[new draft post] The fiduciary class https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2026/05/13/the-fiduciary-class/index.html
i’d feel so sorry for the plutocrats if it weren’t for their externalities.
someday we’ll have a monument to the new solarpunk plenty and there will be a great gold statue of donald trump just like there is a giant visage of andrew jackson on the twenty dollar federal reserve note.
Word of the day: Dysphemism — the substitution of a disagreeable, offensive, or disparaging expression for an agreeable or inoffensive one https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dysphemism
via @Alon
the arc of history bends toward the heat death of the universe.
Why have sentiment indicators broken from past stable relationships to other macroeconomic variables?
✅ Great Q! A genuine puzzle!
Why is the public mistaken, ungrateful even, when in fact the economy has been objectively good?
❌ Bullshit. There’s no such thing as an “objectively good” economy.
the kid always complains that he has no free time even though he spends hours video gaming. it’s what he wants to do with his free time, but it’s an activity that doesn’t psychologically register as free time to him. he often describes it as “grinding”.
just to be edgy, some airline ought to start selling “epstein class” tickets.
"Those in power may pretend not to know where the present political trajectories are taking us, but they seem to sense that they’ll have to hide." #OlufemiOTaiwo https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/a-year-of-magical-thinking/ ht @jbouie
One common definition of democracy (I’m sorry I don’t offhand know the attribution) is “democracy is the system under which political parties lose elections”. I think that needs to be augmented, “along with free entry of political parties able to meaningfully contest elections”.
an irony of the Iran War is it was perpetrated in hopes of a color revolution but by governments who’d drained all color from everywhere else in the world and mocked any hope for it as folly.
you think he must have all the answers but if he made us in his image then he too must be in a state of existential confusion.
@mhjohnson @Phil a lot is buried in the phrase “the wisdom to know the difference”. what might be wise from a psychological perspective might not be wise from a moral perspective.
@Phil It’s the habit of mind. You can’t always fix the bad things you know are happening, you should be judicious and not make things worse from moral vanity, but at the same time you should never concede to resignation or denial, you should always be thinking about whether there isn’t some way you could make a contribution that wouldn’t make things worse or arrogate prerogatives that are not yours. but in practice it’s very difficult to keep that up in a serious way. instead you numb.
@Phil knowing about bad things and shrugging them off in learned moral helplessness makes one worse. it’s not just the knowing but the retreat to inaction, even though inaction might objectively be better than any alternatives it is obvious to consider.
we are made worse people by every bad thing we know about, but treat as just the way it is. yet it is far from clear that we and the world wouldn’t be made even worse by the more obvious things we might try to do about it.
“Americans have to reacquaint themselves with constitutional thinking — with the idea that we, the people, make constitutional meaning. To the extent that the Supreme Court claims broad authority to say what our Constitution means, it is in large part because we have given this authority to them through our indifference.” @jbouie https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/06/opinion/callais-voting-rights-act-discrimination.html
@artcollisions that depends how the subsidies are structured! universal subsidies can diminish incentives (think what a UBI would do with respect to incentives to put up with bad working conditions).
incentives matter. that's why we need to dramatically reduce them.