Already Disruptive: Journalism is a high-margin research technology, not a zero-margin content mill

Linking to blog post because otherwise I end up writing threads that take me almost as much time and are awfully more ephemeral and harder to read 2/2

One of the many reasons why I'll never have problematically large amounts of money is that one thing I'd do with it is hire and fund as many journalists as I could (together w/as many mRNA researchers as I could, all w/a "cry havoc and let them cook" approach). 1/

via @drjlhazelton.bsky.social

Industrial Secrets Everybody has heard of the Dreadnought Factories deep inside the country from where impossible devices flood the world. Orbital imagery shows to jealous and scared competitors continuous clusters the…

"Everybody has heard of the Dreadnought Factories deep inside the country from where impossible devices flood the world. Orbital imagery shows to jealous and scared competitors continuous clusters the size of cities..."

#ShortFiction #ScienceFiction #AdversarialMetanois

abetted by a Dem party that in putting soft norms and collegiality above the sustainability of the rule of law with a who-knows-how-deliberate blindness to the ideology of their social peers dropped the ball in a way that in a better political system would've made them unelectable for a generation).

My informal view is that Dems and GOP as institutional parties have stopped being representative of contemporary US society. The main difference is that money paid for GOP takeover by extremists but supports Dem status quo (plus a GOP judiciary takeover...

I do believe Dem leadership and analysts are 90s-Conservative (don't want more gender equality, etc, than "back in the good days") and think loss of control of the party to "those people" would be worse than the pre-Trumpian society they ache for.

via @schaller67.bsky.social

Industrial Secrets Everybody has heard of the Dreadnought Factories deep inside the country from where impossible devices flood the world. Orbital imagery shows to jealous and scared competitors continuous clusters the…

"Everybody has heard of the Dreadnought Factories deep inside the country from where impossible devices flood the world. Orbital imagery shows to jealous and scared competitors continuous clusters the size of cities..."

#ShortFiction #ScienceFiction #AdversarialMetanois

Industrial Secrets

"Everybody has heard of the Dreadnought Factories deep inside the country from where impossible devices flood the world. Orbital imagery shows to jealous and scared competitors continuous clusters the size of cities..."

#ShortFiction #ScienceFiction #AdversarialMetanois

None of which is to say Schummer et al are as bad as GOP/MAGA. *Past the primaries* the choice is obvious. But before the primaries they aren't the right candidates and most motivated Ds believe so either; you can't blame the latter's anger at being put in that position.

They haven't been wrong so far from a first-order personal utility point of view: I'm as sure that current DNC leadership has failed to meet the moment as I'm sure they have succeeded at their own goals --and might not even perceive the former.

... and that once you do that, in some way who the candidate is doesn't matter much - it's not as if progressives will vote for Rs. They are in a sense governing for a Centrist/donors "virtual party" with the keys to the party office.

Given the structural two-party nature of the US, and the de facto monopoly of the non-fascist offer by the DNC, this sets problematic incentives. Schummer et al believe, with some but decreasing evidence, that institutional control of the party apparatus suffices to win primaries...

A sequencing problem is that for the US (and, insofar as the US influences it, the world) to get meaningfully better Democratic primaries have to go *against*, in some senses, DNC establishment preferences, and during proper elections vote D candidates whoever they are.

On Gaza (and impeachment, ICE kidnapping people, etc) I believe D voters are on the whole "to the left" of D politicians, who are "to the left" of the DNC qua party. The direction, timing, speed, and depth of that convergence is one of the key questions of 2026-2028.

via @alexanderfurnas.com

Early Modern fortifications of this type are very intellectually interesting --the math part of "applied math" being uncharacteristically visible-- and also have their own specific aesthetic which I quite appreciate.

Interpreting Bastion Geometry: Digital Methods for Investigating Dutch Early Modern Military Architecture Through Freitag’s Design Principles - Nexus Network Journal This paper presents a computational framework for the automated geometric analysis of bastion fortifications, tested against the Freitag design principles, developed in the Grasshopper Add-on of Rhino...

Seems enormously fun: "[...] a computational framework for the automated geometric analysis of bastion fortifications [...] enabling comparison with design norms from 17th-century Dutch military treatises."

by Olha Tikhonova

Ablative Somebody gave you a knife and stood back smiling as you cut away parts of yourself. Those aren't the right words. The right words lie red and dead around your feet. They try to come back in the…

"Somebody gave you a knife and stood back smiling as you cut away parts of yourself. Those aren't the right words."

#ShortFiction #ScienceFiction #AdversarialMetanoia

Heck, I'm not even in the US. I'm angry because their screw up was a necessary factor in everything from the the Muskian right in Argentina to, well, if somebody I love dies from pancreatic cancer 10-20 years from now I'm holding everybody who helped (fuck, confirmed) RFK Jr responsible.

A party leadership that lost twice against Donald J. Fucking Trump, no matter how closely, the second time after he tried to steal an election, should have resigned in shame just out of professional pride. But no, sure, the problem surely isn't party leadership and strategy, it's the only Left.

An axiomatically two-party system only works if each party is receptive to their voters at a faster pace than "as their gerontocratic leadership dies." If your response to a huge and motivated block of voters angry with you is "well, fuck *YOU*, get in line" then something is very broken.

(But then, the Democratic Party thinks ads win elections, not "wine moms" and "pro-immigrant bad actors" --oh, the soft misogyny and reflex racism of the rich and old-- which in the media environment of 2026 is exactly the wrong way.)

(Recent aggressive moves are welcome but awfully late. To smirk and say "See, we *are* doing it" at _this_ point in the process, with so many people in warehouses, US science decimated, etc,etc, is to troll what should be your main organizational resource..)

A Democratic Party truly run by ruthless data analysis --instead of analytical capture by leadership preferences (which happens all the time in companies as well)-- would be, *by a combination of numbers and enthusiasm*, quite to the Left and more combative than where it is now.

"Progressives/the Left doesn't win elections, Centrist Democrats do" is, pardon my French, bullshit. Centrist Democrats *prevent* Progressives from running candidates and policy, and soft-sabotage them when they can't.

Graph showing different clusters of Democratic voters according to their preference for higher corporate taxes vs a border-wall.

A main tension of political life in the US is that Democratic Party leadership and their analysis ecosystem lies to the right of their biggest and most motivated block of voters and feel threatened by and therefore contemptuous of them.

@economist.com via @adamtooze.bsky.social

Ablative Somebody gave you a knife and stood back smiling as you cut away parts of yourself. Those aren't the right words. The right words lie red and dead around your feet. They try to come back in the…

"Somebody gave you a knife and stood back smiling as you cut away parts of yourself. Those aren't the right words."

#ShortFiction #ScienceFiction #AdversarialMetanoia

E.g. the liberal patriotic take in the US is that the end of slavery and the Civil Rights Act are keystones of American pride and identity. But there's an illiberal patriotic take --I don't think majoritarian but significant-- that they are instead betrayals of the country's identities and values.

To add to my self-corrections: calls to patriotism are likely to be useful --probably *necessary*-- to activate and organize otherwise neutral or passive anti-Trump forces. My point is the weaker one that some pro-Trump forces are, in terms of their understanding of the US, patriotic as well.

This isn't to say the US doesn't have at constitutive and historically influential levels strong liberal forces. I'd even say that due to its political structure they punch below their weight. But in terms of semiotic statistics a rally around the US flag is as likely to be illiberal as otherwise.

This is an interesting question, but it might be begging the question. Activated patriotism opposed Orban because of his clear position as a Putin satellite; symbolically (if not policy-wise), Trump doesn't threaten historical core elements of US patriotism (flag, POTUS, ~race~, etc).