That money you never saw because it went to United Healthcare? Now you still never see it because it goes to the gubmint. Only now you don’t have to pick an insurance plan, worry about whose in-network, get screwed with huge deductibles and copays, etc.

It’s a lot of money! I agree it wouldn’t be perceived as a tax increase, if the premia were diverted to a public health system. Joe Public doesn’t care whether the insurer they pay is public or private. But it would in fact be a huge tax increase (and RW activists would demagogue it that way).

it’s also about preventing inflation. if people suddenly had their full healthcare premia back as free money, with everything else the same, we’d see inflation.

i agree. there’s definitely a lot of there there, with contemporary AI platforms. whether they lead us deeper into dystopia or we learn something from the social media nightmare and resist centralization on platforms remains to be seen, but whatever all this is, it’s not a nothingburger.

but the barrier to entry relative to buying a mobile phone or getting onto the internet the first time is much lower. you already have a browser and/or smartphone, chatgpt is a click or two away. social media might be more informative as a comparison, but even there, the prereqs were less ubiquitous

unconditional love conditioned as a practical matter on continuing and continual interaction is potentially the most powerful force in politics.

dear all of you. i don’t like it when any of you die. please take that under advisement. thank you.

houses are one of the few assets on which we already tax, to a degree, unrealized gains. property taxes are, at least in theory, outside if California, levied against the unrealized market value of homes.

billionaires are the sad victims of an inadequate tax code, which has allowed them to become surrounded by an isolating bubble of sycophants, severed from participation in community and ordinary fellowship. we owe potential victims of this condition prevention, and those already suffering remedy.

the volk exists only in relation to the wagon.

countertransference will be quite the new frontier.

i really yearn for tentative, dialogic spaces, where one can indulge the undergraduate mindset, not pawning takes off as professionalism or expertise for which one should be uniquely recognized or rewarded, but as contribution to collaborations in which risk and correction dance and intermingle.

it's rather a delicious irony that the tradwife sector will be dominated by AI synthetics.

no one wields the word “okay” like @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com.

sycophancy as a service.

perhaps an Italian coinage, a Salieri.

We do have examples of durably multiparty systems, and that outcome seems to be achievable as a matter of electoral system design! If you haven't seen it, I really recommend @leedrutman.bsky.social on this. bookshop.org/p/books/brea...