymmetry Principle, also known as Brandolini’s Law, states that the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.” Useful article. As we look at solutions though, our priority is demanding upstream leadership. #UrbanTruth

Related: Every city is a bikeable city if the price of gas gets high enough.

When Trump says make America great again, he means make it the way it was before Reagan made it great again.

Treats are definitely not an option. That ship sailed, caught fire, explode, sank, and the wreck was looted by billionaires in poorly-constructed subs that imploded.

Something left out of the vibecession discussion is that whether you think the Biden economy was good, bad, or neutral, it was better than the best reasonable expectation for the post-Trump economy. We are *wrecked*. So, if a Dem wins '28, they need a plan.

Treats are definitely not an option That ship sailed, caught fire, exploded, sunk, and the wreck was looted by billionaires in subs (that susequently imploded)

This does propose a possible answer to "why aren't young people drinking?" of the form "Some of them want at least a small chance to become old people."

"Teen births have crashed 81% since 1991" would be a statement of cultural victory for Reagan's GOP. "We did it, America! All those PSAs, ads, incentives to high schools, nd moral responsibility campaigns? They worked! We rocked it! Crisis averted!" It's like the conservative ozone layer. But now..

The most convincing argument I've every seen against free market capitalism is that "stuff we actually can't afford the real costs of now also costs a lot of money" is almost universally held up as evidence that we have to correct prices with policy.

Allbirds AI will run one token per step (local inference, powered by patented piezo-electric insoles). It's not practically useful for compute tasks, but OMG will everyone be so fit.

The US was founded on rejecting aristocracy and reforged on rejecting slavery, but we never fully grew into these choices as a nation. The central American idea is that people aren't destined for success or failure by accident of birth, but it remains one of America's fantasies that they could be.

If you're a single-issue voter on economic inequality, then the worst administration in modern history was Reagan. We were a very equitable country, improving over time, until his "trickle down" scam. The only contender for a runner up so far is Clinton. (data doesn't cover Trump 2)

If they can't come for Trump, he'll come for you.

The thing is, the miasma of social media & the negativity it fosters *also* insured that almost no one was aware of the incredible advances in climate & energy policy under Biden. It's not *just* the economy. It's everything. That's the point: the info environment rewards doom & resentment.

DOGE was like if a company tried to improve the bottom line by removing the marketing and product development cost centers.

Throwing a week-long party (with no access to showers) on a field of pH 10 talcum powder was one of SiliValley's better ideas, on the technical merits.

I think this is the main explanation. We traded social stability and future prosperity for financial growth. We *did get* the financial growth, on average, but this doesn't make people safe, happy, or hopeful. There's almost no amount of money that can buy those things in the culture we have now.

Pulp. This site has the pulp.

New hot take: Centrist American propaganda stopped working because it was too subtle. Cold-war-era American imperials concluded that people resist obvious propaganda and made their messages subtle. Then the internet firehosed everyone's senses into post-rock-concert deafness. RW propaganda is loud.

We use the word "sociopaths" where it's not quite right. Many Billionaires feel, and are driven by, social forces. The thing we're pointing at is insatiability: having everything you need and what you used to want, and only wanting more. RW Kimmerer calls these people wendigos.

The only reasonable response to this is for Meta staff to toe the line about hyping AI, and unanimously insist that Zuck-AI is much better than the original.

Late to this party, but I think my hottest take is that Johann Sebastian Bach was the first known progressive rock musician

This is the first year of my life that taxation was in fact theft: taken by a ruler who consistently ignores Article 1 of the US Constitution (which legitimizes them) for the express purpose of funding war crimes and massive fraud.

more seriously congrats to the hungarian people for kicking that asshole out

Orban out. Hell yeah!

Money was a pretty good idea The internet was a pretty good idea Mixing them was so many flavors of bad idea we may never recover

It's not actually weird when a tech CEOs isn't good at engineering. Our culture has a specialized workforce. Engineers require a mostly objective skillset and CEOs a mostly subjective one. What was weird was tech CEOs selling themselves as individual tech geniuses, and people believing it.