it literally says so at the bottom, but i can't believe i am just now realizing that John Perry Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" was written… at Davos. my whole youth is a lie. (thanks to Jill Lapore's excellent "These Truths" for the tidbit bookshop.org/p/books/thes...)
These Truths: A History of the United States
Link Preview: These Truths: A History of the United States: A History of the United States
you don’t understand New Math.
go Finland go!
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yes. that is the essence of our problem. Europe is full of great new neighborhoods. brilliant urban life is not inherently scarce, and not inherently rival with small-c conservative incumbent residents. great neighborhoods are things we can just build. ask people like @holz-bau.bsky.social to help.
iconoclasts, independent thinkers, self-made men every one of them.
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the best way to have more housing is to have more (mixed-use, dense, walkable, transit-served) neighborhoods.
more evidence the product here is “democratizing” the experience of sycophancy heretofore restricted to the very rich. the very rich are surrounded by cynically self-dealing sycophants. soon you can be too!
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the best feeling is when you hit an "unsubscribe" link and it 404s.
Yes. Which is a pretty huge sweetener, once people realize what kind of money that is.
I agree the politics aren't easy. As Churchill said, "You can count on Americans doing the right thing, after exhausting all the other possibilities." We're still in the exhausting stage, but we are getting quite exhausted.
I agree you don't advertise as "middle class tax hike"! For middle class things, you talk up what's being bought, then argue it's worth paying for. 1/
Just as a matter of technocracy, though, we are likely to need more middle class taxes to cover the universal benefits a civilized society offers. We'll be richer, not poorer, for what we purchase together, though. That's the purpose and point! 2/
We need to tax rich people for largely disjoint reasons, but the principle of equal sacrifice means when we do tax ourselves, we can make lots of headway in eliminating the gulf that bifurcates us into plebs and plutocrats. /fin
That money you never saw because it went to United Healthcare? Now you still never see it because it goes to the gubmint. Only now you don’t have to pick an insurance plan, worry about whose in-network, get screwed with huge deductibles and copays, etc.
It’s a lot of money! I agree it wouldn’t be perceived as a tax increase, if the premia were diverted to a public health system. Joe Public doesn’t care whether the insurer they pay is public or private. But it would in fact be a huge tax increase (and RW activists would demagogue it that way).
it’s also about preventing inflation. if people suddenly had their full healthcare premia back as free money, with everything else the same, we’d see inflation.
i agree. there’s definitely a lot of there there, with contemporary AI platforms. whether they lead us deeper into dystopia or we learn something from the social media nightmare and resist centralization on platforms remains to be seen, but whatever all this is, it’s not a nothingburger.
but the barrier to entry relative to buying a mobile phone or getting onto the internet the first time is much lower. you already have a browser and/or smartphone, chatgpt is a click or two away. social media might be more informative as a comparison, but even there, the prereqs were less ubiquitous
we need to tax the middle class much more to finance universal social benefits (though much of that will just replace expenditures like private insurance premiums), without provoking inflation. 1/
we need to tax the very wealthy because wealth that confers political influence or leads to lifestyles detached from our political community, who have no use or interest in our commonweal, is dangerous and should not exist. 2/
with respect to neither of these purposes is the formal accounting debt or deficit very useful or informative. 3/
it is simultaneously true that we need to tax a whole lot more and conventional fiscal math is a red herring. /fin
Image of “Re-Animator” movie poster, man holding a syringe loaded with fluorescent green fluid.
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unconditional love conditioned as a practical matter on continuing and continual interaction is potentially the most powerful force in politics.
dear all of you. i don’t like it when any of you die. please take that under advisement. thank you.