a fascinating, surprising history of Peronism, coups, and the complexities of actual organization and activism in early 1970s Argentina that didn’t fall neatly along ideological or social-class lines. https://gabrielu941371.substack.com/p/the-subversives-montonero-local-organizing
promote aspirational versions of efficient lifestyles.
“That is the logic of virtuous violence. Violence comes to feel not merely expedient but righteous because it is cast as protecting one’s own side, restoring order, and ending chaos. In doing so, however, it denies the humanity of those being attacked.” https://thebulletin.org/2026/05/why-congress-and-senior-officials-must-deny-trump-a-nuclear-escape-in-iran/
the vibe part of vibecession is just the knowledge that we aren’t in it together any more. the seventies were tough, sure, but we understood we were collectively undergoing a trauma, together. now we fail individually while the glittering party goes on.
if you are a parent in the US, do you have a plan for how your kid goes to college without taking on a lot of debt, do you believe he or she has a high probability of an economically secure future if the child does go to college, are you confident housing and health care will be affordable?
i love how people say the stock market is booming and inequality is falling, choosing measures inconsistently only to consistently make the point the economy is “objectively” great.
a sunrise over the black sea.
"This is the era of the hollowed-out government… We did not just outsource the janitorial services or the cafeteria. Instead, we outsourced the thinking… The result is not a 'leaner' government. It is a government that has forgotten how to learn." #IsraelKolawole https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-empty-architect/
often it is better to ask than to demand.
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the thesis “contemporary social media contributes dysfunctionally to a collective sense of pessimistic nihilism” is, i think, correct.
it is not inconsistent, however, with the thesis “a great deal is terrible about Americans’ material conditions, and worse in a variety of ways than previously”
it seems kind of dumb to me that there has emerged a discourse that treats these hypotheses, which i’d characterize as mutually reinforcing, as if they were mutually inconsistent, there can be only one.
i find it funny when people holding big retirement nest eggs in index funds wag about how they want to reduce the deficit.
goldman and musk inc joining forces feels like what if napoleon and hitler got together for an encore tour of europe. kind of an all-stars circuit for death stars of different eras.
it may be the end of the world, but our description of it qualifies as a gripping page-turner. preorder now. (quickly, please.)
“In most companies, alignment is just the corporate name for silencing dissent. It doesn't mean everyone agrees. It means nobody says out loud that they don't. Those are different things.” https://phpc.social/@flowcontrol/116611921964285062
Ovid in exile.
A nighttime photo of the statue of Ovid in Piața Ovidiu, Constanța, Romania, May 2026. The Grand Mosque and submarine steampunk bar Hypso25 are lit up in the background.
A person gets cancer. There is a therapy that has a good shot at keeping her alive, but it’s expensive. After fighting with insurance, she does get the therapy, but months have passed. The cancer has advanced and it’s too late. She dies. 1/
She might still have died had she received the therapy promptly. Or not. No one knows, but her odds would objectively have been much better. 2/
In medical consumption terms, she’s profoundly richer than a doppelgänger in her situation 20 years ago. The therapy didn’t exist then, no amount of money could have bought it. Present-day she did eventually consume a profoundly expensive good, which sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. 3/
But in welfare terms, was she better or worse off than her 20-years ago-prior doppelgänger? 4/
Ex post, no, she struggled more and still died. But even ex ante. She had some probability of being saved that her predecessor would not have had. But the ex ante probability of failing to receive the treatment, or of receiving it only with ruinous delay, would be high for many patients like her. 5/
Ex ante, the expected expenditure, and therefore her expected consumption level, would be much higher, but it’s not at all clear that her expected welfare is improved given high probability, welfare negative outcomes. 6/
When systems are misarranged, people can both be wealthier in real terms in the ways that we would measure that, and also worse off in welfare terms despite all that. /fin
education is not preparation for the rest of life. the rest of life is preparation for education.
crypto was going to be something different.
A screenshot of an e-mail: Kraken, a crypto exchange, sends out a very stereotyped, conventional “economic brief” about Fed minutes.
once every future becomes a retrofuture you have a problem.