the difficulty is, Zelensky is not #pathetic.

@w7voa i am so grateful for your work.

( if you want to chat, weekly interfluidity office hours starts in 5 mins, on the half hour, https://www.interfluidity.com/office-hours/ )

just what Florida needs, a royal dynasty. https://assortedflotsam.com/@politicsbot/114082839670131684

@realcaseyrollins @Chip_Unicorn "the government seeking to limit the feedback that they receive" is precisely the kind of "efficiency" i am criticizing.

(it's not a real efficiency, taking into account all of our interests, but it's an efficiency from the perspective of the organization that is supposed to actually read and react to feedback.)

I'm accelerating the pace at which I'm sending letters to my Congressional delegation.

Here's today's, "DOGE massacre at NOAA / NWS threatens Floridians" https://notes.interfluidity.com/vyQHxyjgRairBncH_6NkRg

(I distrust their shitty webforms, so I'm trying docupost.com to conveniently send by postal mail.)

can’t wait ‘til Musk emerges from Ft Knox with photographic evidence of Scrooge McDuck.

the premise of idiocracy was that, over generations, the stupid would out-reproduce the sane. but these people were all alive when idiocracy was released.

@realcaseyrollins @Chip_Unicorn what’s your explanation?

this by @radleybalko is breathtaking. i'd encountered almost all of it, but you put it in one place and realize the scale. https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/trump-roundup-five-days ht @buermann

@realcaseyrollins @Chip_Unicorn if you have a call line that’s only open from 11-3 when people might want to call any time (ie it’s not some live event naturally restricted to the time window, like a radio talk show), i presume it’s because the provider is trying to limit the expense of operating the line (not the literal telephone expense, but the expense of dealing with calls).

@realcaseyrollins @Chip_Unicorn no idea. whoever does it, it’s what a stupid version of efficiency looks like, replacing human, accessible systems with much cheaper, automated, less accessible systems. it’s efficient only from the perspective of the system provider, because it shifts costs and losses to users.

@Phil in some ways it's similar in some ways it's different. to a lot of people, the existence of nuclear weapons is a moral abomination, it's much worse than, say, merely burning the money or wasting the resources. and yet those people do have to pay too. that's life in a shared political community. i oppose the Federal death penalty. i still help pay for the chair.

@Phil no. it is no more slavery to tax to support USAID than it is to tax to support our nuclear arsenal. (LOTS of people object to paying for our nuclear arsenal.)

@Phil see, i disagree! i think we do extraordinary things by collective action, which can be enabled only by some degree of compulsory contribution.

i certainly support the nuclear deterrent. i also support the work of USAID.

how should we resolve our disagreement? people can have different philosophical and policy views.

that's what CONGRESS is for in our Constitutional system.

@Phil i do what i can. but we join together in the provision of public goods, supported by compulsory taxation, because it is impractical for us individually to do these things and relying solely on voluntarism encourages free-riding. why don't you buy your own nuclear deterrent?

@Phil it doesn't give the president the power to refuse its laws. which not only acknowledge AID, but demand it do stuff, and allocate funds for that purpose.

@Phil yeah. you see, i'm not so zen. death awaits us all, but in the meantime, we build societies, which give us extraordinary benefits but also impose upon us positive obligations. when we destroy the sinews of that society, when we shirk obligations we easily could fulfill, i think that's called doing evil. i'm not so zen about it.

this is what "efficiency" looks like. https://im-in.space/@Chip_Unicorn/114077708550331811