just because someone put a book out about a last-year's issue doesn't mean it should become the heart of the news cycle and discourse today. the conversation that decides whether and what our democracy will be should not take its agenda from publicists trying to sell a new book.

exactly. a bit of bureaucratic annoyance, vs your friends and family getting extorted for $10K and risk of deportation if you don’t get a lawyer (expensively) involved fast.

(over on Mastodon, a MAGA-ist accuses this is what liberals have done on the right to bear arms. i don’t buy it, the degree of cost and hazard gun regulations impose for innocent use is minor compared to 10K bounties and expensive legal representation when the govt fails to recognize citizenship)

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i suppose we should have realized the (pre-Dobbs) Texas abortion bounty thing was a new pattern. where they cannot deny a right they dislike, they can render assertion or enforcement of that right difficult or dangerous in practice.

“Much as I might wish for a better party system, I’m operating with my values in the one that we have, not the one I wish we had. In a different system, I might think and feel differently. We all might. And that is precisely my point.” @leedrutman.bsky.social

(thanks!)

[new draft post] A conversation with Kevin Erdmann https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2025/05/14/a-conversation-with-kevin-erdmann/index.html

is the Fed’s business properly to regulate credit, with maximum employment, stable prices, moderate long term rates guidance about the goals of credit regulation, without asserting that credit regulation or the Fed can or should on their own deliver or be responsible for those goods?

"with the decline of local journalism and the rise of social media brain-poisoning, a large fraction of voters have never heard about IRA projects even in their own neighborhood." @ryanlcooper.com

“To save its insurance industry, Taiwan probably needs to intervene massively to keep its currency weak. To save its export industry from the threat of “reciprocal” tariffs, Taiwan likely need to step back from the FX market and let its currency appreciate.” ~Brad Setser www.ft.com/content/d71c...

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i was trying to be relatively mild, with “not-great”. i wonder has he blocked everyone critical of that post? oh well.

bsky.app/profile/inte...

oh god.

the situation in the US is similar. first-past-the-post renders “democracy” a set of tactics incumbent politicians use to defend themselves from change against the people, rather than a means of channeling the will of the people.

or maybe just some “60 Minutes” style resignations.

countries with FPTP that are quasi multi party (there usually are still two major parties) do a terrible job at predictable representation, how choices split votes yields very noisy outcomes. with primaries or without, with two party entrenchment or without, FPTP is irredeemable.