🙁
tonight Apple Pay asked me to authorize a payment, then billed me more than that. initially it was WTF? but eventually a receipt came through itemizing local + state sales tax beyond the authorized amount. is this new? i think Apple Pay should solicit authorization of the full amount it will bill.
one reason the US is so mad at insurance companies is not because rationing exists, but because care is often rationed the same way firms ration customer service, by byzantine discouragements that only the most dedicated persist through. even the most dedicated can and often do die from delay.
if a night is to be sleepless may the fault be peels of laughter and joy.
“the destruction of American public transit in the middle of the 20th century and the suburbanization of the middle class and aspirants both came before the increase in crime rates”
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[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.
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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.
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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.
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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.