all constructs are invalid, but some constructs are not so invalid as to render them entirely useless. (riffing on George Box, all models are wrong…)

“creativity” may be more susceptible to automation than taste.

the sistah souljah moment of throwing bill clinton under the bus would be quite the poetic irony.

“voters” are not a meaningful or helpful locus of accountability. it may feel righteous to blame the people who voted for catastrophe, but there’s no mechanism that translates blamers’ self righteousness into virtuous future outcomes.

mill v1.0.0 is out! mill-build.org/blog/13-mill... #scala

The humans still have noses.

the really fun social media platforms will soon implement rage verification.

not sure i’d feel safe in one of these with my surname.

“we don’t need specific numbers to understand that this kind of tragedy is only to be expected after politicians have spent decades denigrating government and degrading its effectiveness.” @pkrugman.bsky.social

what doesn’t kill you makes you bitter.

there are some clubs, the more exclusive you make them, the less desirable they become, even for the kind of people misguided enough to imagine "exclusive" is somehow attractive.

“‘targeting’ is just taxing by another name. Means-testers have not figured out how 2 better spend a fixed amount of tax revenue. Rather…they use national accting rules to allow themselves to tax more in order to spend more while preventing universalists from doing the same” @mattbruenig.bsky.social

do district court judges really have to follow the precedents of higher courts when those precedents are wrong and unconscionable? district court judges have life tenure too. let courts that make up law beyond conscience or reason have to take every appeal if they mean to enforce their atrocities.

we might have a reliberation day, but we can be sure we will have no deliberation day.

“The China challenge is much bigger than alarmists understand. It’s not just about espionage or market share. It’s about the United States and the West more broadly losing preeminence and Chinese firms becoming reliable parts of life.”

in the photographs, we are stuck, frozen in time, but we are young. so perhaps it’s a wash.

you don’t want news organizations optimizing for viewership or subscriptions. what should they optimize for? that’s a hard question. but definitely not viewership or subscriptions.

“Liberals often refer to right-wing lies, misinformation, disinformation, or conspiracy theories, but what they are identifying are myths in the Sorelian sense.” @lioneltrolling.bsky.social ht @devinnn.bsky.social

a majority of people who voted voted against Donald Trump. if you are going to make claims about the will of a supernatural "we" based on outcomes of flawed procedures, perhaps at least rely on procedures that yield a supermajority of assent. (50.1% is not magically more meaningful than 49.81%.)