or it can use us.

if, during a war, you are going to decide which side is a villain by which side’s spokespeople speak tendentiously and in bad faith, you will find nearly always that all sides are the villain.

try not to slide into defending other people's caricatures of your views.

how long before OnlyFans and similar are overtaken by AI fake characters run by twenty-something mostly male hustlers and we have a strange analogue of the “cultural appropriation” debate of the 2010s?

correlation is not causation, necessarily. but sometimes it is. but the arrow of causality may go in the direction opposite what you presume. so often what people think are means are ends, and vice versa.

one thing i can say for mastodon is it didn’t have a meltdown over burritos.

This is excellent. But what is to be done?

There’s a lot of continuity between Obama’s unwillingness to go hard against banks because it would have “required a violence to the social order, a wrenching of political and economic norms” and Merrick Garland. ( see @ryanlcooper.com theweek.com/articles/950... )

cc @poetryforsupper.bsky.social

capitalism at its best is basically caging the devil in a boiler to drive society’s steam turbines. which can be an amazing source of energy. low carbon too! but never forget you have to keep that motherfucker in the cage.

every day we have a 1:11, a 2:22, a 3:33, a 4:44, a 5:55. 6:66 would be the first transgression.

i’m thinking of opening up an adulting rink.

you know, wages are just lower in less developed countries. mas.to/@meganL/1137...

good piece by @pkrugman.bsky.social. i'd add that our bombed out competitors enjoyed a parallel boom, which seems inconsistent with the thesis he's disputing.

a social media site should amplify negative content during Democratic administrations but deboost it in favor of positive, beautiful, or informative content during Republican administrations.

A good post by Noah Smith on the hazards of formulaic means of describing or comparing the size and strength of economies. www.noahpinion.blog/p/how-do-we-...

gack! i'm still not accustomed to the decouplability of thumbnails and text on BlueSky. since i'd just posted a Prof Musgrave piece and wanted to do a new one, i think i started from the old one and edited. that brought in the old thumbnail, which i failed to eliminate.

i guess you could say he's arguing that Ramaswamy was insufficiently concerned abt the danger of alliances of conveniences with inimical forces! yet, without that alliance, he wldn't be in any position of influence at all. that's better than the guillotine! but i'd say the outcome is not yet clear.

"a government that wastes least governs suboptimally… fear of waste shuts down useful experiments… if you learn from mistakes, you have to make mistakes to learn… you need…a surplus… time and resources to train, improve, and innovate." ~Paul Musgrave musgrave.substack.com/p/government...

"The thing about joining a revolution is…eventually the eddies of radicalism and reaction get mixed up. You…think that you’re leading a counter-revolution against radicalism, only to be surprised when your allies…sharpen the guillotine for you." ~Paul Musgrave musgrave.substack.com/p/unleashing...