hard power only works as a backstop to soft power.

[new draft post] The fiduciary class https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2026/05/13/the-fiduciary-class/index.html

The foundation of contemporary economics is denial of this: “As Recht (2023) bluntly says, ‘you can’t optimize a trade-off.’ There is no consensus over how to optimize over multiple independent objectives in even moderately complex situations.” by @himself.bsky.social @cshalizi.bsky.social

i’d feel so sorry for the plutocrats if it weren’t for their externalities.

still waiting for the announcement of MAMA — Make America Mate Again.

someday we’ll have a monument to the new solarpunk plenty and there will be a great gold statue of donald trump just like there is a giant visage of andrew jackson on the twenty dollar federal reserve note.

Word of the day: Dysphemism — the substitution of a disagreeable, offensive, or disparaging expression for an agreeable or inoffensive one www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/d... via @alonlevy.bsky.social

the arc of history bends toward the heart death of the universe.

Why have sentiment indicators broken from past stable relationships to other macroeconomic variable? ✅ Great Q! A genuine puzzle! Why is the public mistaken, ungrateful even, when in fact the economy has been objectively good? ❌ Bullshit. There’s no such thing as an “objectively good” economy.

the kid always complains that he has no free time even though he spends hours video gaming. it’s what he wants to do with his free time, but it’s an activity that doesn’t psychologically register as free time to him. he often describes it as “grinding”.

just to be edgy, some airline ought to start selling “epstein class” tickets.

Ceci n'est pas… ht @epicureandealmaker.bsky.social

"Those in power may pretend not to know where the present political trajectories are taking us, but they seem to sense that they’ll have to hide." @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social www.bostonreview.net/articles/a-y... ht @jamellebouie.net

One common definition of democracy (I’m sorry I don’t offhand know the attribution) is “democracy is the system under which political parties lose elections”. I think that needs to be augmented, “along with free entry of political parties able to meaningfully contest elections”.

an irony of the Iran War is it was perpetrated in hopes of a color revolution but by governments who’d drained all color from everywhere else in the world and mocked any hope for it as folly.

you think he must have all the answers but if he made us in his image than he too must be in a state of existential confusion.

we are made worse people by every bad thing we know about, but treat as just the way it is. yet it is far from clear that we and the world wouldn’t be made even worse by the more obvious things we might try to do about it.

“Americans have to reacquaint themselves with constitutional thinking — with the idea that we, the people, make constitutional meaning.” @jamellebouie.net

incentives matter. that's why we need to dramatically reduce them.