Matt Steinglass

And where they’ve built out the charging network

Is it that many! Wow

Being in the Netherlands I find there is a great preponderance of "altruistic enforcers" in this culture, and a clear desire to decide that social rules exist and then criticize people for violating them even when they...don't actually exist, or there is no agreement on them.

Anyway now I'm rambling because you got me thinking about this, but thanks very much, this has been extremely stimulating. Hope you feel better. And congratulations on your podcasts.

The artist had grown up in a cult and the whole point of the piece was about unnecessary rules and people's predisposition to create and enforce them, and I had become the embodiment of the cult leaders and followers! Not sure whether the use of museum font was a trick, but it was brilliant.

When I saw someone else enter through a hole, I was a bit off-put, and then when she began moving a panel I said "I think you're not supposed to go through there". She was extremely annoyed and pointed to the floor: "It says 'you can enter here'".

I was at the Stedelijk Museum and there was an art piece with an obvious entry and then various other holes. On the floor next to those holes it said in neutral museum font "You can enter here". I glanced at the labels and assumed they said "Do not enter here", so I went around.

I just realized that yesterday I accidentally performed a version of this experiment in the opposite direction and got it wrong due to an *over*-eagerness to enforce. And I am not at all a rules-enforcing kind of guy!

I think you're right, but I also think this may miss a genuinely informative part of the experimental result that people are so much better at this problem when presented as social enforcement. It feels like that matches humans' sometimes unnecessary eagerness to enforce and punish.

But isn't "badly worded" just another way of saying "human brains are built for social and contextual reasoning, not for abstract propositional logic"?

In effect certainly; I can't remember the specifics atm, was it a per-unit subsidy instead?

Smart man

In 2024-25 the Netherlands had a populist-right government that yanked away a price floor and let the country’s budding heat-pump industry collapse. How many more Dutch households might have gotten off gas by now if they hadn’t?

The Iran war has put Asia on the brink of an energy panic Stranded Gulf supplies are choking off the region’s economies

“Last week the profit American LNG exporters stood to pocket by sending cargoes to Asia rather than Europe hit its highest since December 2022, when the loss of Russian gas after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine triggered a Eurasian bidding war.”

National History Museum on the opposite corner. The okay bia hoi on Tông Đản a few blocks away

The FT is trying to scare me about oil prices, but all I feel is nostalgia for when I used to fill up my Honda at this gas station on Vành Đai

There is an element of that in CDU, as far as I understand. Certainly it has a wing of folks who wish they could just drop the Brandmauer and govern with the populist right.

Rabobank on the unfolding worst case scenario:

The far-left Greens are far-left compared to Cem Özdemir’s centrist Greens.

But to me that’s the whole game—a party needs to move from throw-the-bums-out to stable, smart, forward-looking and good for business. The challenge is how to do that.

I think in fact they are seen as the reassuring stable party since Kretschmann led the state since 2011, Özdemir is over 60 and nationally known, and the CDU fielded a 37yo who seemed both unexciting and a bit of an untrustworthy lad.

I think if anything the tendency may be to underplay this Green success: CDU poor candidate, Greens already controlled the state for 15 years, AfD vote doubled. But I think the glass-half-full, educative story is Greens remaining a party of power in an industrial state, and how they did that.

Trump's decision to bomb Iran is now the greatest windfall to the Russian war effort on record. If it continues, it might save the Russian war economy.

Putin has no plans to stop. Ukraine needs Russia's frozen assets more than ever | Euractiv The US, UK, France, Germany, Canada, and other like-minded allies must form a coalition to cooperatively and immediately employ Moscow’s sovereign assets on Ukraine’s behalf

Opinion: "The US, UK, France, Germany, Canada, and other like-minded allies must form a coalition to cooperatively and immediately employ Moscow’s sovereign assets on Ukraine’s behalf", writes Michael F.Bennet at @euractiv.com
www.euractiv.com/opinion/puti...

Germany’s Greens have come back to win in Baden-Württemberg The defeat of the Christian Democrats is a poor sign for Friedrich Merz

Complex specifics here. Discussions on German TV center on this showing far-left Greens that Cem Özdemir’s pro-business wing is the way to go. But that they won in a scared car-industry state facing China Shock 2.0 as oil goes to $100/barrel is significant.
economist.com/europe/2026/...

Trump told me that the Ayatollah was close to collecting all the infinity stones and had to be stopped.

A handicap blue and white painted sign on the asphalt of a parking space. The symbols are meant to be a pregnant women and a baby stroller, but it doesn't look like that. It looks like pac man being killed with scissors next to a dancer

Twerkers at the barbeque get priority parking 🫡

China - A fragile power? How Europe can use its economic leverage over Beijing China is powerful - but increasingly fragile. Beijing's economic vulnerabilities create both risks and leverage for Europe. How the EU can use its economic strengths to pursue a strategy of leverage-b...

China – A fragile power? How Europe can use its economic leverage over Beijing – Alicia Garcia-Herrero and Tim Rühlig for EU ISS: ‘This Chaillot Paper argues that China’s foreign policy is now shaped as much by domestic economic weakness as by external ambition.’

I'm out of words here

Charles V of Spain on Pizarro's execution of the Inca emperor Atahualpa: "De la muerte de Atahualpa somos muy descontentos, por ser muerte de un monarca y especialmente por haberse hecho en nombre de la justicia." And even he got a (show, ad hoc) trial.