“China surely does not have a great record in respecting the rule of law, but it actually is probably a better bet at this point than what we have seen in Donald Trump’s first 100 days.” @deanbaker13.bsky.social cepr.net/publications...

war is always unsustainable the question is for whom it’s unsustainable first.

the version of capitalist democracy where we tolerate intercessions into deliberation motivated by capitalist ROI (lobbying, campaign contributions, “gratuities”) can’t work. injects noise into democratic deliberation at best, more often worse, supercharges Matthew effects democracy exists to blunt.

very! and i didn’t think the original was so unsketchy!

i always think Scott Bessent is an SNL sketch version of Pat Robertson.

my contribution to the great controversy of the BlueSky day. youtu.be/cZyj6GECjZ0

i wrote a whole lot about both, many years ago.

i think a lot about the “barbie republicans”, kristi noem, pam bondi. such a weird phenom, but maybe this @tressiemcphd.bsky.social quote provides insight. doubling down to the point of caricature on the beauty ideals of an embattled order as a kind of desperate attempt to sustain and reproduce it.

was Milton Friedman the first MMTer? xcancel.com/jbsteinberg/...

[new draft post] How can taxing foreign investors balance trade? https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2025/04/27/how-can-taxing-foreign-investors-balance-trade/index.html

“all in all, simply telling it straight right now is beyond what would a decade ago have been the wildest dreams of the most enthusiastic CCP propagandist, after all.” @delong.social

a guy named Art Laffer had a curve…

should have! but you’ve got to pay that technical debt. you can’t just magic it away with AI.

as i say, i don’t think you have to choose, they come together in the miserable cauldron that turns us as societies from humans to monsters. we might disagree about which ingredient is most fruitful to try to interdict, but the dark magic requires both.

from the outside i thought it was, like, portable event toilets.

🙁

there is work for a fine novelist/journalist to actually follow the path of these kids and portray, honestly and fairly, what their experiences must be like.

"The hard part is untangling decades of…business rules and small codebase-level decisions to make things work. Very little of that will be written down anywhere. Instead, people are essentially the documentation in legacy systems." @altusds.bsky.social ht @nathantankus.bsky.social

is this an idiosyncratic case, or is there some pattern or policy of denying passport renewals to American expats?