It's interesting that Broderick can say "Sure, there are plenty of uncomfortable echoes we can point to, but history doesn’t tend to repeat. The European fascist movement that helped leaders like Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, and Hitler take power in the 20th century was specific and deeply contextual" and then the very next sentence say "It was a direct response to the political and economic realities of the moment" as if the political and economic realities aren't an echo of Weimar Germany.

There's also this insistence that Democrats lost overwhelmingly, rather than acknowledging the slimmest of margins in an electoral system leads to a representative wipeout. There's no acknowledgement that the policies Trump ran on - deporting illegal immigrants and bringing down prices - have been almost entirely absent from the actions of the administration. Eras of turmoil are eras of populism, same as it ever was, and everyone paying attention knew the dangers. We just underestimated the dissatisfaction.

But they never got around to anything average Americans would care about.

THIS SO HARD

Somewhere or other the WSJ has an article pointing out that those with an affinity for the Democratic Party are more likely to have it for social issues than economic ones. Not unions, not minimum wage, not healthcare, but LGBT issues and immigration. Which works where Democrats win, but it gets you annihilated where Democrats lose. The truly unfortunate thing is when you look at Democratic policies they're overwhelmingly popular... but preserving the Democratic base requires threading the needle between Palestine and Bud Light and it's virtually impossible. It also sucks all the air out of "hey how'd we end up with so many billionaires."

I don't disagree with any of that.

veen's minidoc was interesting and worth the watch. It (briefly, tangentially) touched on the following points:

- a great deal of the space is given over to pr0n, which is awkward and weird, but

- a great deal of the space is populated by neurodivergents, who mostly rawk anime avatars because

- the tools to build a decent avatar come from the hikikikomori waifu crew, who colonized en masse and set the tone for the place

- which is mostly in the hidden corners where the looky-loos don't know to stare

That there is the recipe for a thriving counterculture. It's a freak-flag-flyin' festival, which the world needs more of. Such spaces, however, are notoriously difficult to monetize and the minute someone does, someone else will attempt to litigate their monetization away. There's also the very real problem of children in spaces they don't belong, or people doing things that shouldn't share space with children.

Facebook, borne of Harvard's undergraduate social scene, is never going to make room for anything even vaguely countercultural. And yes, absolutely: Facebook has not is not was not never will be the primary screen in a multi-screen strategy.

My pet theory is that some Meta execs have seen the numbers VRChat has been doing and keep pointing to it as if it's something they can achieve, too.

lel

Peak players: 66k

Money spent by Meta on VR to date: $69,000,000,000

Investment per player, presuming VRChat were the goal: one million, thirty four thousand, nine hundred and one and 68/100 dollars

Facebook started playing around with VR in 2019. It is now 2025. By way of comparison, MBS announced the Mukaab on February 16, 2023 with a target date of completion of December 31, 2030. So. A year longer than Facebook has been building their VR empire... but the Mukaab (if they pull it off) will house 400,000 people.

In real life.

For 48 billion.

(if they pull it off)

Zuck knows that the more Facebook faces the Internet, the more traffic and money bleeds out. The whole point of Facebook is to silo the shit out of everything they do so they can control the ad dollars and the content but ultimately, Facebook has to be HTML compliant; it is, in the end, a website. Put that shit in VR and they can control everything. If they can make it a place you'd rather be than the real world they basically own reality. And if you're high on your own supply you read Snow Crash and Ready Player One and you say "but it won't be a dystopia when I'm in charge" because far few techbros get that "are we the baddies" skit.

The real problems under Meta's endeavor is that their prices are eliminating almost all competition, whilst also being the only one in the VR space to essentially abandon developers, in a space where developers have to take enormous gambles to even operate.

The real problem is Linden Labs has economy worth a half billion dollars a year and has done for twenty fricking years and that number doesn't grow, that number doesn't shrink, that number is the reasonable, proven limit of a virtual world for grownups. To be Meta you have to look at Second Life and decide that it's worth blowing a hundred and forty years worth of the space's ENTIRE ECONOMY (not its revenue - its revenue is about $100m a year) to do the same thing, only in VR.

Nobody at Second Life has ever asked for VR.

MXC was that marvelous inflection point where people went from mocking Japanese television to emulating Japanese television. It's worth reading up; the pitch to re-voice Takeshi's Castle for absurdism never would have flown if culture wasn't at an absolute nadir caused by the arc of Running Man:

into the hangover of seven years of American Gladiators:

And the trainwreck that was the XFL:

MXC allowed people who were embarrassed by television to mock television, and it was awesome. But, just as Iron Chef started out as something to laugh only to become something hosted by Alton Brown, Wipeout and American Ninja Warrior soon followed.

So here's an HHS Statement from 2024. You'll note it says "by doing this, we accomplish this." This is typical government boilerplate - "we did a thing for reasons."

RFK JR's statement is "things are bad, let's start a witch hunt." It implies nobody has ever studied childhood obesity, for example. It assumes by default that whatever level we're prescribing SSRI's, it's too much. It sets out a 100-day deadline to deliver a report card on the whole of the medical establishment. Thinking rationally here - how much could you investigate in 100 days? What would that investigation look like? And if you came into it with preconceived notions, would you even have time to question your assumptions?

Now - as we've discussed before, RFKJr did this shit in 2005. We had plenty of documentation saying that vaccines were fine and dandy in 2005. There had been a CDC database for fifteen years at that point. There has been an absolute sea of studies since. The scientific outlook is now as it was before, and yet we've been through 20 years of "teach the controversy."

You don't find any fault in it because you're studiously not looking for it. You believe that all this is on the up and up and you haven't evaluated it critically.

Populism works because people yearn for simplicity. Simplicity always takes some form of "who's to blame." "Americans are unhappy because they take too many SSRIs" is much simpler than "Americans take so many SSRIs because our medical system is intervention-based, funded through extremely flawed public and private policy and hobbled by capitalist self-interest and we legit have no other easy method for dealing with well-earned, organic depression." My wife has the legal authority to prescribe SSRIs. She never does. The thinking behind that is if you're going to be in the practice of reducing people's medication (as naturopathic medicine's basic philosophy requires her to do), you need to understand those medications well enough to understand the risks of reducing them. Do SSRIs take the place of lifestyle changes, better health practices and a general focus on improved well-being? Absolutely. But what's your alternative? Tell the newly-single mom with a history of abuse and a codependent mother-in-law who is also her baby-sitter that she needs to get more sleep, pick up a hobby and eat more fresh vegetables and see how she does. That woman needs therapy and support and whatever solutions she can fit into her life and those should be managed by professionals. We've got two clinicians who focus on mental health and we still refer out a lot. There's a lot more to it than "drugs are bad, mkay?" It's Panama all the way down.

I grew up Santa Fe-adjacent. Which meant a lot of weird shit, tbh. One of those weird-shit moments was when a friend ended up in a school play. My school? Arsenic & Old Lace, the Tempest, boring shit like that. His school? Ionesco's Rhinoceros. Rhinoceros is interesting because it's a fable about people casually watching their friends and relatives turn into stampeding beasts. Why? Because it's easy. Rhinoceros came out two years after Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which is very much about people turning into Red Scare witch-hunters but done in such a way that the HUAC didn't notice because totalitarian culture boards are always very stupid. The thing about Invasion of the Body Snatchers, though, is that it is quite obvious that becoming a pod person is bad. They're not human. They just got got. Turning into a rhinoceros? That's a seductive choice. It's much easier to be a rhinoceros than it is to be a person.

We all know you find no fault in Kennedy's HHS statement. I can speak only for myself, but I would invite you to look for it. I cannot challenge your beliefs, and your belief in RFK is clearly of vital importance to your self-regard. All I can do is point out that you're not debating, you're not conversing, you're proselytizing.

And you didn't used to.

Today is the 4th anniversary of 57 Senators voting to impeach Trump. Not 67, though. Every Democrat and seven Republicans.

Tell me again how this is the DNC's fault.

Bathroom cabinets are in. They don't tell you this when you buy cabinets - make sure you know how you're going to get them there. We had 3/16ths of an inch clearance.

Laundry room door is in.

Wet room door is in. Yes, strange and exciting new room names are having to be created for this house. The "wet room" is off the "art room" which is more of a zone of the 'living room' which you step down into from the 'fish room' which is more of a hallway except it's eighteen feet wide. The "wet room" was once outside, contains a shitpump, has three stairs down, a massive shelf big enough for a queen-sized bed at 4' above the floor and 15' ceilings. It also has a door to the outside. It could be a mud room? Except I'm building a mud room and if you're coming to the house through the wet room you have missed some cues. Regardless, the wet room used to have two shitty no-glass doors, so it could have been called the darkroom. It now has glass in both windows and is fairly pleasant, especially now that I have completely overhauled the shitpump so that it has gaskets and a vent. The glass on the outside door causes concern because obviously, you could break into it. Obviously, you could break into anything with a window. Nonetheless.

The sign is currently a lie. It won't be for long. There are four 50m runs of multimode fiber connecting the main rack stack to, eventually, five other racks. Two of those runs are complete, which means the network is alive. There are currently two subracks live, one of which is completely finished and one of which is in process. This particular locality has exactly one police officer on patrol at any given time and I will have a workshop full of precious metals so I figured it was worth the effort to discourage opportunistic pillaging.

Counters go in today. Having a discussion with the county tomorrow about riparian restoration (I have a quarter acre of wetlands).

I take watchmaking classes because they are humbling. I have been humbled more than enough over the past six months. I had to design a component in order to fit a doorbell yesterday. Granted, the doorbell has two cameras and a screen and granted, the doorbell is on brick but fuckin' hell.

The analogy I've taken to is that I'm retrofitting an ocean liner into a science vessel. As I was pointing out to my wife yesterday, there is no building system that has not been completely revised. Sewer, water, gas, hot water, electrical, data... completely modernized.

My fear is that when we're actually living in the place I'll be too burned out to enjoy it.

"From my understanding" doing a lot of work there. The United States pumped more cash into the economy than any other, which led to more employment, more investment and a faster recovery. It also led to greater initial inflation, but that inflation also cooled faster than any other country.

Economic statistics are notoriously obscure and net price changes are a function of inflation over time, rather than a rate of inflation, so there's hay to be made about the truly uneven nature of the pandemic recovery. But you can't wave your hands and say "from my understanding" and pretend that global pandemic recovery had nothing to do with economic policy.

There are more realtors in the US than houses for sale and have been since 2021. It's also not a difficult license to get; not one, not two, but three of my colleagues got their California realtors' licenses within a week of sitting at a console mixing idiots with nothing better to do.

On top of that, California's real estate market is shady AF, with lots of unpermitted bullshit that gets winkwink nudgenudged, lots of kickbacks, lots of unpublished deals, etc. It's scumbags from stem to stern and the fact that every lazy producer on earth can make money by following these dipshits around with a camera crew as if they're Paris Hilton (the realtors pay for this shit, BTW) hasn't improved the outlook.

You will never not encounter huge assholes in the California real estate market. You can be salty about that or you can recognize that they justify their existence by acting as flaks for each other in hopes of being invited to the feeding frenzy. Any dipshit walking in retail is going to be treated as poorly as you were, by every realtor out there, with absolutely no recourse.

The only people I have ever met who are happy or successful in the California real estate market within the past fifteen years are either (A) wealthy AF and able to pay cash (B) acting as their own realtors and snatching distressed properties before anyone else sees them. It's a shitty system and no matter how egalitarian Zillow or Redfin makes it look, it's a lie.

I didn't elect him. neither did you. Neither of us elected anyone on this entire chain, and yet here we are, subject to this guy's mad coding skillz, and your quip is "trust the process?"

expensive AF to get into FTFY

A Harvard admissions board member, speaking under condition of anonymity, told Jeff Selingo in Who Gets In And Why that Harvard's admissions system wasn't designed to build elites, it was designed to ensure only elites would apply.

so revise the fucking book

If he'd learned how to code in the six years since he'd be embarrassed by his code. Counterpoint: this is the only evidence we have of any of the kid's skills but apparently he gets to push updates at Treasury.

If you were on a plane that suddenly got a new captain, and the only information you knew about him was that he crashed another plane six years ago, you would rightly feel concerned. I'm really curious how you see this as different.

Paul Roberts points out in The End of Food that the American school lunch program was under the purvey of the Department of Defense until Nixon - parts of it still are. The War Department had noticed through their metrics that the fighting weight of soldiers was dependent on the nutrition available to them and that the Great Depression had not been great for American military might. More than that, one of the reasons Americans won the Revolutionary War was due to the height/weight imbalance between the colonies and the British Empire - a diet of jam and bread had driven the average height of a British soldier fully six inches under the average height of a colonist.

It's easy to take control of your nutrition if you're wealthy (or if your government wants you to win in an arm-wrestle). It's tougher when you let capitalism run unfettered. Our local grocer up here, Fred Meyer, used to be a quirky outfit like Target but with hella more groceries. They had a substantial natural foods selection, lots of bulk bins, plenty of natural ingredients. Then Kroger took over and now they're Walmart. Me? I can wander down to Whole Foods and overpay for whatever I want but Kroger is also transforming QFC from a chain that prided itself on fresh ingredients into a Fred Meyer without clothes or housewares.

By "Pandemic recovery" I mean "economic recovery from the pandemic" which, yes, was far more Congress than Biden. Nonetheless, presidential elections are referendums on the past four years and the past four years were much better for Americans than pretty much any other nation.

The problem with America is the Republicans have grown comfortable with their permanent minority status and have consolidated their platform around demagoguery and the lunatic fringe. When one party is 100% wedge issues 100% of the time, you're effectively at one-party government vs the chaos agents.

The problem, Steve, is you feel like you should have an opinion other than "what the fuck is this bullshit" which means you've already lost.

Ostensibly, Trump ran on (1) deport everyone (2) Tariffs will save us (3) grocery prices are coming down on Day 1 (4) Palestine and Ukraine will be solved immediately. There were no clear plans for any of those points but...

Let me digress. I subscribe to FT Alphaville because it's free and it's extreme financial snark. Fortunately for everyone I can't forward or link anything because if you aren't in the system you're out in the cold but every now and then?

So this is my new favorite term for Trump-era unforced errors and stupidity, courtesy JP Morgan Chase: "Left Tail Risk."

I had a roommate down in LA who I came home to find despondent once. When I asked him why, he said "I have to burn my shoes now." This wasn't him figuring out how he felt about New Balance's ad policies or balancing his comfort with any social inconvenience he might suffer for his Nazi footwear, this was a man who had gotten so wrapped up in a miasma of self-reinforcing social media bullshit that he was looking for lighter fluid before contemplating what he'd wear to work the next day.

Counterpoint: We had a patient who was given megadoses of Ivermectin for her COVID by another naturopathic doctor we know, and she wanted to know if it was going to be safe for her baby. Now - ivermectin has been a frontline anti-parasitic since the early '70s. It's a well-profiled drug. You could look up dozens of studies on Ivermectin going back decades, describing its safety and efficacy across many diseases and cohorts, and not find a single one related to pregnancy. Which, since Ivermectin is largely used in the developing world and since pregnancy is not unknown there, says one thing really clearly: Merck has no need to test Ivermectin in pregnancy because they know beyond a reasonable doubt they won't like the answers and "not studied" kicks the shit out of massive nasty contraindication warnings all over their meds.

These studies weren't hard to find. It took us ten minutes to go "uhhh, yeah, this could very well fuck up your baby" (baby miscarried). But since the popular media was full of Fauci trying to do his job and Trump telling us to inject bleach, the lunatic fringe elevated Ivermectin to the point where our friends were prescribing it through sheer dumb flooding of the zone.

Back to Trump. Of his thumbnail sketch presidential platform, (1) is a bunch of search engine chicanery (2) has been an absolute shitshow (3) hasn't been mentioned since election day (4) is a resort maybe, you know where he got the idea.. The senile, bloviating dipshit is zero for four but instead of looking at that, you're out here trying to have an educated opinion about annexing Panama.

veen posted this about four hours before you posted the above:

You shouldn't have to have an opinion about annexing Greenland. Nobody should. It's a fucking stupid idea. The fact that it's never come up before demonstrates how stupid it is - there's a world full of experts that make a lot of money to think about feasibility and advantage and "make Greenland a territory" has never come up. Make Puerto Rico a state? Ohhh yeah. That one has been coming up for decades. Trump would never go for that, though because here's the thought process:

- see a map

- see Russia & Canada

- see how much bigger they are than the United States

- see how turning Greenland into the United States makes it more bigly

The dude hasn't even gotten to Mercator Projection Thinking but here we are jawboning about canal tariffs because Trump walks past Teddy Roosevelt's portrait. And you can think that no one is that black and white, but I know about two dozen people who worked with Trump - the only reason I never worked The Apprentice is I'm an elitist who doesn't like leaving my air conditioned submarine and they couldn't pay me enough but I know both sound supervisors on that show, half the mixers and two thirds of the camera department and that's exactly who he is. We once (before 2016) had a discussion in the booth about who had less object permanence, Paris Hilton or Donald Trump and while Paris won, it was a real debate.

When John Bolton calls you a lightweight? You're a lightweight. Someone once described Trump as a poor person's idea of a rich person. He is also now a stupid person's idea of a smart person.

None of which would matter, except that your takeaway is

In short, fuck the DNC for brining us to this point.

I get it? But the DNC had to deal with half the country insisting a vote for Harris was a vote for Intifada. Had to skirmish about transgender prison reassignment rather than the best pandemic recovery in the world by far. "They're eating the dogs" came up in a mutherfucking presidential debate and this is somehow the DNC's fault?

THAT is "left tail risk." It's a refusal to grapple with real issues because you're wholly consumed by fake ones.

Starting Sunday's set with this

The basic issue, TNG, is you've created a lengthy document to discuss the accountability of the least accountable people in politics. You have a bunch of headings earnestly discussing your perception of assorted actions or policies that were hatched with less deliberation by the instigator than the observers. You are also attempting to analyze a state of affairs as ephemeral as a cloud on the horizon. Finally, you are reducing numerous complex situations to a gut check, effectively deprecating the positions of policy experts to a man-on-the-street interview. Like this:

I hear from some in the know that the China influence is not as dire as is being sold to us. Did Carter fuck up by relinquishing control? Sure. But that’s our fault, not Panama’s. Not a fan of how Trump is approaching this.

The issue starts and ends with international sovereignty, which is a fancy way of saying "if you pick on every little country that doesn't do what you want you will quickly find yourself picking on every little country." You may have heard the phrase "exhorbitant privilege" bandied about by wonks and talking heads. It's an elliptical way of saying that the United States runs the world, unquestionably, with no serious challenges, and has done since 1945. You can use a carrot, you can use a stick, you can use a carrot and a stick and the carrot/stick ratio is foreign policy in a nutshell. It's important for purposes of domestic politics to act like there are serious challenges to this because everyone has an opinion about carrot sticks but the US runs the world and it's not close.

The way we chose to run it in the '60s had a lot of stick in it, particularly in Latin America. America's "stick first" approach had led to our failures in the Vietnam War, the collapse of Cambodia, the collapse of Iran and secret wars in Laos. Carter, who ran on being Not Nixon, decided to turn the corner. Panama, as a reminder, had become an armed camp during the Vietnam War, with American troops firing into Panamanian crowds. Unwinding the Panama Canal treaty by 1999 matched Britain's unwinding of Hong Kong by 1997, thereby giving China a reason for continued rapprochement with the Western powers. The alternative could easily have been another Suez Crisis, which ultimately led to the Iron Curtain but it wasn't.

There's an easy five doctoral theses in there but you've boiled it down to "Did Carter fuck up" as if the geopolitics of Panama are restricted to Panama. Ask the Iranians why they restarted their nuclear program and they'll tell you: there were three countries named as the "Axis of Evil" and the one furthest from nukes is now a vassal state. The State Department isn't a rec center, it's a vital arm of government dedicated to the distribution of carrots. The most important thing about Trump is he's convinced you that a gut check on Panama is a valid way to decide where to place your support.

THIS IS THE WAY POPULISM WORKS. It's always - ALWAYS - the guys going "it's complicated" who are lined up and shot first. Any good demagogue knows that you don't get your way by debating, you get it through unilateral decisions... and that if there's no debate, there's no blowback for walking back your decisions. Let's talk tariffs -

Have not been concerned. Have always assumed they were a negotiating tool. Did they work as a negotiating tool? Yet to be seen.

Trump managed to freak out every fund manager and retail investor by YOLOing into round numbers, only to walk everything back within six hours when Mexico and Canada promised to keep doing the exact same shit they'd been doing for 20 years. When Mexico says 'sure, we'll put ten thousand troops on the border, we've had fifteen there for years' we look like Mexico's bitch to anyone with a cursory understanding of border controls or foreign policy. This is the entire world going "what a terrible idea," Trump tweeting some dumb shit, every market going "what a terrible idea" and Trump going "I am a very stable genius." There's no policy to wargame here, no chin-stroking discussions, just gut-checks by demagogues and their flock.

They're doing what they can get away with, that benefits them personally, with no greater vision beyond that. By regarding it any other way you're falling into the trap. The fact of the matter is, every expert on every subject you've chosen disagrees with the choices being made but the whole game is to make you think those experts are safe to ignore.

They're not.

You know, the more I look at it?

If I were Trump, I'd give Musk free reign to break everything he can touch, piss off everyone he talks to, ruffle every feather he sees, and generally act like a magnum jackass until the whole country is at wit's end. Then I'd go "I alone can fix it" and cut him off entirely to twist in the fucking wind.

We're talking about a man who is entirely focused on how Forbes reports his wealth. He hides his tax returns because they report his wealth as less than he brags about. And he's resoundingly beaten every Democrat out there; the only opposition he has is other populist billionaires.

Elon Musk is doing whatever the fuck he wants because Trump is letting him. Trump has a get-out-of-jail-free card from the goddamn Supreme Court.

My only wonder is how bad trump thinks this needs to get before he casts Elon into the pit.