Adam

Populism innit

Highly unlikely, extreme majority of treasuries demand is institutional with mandates, regulatory constraints, the allocation to treasuries is not substitutable with equities or metals

America is part of the Americas after all

Shrewd political (mis)calculations, is my guess

True, we also doubled life expectancy through better public health and sanitation the last century and half and expanded access to birth control but didn’t do as much for the fertility window

There is a chance the hard left solution is legalizing squatting and shanty towns

Wherever informal housing is still possible people tend to have more kids and earlier. Where it’s not people adjust by not committing, time to financial independence extends, fertility biology does the rest.

more health expenditures. I guess total household expenditures as a percentage of net income can help make the case of people Will keeps fighting over this, or just certain generally stressful fixed costs taking up a larger and larger portion of people’s income.

Basic needs pile up, you need more stuff to function, more redundancies, phone plan and broadband say, some of it is relative, you need more car more house to not fall into relative poverty which does affect people’s wellbeing, credentialism is expensive to keep up with, people live longer have

the relationship between how many units of CPI a person can buy — as reckoned (inevitably differently) by any of various statistical agencies which are doing the best they can — and economic welfare is extremely weak except over very short periods of time.

Just realized that equal opportunity progressivism was always about bringing attention to this obvious reality and doing something about it structurally.

Never considered that. Seems obvious when you think about it. We need some kind of “needs parity” measure of some kind, price inflation adjusted by this expansion of baseline requirements to achieve a welfare equivalent standard of living.

Also, watching this I did personally come around to the idea that post economic wealth looking for hobby outlets is probably less destabilizing in the Bahamas than messing with a whole country with a complex economy and society to run

Not saying any of it is deliberately planned of course, just that the 10B tax bill I believe broke him and there is this aspiration for “exit” that is frustrated in SV

Belaji’s voice vs exit speech some years before the clearest articulation of this probably. Not sure where it leads, but if you can’t exit a system rendering it inoperable is one way, can’t have citizenship based worldwide taxation if there is no state capacity left to enforce it

True, Musk paying the largest tax bill in history though, did mark an acceleration of some kind. US wealth, or imported US wealth to a stronger degree maybe, the Thiels Musks, having no exit, no Monaco Jersey Dubai, or even Singapore Switzerland type escapes must be playing some role

Overall social media use is declining.

Between 2020 and 2024, more Americans — especially the youngest (18–24) and oldest (65+) — report using no social media at all.

A small group of heavy users remains, but the middle is thinning out.

♟️ Between 1989 and 2021, more than 75% of democratic and hybrid regimes initiated at least one prosecution against a former leader. Latin America stands out significantly in this trend.

at the moment, so not sure about them.

I can assure you the vast majority, pretty much all reasonable people minus extremists, haters, and reactionaries cheering for Trump, has towards Americans the same kind of solidarity you feel towards other people on the receiving end of authoritarianism. Canadians and maybe Danes are too livid

It’s a shitty and purposefully demeaning way of saying activist or zealous, I guess. At least, that’s how I replace it in my head whenever I see it

They failed bad but the papacy did go on to become increasingly powerful and influential, the Gulf sponsors in this analogy seem to be pulling off something like that possibly

Very interesting. Vague similarities with the various doomed jihads we’ve seen since the 90s, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Algeria, Iraq, Syria. The scattered offshoots, from Timor, to Somalia, Nigeria, chaotic, inept, opportunistic, and deadly to the unlucky populations in their crosshairs

screenshot of the post: "I thought my capacity for shock had been completely lost. But I have to admit, reading this message, which went out this morning to all public employees of the State of Virginia, stunned me: "Good morning, State Colleagues: Many of you saw the Proclamation issued by the Governor last night asking Virginians to pause at noon today to reflect and pray for Charlie Kirk’s family, to reject all forms of violence, and for our Commonwealth and Nation to stand together. (You may find the Official Proclamation here.) Just as our Nation joined together after September 11th, so too must we make a similar and lasting commitment to defeat the evils that harm our democracy." Over the years, I've read countless articles and books about the Redemption period after Reconstruction, how previously reviled and odious figures—slave masters, Confederate politicians, southern generals—were canonized by, first, the white South and ultimately the white power elite of the nation as a whole. I suddenly have such a visceral sense of what it must have felt like to be a formerly enslaved person, an abolitionist, a Union soldier, the families of Union soldiers who lost their sons or husbands or brothers, a radical founder of the Republican Party, to see this happening. It's stupefying, shocking, as I said, to see a version of it now, in real time, right before my eyes. It's like I'm seeing Birth of a Nation getting made right in front of me. After 9/11, Susan Sontag pleaded to a nation that had completely lost its mind, its sense of reality and proportion, any and every sense of history at all, "let's not be stupid together." I know it's a lot to ask of this country, but, please, let's not be stupid together."

from Corey Robin on FB:

can side with overtly or covertly. As things stand I can see both sides in the US having some, but structurally just like a 160 years ago the liberal side comes on top seems to me.

Tautological maybe, but seems to me that, reactionary or progressive, state backed or insurgent, democratic or anti democratic, the thing that matters is who has an edge organizational/technological, demographic, moral that can be deployed at the right time or for a long time and that the majority

A good heuristic of the brokenness and brutality delta I see currently is Lucy Connolly being a mascot of the right vs Kyle Rittenhouse being a mascot of the right, we exist in two different civilizational universes, the free speech stuff is in large part concern trolling

As always everything bad that happens in Europe multiply the nightmare factor by few orders of magnitude and you get a decent idea of the actual reality

Much deeper surveillance, draconian methods for what they consider dangerous speech bsky.app/profile/rian...

New high of Americans saying immigration is good for the US