suppose there were an elixir you could drink and become a giant, but if you did it would be inevitable you would, wittingly or not, step on some people like ants. would it be ethical to drink it?

“buildings are a bit like intellectual property, which also lasts longer than the economic horizon of the businesses that produce it. The economic argument for rent regulation is a bit like the argument for limiting patents and copyrights to a finite period.” @jwmason https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/after-the-rent-freeze/

// this is a very brilliant piece

come spring the ice will melt.

i woke up today and found i was unable to verify my identity.

“Conservatives complain endlessly that ‘unelected bureaucrats’ have escaped the control of their democratically-elected masters and are implementing an agenda at odds with the wishes of the American people. Would this were so as far as NASA is concerned.” #FrancisFukuyama https://open.substack.com/pub/persuasion1/p/why-it-took-so-long-to-return-to

@admitsWrongIfProven i prefer taxation to eating bodies and drinking blood.

@admitsWrongIfProven i mean they might not, but we do!

the optimized life is not worth living. https://allpro.social/@thomas/116021092370100103

when Bezos bought The Post, he wanted to be respected among the professional managerial class. his goals have changed. he no longer wants the respect of educational professionals. he want subservience. so he is destroying The Post to show his middle finger.

if you become a client, my advisory will help ensure you place bets only on the highest quality numbers of the roulette wheel.

thinking of housing shortage in terms of raw numbers of homes is just stupid, because homes aren’t fungible. scatter 40 million new homes across the tundra of Alaska and you’ll do nothing to address housing miseries. build a neighborhood 50,000 people are excited to live in and you’ll do a lot more. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/02/04/us-housing-shortage-millions/

the humans are always squabbling, and it might be kind of cute, but then they go ahead and start murdering one another.

you go looking for the third biggest city in Norway, you are on a Stavanger Hunt.

@joXn Seems a distinct possibility! Imagine if there had been some cultures that dodged facebook/x/tiktok style social media. I think they’d have dodged a bullet!

@joXn That’s a very interesting wrinkle. Do you think societies with languages more distant from English will much less quickly reorganize work? (That might be a good thing or a bad thing for them!) Alternatively, despite the United States and broad Anglosphere’s flagging prestige, will the prospect of AI automation of white-collar work incentivize greater adoption of English in professional settings?

@joXn good question! but if (a big if) AI reorganizes how humans engage in the kind of work that demands schooling, might we decide to do less of it, or else devote education to very different purposes, which might have implications (shorter or longer) for how “much” of it we do?

"The irony here is that their impunity to consequence has its own consequence: the dismantling of the system that protects and empowers them." #CharlesHughSmith https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2026/02/power-and-impunity.html

Kind of a social democratic answer to "network states", @alphistia https://stinkhorn.us-west.host.bsky.network/xrpc/com.atproto.sync.getBlob?did=did:plc:u6htnzwc6uyc3nd2wavjncqf&cid=bafkreielyscggsmouu5r3oob7hldm4yqrrvidgd6sjoxq4gogm5qflsf2u

i now view nearly all digital ads and sponsored content as some mix of cheating and manipulation and treat it as an ethical gaffe to click or even offer my attention to them.

does AI mean young people should typically have more years or fewer years of education?