As an American, what the f**k is thermal shock *Proceeds to duckduckgo* Ok so Europeans have a genuine mental illness about AC on the level of Korean fan death or people who drive at night without headlights because they think the photons slow the vehicle down

I think the answer is literally “Europe”

absolutely. i think that there should be more of these big, federally organized civic activities. an annual fair where each state showcases their best food and fare is actually a great idea.

Shareholders

I’m in outstate Minnesota and the bike infrastructure has improved to the point where we’re going to bike to a brewery the next town over this afternoon, and that’s in a state that’s basically Hoth for half the year. It doesn’t have to be that way in 90% of the United States!

When people say "bikes" they don't typically mean "just get on a bike and ride everywhere, loser." What they mean is that in a country where the more than half of all local trips are 3 miles or less, our government could do a lot more to make it safe for people to choose to bike if they want.

I'll stay awake for days without complaint; I can skip meals and barely notice; I can be physically exhausted and still function; subzero weather doesn't faze me. But if the temperature rises above 76 degrees I start to lose my entire will to live and become the most irritable person alive.

Every time I read a post like this I turn my two window ACs, which run virtually nonstop May through September, down another degree. We're down to 65, I'm gonna sleep like a newborn tonight

Overall Iberia is surprisingly dynamic: best economic growth in the EU by far, relatively less weird about immigration, and more solar panels than the mind can conceive. But they really need a few more changes if they want to be the new heart of Europe; better room temps and ice coffee top my list

people are really angry about this post lol

leave the old world and their dead empires behind

The only time I met Noah Smith in person (~2015) he introduced himself as “Noah, everyone follows me on Twitter” and then proceeded to drop multiple n-words singing along to rap during karaoke. Just a really terrible guy.

The Venn diagram of centrists who have gone insane in the past four years and centrists that are still on the Nazi site formerly known as Twitter is a perfect circle. And yes, this phenomenon is not limited to the United States, it is an existential crisis threatening democracy in the anglosphere.

I will vote for a platform of de-Trumpification. It needs to be a scorched-earth removal of every hateful symbol.

Up till around COVID he mostly passed off as a centre-lefty economist on Twitter. COVID + Musk Twitter + SV circles have broadly pushed him into a very weird position of being a sort of reactionary centrist type

"They're all yellow people anyway, what difference does it really make who conquers who?" is the actual sentiment here. The same is true of Russia and Ukraine: "it's just a bunch of Slavs, who cares?"

Indonesia was Dutch for longer than Taiwan belonged to mainland China, but for some strange reason (racism) plenty of people understand that the Netherlands storming Jakarta would be imperialist aggression and seem to think the PLA marching into Taipei is just a reaffirmation of the natural order.

Perhaps the greatest thing in American history per our surgeon general nominee Nicole Saphier.

Group chats theory of everything: the quality of your takes depends on the quality of your group chats, and he’s in some terrible Bay Area group chats

Beyond named cases, the scale of death is measured the way mortality always is, excess deaths against a baseline. Against this baseline, the Lancet predicts 14 million excess deaths by 2030 newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/USAID-cuts-global-impact-14-million-deaths

Reminder that Musk literally shared Russian disinformation to justify his USAID cuts

The prevalence within a lot of US right-wing commentary (on X, broadcast media etc) that the UK has been "taken over by Islamists" is both scary and reminiscent of how Russian media talks about it's adversaries, frankly. The line between delusion and deliberate misinformation is blurred.

do i even need to say it

🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️ One milkshake to rule the boys, one milkshake to find them, one milkshake to bring the boys and in my yard to bind them 🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️

so like, I don't think tankie is the right label because she thinks that markets are still good (she used to be big on neoliberal twitter)

A depressing number of people will publicly affirm that they think race is just a social construct, and then turn around and argue by dint of collective racial guilt that Ukrainians deserve to be slaughtered and colonized in 2026 because of atrocities the British Empire committed in Kenya in 1952.

Ethnic cleansing during the Mau Mau rebellion is not somehow more "real" than Russian ethnic cleansing in Ukraine because both victim and perpetrator are "white". Nor is the fact that former imperial powers are backing Ukraine carte blanche for it to be brutalized by Russian imperialism.

Similarly, Imperial Japan and Imperial China's colonial atrocities are no more excusable than those of Britain or the US just because they were perpetrated against other Asian peoples. Colonialism is colonialism, regardless of the "race" of the colonizer.

Idk how to say this, but its clear someone is being paid to shit on Canada/UK

what the fuck

no normal person even knows *how* to talk this way much less does it in public.

I'd rather have the overpriced coffee shop than the dilapidated service station it replaced and I don't think I'm unrepresentative of my neighborhood

If you’re pulling in 15k a year, there is no housing you can afford, in any neighborhood. You cannot prevent that person from being displaced by preventing gentrification; you’re simply blocking economic growth that might help them or some similarly situated person to raise their incomes.

Gentrification also usually incentivizes new construction, which reduces housing cost pressure, both locally and across the entire region. It creates new jobs, which enables people to afford rent.

If you happen to own property in a gentrified neighborhood, you may benefit quite a lot. Rents do rise but less than you might think (one thing people don’t realize is that poor neighborhoods often don’t have dirt-cheap rents, but moderate rents).

It also provides a lot of wider economic benefits. Declining, impoverished, or blighted urban areas have impacts that go far beyond the neighborhood itself, dragging down schools, city budgets, accelerating suburbanization. Gentrification helps arrest some of this

So the key thing about gentrification is that the neighborhoods it affects tend to be trending towards abandonment - shrinking population, many fewer jobs/businesses - and it rarely displaces more than a fraction of the existing population. If you live there and stay there you probably benefit.

Neighborhoods can change various ways and the other major trajectories developed urban neighborhood can take - growing poverty, or outright abandonment - are typically far worse

Gentrification creates some winners and losers, which we should try to mitigate. But far more people win than lose, typically, often including among the residents of the pre-gentrified neighborhood

There is some displacement risk, which policymakers should seek to mitigate. People forget, however, that the most severe housing displacement tends to be in the POOREST neighborhoods, because the primary variable isn’t the cost of housing but how much income residents have.

The SHAAAAAADE

Yeah the thing is, this has been studied extensively and mostly doesn’t happen. There are a handful of neighborhoods in America where gentrification has come through like a big wave; they’re extremely rare. When families of color move to the burbs, it’s almost always because they want to live there.

we've invented radical centrism from the blog post "the idea of radical centrism is a literal joke, you fucking dingleberries"

Ignoring the slander of Britain and British Muslims that has sadly become typical of his output, isn't there some very obvious reasons why Iran actually isn't the global standard bearer of "Islamism"

I’m on here, not on there. Civil society has absolutely moved to the right. We aren’t effectively countering it, opinion polls notwithstanding.

Yes. I think the synthesis with Sharon’s point is that the X centrists don’t understand that they themselves are pushing society to the right, rather than following some sort of organic movement.

a big part of it is that basically after the Musk takeover, the most loudest voices on X in Anglophone countries (and European ones) were the ones on the radical right so people who think they're in the "centre" have basically convinced themselves that civil society has rapidly moved to the right

The problem with portable AC units is that they suck your freshly cooled air back in to take away the heat from the compressors and pump it outside, wasting a bunch of cooling by creating a pressure imbalance which sucks more warmth into your room. A second intake hose fixes that

Noah Smith, like most of his ilk has been Houellebecq-poisoned