"According to the…annual Harris Poll, for the 1st time, a majority of Americans believe billionaires are a threat to democracy. A remarkable 71% believe there should be a wealth tax. A majority believe there should be a cap on how much wealth a person can accumulate." www.nytimes.com/2025/12/14/o...
Opinion | The Billionaires Have Gone Full Louis XV
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we’ll find virtue among elites has been restored, once the snapchat generation takes control.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (i was responding to conversation i was seeing here.)
i wouldn’t have made myself an active participant in gab or parler (i considered making accounts to lurk and monitor them, though) why should i have treated it differently when Twitter was bought by, brought under the active control of, a person with the same views as the proprietors of gab+parler?
all these words, but they are all inevitably variations on a mixed economy of some sort, and the virtue and vice are in the details, the how even more than the how much, of the mix.
capital bought the center so you should respect its intellectual property and heed the cease and desist.
if the world lifted all tariffs but deficit countries committed to filling any domestic demand gap created by trade imbalance with efficiently implemented military build-up, perhaps surplus countries would seek a more balanced path. (not really recommending this. it’s a thought experiment.)
life marinated in contemporary communication technologies is neverending moral injury.
my favorite platform is the public internet.
who could have predicted?
can you tell?
pricing power is the root of all evil, except of course when you’re the one doing the pricing.
i just aced my turing test.
principle is like kryptonite to the unprincipled.
Traditionally, we favored novelty.
wtf?
Loading quoted Bluesky post...
i encounter a lot of worry over online porn and the effect ubiquitous AI-generated porn might have on users, but less discussion of the producer side, of the likelihood AI is the end of the porn industry, porn in all its fetish and variety simply becomes too cheap to meter.
to say that its a fallen world is optimistic. it suggests the world is not still falling.
from a really excellent piece by @kevinerdmann.bsky.social kevinerdmann.substack.com/p/are-we-und...
![Both of these pictures show how carless families would buy groceries.
Figure 1 [Image of a 1920s-ish vibrant pedestrians streetscape (left) next to an empty, contemporary bus stop on a suburban artery (right)]
By any reasonable statistical measure, the people on the left were poorer than a person who might be sitting at that bus stop surfing the internet on their smartphone. Are the statistics that say the right picture is better wrong or are the vibes that say it may not be better wrong?](image/bafkreif2lwbx2xmudtlkjb6rgedhexe6fdoxb3fdyeayl22pfr4j5la7fy.jpeg)
Both of these pictures show how carless families would buy groceries. Figure 1 [Image of a 1920s-ish vibrant pedestrians streetscape (left) next to an empty, contemporary bus stop on a suburban artery (right)] By any reasonable statistical measure, the people on the left were poorer than a person who might be sitting at that bus stop surfing the internet on their smartphone. Are the statistics that say the right picture is better wrong or are the vibes that say it may not be better wrong?