houses are one of the few assets on which we already tax, to a degree, unrealized gains. property taxes are, at least in theory, outside if California, levied against the unrealized market value of homes.
billionaires are the sad victims of an inadequate tax code, which has allowed them to become surrounded by an isolating bubble of sycophants, severed from participation in community and ordinary fellowship. we owe potential victims of this condition prevention, and those already suffering remedy.
the volk exists only in relation to the wagon.
countertransference will be quite the new frontier.
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i really yearn for tentative, dialogic spaces, where one can indulge the undergraduate mindset, not pawning takes off as professionalism or expertise for which one should be uniquely recognized or rewarded, but as contribution to collaborations in which risk and correction dance and intermingle.
it's rather a delicious irony that the tradwife sector will be dominated by AI synthetics.
no one wields the word “okay” like @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com.
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sycophancy as a service.
perhaps an Italian coinage, a Salieri.
We do have examples of durably multiparty systems, and that outcome seems to be achievable as a matter of electoral system design! If you haven't seen it, I really recommend @leedrutman.bsky.social on this. bookshop.org/p/books/brea...
Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America
Link Preview: Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America
Suppose you love Pokemon cards. You spend your first 50K on Pokemon cards, and your second 50K on Pokemon cards. You can't infer, then, that you value the second 50K of Pokemon cards less. 1/
Even if the goods purchased are different, maybe I get the same or more value from the second 50K, but I had to combine it with the goods purchased first? (Maybe I buy a record player first, but it's the records I get the most utility from?) There are lots of possibilities! 2/
The main evidence for declining marginal utility when economics is taken as a positive science is in risk aversion. Absent declining marginal utility, you should be indifferent between doing nothing and flipping a coin, heads you will $1000, tails you lose the same $1000. 3/
Most people refuse that bet, absent some sweetener, suggesting the prospect of gaining an amount, not in terms of any particular good but the purchasing power with which we purchase goods, is less valuable than the cost of losing the same. /fin
[new draft post] Constant real wages can hide a lot of pain https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2025/12/28/constant-real-wages-can-hide-a-lot-of-pain/index.html
it's just getting all the statements that i find so annoying. i just want them all as an archive, but i have to click and download one month at a time, multiple accounts, multiple institutions.
Lots of first past the post systems maintain multiple parties, to a degree, Canada, Great Britain are the ones I'm most familiar with. They still tend toward a (sometimes shifting) dominant pair, with third party voters becoming strategic around those pairs in close constituencies. 1/
It's Duverger's tendency more than "law", but even where systems don't collapse to two-party-ness, strategic voting to avoid spoiling becomes a very dominant concern, limiting expressiveness. 2/
Proportional-representation-based systems permit voters to express their own preferences (rather than strategically managing a party landscape) much more, whether or not there's outright collapse to two parties or just weird first-past-the-post strategic voting to navigate. /fin
( a bit related maybe is the idea of a "stochastic gong show"? www.interfluidity.com/v2/8331.html )
it's first-past-the-post elections that make de facto two party systems. other electoral systems — proportional representation, approval voting — do not. lots of states have persistent multiparty systems. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverge...
a thing i really hate is that financial institutions won't let me download all my statements and documents as an archive, i have to go through one month at a time, which takes a long time. 1/
scraping all my documents from financial institutions would be a useful AI use case for me, but also a bit scary, i'd have to give it access logged into financial institutions. 2/
do any of you do anything like this? /fin
it is astonishing, continues not to compute for me, that such a manifestly unsuitable person has now twice been elected. reform of a system that would do that seems a lot more urgent.
proportional representation doesn't require a constitutional change. a unicameral legislature that appoints and can remove the executive certainly would. 1/
however, re impeachment, as you suggest, a multiparty system brings the legislature closer to the founders' imagined legislative independence via "dilution of factions". 2/
in a well-sorted two-party system, Presidential impeachment almost impossibly broken. the legislature will usually be near 50/50, 50% perceive their own fortunes tied to the President's, can't get 2/3rds to impeach absent extraordinary unpopularity. 3/
with multiple parties, that no longer holds. whenever the President's party holds less than 1/3 of the Senate, much of the Senate can serve relatively independently as jury. 4/
(it also avoids the opposite bias: in a 2 party system, kneecapping the other party necessarily helps your own. in a multiparty system, members outside the President's party don't necessarily gain advantage from kneecapping the President's party.) /fin
We don't have to change the constitution at all to have a true multiparty system. We can change Congressional elections from first-past-the-post to some form of proportional representation with a simple act of Congress, and reform away the one-size-fits-all primary processes.