Alas, tire rubber particles seems like a big enough problem that you would still have very strong incentive to regulate weight in EVs. Not sure that means we will 🤷‍♂️

The dream of 2011 is alive in Portland thanks to a COVID era slump and rents that have been largely flat for 10 years because of impressive-by-US-standards housing policy.

The thing about a quick and terrible first draft is that relative to moving more carefully and slowly you run a much higher risk of rereading and coming to understand that your idea is just bad. Which is great if you have time to come up with a better idea but definitely bruises the ego a bit.

At long last we are doing the water knife from the acclaimed sci fi book 'don't do The Water Knife, please please figure out some way to avoid The Water Knife.'

I think a lot of people struggle with the fact that the Iranians aren’t that interested in playing the TACO game with Trump but if Trump TACOs and then murders them all in six months only to TACO again on their successors, they will not get to feel smug vindication because they will be dead.

Build whatever you want but if anyone specifically at this public meeting for people opposed to this housing project wants to rent the unit it goes straight to them and everyone else gets an email telling them that they are gentrifier scum.

Sometimes wonder if the problem is just that no one has been vulgar enough about paying these people off. Like what if you said anything goes build whatever you want but 40% of units can only be rented to people who moved to the city before we passed this exemption.

Hate My Job GIF ALT: Hate My Job GIF

U.S. Navy rn:

I honestly don’t think I could live like this for any amount of money or power, if I were Starmer I would just quit.

So basically Starmer’s Labour is running a caretaker government that can’t afford to piss off even the most scandal laden New Labour fossils the goals of which are limited to just barely keeping the lights on until either the Greens or Reform puts it out of its misery.

At which point the question becomes how much can Dems afford to say people who love violence and are good at it don’t belong in the tent regardless of their other beliefs.

I feel like the Occam’s razor explanation with Platner is that he’s genuinely kind of a horrifying sadist but his sadism is currently and for the foreseeable future trained on Republicans.

You can chart the history of the discipline in basically:

1950s APSA report: Misunderstood but bad, taken seriously and some of the changes were implemented if only in a monkeys paw sort of way.

1970s: strangled in the crib by the behavioral revolution.

1990s onward: good ideas, no one to listen

One thing I think about a lot here is that APSA tried to put out a sequel to their disastrous 50s 'we need the parties to polarize' report on Congressional reform in the 70s and it failed because the academics involved just used the access to congress to do data collection for their own projects.

After trying and failing at regime change in two very different ways in Venezuela and Iran I think we’re going to play the hits on this one where we succeed and just wind up owning the humanitarian catastrophe and instability that we were already sort of responsible for but we’re now in control of.

Someone on here recently proposed "unknown knowns" as a term for this but IMO their explication of what it meant went way too deep on institutional blind spots in large organizations when 'things that are objectively true but which we as a culture refuse to understand' was right there.

Like if you’re someone with dirt on Swallwell you might even prefer that he stay put in Congress, but if you’re Swallwell the only way to buy more time before the walls close in on you is to become more valuable to the people who have dirt on you by climbing higher.

FWIW my original version of this take which was probably closer to what I actually belief is more about candidate psychology than external incentives:

I think there’s also a perverse Eric Adams esque thing where the more vulnerable you are to blackmail the more political kingmakers have incentives to ensure you keep winning higher and higher office.

The irony here is that a lot of evangelicals take a very strict view of ‘render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s’ and separation of church and state, so while I would argue they would be morally culpable for the bad consequences either way here, they might not be spiritually culpable.

A lot of evangelical position taking on Israel and other topics flirts with something like ‘second coming accelerationism’ and voting for the antichrist is perfectly in line with that.

I think they’re going to go with occultation like in Twelver Shia Islam. In the confusion around timelines or succession they will say that RFK or someone slipped away with his body and they are in the process of healing him with antivax woo or something.

OTOH I do think a huge part of why small democracies like New Zealand are so well governed is that their voters and political class know they are completely dependent on world markets while having close to 0 pull within those markets and essentially 0 margin for error in economic decision making.

I thought the UK had learned this lesson after Brexit, then I thought it had learned this lesson after Liz Truss, then I read more UK history and tried to puzzle out how they failed to learn this lesson after Black Wednesday, then I read about the Suez crisis….

Men would literally rather become Albanian than go to therapy.

Technology has improved enough since the late Franco era that he could probably become the integralist to achieve the farthest distance from Earth.

Trump knows Vance wants to be president but thinks he should aim higher at being the world’s second catholic integralist astronaut.

Like if I’m the Japanese minister for foreign affairs, it’s my job to understand that anime is deeply relevant to Japanese foreign policy and soft power, that doesn’t mean anime is good or bad or that I endorse anime, but it’s relevant!

It is insane that policy makers in the state that contains 50% of all Jews and claims to represent 100% of all Jews does not consider anti-Semitic myths relevant to their conduct, maybe they think there’s no way to win there but it’s still relevant!

And I really don’t know what left wing Jews or left wingers in general are supposed to do given that. Trying to fight anti-semitism in that context feels like fighting desperately to seal the windows while the door is wide open.