this is a long arc story. i’m not talking about last week. i’m not talking solely about long-distance dispersion. much of what we count as growth is not improvement in welfare terms, but remedy for the costs of the changes incurred by what we last scored as growth. 1/
for example, the cars we buy and gas we spend on commutes is counted as GDP. but if cars were rare, our built environment would place residences near or transit accessible to workplaces. commutes are a remedy to the problems created by how we chose to grow, not actual additions to human welfare./fin
dude, i have always lived far from my family and remember well trying to game international phone services. don’t make assumptions. zoom is progress, given the distance. the point is the distance itself is a result of economic change. it’s progress against a baseline of new costs. it’s remedy.
you’d think a kind of darwinism would have selected against groups with worldviews so inefficient in practical terms. but maybe the social order associated with such worldviews more than compensated.
(there are definitely rationales for credit card fees. the question is whether the rationales justify the price. given the regressive rebate economy that has grown on top of the industry, i’d say the answer there is pretty clearly no. when you’re giving away toasters, a rigid price is out of whack.)
i think they are, at baseline, substantially cheaper, although as @nosunkcosts.bsky.social points out people have snuck in wrinkles and loopholes to pad things with fees under some circumstances.
the MAGA Civil War is when Georgia secedes from Massachusetts.
so when is it sub 50 bps, vs when does this loophole apply to feed vampires?
yeah. i think to be cheap it’d have to go through the chip+PIN flow, rather than the signature flow. but it seems like a thing merchants and customers could learn!
i’m glad more places are offering cash discounts, to help expose and wean us from the credit card fee racket, but i wish they’d also offer debit card discounts, inexpensive without the inconvenience of carrying cash.
so much of what we’ve called growth has come from blowing up what was once free and ordinary, then restoring a poor facsimile thereof for a price. we can talk to our families over zoom. what a novelty.
as i said, not remotely my view.
probably not. serves me right for reacting to a stupid x post. x.com/michaelaarou...
claims like Mississippi is richer than France because GDP per capita aren’t the zinger you think. they just (correctly!) undermine the notion that GDP per capita is a good measure of prosperity.
how does the electrical power utilization of generative AI compare with that of bitcoin?
(i'd noticed sometimes if i accidentally miss a space after a period it adds a url card and they stick around even when i fix the spacing if i forget to x them out. using them for attributions is a great hack!)
we visited the summer before last ofc can't afford to stay in central Paris stayed in Colombes, hotel had a great rooftop terrace surrounded by new apt buildings rising like beautiful mushrooms we could fantasize about living in and take the same easy train we took as tourists anywhere.
i guess the hope is that a special space would facilitate establishing a norm in a way the ability to reply-to-self thread does not. we'd become obnoxious with our "where are the attributions?" like we can be obnoxious about "where's the alt text?" 1/
also, it'd be less work to just paste in links than it is to write a free-form bibliography in subsequent posts. Should I include the title and author or some annoying shit like that? Should I annotate? A links only special place obviates all that. /fin
a thing no microblogging platform offers, but all should: a hidden by default but click-to-revealable space for attributions of claims made in the post. just links, excluded from the character limit. many posts make factual claims that strike me either wrong or extraordinary, no way to tell which.
you’ve got to go back farther to get Google left coded. 20 years ago. but they were using precursors to modern machine learning even then to address spam! no one thinks there’s anything inherent in the tech that’s “right-coded”. it’s who wields it and to what perceived ends.
is DOGE going to be politically sustainable at this point under its proposed leadership?