can we (are we?) preemptively develop vaccines against H5N1 flu that would at least reduce its severity should it breakout as a human pandemic?

facebook began with a mission to connect the world and ends with a mission to dissolve all connections in slop.

if your requirements for a free society are inconsistent as a practical matter with its survival as a free society, you might want to reconsider those requirements.

people imagine that causality goes from free speech to a decent society, but it’s much more accurate to understand it as a decent society makes tenable free speech. 90s-era freewheeling speech norms were made tenable by shared epistemological institutions that were biased but broadly functional.

Constanța

evidently they were quite delicious.

🙁 i hate to give advice i resist, but deal with the hell of the health care system and get it looked at if “is this thing cancer” is a thing that crosses your mind.

i feel suddenly like we're on our own.

more persuasive in its history than its prescriptions and predictions. i don’t think China’s debt situation, mostly domestic debt, forces disruptive change in the way these authors presume. rest-of-world unwillingness to absorb China’s surpluses might. but different causes, constraints, implications

i was thinking about how i used to have to walk a few blocks and repark the car on street cleaning day in the city i used to live.

if you let the data speak for itself, you’ll hear only lies. @jpkoning.bsky.social on how accurate data about euro-denominated traffic over the SWIFT network might lead one to conclusions 180° off from what’s likely going on. jpkoning.blogspot.com/2024/12/some...

it’s amazing how nostalgia can turn even mildly annoying aspects of the quotidian into things i now pine for.

i think we should defend antarctica from the soviets first.

when what we now take as pathological was aspirational. see also Milton Keynes, and actual city in Great Britain inspired I think by similar currents, muddling along surprisingly well despite what we’d now regret about those currents. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_...

yes. i’d not want their political system, but there’s lots to learn from and admire in their urbanism and governance. (they’re very small, so i don’t think it’s some slam dunk for authoritarianism. in general how to think well as collectivities of 100Ms+ is a hard problem!)

it’s always been true that the modal person lives not so far from where they’re from. but there did not exist 120 years ago a mass professional class whose choice of residence was routinely determined by education and career. there does now.

contemporary Singapore might fit this mold. i think they sometimes describe some of their newer new towns as “garden cities”. in any case, they add housing at scale not through piecemeal infill but by creating new, transit linked new towns. they make automobile ownership onerously expensive.

it’s just now they believe that they *are* the american eagle, and so what’s wrong with grooming?