was King Midas wealthy or poor?
a frozen conflict is not the same as a peace.
the first prerequisite of a peace is mutual agreement as to the borders.
humans are better at organizing the doing of things than organizing a refraining from things they would otherwise do.
instead of applying incentives to try to get people not to do a thing, consider whether you could apply incentives to get them to do some alternative things.
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.
“think tanks” should be entirely obsoleted by organizations called “political parties”.
there are a lot of people i 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.
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. https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9484.html
(an old post, but relevant to some recent conversations.)
shouldn’t it really be spelled “ewwwbermensch”?
“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 https://www.404media.co/elon-musk-could-drink-piss-better-than-any-human-in-history-grok-says/
“Culture and interpersonal relationships don’t hover above policy and political economy; they condense and reflect it… Generosity and tolerance are not free-floating virtues. They emerge from political-economic conditions that make them actionable” #EricReinhart https://www.newglobalpolitics.org/neither-culture-wars-nor-big-tents-will-save-american-democracy/
a bit on the nose, writers, that the most valuable company in this world is basically called “Invidious”?
[new draft post] The qualitative is the foundation of the quantitative https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2025/11/19/the-qualitative-is-the-foundation-of-the-quantitative/index.html
should the ad distribution industry just be nationalized?
when “abundance” is framed (as it is here) as good-government reform of the public sector so the public sector can do more faster cheaper, it is not controversial on the left.
but when “abundance” is framed as govt reform to make way for more, faster private sector activity, it is controversial on the left, bc many of us see the private sector as having grown extractive, predatory, and do not see incautious unfettering of that machine as a source of broad prosperity.
https://jacobin.com/2025/11/klein-abundance-mamdani-sanders-socialism
[new draft post] Running on democracy hasn't been tried https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2025/11/18/running-on-democracy-hasnt-been-tried/index.html
github gone down. (not the website part, ssh authentication is down for me.) i'm ashamed i depend upon it. but boy do i!
Text: What if a sufficiently affluent country with a lot of land simply will not tolerate this sort of tight-knit communitarian living when it has the option not to? What if banging on about "living in community" is, to most people, like talking about going without air conditioning? I don't think that is true, but sometimes it feels like it is. I think a better analogy is that suburban living (and this isolated way of living which can take place in any setting) is like junk food; something that is not good for us, but which hacks our short-term pleasure centers. Something which is almost impossible to choose to refuse when we can also choose to have it.
“That is, rational choice modeling is just a structured way to make up a guy… it seems reasonable to think of economic rationality as a compression scheme.” @akhilrao https://akhilrao.org/blog/2025/11/16/Building-rational-surrogates/