tbh I'm like 10% with Brie on this, if just because my parents kept on complaining about the ever growing "Asia box" I had of various East Asian ingredients "how many different kinds of seaweed does one person need"

it's very funny to hear about "Farm Success Stories" and they're always always always "we stopped producing an extremely competitive commodity and instead produced bespoke, specialized products" Yeah I bet!

“Hell even Tiffany chewed” lives rent free in my head

IMO it's hard to find any part of the broader left as utterly discredited by the events of the last two decades as the anti-trade, anti-globalisation set. Just fundamentally wrong about absolutely everything, and in a way that opened the door wide for the far right to come charging through.

Something that ironically makes me skeptical of unions is that democratic wage setting makes little sense knowing that the median person thinks American doctors should be paid more

Probably my most heretical food take is I *vastly* prefer oil to butter in cakes. Butter obviously has a much better flavor, but ngl the saturated fat kinda stiffens up the texture and makes the cake taste stale.

A lot of “omg even the WWE people are anti Trump” posts are telling me that most people think various hobbies are a lot more chud-y than they actually are

There is only one working class, the professional managerial class, and there is only one working class party, the Democratic party, and there is only one working class paper, the Financial Times

studying bioengineering so we can make a drug that makes Noah Smith asexual again

that tweet about how vance has 4chan politics with tumblr cadence - "pretty problematic of you to want to tax the rich when there's literally a (checks notes) white genocide going on right now"

The painful reality is that checks and balances, federalism, etc, actually did very little to prevent tyranny but a mix of Republican Virtue and the ability to subsume partisan concerns into regional ones did. When those were gone, nothing was left.

It’s kinda funny — I 100% agree with the idea that Democrats are too left wing than they should be. But also, popularism takes this a step further and argues that they’re not cautious, consensus minded, and focus tested enough, which, like, lmfao.

This part of our response essay is where I'm at. Boiling down all of politics to electoralism has been absolutely terrible for resisting rising authoritarianism. www.bostonreview.net/forum/how-no...

Pokemon *go* to the island

excellent way to estimate the lizardman constant

I have been really impressed with Mamdani but there's a lot of posts that's like "So close, that's not an enlightened despot ruling by fiat, that's a tiktok saying he'll do a good thing"

There no logic, people like Helen just have careers backfilling justifications for xenophobia. Immigrant groups that underperform US-born are lazy morons who don’t deserve to be here, those who over perform are ruthless strivers destroying valuable White Ways of Knowing & Doing. There’s no winning

tbh the real takeaway of the post-GPT AI boom is that god's language is 4096 single-precision floats or so

same vibe

Where's Robert Nuzleaf?

John Ralts

apologies for 3 minutes edit: groudon brown

The Chinese HSR project is unambiguously one of the most ambitious transport infrastructure projects ever built, but fascinatingly it didn't have the ambitious to build many new stations downtown, instead opting for 15-45 minute subway rides from the city centers (this is probably bad)

tbh, tonogenesis is a much more mechanical process than I thought. My intuition was that it just kinda randomly emerged, like almost all other phonology aspects, but it's a pretty mechanical result of consonant loss. We're pretty sure Seoul Korean will be tonal eventually, which is crazy.

you probably shouldn't be hanging out at the Nazi bar, but even if the presence of Nazis isn't enough for you, the fact that it's dominated by unpleasant idiots by design probably should be another reason

"Presumably, the PLA is a super smart organization full of highly wired Chinese technocrats who’ve been thinking very hard about all of these problems." yeah sometimes you can, uh, really tell that Tooze isn't a China expert.

ngl, "we can't build a train that goes fast, on time, at a reasonable price" has done far far far more damage to elite legitimacy in developed democracies than some Yale professor saying "BIPOC"

This probably makes me a luddite but I vastly prefer the Uniqlo RFID chip in the tag over the various computer vision "Just walk out!" systems

broke: The Chinese economy will explode into nothing very soon woke: It's unclear to me how economic organization in China differs from Japan or Korea, if not being outright worse, which is fine for now but will become a problem in the next 10-20 years.

SKY IS BACK!!!

Why does Sabrina look like she’s gonna ask me to sowoneul malhaebwa

undoubtedly Chinese HSR is bolstered by a highly over capacity air travel network and generally lower wages but what surprises me is how viable Beijing-Shanghai is as a route. Traditionally 4-5 hours by train is too long.

I get that American left of center types like the word "collectivism" because they're told "individualism" is why we can't have trains or universal healthcare but I really do wish people understand "collectivism" often means "tyranny by aunties" or "80 hour workweeks"

"adam tooze comes out as a treatler" You bolt awake in the shores of Little St James. You are not online. It is 1997 AD. You are the Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and you have changed your mind. The future cannot come to pass. The financial industry must not be deregulated

Liberal Elites believe in this weird form of leninism where if they don't hold legitimacy with the median 45 year old plumber in Wakeusha county, Wisconsin, they literally have to do everything that guy wants

now that we're doing round 193483 cooking at home vs eating out I ascertain that @stephenjacobsmith.com had the best take on this, which is that *of course* fast casual restaurant food is cheaper than making the same dish at home. At home you make pasta, not Chipotle recreations

tbh I think it's fairly obvious what's going on here Tooze is a Columbia professor, so he thinks that cooking is a little bit beneath him as someone who moderates Davos panels Same time, he feels guilty about that as a left (?) wing figure and therefore back-justifies something else

Stancil solidarity walk out 1:30 PM thursday

Tbh I’m fairly pessimistic about the next decade of politics because I don’t even think affordability politics is about the price level anymore, it’s about a wholesale policy agenda to make it 2019 again which is impossible. We’re probably stuck with politicians promising and failing to deliver this

The strictly business-brained NFL exec who months ago foresaw the February 2026 vibes and then hired Bad Bunny

Tbh on one hand it’s unfair, on the other hand no party has an interest in being honest about how the tax and spend system works in the US so I can’t really get too mad.

tbh this post reveals the vapidity of the whole "populism vs abundance" debate on account that if a more abundance-coded politician had an environment section that literally doesn't mention climate at all, it would definitely be an attack point.

The real bleak thing about the whole 996 trend in tech is that most people are counting stuff like "thinking about work while watching a movie" as "working," while the lifestyle is supported by an army of service workers who legitimately work such hours while commuting 4 hours a day.

It's interesting that a lot of the most fervent "car people" aren't really all that car-brained. The kind of guy who does track days in their miata is different from the kind of person who wants a god given right to drive a RAV4 anywhere for as cheap as possible.

tbh I watched this video, which basically implied DC metro's biggest problem was that it doesn't go to Dulles and Tyson's. The latter I think was a legitimate problem, the former... ugh. The 5A was faster. But generally speaking, the problem with the DC metro is land use!

The President trusted a fart and it betrayed him JUST LIKE HE BETRAYED THE AMERICAN PEOPLE RT AND FOLLOW IF YOU AGREE

Tbh I don’t want to make this into an MRA issue or whatever but it’s bad that men are just kinda assumed to be child molesters as default is bad, first of all because it distracts from the real threat (relatives, not strangers), but also because it probably has icky implications for LGBT/black men.

i was today years old when i learned that “Around The World with Billy Fog” was a joint Spanish-Japanese production omg