[new draft post] Wreckresentative democracy, "Secret Congress", and bee-sting theory drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/12/24/w...

(still doesn’t seem all that different from FY 2024. Treasury had to borrow in anticipation of the revenue it would not have in 2024, would do the same in 2025. i don’t think it proactively raises cash based on revenue estimates several years out.)

(extending the tax cuts gets you tons more spending relative to a forward-looking baseline, but little new spending relative to FY 2024, during which those same tax cuts were in place.)

US FY 2025 deficit: significantly bigger than FY 2024, about the same, significantly smaller than FY 2024?

what would CNN’s euphemism, in the name of journalistic neutrality, be for extermination camps?

a great profile of a founding father of the institutions undoing us, by @rickperlstein.bsky.social.

there would be a lot less rationing relative to medical need if what was rationed was inexpensive and abundant. which is why, while rationing in some form of course is everywhere, it is much less contentious, less big a deal, everywhere else.

really a fascinating meditation on the freedoms and burdens fragmented political spheres vs centralist attempts to order and rationalize them and then decentralist romanticizations in reaction. balance it strikes me is the thing, but balance so often is just a nice name for conflict.

if we were better at housing, they would welcome us as liberators.

one way to describe donald trump is he likes to be a dick to friends and a friend to dicks.

the career paths now are health insurance ceo, only fans, and uber driver.

break-up physics.

"voters" are not a coherent agent, have radically diverse interests, no means of being held accountable in common. constituted as "voters" we are a phenomenon, not an agent, no more constructive to blame than a lightning strike. if our behavior should change, then our institutions must.

(bluesky seemed like a very gentle place, until i confessed that i am still friends with some tankies.)

his justifications for exceptions includes terrorism, which luigi is being charged with, at least under NY law: “These commutations are consistent with the moratorium my Administration has imposed on federal executions, in cases other than terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.”

(luigi is being charged as domestic terrorism, i think.)

biden (or his delegates) sure did!

so are roof, bowers, tsarnaev.

if luigi had been convicted some time ago and was on federal death row, would biden have commuted his sentence today?

tired: peace through strength wired: peace through conquest