tech barons take note. this is the future you preferred to one that included musings on an unlikely unrealized capital gains tax. this is the future you may have delivered to all of us, but from which you will not be exempt. ht @alanbeattie.bsky.social

“The rise of Whatever” @eev.ee eev.ee/blog/2025/07... i’ve complicated, still mixed, views abt LLMs, whether what comes of them can be good despite much evident awfulness (“slop”). but the “whatever” thesis perfectly captures what happened to the web and crypto. and yeah, LLMs are whatever machines

Thread by @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com. (I lean towards (a), see drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/08/13/c... and the industrial policy pieces linked beneath it. but (b) could be right. it’s a continuing debate!) 👇

we are governed by laws or we aren’t. some small social media company should sue. will even this Supreme Court claim a President can not only refuse to enforce a law, but affirmatively impose a regime in defiance of it?

celebrated the fourth this year with a colonoscopy. felt about right. doesn’t look like i have colon cancer. maybe there’s hope for my country as well.

it’s hard to be an institutionalist when these are the institutions.

so, tomorrow is the 4th of July.

i hate feeling this way. but my god, what those motherfuckers have done today. and the “supreme court”.

no guard rails. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

a thing i find weird is, was there even any meaningful debate on the whole new Gestapo thing? i know legislators talked about Medicaid, rural hospitals, deficits and baselines. but it seems like the new Gestapo was unproblematic, a shoo in, not any not even one of Republican legislators’ concerns.

the Republicans will, in this indirect, kind of confusing way, provoke a crisis in Medicare and then argue the program is inherently broken and only some further austerity can “strengthen” it by “putting it on a solid foundation”. govern badly as proof that the state can do nothing good well.

Resilience is a dimension of epistemology we (at least I) have too little considered. However we know what we know, how resilient is it to interests that seek to snow us, or leave us without what had once been our capacity to know?

what’s the inverse of Hanlon’s Razor? i think that’s what applies to the current Supreme Court.

@ryanlcooper.com on elite impunity: “any country that completely gives up on accountability for its political class will eventually produce someone like Trump. Open the door to criminals, and sooner or later one will walk through.” prospect.org/politics/202...

plutocrats are the ultimate degrowthers, because serious growth requires unpredictable change, and plutocrats want to fix current hierarchies in amber. you see this now in the Trump Administration’s reinforcement of fossil fuels and suppression of solar / batteries / etc.

you’ll know evil when you see what people will do in the name of god.

if accurate, “we would spend more on ICE than Israel spends on defense” is quite something.

“A method of legal interpretation that relies on this kind of historical inquiry only when it will yield the answer it wants is clearly far more opportunistic than principled.” ~Kate Shaw www.nytimes.com/2025/07/01/o...

so many possible names — the “pollute the planet act”, “kill the poors act”, “rich get richer act”. but i think i’d go with the simple “gestapo act”