need to buy more media.

it’s not so much that digital media divide us as they dissolve us. the space of what you can interact with is constituted ever more sparsely of humans.

incentives matter, but disproportionately to the worst people.

i can attest to a certain immoderation in some of your habits, going back decades!

oh, fuck.

are social democrats “leftists”? democratic socialists? self-described communists? trans rights advocates? feminists? civil rights advocates? what does the word even mean? who are people talking about when they say “leftists”?

“think tanks” should be entirely obsoleted by organizations called “political parties”.

there are a lot of people i’d could work in concert with who i wouldn’t want to share a sleeping bag — or a tent, or even a big tent — with. we need more tents.

Plus, pure volatility — people who on average are not so wealthy enjoying occasional windfall years that put them in a top quantile, but whose other years are austere — does not constitute meaningful mobility, is welfare destructive compared to just receiving the average income at a steadier rate.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night-w...

(my guess — only a guess! — is that client apps typically run the HTML through sanitizers, and what will succeed in being displayed is a function of divergent and unspecified choices clients make in choosing or configuring those sanitizers.)

these writers…

the EU was not built to be a night watchman state exactly, but definitely for technocracy rather than popular legitimacy. a very big mistake, as contemporary geopolitics are making clear. i hope both the EU and the US find their way to government of the people, by the people, for the people.

you need the kind of state you are willing to trust to be more than a night watchman. of the people, by the people, for the people.

technocracy alone, however sophisticated and data-suffused, is not adequate to the task of governing a human society. www.interfluidity.com/v2/9484.html (an old post, but seems relevant to some conversations here.)

shouldn’t it really be spelled “ewwwbermensch”?

look. it’s a computer algorithm. it can’t be biased.

“the broader political project of AI chatbots and LLMs: They are top-down systems controlled by the richest people and richest companies on Earth, and their outputs can be changed to push the preferred narratives aligned with the interests of those people and companies.” @jasonkoebler.bsky.social

(the CPI basket is biased towards the spending of the wealthy, so the measure will understate the effect of price changes on the basket of goods and services more typical of the less wealthy, if there is a meaningful difference in price experience.)