let’s prompt a GPT to structure the SPV!

I hope to hear more of yours!

no platform thus far invented can accommodate your kindness.

the present is different than the past, but that doesn’t render it superior. its shape derives from path dependence and lock-in much more than it is the result of some ill-defined collective “revealed preference”.

the nordics aren’t “left of liberalism”.

cc @poetryforsupper.bsky.social xcancel.com/dylanoa4/sta...

was King Midas wealthy or poor?

this is a way of saying you can buy more “stuff” in some sense, but the stuff you can buy translates to less welfare. which means, in welfare terms, the only terms that ultimately matter, you are poorer for all your stuff.

i have literally given the difficult questions surrounding welfare economics maybe a bit more thought than you have. it is not about winning an argument among people who make a fetish of flawed measures.

a great example of a post that refutes its own measures. no reasonable observer could conclude the typical Mississippian is better off than the typical Norweigian (except maybe the weather). if your measures say this, you’d better rethink your measures.

it's not great to conflate needing to cover the cost of a long commute, or to find housing where the schools are good and your kids are safe, with succumbing to the hedonic treadmill.

our son was at Montessori House of Children, near Geary & Franklin. he had a great experience there. the link on Apple Maps suggests they may have closed, though. 🙁

gambling for redemption makes everybody happy ex post if the gambles pay off. sure, ex ante, or if it doesn’t work out, it can look like fraud. there’s a continuum between somewhat obscured risk to “only winning at powerball will save us.” at some point on that continuum, yeah, it’s pretty fraudy.

when our kid was last in preschool, 2018-ish, all-day childcare for one kid ran us $1500/month in San Francisco. once it was just aftercare for public school, it was cheaper, $300-$400 a month, but it was a lottery to get into that, it was oversubscribed.

enron’s SPVs would have been fine if all the projects they helped finance had worked out well!

absolutely. it’s a more discretionary set of expenses than some others, but as you say it once played an important role in local social cohesion that’s now largely disappeared, as participation has become restricted to the rich and the unusually devoted among the nonrich.

i’d not endorse all of the cost computation choices. but the key point—changes in the price of participation in contemporary life are not taken into account by conventional purchasing power measures, and that price has grown much more than is reflected in inflation and poverty measures—is correct.

a microwave oven, but for brains!

a frozen conflict is not the same as a peace. the first prerequisite of a peace is mutual agreement as to the borders.