can we (are we?) preemptively develop vaccines against H5N1 flu that would at least reduce its severity should it breakout as a human pandemic?

facebook began with a mission to connect the world and ends with a mission to dissolve all connections in slop.

if your requirements for a free society are inconsistent as a practical matter with its survival as a free society, you might want to reconsider those requirements.

people imagine that causality goes from free speech to a decent society, but it’s much more accurate to understand it as a decent society makes tenable free speech. 90s-era freewheeling speech norms were made tenable by shared epistemological institutions that were biased but broadly functional.

i feel suddenly like we're on our own.

more persuasive in its history than its prescriptions and predictions. i don’t think China’s debt situation, mostly domestic debt, forces disruptive change in the way these authors presume. rest-of-world unwillingness to absorb China’s surpluses might. but different causes, constraints, implications

if you let the data speak for itself, you’ll hear only lies. @jpkoning.bsky.social on how accurate data about euro-denominated traffic over the SWIFT network might lead one to conclusions 180° off from what’s likely going on. jpkoning.blogspot.com/2024/12/some...

it’s amazing how nostalgia can turn even mildly annoying aspects of the quotidian into things i now pine for.

it’s just now they believe that they *are* the american eagle, and so what’s wrong with grooming?

the MAGA Civil War is when Georgia secedes from Massachusetts.

i’m glad more places are offering cash discounts, to help expose and wean us from the credit card fee racket, but i wish they’d also offer debit card discounts, inexpensive without the inconvenience of carrying cash.

so much of what we’ve called growth has come from blowing up what was once free and ordinary, then restoring a poor facsimile thereof for a price. we can talk to our families over zoom. what a novelty.

claims like Mississippi is richer than France because GDP per capita aren’t the zinger you think. they just (correctly!) undermine the notion that GDP per capita is a good measure of prosperity.

how does the electrical power utilization of generative AI compare with that of bitcoin?

a thing no microblogging platform offers, but all should: a hidden by default but click-to-revealable space for attributions of claims made in the post. just links, excluded from the character limit. many posts make factual claims that strike me either wrong or extraordinary, no way to tell which.

is DOGE going to be politically sustainable at this point under its proposed leadership?

how many engineers at X will be diverted now to a project setting up a realtime somebody-else’s-voice filter for his sock puppets on spaces?

if you want Americans to become scientists, you’ve got to kneecap the money hose thru finance, management consulting, and monopoly tech. Americans capable of doing science get faced with a choice of six years of lab slavery or $200K to start traveling around, meeting people, building spreadsheets.