Britain is an object lesson in how poorly arranged democracies can succumb to destructive positive feedback. The people who ensure a stagnant economy with Brexit enjoy political dividends by blaming immigrants for the consequences of that very stagnation.
(US democracy is arranged at least as poorly.)
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Scarcity and want are finally fully defeated as artificial intelligence technologies automate the greater fool.
the overfamiliar elite networked social scene of the Epstein e-mail dump is not mostly about the girls and sex. similar scenes very much continue.
one perspective is great, it was only the abuse that was bad. another perspective is the abuse was emblematic of the corruption of this kind of scene.
the antitrump coalition used to fancy itself institutionalist, but revelations of the vile personal behavior of the people who captain once favored institutions, and the willingness of those institutions to deform themselves to curry favor with the new order is undermining that i think.
there is no hypocrisy under supremacy. a double standard is, from a supremicist perspective, simply correct.
it’s like “american beauty” meets “being there”.
the self-storage industry is a microcosm of what’s wrong with America.
ok, ratcheting rates on stuck customers, auctioning their shit if they don’t pay, is icky. we’re not commenting on whether it’s ethical. but it’s legal, it’s profitable, we’re best off if it becomes widespread standard practice.
@neilk for a while!
[new draft post] Real purchasing power over time is not economic welfare over time https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2025/11/12/real-purchasing-power-over-time-is-not-economic-welfare-over-time/index.html
a liberal democracy that doesn’t treat its public like mere rats seeking cheese would make of itself that shining city on the hill.
@ouguoc @Zamfr Good point. They clearly have market power, but perhaps it’s less due to what we call “lock-in” than simple monopoly. My understanding is you just can’t live and transact normally in China without WeChat. It’s not that once stuck, you can’t jump to alternatives, but that there really aren’t alternatives that can do what they do.
Perhaps on the road to totality there was a period of successful lock-in helping make it possible. But there might have been political support too. 1/
@ouguoc @Zamfr But WeChat, at least, is an everything app. I think (from my 10-years-dated experience of visiting) there’s no alternative to WeChat as a kind of cash substitute for small transactions. But China does seem to have a much more diverse chat / social media scene than WeChat. So maybe where there are alternatives it’s not so sticky?
I sure don’t know enough to say! /fin
sometimes the iresome gets tiresome.
have you ever experienced vendor lock-in from a Chinese product? how often from a product not sold by an American firm? is vendor lock-in an usually American business model?
not uniquely. spotify has obviously gone for lock-in via two-sided marketplace network effects.
who else?
Text: I have good news for you, though: assholes are a minority. People of conscience, people with good will and good intentions have always outnumbered psychopaths and sycophants. It might not feel that way but that's because psychopaths have a structural advantage: normal people aren't obsessed with climbing hierarchies and dominating others. Look around you. The world runs on kindness and empathy. Hardly anything in our daily life would function at all if complete assholes were anything more than a tiny minority of the population. It actually takes a vast machinery to suppress this fact, and to reward evil behaviour.
people say Trump has really coarsened our politics, but pretty much everyone who interacts with him says “pardon me”.
the relationship between how many units of CPI a person can buy — as reckoned (inevitably differently) by any of various statistical agencies which are doing the best they can — and economic welfare is extremely weak except over very short periods of time.
[tech notebook] Sysadminning in Scala, documenting in Claude https://tech.interfluidity.com/2025/11/08/sysadminning-in-scala-documenting-in-claude/index.html
The LLM is so positive, but that's why it's not predictive. Just because it seems to really like what you are doing (and offers such apparently perceptive compliments!) doesn't mean that anyone else will.
the richest people in the world want to make the rest of us feel so poor.
