@Phil as an individual one might prefer to live in the wilderness. a liberal society can accommodate diverse preferences. but as a society, that is not going to be a common preference or practical as a widespread norm. most people will want and need a grocery store, along with more social kinds of amenities, pretty near by.
The relevant unit of housing is not the unit. It's the district or neighborhood. Housing in contemporary society is not to about glorified tents, just to keep the rain off. Homes are the literal structure of society. Their most important characteristics are in relationship to other elements.
@dpp au contraire.
how is AI slop affecting / likely to affect geolocation of photos?
we are getting bad at managing migration just before when we will need so much of it. https://fediscience.org/@rahmstorf/115729127242139985
@ike what a coincidence! i answer to that as well!
i’m 55 years old, but when i talk to myself i still refer to myself as “kid”.
"According to the…annual Harris Poll, for the first time, a majority of Americans believe billionaires are a threat to democracy. A remarkable 71 percent believe there should be a wealth tax. A majority believe there should be a cap on how much wealth a person can accumulate." https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/14/opinion/billionaires-politics-money.html
@eARCwelder you’ve got to have the courage to do something better at the same time. i wouldn’t have wanted Biden to restore Obama trade policy. i would have wanted him to make an affirmative case for balance-promoting capital controls, though, as an alternative to the Trump tariffs he inherited.
@eARCwelder i agree it’s good to move beyond “free trade” dogma. i just think tariffs are for the most part a really terrible tool, so terrible in fact they may well discredit my view that the balance and composition of trade is a necessary and legitimate object of policy, and give succor to foolishly dogmatic “free trade” under the usual neolib “see, TINA. we told you so.”
trade balance should be regulated on the regulatory, that is capital-account, side.
@eARCwelder (no country is linking military expenditure to trade deficit that i know of. Japan i think now runs a small trade deficit but its overall balance of payments remains positive. it’s really the overall current account deficit that represents the demand drag fiscal policy, potentially military, gets called to fill. one wldn’t expect, if a country did this, it would improve relations with surplus powers. the point is to make surplus countries perceive themselves as “financing” a threat.)
@eARCwelder it really makes little sense to tariff China either. tariffs are very shitty tools. the only kind that make any sense are narrowly targeted to sectors rather than sources. the US has not matched increasing trade deficits with increasing military expenditure, and certainly has not efficiently implemented conversion of fiscal inputs to military outputs. the US “provides demand” by running large fiscal deficits, but not linked to military menace.
@eARCwelder (taking control of balance of payments is far from a shitty goal, though! it’s just that there are much better tools, on the capital side, to do that.)
if the world lifted all tariffs but deficit countries committed to filling any domestic demand gap created by trade imbalance with efficiently implemented military build-up, perhaps surplus countries would seek a more balanced path.
(not really recommending this. it’s a thought experiment.)
life marinated in contemporary communication technologies is neverending moral injury.
my favorite platform is the public internet.
pricing power is the root of all evil, except of course when you’re the one doing the pricing.
principle is like kryptonite to the unprincipled.
Traditionally, we favored novelty.
i encounter a lot of worry over online porn and the effect ubiquitous AI-generated porn might have on users, but less discussion of the producer side, of the likelihood AI is the end of the porn industry, porn in all its fetish and variety simply becomes too cheap to meter.
@ouguoc i love this framing. the moon is constantly falling to the earth, and constantly missing. constantly falling, constantly failing.
(i think it was Douglas Adams who said the trick to flying is to throw yourself to the ground and miss. objects in orbit prove it really works!)
to say that it’s a fallen world is optimistic. it suggests the world is not still falling.