I want to write more, but LLMs can't help, it's not that I want to produce more content, I want to write more.

"Gradually, what began as an 'emergency' good, supported by the state’s ability to seize land for the public good, morphed into what Chua calls an 'asset-based welfare product'." @global-developments.org // a good description of what housing has become in many places

when you use “thermostatic” to describe American politics, you are implicitly acknowledging that the two- party system makes people stupid. in a multiparty system, sure, people get a taste and then want to throw the bums out. but they have to actually think and decide which bums they wanna put in.

social media is exhausting. socializing with people who share your worldview, who pitch in to elevate some professionals you hang with to advance it, is invigorating. as i think @resnikoff.bsky.social put it, it's time to put the party back in parties. or the genuinely social back in civil society.

Great thread.

i like to re-up this one every once in a while. www.interfluidity.com/v2/7964.html

maybe one way of interpreting the decoupling of sentiment from models based on conventional contemporaneous indicators is, after the COVID experience, people much less believe present conditions are a good proxy for the future, and they think worse futures more likely than better ones.

we usually call them sociopaths, but maybe it’s more informative to describe the people currently operating the commanding heights of our society as solipsists.

there is civil law, common law, and calvinball. under which legal tradition does your country fall?

the norm we should enforce is you do what i like.

pizzagate is real.

even the most absolute autocracy qualifies as a democracy, given a sufficiently narrow definition of the demos.

shouldn't the verb for consuming tokens be toking?

retronyms emerge.

"If Israel doesn’t like how it’s perceived, it should change its behavior" @mattyglesias.bsky.social www.slowboring.com/p/if-israel-...

maybe we can make goodmaxxing a thing.

the correlations between virtue and wealth or power are, at least tracking from moderate to very high levels, quite obviously inverse. the entire world at the moment is a demeritocracy.

there are times when all the world’s asleep the questions run too deep for such a simple man. youtu.be/kln_bIndDJg?...

try not to bother the humans.

i just watched a horse-drawn cart (ragged, dragging behind it some kind of refuse, but on a major, affluent thoroughfare) pull over. a man gets out, walks to a fence guarding an apt building, pauses, then suddenly snatches into a cardboard box a parrot that had been lounging on a beam above a gate.