love it when a university i attended 20 years ago writes to let me know they've been hacked and they've leaked my social.
@admitsWrongIfProven i suppose whatever the good guys in star wars were trying to do.
@admitsWrongIfProven that’d be the root of all good too.
we’ve been gaslighted into believing that gaslighting is a thing.
i like to think i could have made a failure of myself no matter what my race or gender — or nationality or religion or sexual preference — had been.
A great piece that explains succinctly why Congressionally defined independent agencies, far from undermining executive accountability, are prerequisite to it. by @jbouie https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/opinion/trump-presidential-power-miller-vought.html
@Phil In policy terms, often people talk in terms of numbers of units, as though building barracks would address our housing issues. It would be better for the homeless than not building barracks! But when we think about how we want to address what is a real crisis in housing for people who simply want to live well, we should think about what kind of neighborhoods should accommodate them, and how to build those, not merely how to augment the number of units.
@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.