do we have no one in government who understands the stakes of government are much larger than their own careers and personal lives?

so Musk interceded as a chaos monkey (as @pkrugman.bsky.social put it), but the end result is he + Republicans have a deal they'd prefer to the original, that we disprefer? we spent the last 24 hrs mocking thr incompetence. we're the sensible ones. but if chaos outplays us that seems, well, wrong.

"your subscription will renew" is such a nice way of saying "we will take your money".

it'd really suck if your family had planned a trip — maybe bought plane tickets, prepaid a hotel room — to one of America's national parks over the break.

[new draft post] Wreckresentative democracy drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/12/20/w...

i wonder if Trump has so internalized the idea that money is the game of life’s ultimate scorecard that he just can’t defy Elon, a man two orders of magnitude greater than he is.

it’s a bit pathetic that we watched RBG undo herself and the country because of career and ego and a misguided sense of unique capability. then we watched JRB do just the same. now we have to live in the country their failure, our failure, bequeathed to us. it’s not clear we’ve learned anything.

the correct honorifics are God Emperor Musk and Assistant Principal Trump, right?

in cars we are traffic to one another—dangerous, frustrating—when if we were on foot, we would be liveliness, buzz.

a thing i find astonishing is the fate of the republic may have turned on a choice to indulge an office romance. perhaps the world’s most consequential kiss.

deceptive pricing as free speech: “The line of argument will be that mandating the display of all-in pricing information amounts to compelled speech by the government forced on private enterprise, violating the First Amendment.”

once we had david and goliath. now we have big pharma and little grifter.

so we’ve got to be at least like ten percent, fifteen percent, of the way through trump’s term, right? at least we’re making progress, working our way towards an end of this.

it’s not a shutdown it’s a muskdown.

so is this a feint, a prod that maybe gets something or another renegotiated, or are they really gonna scrooge the holidays with a shutdown?

a problem is we have no clear consensus (even among left-liberals) of what constitutes “real free speech” in an age of concentrated ownership, network effects, unaccountable algorithmic amplification. we agree upon certain plain violations, but lack a coherent framework on what to uphold and defend

if we're so much richer now, why can't we afford someone to answer the phone when we call up a business?

Basically, Tesla will print money because it will be the only untariffed supplier of Chinese EVs. Great industrial policy there.

from @jpkoning.bsky.social jpkoning.blogspot.com/2024/12/afte...

tech titans are like that joke about self-styled "non-conformists" ostentatiously converging on the same set of "eccentricities". LLMs everywhere! nuclear announcements within days of one another! must contribute to inaugural fund of bold new administration! truly these are independent minds.