so, it’s pretty much all term premium, right? or are people anticipating some really intense short rates a couple of years from now? #finance
if democracy is conceived of as rule by an atomized public informed by engagement-focused media, it will be a form of misrule. you can’t exhort media to be different to fix it. you have to reconfigure the polity to be something more rational than an atomized, distractable mass public. 1/
specifically, the democratic public has to rule by participating in institutions that both meaningfully enfranchise them and act rationally, rather than reactively, on behalf of their interests and values. 2/
usually when democracy has worked, these institutions have taken the form of political parties. but there are other possibilities. /fin
“Friendship…has always depended on a certain irrational generosity. A willingness to waste time together magnificently.”
Pranav Jain on “The quiet grief of adult friendship” https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/civil-irony/the-quiet-grief-of-adult-friendship/
can't imagine why the period from 2019 to 2022 might have left people who had hoped to buy a home a bit bitter. (and then, of course, there is the effect of rising interest rates on mortgage costs, ht @SteveRoth)
A graph of all-transaction-home-prices-for-the-US divided median-household-income-in-the-US, showing a sharp rise from 2019 to 2022.
AM radio, 2026.
A radio app on a dashboard touchscreen, set to AM 930 KHz.
which disappeared first, local journalism or the local itself?
hard power only works as a backstop to soft power.
[new draft post] The fiduciary class https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2026/05/13/the-fiduciary-class/index.html
i’d feel so sorry for the plutocrats if it weren’t for their externalities.
someday we’ll have a monument to the new solarpunk plenty and there will be a great gold statue of donald trump just like there is a giant visage of andrew jackson on the twenty dollar federal reserve note.
Word of the day: Dysphemism — the substitution of a disagreeable, offensive, or disparaging expression for an agreeable or inoffensive one https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dysphemism
via @Alon
the arc of history bends toward the heat death of the universe.
Why have sentiment indicators broken from past stable relationships to other macroeconomic variables?
✅ Great Q! A genuine puzzle!
Why is the public mistaken, ungrateful even, when in fact the economy has been objectively good?
❌ Bullshit. There’s no such thing as an “objectively good” economy.
the kid always complains that he has no free time even though he spends hours video gaming. it’s what he wants to do with his free time, but it’s an activity that doesn’t psychologically register as free time to him. he often describes it as “grinding”.
just to be edgy, some airline ought to start selling “epstein class” tickets.
"Those in power may pretend not to know where the present political trajectories are taking us, but they seem to sense that they’ll have to hide." #OlufemiOTaiwo https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/a-year-of-magical-thinking/ ht @jbouie
One common definition of democracy (I’m sorry I don’t offhand know the attribution) is “democracy is the system under which political parties lose elections”. I think that needs to be augmented, “along with free entry of political parties able to meaningfully contest elections”.
an irony of the Iran War is it was perpetrated in hopes of a color revolution but by governments who’d drained all color from everywhere else in the world and mocked any hope for it as folly.
you think he must have all the answers but if he made us in his image then he too must be in a state of existential confusion.
we are made worse people by every bad thing we know about, but treat as just the way it is. yet it is far from clear that we and the world wouldn’t be made even worse by the more obvious things we might try to do about it.