Still A Disaster

The actual problems this city has are almost never what people waste oxygen talking about on TV and YouTube.

One weird part of living in NYC nobody tells you or really talks about is how much daily life here is straight up lied about in the media.

Basically every transplant I know has some family member back home always asking if they're terrified of some kinda giga-violence that doesn't exist here.

If you take the "every accusation is a confession" thing to its logical conclusion, then the wild, panicked accusations of the Obama years detail a pretty clear (and disturbing) agenda and how they plan to act on it.

... Whereas if you distill things down to a far simpler, far more grizzly, and infinitely less flattering set of basic, cynical emotional units it all easily slots into place. It all makes perfect sense in moments.

The picture painted is also one which implies a fairly bleak future.

If you try and square what's happened the last several years with the story we tell about ourselves, it doesn't take long to realize that that is basically impossible. You end up in this insane, infinitely complex equation of arguments balanced like a 50-dimensional jenga tower...

It's almost like we're circling around a grim truth that principles/ethics/convictions do not matter at all in our society - if they ever did to start with.

Whole lotta "all lives matter" types hastily cooking up ever more sloppy reasons for why tons of them don't, actually.

Hard to not feel like the whole society is just a total wash at this point.

Point-of-no-return was decades ago. Save file is broken and locked into the worst ending, backup auto saves don't go back far enough to avert it. Inescapably cooked.

I don't WANT to feel that way, but it is hard not to.

[Watching Toy Story]
Buzz Light year: "You are a sad, strange, little man."
Me: "Fuck, he *really* gets me."

American culture is foundationally at odds with reality and we're just stuck in the shitmire until that changes.

And that's before we factor in how irreparably fucked the worldview of some 70m of us is at this point.

Just sitting here in dread thinking about how like 99% of the policy proposals to fix our societal problems wouldn't actually change a single damn thing about how broken everything is.

And even then, that's a pretty gross oversimplification of what happened in those episodes. The OPEC one in particular feels almost disingenuous to describe in those terms when the price side of things is being driven up almost regardless of what the wages are doing.

Actual wage-price spirals are pretty rare, and almost never driven by increases in minimum wage (as in, I struggle to think of one). Its usually some other factor driving it, like the OPEC shenanigans of the 70s or covid mangling the entire global economy in 2020-2021 for the US.

Oh, we're also apparently ignoring savings as a possibility in this hypothetical of yours for some reason.

Gonna go out on a limb here and assume you took macro or read an econ textbook at some point but: you're implying here that somehow supply-side elasticity is 0, demand-side elasticity is functionally unlimited, and businesses have no margins at all.

Which is a goofy thing to imply.

🫡 godspeed

I think we're about to find out how many friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues want to see us black-bagged by the government.

Here's to praying that's a way smaller number than it looks like right now.

Feels like we're awfully close to the terrifying mask-off moment when it becomes indisputably clear that a lot of people who spent years screeching about "gov. tyranny" only did so because it was what they had always wanted to do to us, and they had just been assuming it was mutual.

It is hard to overstate the economic damage that dropping a 20%+ tarrif on everything will do.

A ton of firms front loaded in anticipation, so full effects won't be felt till 2026, but the damage will still be severe through the year.

Maybe a hot take but products having sub-subtitles should be considered a marketing disaster.

I feel like the longer any given software product is around there is a phenomenon where its name will get continually longer as versions, features, and technologies get added until you've got multiple acronyms and decade-old buzzwords and everyone just ignores the formal name.

The only people who are gonna be blindsided are the talking heads, neoclassical economists, and Wall St. Almost everyone else seems to be well aware and have been for some time.

The stark dichotomy between everyone I know talking about how shit the economy is right now, and most of the major metrics all appearing fine (and talking heads never shutting up about that) absolutely screams "novel type of economic crisis incoming"

By a huge margin, the wildest part of the "Duo died" saga is learning he was canonically over three thousand years old

Scene from The Princess Bride where Vizzinni says "You're trying to kidnap what I've rightfully stolen"

OpenAI right now

They killed Jim Henson because he was on the verge of building a muppet that had a soul

Overheard at a party: "I can't believe you answered a grindr booty call to a halfway house in Miami"

The crippling psychological trauma of seeing someone refer to pizza rolls as "raviolis"