Sometimes I feel like I'm posting out news from 'The Onion'

You can really tell that a man designed the seating at that coffee shop.

Was quite struck by 无限大 conspicuously setting itself in mock Tokyo, except all the signage is in Chinese. Fictional Tokyo is even more modern than actual Tokyo... it's like how the Japanese used to think of Paris.

3. Aperçu: a comment or brief reference that makes an illuminating point.

Read in Patrick Farrel's NYT piece on Joan Didion's Thanksgivings.

"What is certain, and felt instinctively by almost everybody, is that things cannot go on in their present way" – The Times, May 1975

“It is difficult to imagine a previous period when such an all-pervasive hopelessness was exhibited at all levels of British life” – Professor Stephen Haseler, 1975

“Housing shortage – Jews to blame," letter sticker, German Reich, 1938

zwangsraeume.berlin/en/context

You occasionally see a variant of this in econ discourse where people fret that issuing long-duration bonds will increase borrowing costs when they massively decrease it because investors recognize the rate convexity is very valuable (see, eg, Austria's sovereign curve with the century bond)

one of the things that comes up in matranga's "the ant and the grasshopper" is that, going by skeletal evidence, the average pre-agriculture human experienced ~11 episodes of severe starvation *before adulthood*. agriculture brings this down to ~4

www.andreamatranga.net/uploads/1/5/...

Fifteen years ago Kyrgyzstan was famous for having both an American and a Russian military facility. Syria now? www.reuters.com/world/middle...

I am personally disgusted by this and would like to be on record that if I were presented with this set of facts, I would absolutely vote to convict per the judge's instructions.

The law is the law, and I have as little right to ignore that as a hypothetical prosecutor has reason to strike me.

I heard there was a statue tall
That sneered at folk and commanded all
But you don't really care for symbols do ya
It goes like this the feet the fist
The head that fell the aim that missed
The long lost king whose name was Ozymandias
Ozymandias
Ozymandias
Ozymandias
Ozymaaaaandias

Romani ethnic identification attenuates with educational attainment

www.nber.org/system/files...

British Politics' Midlife Crisis Why British Parties Can't Make Peace with Their Actual Voters

On the morning of Keir Starmer's conference speech here's a new post on an odd psychopathology in British politics - our main parties don't like the people who vote for them - the dreaded Professional Managerial Class. And so they are acting out like a divorced dad seeking cooler voters. 1/n

Top 10 American Fears of 2024 (Chapman Survey) Horizontal bar chart ranking the top fears of Americans (percentage “afraid” or “very afraid”): 1. Corrupt government officials (65.2%, top fear for years). 2. Loved ones becoming seriously ill (58.4%). 3. Cyberterrorism (58.3%). 4. Loved ones dying (57.8%). 5. Russia using nuclear weapons (55.8%). 6. Not having enough money for the future (55.7%). 7. U.S. becoming involved in another world war (55.0%). 8. North Korea using nuclear weapons (55.0%). 9. Terrorist attack (52.7%). 10. Biological warfare (52.5%). Red bars display percentages; small arrows indicate change from 2023 rankings.

Top Public Worries in the U.S. (Yale & GMU poll, May 2025) Stacked bar chart of worries among U.S. adults. Categories ranked by share “very worried”: • Government corruption (54% very worried, top issue). • Other leading concerns: cost of living (48%), the economy (47%), state of democracy (44%), disruption of federal services (44%), cultural/social divisions (36%), treatment of immigrants (35%), global warming (29%), crime (26%). • Lower worries include job security (17%), health (16%), and being targeted because of identity/beliefs (15%). Green shades show “very/somewhat worried,” yellow/orange shades show “not very/not at all worried.

Perceptions of Federal Government Problems (AP-NORC poll) Bar chart showing the percentage of U.S. adults who consider various issues in the federal government to be a major problem, minor problem, or not a problem. • Corruption: Overall 70% major, 22% minor, 7% not a problem. Higher among Republicans (78%) than Democrats (63%). • Inefficiency: 65% major overall, with Republicans (81%) much higher than Democrats (55%). • Red tape (bureaucracy): 59% major overall, with Republicans (73%) higher than Democrats (47%). • Civil servants unwilling to implement president’s agenda: More partisan split—Republicans 56% major problem, Democrats 20% major problem; overall 34% major, 36% minor, 28% not a problem. Title: “Majority of the public believe corruption, inefficiency, and red tape are major problems in the federal government.

Word Cloud of How People Describe American Government (Berkeley Democracy Policy Lab) Large central word: “Corrupt.” Other prominent words: Broken, Chaotic, Dysfunctional, Shit, Clueless, Divided, Inefficient, Crooked, Hijacked, Justice, Woke, Bloated, Untrustworthy, Hopeless, Frustrated, Disastrous, Messy, Sneaky, Turmoil, Delusional. Smaller scattered words include both negative and neutral terms such as Crap, Important, Poder, Resilient, Unfocused, Needs Help. Visual emphasizes “Corrupt” as the dominant public perception.

I’m starting to notice a trend in the polling data…

—Top Public Worry: Corruption

—Biggest problem in Fed Gov: Corruption

—Top fear: Corruption

—What one word would you use to describe American government?: “Corrupt”

It’s almost like voters are trying to tell us something.

among the issues with people not having any knowledge of hybrid regimes in the global South is the fact that everyone assumes contemporary authoritarian governance looks like 20th century totalitarianism

Acemoglu once said (dismissively), "It's all Jack Goody" regarding the (now) popular claim that the Catholic Church created the European Marriage Pattern. When you read Henrich it does seem synthesised from a variety of sources. But in fact their thesis is 95% Goody. He had said it all >40 years ago

Seems like very imaginable reasons - subsidies for married first-time buyers toward new builds is tantamount to targeting neolocal nuclear families...

... but is the lower human capital investment outweighed by the productivity gains from the child facing a lower 'income tax'? ;p

Everyone having social media was supposed to create millions of informed public citizens. Instead it created millions of William Randolph Hearsts, all eager to create their war.

Honest John's migrant twostep

www.theage.com.au/business/the...

Kindleberger Spiral is an inward spiral, visualizing the steady collapse of world trade.

As someone trained as a trade economist, it is my duty to share the 1929-1933 Kindleberger Spiral, showing the month-month decline in global trade due to the combined factors of the (global) Great Depression and retaliatory tariffs. Smooth Hawley is implemented mid-June 1930.

Ideological Bias in Estimates of the Impact of Immigration Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

I take no pleasure in reporting that social scientists' conclusions regarding the effect of immigration on support for the welfare state, based on the exact same data, are affected by their own political beliefs about immigration. Wild experiment by Nate Breznau et al. www.nber.org/papers/w33274

samkriss.com/2017/04/08/f...

Irregular verb again. We overwhelm with superior numbers, you perform human wave attacks, they betray their own by ordering suicide charges.

(Discussing Viet Nam requires optional verb tenses available as DLC.)

"There has been a tendency to misconstrue academic freedom as some kind of extra-constitutional right, and university autonomy as conferring upon the campus the status of an extra-territorial settlement. Such interpretations are figments of the imagination."

Today we would call it 'civil society', but in fact said civil society has long rested on a precarious dependence on state funding but tacit autonomy, which has been openly challenged on the merits from time to time...

Correct.

It's interesting that Defense is so low for a country still technically at war.

Hate a MAGA = Maoism comparison but this reminds me so much of the Mao badge craze, which unleashed market forces Mao had sought to tame.

Gotta hand him credit for intellectual self-consistency?