Praxis Thoughts Haver

#ReleaseTheCuomoList

I've bought two cross ocean/continental flights in the last 2 weeks and paid about 20% less than I did for comparable flights last year.

Close friend works in Airport management and everyone in the industry is telling him some version of "1st class is doing great, and Coach is bombed out." Born out in airfares as well, which are consistently cheaper outside of premium cabins.

The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine How a single consulting firm extracted $282 million from a network of spam PACs while delivering just $11 million to actual campaigns.

losing my mind at this. apoplectic. want to punch a wall, or a human being

data4democracy.substack.com/p/the-mother...

Given what his team wanted to extract from MAPE in contract negotiations, this doesn't surprise me.

this has been stuck in my head for days with minimal negative side effects

Translation: "He won't ask for our very limited funds and he's going to lose anyway"

I have gotten 5-6 books thru bluesky recs

nope

Not to Statue-post, but it does seem like young men suffer from low ambition. Building and supporting family is the relative "easy button" on that scale of ambition.

TLDR: Sunbelt is experiencing a similar trajectory to Long Island, NY but 40 years later. Explosive growth/family formation predicated on sprawl, single fam housing, and no forward looking transit investment. Followed by population stagnation, traffic, and inability to build transit or density.

Let's add "We can't find construction labor" to the mix now too. bsky.app/profile/ryan...

Yes, the warmer temps mean less ice and rock salt damage. Yes perpetual humidity causes its own unique problems to infrastructure. Yes a lot of Sunbelt infra is 10-20 years old now.

North Carolina is going this way too. Sprawl and maintenance of aging infra are going to hit the Sunbelt alongside some nasty Climate Change impacts.

Cops are cowards. We shouldn't pay them

The problem of inter-generational living is that the Old need to recognize their mortality and their role in passing on. You are going to lose capacities, and face harsh truths. You have to accept them, otherwise caregivers are forced to cover them up in labor intensive ways.

Likely because the benefits are variable often asymmetric in distribution. EX: We live with my wife's 94 year old grandparents. While we dont pay rent the increasing role of "caregiver" has ruined my wife's relations with her grandparents and her extended fam. Plus we cant move out.

OMFG stop both sidesing this.

one of my tiktok followers made this

Olivia Rheingold is a fascinating car crash of a failed "conservative journo influencer." Her snark never lands, her scoops are always a *shrug,* her vocal fry is waaaaay too pronounced, her veneers cause a lisp, and her fillers have angularized her face like an Escher staircase. Total Looney Toon

Starting to realize my brain is a *strange location* because I'm a fixture at my local film festival and the directors often think I'm "in the industry"(I am an extreme dilettante) because I bring up esoteric films of the 1970-90s to them in conversation.

It's fast. You'll read it in like a day.

Leverage also shows how little the fraudsters gain in comparison to the victim's loss. A family will lose its 200 year farm so some butthead can expand his third vacation compound. The fraudsters are also small minded scum, who sit around playing Candy Crush, as the team expertly destroys them.

is key for inflation. Traditional economists derided price controls, ignoring the psychological aspects of pricing. In an inflationary spiral price caps disincentivize hoarding and greedflationary behavior. Its why you need them even with supply response. 7/7

That's why government action, both in priming demand and attacking supply chokepoints, is so important in these cycles. Recessions and Inflation are material but also psychic phenomenon. Folks seem to understand this for the latter, where "confidence" is the byword but the same...6/7

so slow and so lacklustre for so long. No one could get a hiring cycle going because at the first stench of danger employers would reduce headcount and sit in a crouch position. Over time these behaviors become self reinforcing as cultural memory makes them seem natural and ubiquitous 5/7

Thus inflation is also a psychological feedback that bootstraps off of greedflation. Similarly in deflation/disinflation, managers downsize/RIF because its an "easy" button individually, but collectively this ensures a persistence of poor demand. That's 1 reason why GFC recovery was 4/7

that's why CPG corps like Hershey or Clorox overtook price after inflation had abated. Not because inflation was driving up costs, but because increasing prices was the "easy button" to make shareholders happy and telegraph to the market your strength. But this helps reinforce price pressure 3/7

In a deflationary/disinflationary environment layoffs are a panacea to juice profits and cover up mistakes. Conversely in an inflationary environment, greedflation is the default management lever. The market dynamic provides the background motivation, but its more herd behavior than logic 2/7

Greedflation is as much a management culture artifact as a market dynamic. Once there's sufficient inflation for a sufficient time scale, C-suites start taking price to juice profits and cover up mistakes. Layoffs follow a similar cultural contagion. One firm does it, so they all do. 1/7