I think I'd disagree as much as I'd agree with #KarthikSankaran's hard-to-summarize views on globalism, but unsurprisingly he is full of insight and wit. https://sankaran.substack.com/p/restoring-balance-or-maybe-not-to

driving should be a vacation activity, like water-skiing.

@LesterB99 hezbollah is kind of a fusion of a militia/terrorist organization and a civilian government or NGO. so it’s hard to generalize about the kinds of folks, i think, unless pager use was restricted to the military side.

how long were they deployed?

kind of amazing no one took a commercial flight carrying their pager, then got randomly swabbed for explosives and like, wtf?

(very lucky no one was on a commercial flight but still in radio range.)

not quite yet, but soon:

if you don’t know the author, there is no author.

@kentwillard for the reasons you suggest (subsidizing speculation, blowing bubbles) i think we want to be careful not to imagine a lending subsidy is a fixed capital subsidy. people do all kinds of stuff with loans, much of which we’d be better off taxing than subsidizing. however we do it, what we want to subsidize is deployment of fixed capital, the fixed cost portion of actual, direct production.

@kentwillard yes. i generally like the idea of taxing to shape market structure. https://www.interfluidity.com/posts/1258156478.shtml

call it the brown new deal. https://x.com/jstein_wapo/status/1836115725276283077

raise the SALT cap. don’t eliminate it.

winning isn’t everything. it’s nothing at all.

This post fails to replicate.

"The public sector can stop private risk aversion from disciplining necessary investments if it tries… a more democratically representative, state-directed financial system would channel investment instead based on what risks *not investing* poses to people’s material security." #AdvaitArun https://advaitarun.wordpress.com/2024/09/17/the-short-end-of-the-liquidity-stick/

[new draft post] Abundance is overcapacity https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/09/17/abundance-is-overcapacity/index.html

There are good-government cases against citizens' initiatives.

Representatives are supposed to be informed experts who do our policy work for us. Ballot proposals create immovable superlaw — often astroturfed by corporate interests, and voted on by rationally ignorant citizens. They foreclose important options of the legislature.

Yet the past few years have turned me into a citizens' initiative superfan. Legislatures are now gerrymandered, captured. We need the check.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/09/ohio-supreme-court-voter-fraud-gop.html

@csaltos if it's a malfunction they were able to exploit, I'm surprised it happened simultaneously enough that word wasn't able to get out. it's kind of extraordinary if a remote exploit could pretty reliably cause nearly every pager's battery to overheat to the point of explosion within minutes. but i guess it's possible! if that's the case, how much of our tech can be converted so effectively into bombs?

Pagers aren't usually bombs. So was this a supply chain attack? Were small bombs embedded in the pagers Hezbollah purchased, at the manufacturer or en route to end customers?

@andrei_chiffa (i think they are not willing to accept that, and are striving now to diversify away from such dependencies.)

when you find takes about your writing, both left and right, all over the internet, it just means you’ve gone chiral.

“Alternatively, we could nationalize Musk’s holdings and run national security from the government, in conjunction with private business, but not handing them the keys.” #ErikLoomis https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/09/the-inevitable-wage-of-neoliberalism