one question is whether regulating or even banning certain kinds of internet platforms would be legal under the Constitution and current Supreme Court precedent. a quite distinct question is when and if various forms of regulations or bans would be a good idea.
Only Trump could go to Hamas.
The United States is such a broken place.
the way you bend the curve is make people to frightened and bitter to ever have any contact whatsoever with the health care system under any circumstances at all. great job, technocrats!
dear interweb, a month ago i went to an ER. recognizably the hospital chain billed abt $8000, which after insurance adjustments became $1100. i paid. more than a month later, a random provider i’ve never heard of bills ~$1500, adjusted to ~$600 for the same ER visit. do i really have to pay this?
if you can circumvent all margin limits and financing constraints, investing at very high beta despite negative alpha will eventually make you very rich. just don’t confuse a talent for generating hype to raise money and keep creditors at bay for industrial genius.
Jack Welch Thought is back! Looking forward to Meta becoming the new Boeing! ht @mariabustillos.bsky.social
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is this a lifestyle community?
for now we have achieved Artificial Colonel Intelligence.
one way to overcome deflation without going "welfarist" in the way Xi (misguidedly) fears would be to fix this, and finance decent public health care. healthy people who need money for food are the best workers! subsidizing high quality medical care for all would make a sizable economic stimulus!
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history proves that while technological change does eliminate some traditional jobs, new, better, more productive jobs always emerge in the aftermath. for example, for every job AI destroys, two new jobs will be created in the guard labor sector.
[tech notebook] Syndicating RSS to Mastodon and BlueSky with feedletter https://tech.interfluidity.com/2025/01/14/syndicating-rss-to-mastodon-and-bluesky-with-feedletter/index.html
ai will give us all perfect personalized tutors at the same time it eliminates any purpose or incentive to learn much.
traditionally we regulated free speech by eschewing prior restraint but using torts and the judicial system to impose some accountability ex post. it was a good balance! lawsuits are risky and costly so you could speak pretty freely, but outrageous threat and defamation were deterred. 1/
but we now have a class for whom lawsuits are not risky and costly, for whom the expense — even if they lose and some anti-SLAPP law hits them — is negligible. and these people are difficult to sue, since a lawsuit can become an all-pay auction in legal expenses, and plutocrats can outbid. 2/
to some degree it was always thus — corporations have long had deep pockets. but the emergence of ideological, aggrieved billionaires who can speak without accountability but punish others for speech they dislike strikes me in practice as a sea change. 3/
i find when i write in places like this i worry much more about Elon Musk than i ever did about Goldman Sachs. (i said a lot of mean stuff about Goldman Sachs!) 4/
plutocrats championing the traditional free speech regime are championing a regime where no meaningful accountability binds them, but they can hold others painfully to account at will or on a whim. 5/
i dislike some of the censorious tendencies of the last decade, even the ones those very billionaires complain about. but “free speech unless you piss off a billionaire” strikes me as imposing a far worse chill than any excesses of wokeness or public health overcaution. /fin
“Self interest is the biggest impulse in politics. Never, ever doubt that. The second biggest is building an intellectual superstructure that justifies your self interest as truly being in the national interest. That's what's happening in much of Silicon Valley.” jabberwocking.com/why-has-sili...
lots of normies use tiktok a lot, and they don’t become Q, it’s mostly comedians or cooking videos or whatever. but when politics comes up, you find you have to correct misinformation they are sure is information everybody knows.
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a bit odd if “Chinese officials” are not willing to have TikTok put up for sale in an open process, but prove willing specifically to sell to Elon Musk. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
China Discusses Sale of TikTok US to Musk as One Possible Option
Link Preview: China Discusses Sale of TikTok US to Musk as One Possible Option: Chinese officials are evaluating a potential option that involves Elon Musk acquiring the US operations of TikTok if the company fails to fend off a controversial ban on the short-video app, according...
iOS has a great select-to-translate feature rendered frustrating by the ridiculously narrow range of languages it supports. an intelligent Apple would fix this kind of Apple Intelligence.
This is worth a read. Its definition of "social democratic" is closer to mainstream US Dem / UK Labor than my own. I bristle at some of the characterizations of more "left" tendencies, and some technocratic tendencies. But taken as a view from the inside, it's clearsighted and insightful.
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"This is the age-old challenge, how do you measure deterrence? …When we started, I heard a lot of doubt that we wouldn’t succeed. By the time I was done, I heard a lot of frustration that we did succeed." ~Jonathan Kanter, DOJ head of antitrust. prospect.org/economy/2025... via @ddayen.bsky.social
Q&A: Taking On the Biggest Problems and the Biggest Companies
Link Preview: Q&A: Taking On the Biggest Problems and the Biggest Companies: An exit interview with Jonathan Kanter, Biden’s head of the Justice Department Antitrust Division