Patrick

I think we are internationally an outlier, legally speaking. But support for corporal punishment correlating with support for authoritarian politics, well, that was an illuminating rabbit hole.

Last shut down in 2018 he jumped at the opportunity to take credit for it.

Fellas, is it good when your company’s CFO and GC bolt for the exits “to spend more time with family.”

From the FT: “[Tesla’s] chief financial officer and general counsel recently departed after short stints, within a week of each other.”

The long list of departures in the article is eye popping.

Sudden CFO and attorney departure. Oh boy, wonder what this can be, if only this was a sign in a certain situation. Usually has something to do with accounting.

I think if Trump would say it was, but doesn’t want to look weak it would get a lot more attention.

I noticed this a few years ago when I went to a pop punk night with my wife and some friends. Though it was a pure nostalgia act for my age group.

Same. Old internet was mostly text, more active. Still used it for lots of dumb, reckless stuff, and it had lots of bad. Bad, usually being coordinating how to fry your brain or get hurt being dumb offline. Now, internet is mostly passive, frying your brain.

Very good take. Menswear guy got me to try them, before he was everywhere on Twitter too.

Broadband roll out and political polarization tracking it was not something I would’ve predicted. Until I heard it. But makes sense.

I grew up with unsupervised internet, the old internet. Most of my peers did too. If you were lucky, you had your own computer. Now, all my friends that are having kids view are planning how to limit screen time, internet access. Seeing what we had akin to giving kids cigarettes.

Online moving from mostly text, active engagement to mostly visual and passive engagement has been really bad. The mostly text online world had plenty of terrible aspects. But not…all of this. My millennial crank belief.

I’m fighting it, but it feels futile, I’m going to become a snobbish crank about how the internet was best as text 2002-2008. Or somewhere around there. On laptops and desktops. Smartphones have to be a BlackBerry circa 2007.

Ah, makes sense. Do feel that our experiences are more similar than dissimilar from growing up in a world where the internet was still separate. Compared to my youngest siblings, or anyone under 30. Or could just be I’m getting older.

Praxis of all local associations, voluntary organizations are now liberal, at all levels. Hanania’s “Why is Everything Liberal?” Nationalism is online, disconnected from civic life.

Guessing you’re somewhere close to me in your 30s, right? I’m 36, met wife in 2011. People still mostly met on campus then, like we did, and apps had just broken through the mainstream but were seen for hook ups, not dating. By 2014 it seemed to everything moved to apps.

I’ve been thinking a lot about behavioral economics and its concept of loss aversion today. Unlike equity markets the effect is far beyond “marginal” in politics, unfortunately for us.

Pretty much a structurally inevitability in a presidential system when polarization is high and parties are ideologically sorted. Path dependency of the Supreme Court plausibly leads to the same outcome for them. It’s grim to contemplate.

If my power and legitimacy rested on a polite fiction, judicial review, I would produce a legible body of review. At least make it harder for the other party to opt out of the polite fiction. She might want to look overseas to see the end game.

Informal term for the polite fiction “judicial review”. A polite fiction requires both parties to accept they have more to gain maintaining it. Democrats realize this isn’t the case, so they’re slowly “rediscovering” departmentalism. Court rediscovers its binding constraint too.

Yes, was thinking of this too as part of “the few”. I think most liberals make the same mistake I did for a while, see it as gauche and discount how mainstream it is because they don’t interact with the conservative parallel culture at all or only its elites.

Far-right paranoia and hatred liberalism managing to reproduce the pathologies of communist regimes is always, something.

Affinity fraud is an underutilized way of looking at the conservative movement. Realized this in, like 2010, but Brad Delong is one of the few who shares the view.

Replace “being annoying” with “losing money” and you’ve got one of the most robust findings in behavioral economics, loss aversion. Unfortunately the effect is probably far larger in politics than equity markets.

Mostly agree, with an asterisk. From 2015, during a transitional media environment, true. Social media, smart phones have meaningfully lowered the cost of participation and changed the information environment. Premise weaken, but unsure to extent.

Perils of a catch all party of protest. The reshuffling has left the coalition as a vehicle for multiple, different, and contradictory factions with unpopular, crank, and utopian demands that could never be met. Thought it would sink in 2024 though!

I don't like talking about this but as a single guy, especially as you get older, you're not really wanted or welcome in progressive spaces and I don't really want to be in maga spaces, and realistically that leaves you very few options.

Very interesting piece, not about real estate or anything having to do with economic reality. But folk economics and not understanding…well, a lot of things. Starting with conceptually looking at things from the margin rather than aggregate.

Yep, haha. I like organization and structure, hence math, finance, and accounting background. I’m even weirder with mental math, struggle to verbalize simple things. But if I’m writing I can do it just fine. Until people pointed this out I thought everyone did stuff like that.

I assigned it red. I organize stuff by color coding everything…thought it was what everyone did. If stuff isn’t color coded I need a visual and audio reference. I can recall weird stuff like every Lego system from my childhood.

Ah this feels a lot how my brain operates. I just thought it was because of my ADHD.