@admitsWrongIfProven every day cars kill people. if there's no good day to make the joke, any day must be a fine day to make the joke.

"your subscription will renew" is such a nice way of saying "we will take your money".

@realcaseyrollins you know, facts of the case actually matter.

@realcaseyrollins absolutely. the one they negotiated in good faith for weeks and remain perfectly ready to pass.

it'd really suck if your family had planned a trip — maybe bought plane tickets, prepaid a hotel room — to one of America's national parks over the holiday break.

[new draft post] Wreckresentative democracy https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/12/20/wreckresentative-democracy/index.html

i wonder if Trump has so internalized the idea that money is the game of life’s ultimate scorecard that he just can’t defy Elon, a man two orders of magnitude greater than he is.

@BenRossTransit maybe. but the result we got is pretty bad. yes, the margins are tight, but ultimately we’ve ceded control to fascists for at least two years, desperately hoping they’re too inept to cement for themselves permanent control. we can have our theories about the counterfactual. but i’d go for a timely, full primary over this result in heartbeat.

it’s a bit pathetic that we watched RBG undo herself and the country because of career and ego and a misguided sense of unique capability. then we watched JRB do just the same.

now we have to live in the country their failure, our failure, bequeathed to us. it’s not clear we’ve learned anything.

the correct honorifics are God Emperor Musk and Assistant Principal Trump, right?

there ought to be something analogous to SLAPP laws for fraudulent, abusive DMCA takedown notices. https://raggedfeathers.com/@lilithsaintcrow/113682494431693388

in cars we are traffic to one another—dangerous, frustrating—when if we were on foot, we would be liveliness, buzz.

@pixelpusher220 @louis i think we'll just disagree on this. i don't think Elon Musk has a right to buy infinity attack ads against candidates he dislikes no matter how up front he is about the fact he's buying them. i agree it's not clear how we get there from here, but it's worth knowing where you want to go.

@rezendi sure. but for big firms (the ones who used to, ubiquitously, offer prompt 24/7 human telephone support), it’s unlikely offering it now would be a bigger hit on mostly dramatically expanded profitability than it was then. it would be a hit, that’s why they don’t do it! but it was a cost then too. in 1992 it was a competitive necessity, in 2024 industries have standardized around cheaper alternatives.

@pixelpusher220 @louis i don’t think money is ever speech. i think expenditure is a public, commercial act, always regulable. usual caveats apply, any regulation whose purpose is to discriminate against the expression of particular viewpoints violates the first amendment.

i don’t agree with Citizens United’s enabling of dark money shell corps, but my dispute with it is more foundational than that.

campaign finance is regulable, full stop.

deceptive pricing as free speech: “The line of argument will be that mandating the display of all-in pricing information amounts to compelled speech by the government forced on private enterprise, violating the First Amendment.” #LukeGoldstein https://prospect.org/politics/2024-12-19-modest-ftc-junk-fee-rule-bipartisan-support/ ht @ddayen@mastodon.onlin

once we had david and goliath. now we have big pharma and little grifter.

so we’ve got to be at least like ten percent, fifteen percent, of the way through trump’s term, right? at least we’re making progress, working our way towards an end of this.

@rezendi baumol means the same customer service rep costs more in absolute terms, but still less relative to the now more productive economy. we should still be able to “afford” at least what we afforded in the past, even where low productivity and higher opportunity costs render some activities more costly.