we keep arguing about immigration but i wonder if pretty soon we won’t be competing to emigrate.

@artcollisions probably our choices there get rather dark.

centrism as triangulation in the age of Trump.

do the drones negotiate a Christmas truce? refuse to kamikaze, light up a cigarette with their neighbors in the sky?

sick, perhaps getting worse. hmm. see a doctor? or wait a week + hope for the best because contributions to the calendar-year deductible disappear into a black hole now, make progress towards useful insurance in a week.

skin-in-the-game really renders health-care utilization choices more rational.

@jellyfriend @haskal and then it was weirdly fine that the solution to absolutely everything became JSON.

one reason the US is so mad at insurance companies is not because rationing exists, but because care is often rationed the same way firms ration customer service, by byzantine discouragements that only the most dedicated persist through. even the most dedicated can and often do die from delay.

“the destruction of American public transit in the middle of the 20th century and the suburbanization of the middle class and aspirants both came before the increase in crime rates” @Alon https://pedestrianobservations.com/2024/12/24/public-transportation-and-crime-are-not-about-each-other/

#relatable https://blog.rongarret.info/2024/12/i-have-failed-now-what.html

[new draft post] Wreckresentative democracy, "Secret Congress", and bee-sting theory https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/12/24/wreckresentative-democracy-secret-congress-and-bee-sting-theory/index.html

@Canevecchio (i’m not sure that one, “concentration camp” in translation, would meet CNN’s high standards of journalistic neutrality, given its well-known history.)

US FY 2025 deficit?

what would CNN’s euphemism, in the name of journalistic neutrality, be for extermination camps?

there would be a lot less rationing relative to medical need if what was rationed was inexpensive and abundant.

which is why, while rationing in some form of course is everywhere, it is much less contentious, less big a deal, everywhere else.

@dpp @eARCwelder how do we know you do not actually live in Providence Plantations?

really a fascinating meditation on the freedoms and burdens fragmented political spheres vs centralist attempts to order and rationalize them and then decentralist romanticizations in reaction. balance it strikes me is the thing, but balance so often is just a nice name for conflict. https://lateralthinkingtechnology.wordpress.com/2024/06/19/the-cult-of-the-patchwork-chinese-modernity-1978-2012-and-the-holy-roman-empire/ ht @guan

if we were better at housing, they would welcome us as liberators.

@eyesquash but currents aren’t agents. they don’t choose themselves. we don’t pretend we can hold molecules accountable for them.

one way to describe donald trump is he likes to be a dick to friends and a friend to dicks.