so much of civilization is keeping one’s vexations to oneself.

I know everyone on this website hates AI but let’s not lose sight of the fact that stuff enjoying copyright protection for a century is preposterous

watching people disembark from the plane you're about to board not wholly unlike sitting on a warm toilet seat, in that intellectually you know you weren't the first there but it still somehow feels wrong to be reminded of it

"Life expectancy was significantly higher in compact counties than in sprawl. Compactness affects mortality directly [through less traffic violence] & indirectly through vehicle miles traveled (traffic fatalities) and body mass index, a contributor to chronic diseases." www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/15...

You can pretend to have your shit together if you want. They don’t really check

“Enjoy what may be your last Merry Christmas!” is just over the top with menace.

Imagine you win the $1.8 Billion Power Ball jackpot and suddenly you're the only billionaire getting properly taxed

apartments don’t have to be small.

This is John Roberts' America.

As always worth reading John Handley's report on what US consumers get for being a 1/3rd richer than the UK consumer: big house, big car, a huge amount of extra nebulous spending on healthcare, and a bunch of miscellaneous stuff. www.smf.co.uk/publications...

nowadays if you’re naughty he just farts into it because natural gas is cleaner.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all you wonderful people! Better days are made from darkness. Never stop laughing at evil.

we should drone-show Santa’s sleigh flying around Christmas eve in order to more thoroughly and marvelously mislead the children.

since AI is going to solve all the medical miracles now, we can dispense with the exorbitant patent rents, right?

But I hope ONE LONG NIGHT clarifies just what is happening today. If we understand that what Congress has funded and the government is building are concentration camps, the stakes are obvious. The majority of Americans are, by and large, free to act and can undo this. It is more than possible. [2/2]

“…stop framing our approach to China in terms of why it can’t last, what must go wrong, or when the contradictions will finally catch up with it. The system has worked. It has delivered. Waiting for its collapse is not a strategy; it’s a coping mechanism.” jiwankshetry.substack.com/p/must-read-...

This is genuinely horrifying. Fact-free far-right agitprop given accolades by credible media across the political spectrum.

So I posted this endnote yesterday, about this exact book, which is getting all these wild year-end accolades despite being so disconnected from the facts of the pandemic. (www.wrecka.ge/landslide-a-...)

trump admin sanctions are outrageous and purposeful: 1. ensure europe doesn't regulate their political allies on the right, enabling space for incitement, disinfo, propaganda. 2. promote muskian/big tech lawlessness 3. distract from its unprecedented domestic repression of speech

it’s all down to the chicken tax. 🐔

“Practically every elite institution selects for people like this now.” @ryanlcooper.com

I’ll just note that the US didn’t do this to China, which outright bans US social media websites

“Stop asking whether Weiss is good at journalism. She is good at the job she’s actually doing: performing submission to power and recruiting others to the ritual. In today’s media oligopoly, that job pays.”

The leaders of the US auto industry had a difficult path towards relevancy, only by leaning on the support of Biden's IRA. They've decided to throw that away, juice some ICE profits for a few more years, and let their successors deal with the incipient crisis of global uncompetitiveness

It's funny how us parochial Americans generally seem to perceive that the EV revolution is stalling or reversing when in fact it's accelerating rapidly worldwide. 25% of cars sold globally in 2025 were EVs! It's mostly just the US that's being left behind

“If I die and can look back and think ‘yeah, I more or less enjoyed a lot of that and helped more people than I hurt’ then I’ll consider my life a success no matter the scale or the stage.” @ianwelsh.bsky.social www.ianwelsh.net/what-constit...

I’ve occasionally wondered whether resources like this would be useful, & figured you’d have a bottleneck trying to rapidly+remotely access the info on smartphones which rely on restricted App Store ecosystems. This database solves that problem by letting you use a simple text msg to look up plates.

via The New Yorker, Ellis Rosen cartoon

"More broadly, the whole affair neatly encapsulates the bizarre anti-free-speech free-speech discourse of the past decade, the purpose of which has been to justify restricting any speech that conservatives disapprove of while framing liberal censoriousness as equivalent to state censorship."

I just released v1.0 of my #Unredacter software. It can be used to remove lazy censorship from PDF documents, like those in some of the #Epstein files. You can find it here: www.ingenthron.us/Unredacter-v... Free for all to use for all purposes (credit is appreciated, though). #uspol

“the financial system should be designed to put small firms in an environment where they can build credit histories and demonstrate their ability to handle debt – and where they don’t need to rely on collateral to get started.” @csissoko.bsky.social syntheticassets.wordpress.com/2025/12/22/i...

He’s gotten terrifyingly farther in this project than we could have imagined. He’s shut down the WP and CBS. CNN is very likely going to go, one of his main targets though a problematic publication at absolute best. ABC and NBC are fairly constrained by corporate masters. Twitter is gone.

One thing I love is obsolete technology being encoded in our language. Words like “footage” and “rewind” and “dial (as a phone)” that literally describe a physicality that doesn’t exist anymore, yet lingers linguistically. Anybody have any other examples?

you can never find scissors. not when you need them. never. so you end up buying another pair. until you move. then they all appear, come out of the woodwork, hundreds of them, snapping at you.

The right, along the Roberts Court, is trying to nullify the Reconstruction amendments guaranteeing equality under the law, in order to restore the Antebellum Constitution, which envisions “liberty” as an eternal aristocracy of race and class (gift link) www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

Tonight’s dumb napkin cartoon…

what would Andy Rooney say?

it feels so trite to point out but it really is so emblematic that her stupid fucking outlet is named "The Free Press" and then she becomes a literal state-sanctioned censor

“I trust my immune system. I don’t need a vaccine.” Ok, I trust mine to protect me too. Which is why I trained it extensively on what the virus looks like so it can handle it. Boxers don’t enter the ring without a plan. It’s the punch you don’t see coming that knocks you out.

I've surveyed the political scene and in my expert judgment the voters hunger for candidates who are sniveling little weasels who don't believe in anything

data is important, measurement of public opinion is important, but politics also isn't a machine. there are a vast number of qualitative factors at work. and people themselves are unpredictable.

“There is no point in criticizing something if some law of nature means that it must be so. But there is, despite claims otherwise, no law of nature which says we have to be bastards to each other or to the species we share this world with.” @ianwelsh.bsky.social www.ianwelsh.net/we-dont-have...

love it when a university i attended 20 years ago writes to let me know they've been hacked and they've leaked my social.

as far as business goes, why sell something to someone once when you can sell nothing to them an unlimited amount of times

Since Bruenig was mentioned elsewhere in-thread, we might as well just leave it at “some people see risky guarantees as risky and report that precarity as negative sentiment” We don’t have guaranteed jobs or wages or healthcare. Some find that scary! www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2023/12/04/o...

from @karlbode.com www.techdirt.com/2025/12/19/t...

#EconSky blog.popdata.org/multigenerat...

Call it affordability, vibes, politics: asking people how they're doing financially has been a grim exercise for some time. Only 21% in 4th quarter said they're better off financially than a year ago, near Great Recession lows. Drop in 3 steps: pandemic '20, high inflation '21-22, and past year.

FOUR new deaths in ICE detention. That puts the total this year at 30 people dead; the highest in ICE's history and worse than even during the COVID years. It's clear that the system is breaking down. Many of these are preventable deaths.