(i don’t know enough about the facts of the crisis to comment on whether misprioritization of water uses is at its root. still, i presume before the chaos of evacuating Tehran, before riots and death from mass thirst, they’d address whatever they still can without too much outside encouragement.)
“the Constitution is not a (career) suicide pact”, they console themselves.
i wouldn’t advise individuals freelancing. but in the past, in a disaster of that scale, i’d expect the US government to offer logistical support, for getting water from place to place, or people from place to place, if there were a disaster of this scale. 1/
For any US administration, Iran would be politically difficult to help, and the Iranian government might not accept it. I’d certainly not advise US help, organized or by individuals, if their government doesn’t permit it. 2/
But when there are big natural disasters, we have in the past suspended political differences to help. I think that’s a good tradition. /fin
america’s slumbering balloon industry heeds the call.
if Tehran really runs out of water, would we help?
it’s not just Trump. it’s a key dynamic of the contemporary right. parody sites make up bullshit, are explicit and overt that it is bullshit, but influencers forward it in less plainly attributed way until it’s a thing everybody knows in MAGA-land. 1/
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you can call out its origin to what passes for public intellectuals in that crew, and they’ll cheerfully concede it’s fake, in its details if not its essence. (think Vance’s simultaneous concession and defense of the “eating dogs and cats” lie.) 2/
but it will still be a thing that everybody knows. it shapes people’s unexamined baseline priors, their sense of what is plausible, how the world works. /fin
you can see why the Thiel / Andreeson /Musk types would have complicated theories about what would constitute an antichrist and in what sheep’s clothes it would appear, given the conclusions simpler stories might bring. xcancel.com/paul_heron_/...
if you’ve already eaten, i’m afraid you’ll have to vomit.
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“and if you were raised in the house, enjoyed its shelter as a child, it’s only fair you should inherit the debt.”
it’s not unimportant but it tells you almost nothing about welfare over long periods of time. 1/
consider a person who walked 10 mins to work in 1925 vs someone who commutes an hour / 30 miles today. 2/
the today person is buying in real terms something entirely unaffordable in 1925. her real purchasing power is huge! 3/
any CPI, W/P style calculation would score her as much much wealthier for being able to afford transportation at contemporary norms. 4/
but all that purchasing power must be expended on a commute that in welfare terms buys no more than the 10 walk that was common in 1925. 5/
contemporary circumstances — norms, the nature of the built environment etc — can absorb much or all or much more than all of what you might correctly score as W/P. 6/
the cost of the prerequisites to sustaining that W, the ever-changing cost of the level of resources required to live an ordinary life are not tallied in inflation measures. 7/
that’s not to say the measures are wrong. you really can buy a lot more stuff than you could in 1925! but the relationship between stuff and welfare is very far from fixed. 8/
there’s all kinds of stuff (transportation, education) you need tons more of than you did 100 years ago to live a remotely welfare comparable life. /fin
i guess it becomes a definitional question. if i write a program that says, ‘println(“Will you marry me?”)’ in a sense it has produced a linguistic uttterance but can we characterize it in any meaningful sense as having proposed something?
i too am tempted into factional infighting, but i think for now elections are decided by whether the broad public is Republican curious or experiencing a bout Republican revulsion and our not-Republican factionalizing is mostly epiphenomenal. not a permanent state of affairs i suspect, but for now.
the phrasing “Grok proposes” already grants the contestable premise.
the relationship between how many units of CPI a person can buy — as reckoned (inevitably differently) by any of various statistical agencies which are doing the best they can — and economic welfare is extremely weak except over very short periods of time.
[tech notebook] Sysadminning in Scala, documenting in Claude https://tech.interfluidity.com/2025/11/08/sysadminning-in-scala-documenting-in-claude/index.html
how do you evacuate a city of 10 million people? and to where, where else is the water and resources now lacking in Tehran?
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"You don’t have to be a wild-eyed leftist to think all of this has a pre-French Revolution vibe." @billkristolbulwark.bsky.social www.thebulwark.com/p/let-them-e... // liberals mugged by reality now clubbed by inequality. the world beats the shit out of you and there's no direction that's safe.
Let Them Eat AI-Generated Cake
Link Preview: Let Them Eat AI-Generated Cake: Elon Musk and the coming twilight of the elites.
The LLM is so positive, but that's why it's not predictive. Just because it seems to really like what you are doing (and offers such apparently perceptive compliments!) doesn't mean that anyone else will.
the richest people in the world want to make the rest of us feel so poor.
how can Bovino be a real name in this story? isn’t that a bit heavy-handed of the author?