AI is currently on a path toward delivering the most massive improvement in human history, under the Kaldor-Hicks criterion. https://zirk.us/@interfluidity/116471551079158516
“Real welfare economics asks: is this society better, taking account of everyone who lives in it? The Kaldor-Hicks criterion answers a different question: could the winners, if they chose to, arrange things so that no one was worse off?” @delong https://braddelong.substack.com/p/not-my-john-hicks-lecture-john-hicks
careful who you dish for.
if we want to restore social trust, we need to make sociopathy less remunerative.
@gildilinie we need to write some good stories about cyanibacteria hauntings.
what if running the global economy on the liquefacted corpses of ancient beings somehow cursed us?
somewhere in these ashes there is a phoenix.
the guilty massacre the guilty. and then the tables are turned.
if you define victory in terms of destruction of the other side, then war becomes a positive sum game, both sides simultaneously can be victors!
sometimes when you rip off the bandaid you just bleed out.
suffering is bad and should be prevented.
there's a thing the humans get caught up in where it becomes less important whether a thing is true or false than who the saying of the thing would be associated with.
escalation dominance is just another word for nothing left to lose.
“Literally, White treated corporations like children whose brains were too underdeveloped to truly hold them responsible for their actions.” @ddayen https://prospect.org/2026/02/17/epstein-files-email-kathy-ruemmler-elizabeth-warren-class-war/
failures of the neocons discredited idealism, but the current crew is managing to render publics cynical about cynicism itself. maybe there’s something hopeful in that.
having one of those days when my will is rather flagging in an optimism of the will kind of way.
“Power does not grow out of the barrel of a gun, cruelty is not the same as strength, and a politics built on such ideas promises ruin, delusion about the limits of our power and a betrayal of the promise of our founding.” #PhilKlay https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/22/opinion/trump-iran-war-memes.html
it’s hard to wake up to all this.
political representation is supposed to be representation like a lawyer, not representation like a representative sample. we keep getting this wrong.
one way to understand all this is the world’s largest petrostate kneecapping its lowest cost competitors, potentially for years, all in the name of protecting the security of their region.