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." www.liberalcurrents.com/the-empty-ar...
the name DHS was notably fashy at the time, not at all reassuring. “domestic security” was the conventional phrase for its function then. “homeland” was pawned off as a GW Bush homespun folksiness but many of us understood it as intentionally blurring lines against fascism. now here we are. 1/
Loading quoted Bluesky post...
“homeland” wasn’t in common usage at all, it felt weird and foreign. (“the heartland” was a common expression, but it implies a geographic subset of the country, so wouldn’t make sense as the H in DHS.) /fin
a lot of the problem with contentious posts is not that they are wrong — they might or might not be! — but that they arrogate a tone of certainty that goes far beyond what the sort of evidence they cite could possibly provide.
i’m with brian, but the democratic party will struggle to do it. values and interests within so broad a coalition conflict too much. campaign strategies like what Kamala adopted (cautious, focused on personal biography and vague values) are endogenous. we need more, more coherent parties.
Loading quoted Bluesky post...
by sabotaging the government, we prove that government could never work. by inflaming petty nationalisms, we prove an integrated society is a pipe dream.
it’s a thin line between exotic and alien.
often it is better to ask than to demand.
Sorry this service is not available.
i like to think about what fraction of e-mails in my inbox are fundamentally lying or trying to deceive me. that is after all the spam filtering, my frequent unsubscribe requests, etc.
Loading quoted Bluesky post...
enshittification does not typically show up in inflation statistics. does anyone thing that means the phenomenon is not real, it’s just a collective delusion of negativity?
Loading quoted Bluesky post...
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.” 1/
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. /fin
what if the Trump administration lifted sanctions just enough that IRGC can trade on US markets, but long positions only?
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.)
he’s like a private sector Marco Rubio! ht @ericmbudd.com
Loading quoted Bluesky post...