Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
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 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.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
remember all the glowing profiles about his insistence in the discipline of the written word, that participants write up their views in careful detail prior to presenting them at meetings?
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Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
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/
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
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/
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
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/
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
But in welfare terms, was she better or worse off than her 20-years ago-prior doppelgänger? 4/
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
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/
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
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/
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
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
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
you know a thing is not or is no longer hegemonic when it is frequently described in terms of hegemony.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
Steven-Pinker-ism—marshalling statistical evidence to claim that, actually, things now are better than they ever have been, despite your own, merely anecdotal, experience—has been an aggressive tactic of the center left for more than a decade, generating quite a lot of evidence it’s ineffective!
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
education is not preparation for the rest of life. the rest of life is preparation for education.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
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.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
once every future becomes a retrofuture you have a problem.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
so, it’s pretty much all term premium, right? or are people anticipating some really intense short rates a couple of years from now?
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
death cults of different kinds on both sides of the lines.
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Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
if democracy is conceived of rule by an atomized public informed by engagement-focused media, it will be a form of misrule. you can’t exhort media to be different to fix it. you have to reconfigure the polity to be something more rational than an atomized, distractable mass public. 1/
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
specifically, the democratic public has to rule by participating in institutions that both meaningfully enfranchise them and act rationally, rather than reactively, on behalf of their interests and values. 2/
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
usually when democracy has worked, these institutions have taken the form of political parties. but there are other possibilities. /fin
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
yea and truly the most american of trucks will be fueled by the strategic bourbon reserve. ht @bananapantz.bsky.social
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Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
It’s not that it’s automating workers that has the tech industry so enthralled with AI. It’s that AI has the potential to automate *customers* and therefore become a huge source of new demand. “Agentic AI” represents a new frontier to market and expand sales to.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
“Friendship…has always depended on a certain irrational generosity. A willingness to waste time together magnificently.” Pranav Jain on “The quiet grief of adult friendship” timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/civil-...
The quiet grief of adult friendship
Link Preview: The quiet grief of adult friendship: A few weeks ago, a friend called me at 01:40 AM. Not texted. Called. For a brief second, my body prepared itself for bad news. Adulthood has conditioned most of us to believe that late-night...
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
if we could trade him shooting someone on Fifth Avenue for the things he actually has done and let others do, we'd have to take that trade. (Get on the Trump trolley.)
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Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
can't imagine why the period from 2019 to 2022 might have left people who had hoped to buy a home a bit bitter. (and then, of course, there is the effect of rising interest rates on mortgage costs, ht @steveroth.bsky.social)
A graph of all-transaction-home-prices-for-the-US divided median-household-income-in-the-US, showing a sharp rise from 2019 to 2022.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
AM radio, 2026.
A radio app on a dashboard touchscreen, set to AM 930 KHz.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
is there anything like audible — two books a month for a fixed price — that’s regular ebooks rather than audiobooks (and not owned by amazon)?
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
which disappeared first, local journalism or the local itself?