Steve Randy Waldman

what if running the global economy on the liquefacted corpses of ancient beings somehow cursed us?

Higher education would be better if the people who participate in it, both as students and as educators, were there, on the terms they are there, because they affirmatively choose it rather than in order to pursue instrumental derivative goals.

the arc of history bends toward the heat death of the universe.

the vibe part of vibecession is just the knowledge that we aren’t in it together any more. the seventies were tough, sure, but we understood we were collectively undergoing a trauma, together. now we fail individually while the glittering party goes on.

"This is the era of the hollowed-out government… We did not just outsource the janitorial services or the cafeteria. Instead, we outsourced the thinking… The result is not a 'leaner' government. It is a government that has forgotten how to learn." #IsraelKolawole https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-empty-architect/

an irony of the Iran War is it was perpetrated in hopes of a color revolution but by governments who’d drained all color from everywhere else in the world and mocked any hope for it as folly.

“That is the logic of virtuous violence. Violence comes to feel not merely expedient but righteous because it is cast as protecting one’s own side, restoring order, and ending chaos. In doing so, however, it denies the humanity of those being attacked.” https://thebulletin.org/2026/05/why-congress-and-senior-officials-must-deny-trump-a-nuclear-escape-in-iran/

#JohnHussman suggests essentially an excess margins tax. https://www.hussmanfunds.com/comment/mc260426/

One common definition of democracy (I’m sorry I don’t offhand know the attribution) is “democracy is the system under which political parties lose elections”. I think that needs to be augmented, “along with free entry of political parties able to meaningfully contest elections”.

“Americans have to reacquaint themselves with constitutional thinking — with the idea that we, the people, make constitutional meaning. To the extent that the Supreme Court claims broad authority to say what our Constitution means, it is in large part because we have given this authority to them through our indifference.” @jbouie@threads.net https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/06/opinion/callais-voting-rights-act-discrimination.html

one way to understand all this is the world’s largest petrostate kneecapping its lowest cost competitors, potentially for years, all in the name of protecting the security of their region.

Why have sentiment indicators broken from past stable relationships to other macroeconomic variables?

✅ Great Q! A genuine puzzle!

Why is the public mistaken, ungrateful even, when in fact the economy has been objectively good?

❌ Bullshit. There’s no such thing as an “objectively good” economy.

just to be edgy, some airline ought to start selling “epstein class” tickets.

you think he must have all the answers but if he made us in his image then he too must be in a state of existential confusion.

incentives matter. that's why we need to dramatically reduce them.

if you are a parent in the US, do you have a plan for how your kid goes to college without taking on a lot of debt, do you believe he or she has a high probability of an economically secure future if the child does go to college, are you confident housing and health care will be affordable?

i love how people say the stock market is booming and inequality is falling, choosing measures inconsistently only to consistently make the point the economy is “objectively” great.

often it is better to ask than to demand.

[new draft post] The fiduciary class https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2026/05/13/the-fiduciary-class/index.html

a fascinating, surprising history of Peronism, coups, and the complexities of actual organization and activism in early 1970s Argentina that didn’t fall neatly along ideological or social-class lines. https://gabrielu941371.substack.com/p/the-subversives-montonero-local-organizing

hard power only works as a backstop to soft power.

i’d feel so sorry for the plutocrats if it weren’t for their externalities.

Word of the day: Dysphemism — the substitution of a disagreeable, offensive, or disparaging expression for an agreeable or inoffensive one https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dysphemism

via @Alon@mastodon.social

someday we’ll have a monument to the new solarpunk plenty and there will be a great gold statue of donald trump just like there is a giant visage of andrew jackson on the twenty dollar federal reserve note.

the kid always complains that he has no free time even though he spends hours video gaming. it’s what he wants to do with his free time, but it’s an activity that doesn’t psychologically register as free time to him. he often describes it as “grinding”.

"Those in power may pretend not to know where the present political trajectories are taking us, but they seem to sense that they’ll have to hide." #OlufemiOTaiwo https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/a-year-of-magical-thinking/ ht @jbouie@threads.net

we are made worse people by every bad thing we know about, but treat as just the way it is. yet it is far from clear that we and the world wouldn’t be made even worse by the more obvious things we might try to do about it.

entirely orthogonal to the question of whether it's right or wrong, AGI-ism behaves precisely as a millenarian cult. much can be dispensed with or tolerated, because ultimately all that matters is what we know will come.

promote aspirational versions of efficient lifestyles.

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the Wayback Machine as a very personal, very fragmentary, time machine. https://web.archive.org/web/19970419013806/http://boo.media.mit.edu/

on the anti-US-imperialist left (“tankies”), i wonder if part of Trump’s appeal, perhaps only semiconsciously, is that he’d be openly as bad as they were always sure the United States always was. they’d be proven right, and no more of what they perceived as hypocritical sanctimony.