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My hobby? Oh I sort of, trade five paragraph persuasive essays with other people online. Fun? Sort of but it's mostly like, stressful. There's a lot of pressure in the recreational five paragraph essay world.

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He does have other options they just aren't as fun!

I know the superman desconstruction thing is the deadest horse there is by now, but yet still can't help but find it kinda... farcical? that he's gassed up as this inspiring paragon of virtue in-universe and out, but his entire powerset revolves around his incredible capacity for violence. He's a jesus figure but instead of curing your leprosy he can punch a truck in half. The laser vision is just the punchline, there, no wonder all the evil supermen love pulling out that card.

It even frustrates me that "evil superman" is the only way anyone seems to take this character to task. Even a good-natured kansas kiddo would struggle to use those powers constructively. He's lucky his universe keeps softballing him apolitically evil supervillains to beat up, cause otherwise he doesn't have a lot of options besides domestic terrorism.

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Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages Gameboy Color 2001

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you can tell ai artists are real artists because ive had to unfollow every single one of them after their feeds became 95% ai art discourse and 5% art

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ladies

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Really wish voters weren't so stupid, and understood that when a bill passes on a tiebreaker and Republican moderate senators "didn't vote it", that is the majority of the time (not always, but like 75%) a tactical decision the whole group decided on. Thom Tillis (who isn't even running for re-election!) knew the vote was gonna be 50/50, and if it wasn't gonna be 50-50 he would have asked for some minor tweak and then changed his vote. It is just a trick to allow Republicans to run cover in the next election and go "we never supported this". And people do in fact authentically buy it.

Though ironically enough, voters are so stupid that if their material conditions get worse for any reason they will blame the incumbent regardless of whether or not anything they did caused it! In this case the stopped clock might just be right in 2026.

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I think this makes sense! It isn't so neat in practice of course - there are positive externalities from economy-wide efficiency gains and you don't want to disincentivize those at the same time, and a lot of the "actuality" of policies to do this create structural inefficiencies - like the distinction between full time and part time staff, in places like France companies move mountains to not hire any full time people because the obligations to them are so onerous, and in particular start-ups often can't afford to exist. But that doesn't remove the correct point that companies are not life, fired individuals suffer in ways totally out-of-proportion to the price of widgets, and mass layoffs like in recessions have multiplicative damage on health, happiness, long-term earnings, and such.

My big point would be that today, most developed countries already do try to internalize these externalities a good deal! Unemployment benefits in the US totally do this, companies pay into them and then have to pay out to anyone they fire - but not anyone who quits (or in some places fired "with cause", etc, it is complicated ofc). European systems have generally even more expansive policies to make companies pay for those they laid off. In fact if you ask me, we tip too far on this right now - during COVID we gave all these loans to companies to "keep people on the books", and it was a corrupt disaster - we could have helped people better by just giving them money directly, and the economy transformed so dramatically after COVID due to real changes that many of those jobs churned over anyway.

So if I was designing a welfare system from scratch I would totally agree with you - but in Present Day Present Time imo we actually do too much of this. Society writ large should internalize this externality, and pay people more who are unemployed for any reason, to allow for fairer redistribution and more flexible labor markets.

Discussions on private equity are weird, because it's like having concerns about natural gas electric generators, and seeing that 90% of discussions discuss them as if they purely exist to pump out CO2 and smog.

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Is it net wealth creating to buy a business, raise prices to near the maximum that customers can support, and then let the company go bankrupt a few years later after getting nice management fees that can’t be clawed back by a bankruptcy court?

Yep! Like, clearly so, right? After all, they spent tons of money and took out tons of loans to buy the company, and somehow got more money into the system in order to justify all of that massive investment and turn a profit? If "raising prices" was just something any company could do to "fuck over customers" at any time and make free bonus money, every single company would simply do it, always. If they are generating more revenue it is because they altered the business model in some way. This isn't some subsector market failure thing; either you think market prices clear or you don't (which fair if you don't, but then PE is the least of your worries - you need to build GOSPLAN first!)

Unless, of course, they bought a car dealership where a government monopoly prevents anyone who isn't an elite class of registered car dealers sell cars, including the manufacturers of cars themselves. Then it is more likely that they are immune from competitive pressures and are just collecting free rents. But note the problem there is really not the PE guys! Maybe it's the monopoly!

I'm not a dumbass ofc, I know of the 80's LBO boom and the arguments people made, I get how buyouts could violate implicit promises and arrangements between management and staff in order to extract short term revenue and all that. The kink here is that, for one, generally the case is super exaggerated - 90%+ of LBOs were not "pump & dumps" - and the other is that the 1980's were 40 years ago. Tax law has changed, Enron happened, Dodd-Frank happened, workers do not rely on implicit handshakes for compensation contracts these days precisely because of stuff like this, and more.

Survey the actual PE industry that actually exists in the year 2025 and you just aren't going to find 1980's Pittsburgh manufacturing company LBO woes anymore. You will find totally different woes, like the healthcare stuff mentioned above, but they woes that afflict the economy broadly and don't at all suggest that PE is some unique bad actor or anything.

Discussions on private equity are weird, because it's like having concerns about natural gas electric generators, and seeing that 90% of discussions discuss them as if they purely exist to pump out CO2 and smog.

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I honestly think people are generally much less first-principles about this - after all, they have no problem (the liberals, to remind) accepting the multi-ethnic, non-identitarian countries of the United States, Canada, etc. Precisely as you say at the end, the only scenario where Israel doesn't exist ~50 years from now is one where it got nuked into oblivion or the like, it isn't worth considering. People just have a vague-enough desire for peace in the Middle East and an (imo correct) intuition that neither side of this conflict particularly wants to be in the same democratic polity, so two states is the way to go. More informed viewers understand that this is the general approach endorsed by regional powers like Saudi Arabia & the PLO, alongside liberal parties in Israel, and so is the only game in town. They don't really care a ton about the details!

There is def some role for "jewish people are culturally similar to us and believe in democracy" and "muslim populations couldn't tolerate a large jewish population" and all that stuff in the thinking, but I really do consider it secondary to the first-order practical thoughts.

Tbh it's kind of crazy to me that so many ostensibly liberal people flock to "Israel has a right to exist" as a slogan. "States have a right to exist" contravenes basically every core tenant of liberalism and democracy. Like just in the declaration of independence, we have:

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

It kind of feels to me like if you think the Declaration of Independence is too radical maybe you dont actually believe in the in the foundational principle that human rights are more important than the needs of the state!

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I certainly believe you that those people exist, the world is vast! And in the US context jewish-americans are typically self-defined as liberals but many got super-radicalized by the war, I know the types. But they are pretty fringe - two-state solution is the consensus stance, and actually the current war has been broadly bad for Israel's view in the US!

Ofc that ~30% opposed are overwhelmingly conservatives, not liberals, which you can tell from the rest of the data. I don't have detailed cross-sections ofc, and some people identity as both liberals & conservatives, things be weird. Still, all said and done it is a safe bet that ~80% of US liberals support a two-state solution. Other countries will differ ofc but I bet in the typical European country this is either similar or even more supportive.

Tbh it's kind of crazy to me that so many ostensibly liberal people flock to "Israel has a right to exist" as a slogan. "States have a right to exist" contravenes basically every core tenant of liberalism and democracy. Like just in the declaration of independence, we have:

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

It kind of feels to me like if you think the Declaration of Independence is too radical maybe you dont actually believe in the in the foundational principle that human rights are more important than the needs of the state!

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Oh, well "sure", but also pretty much all "liberals" who say "Israel has a right to exist" also agree with you, they support a two-state solution. Like unless you mean the Israeli right government or like the evangelical wing of the Republican party, which I think of as very much not liberals (and I am pretty sure they agree!), supporting Palestinian statehood is pretty much the default state of liberal consensus.

I don't think there was anything directly comparable given the timespan involved here, but I think it would be pretty easy to find someone-like-Thomas-Jefferson saying something-like "if a group kills a large amount of your civilians, you can respond with a metric shit ton of force". That is just a pretty common opinion to hold both today and back then - and something that definitely happened with the Native Americans, tit-for-tat violence-into-expansion was like the defining dynamic there (and they certainly had a less robust concept of the "laws of war" in the 18th century)

Tbh it's kind of crazy to me that so many ostensibly liberal people flock to "Israel has a right to exist" as a slogan. "States have a right to exist" contravenes basically every core tenant of liberalism and democracy. Like just in the declaration of independence, we have:

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

It kind of feels to me like if you think the Declaration of Independence is too radical maybe you dont actually believe in the in the foundational principle that human rights are more important than the needs of the state!

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This doesn't seem to have any applicability to Israel? This is about the citizens of the state and their relationship to their own government. Regardless of the deep political cleavages in Israel today, popular support for the existence of Israel as a state and their general government structure amoung them is extremely high! Really not in dispute in their society.

Certainly the people of the West Bank or Gaza have a different opinion, but that is like reading this document to think the Brits or Native Americans should have a say in the government formation of the US. I promise you Thomas Jefferson did not hold that opinion. He even thought a pretty wide swath of Americans didn't even deserve a say!

Tbh it's kind of crazy to me that so many ostensibly liberal people flock to "Israel has a right to exist" as a slogan. "States have a right to exist" contravenes basically every core tenant of liberalism and democracy. Like just in the declaration of independence, we have:

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

It kind of feels to me like if you think the Declaration of Independence is too radical maybe you dont actually believe in the in the foundational principle that human rights are more important than the needs of the state!

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Well, the USSR did have one more famine:

But maybe we can give em a pass on this one, not a problem ice cream could fix!

(Memes aside they did actually have one more authentic famine even if ti was nowhere near as severe, took a bit for all the lessons to sink in and the war damage to be reverted)

As [Mikoyan] declared in a January 1936 speech: “I am a great supporter of the production of ice cream. Certain comrades believe to this day that ice cream is merely a children’s treat, and is of no use to grown-ups.” At this point Mikhail Kalinin, who was in attendance, exclaimed, “But everyone loves ice cream!” Mikoyan replied, “They love it, but some shun it out of hypocrisy, because they believe it’s just for kids. The production of ice cream needs to be expanded as much as possible. I am lobbying for ice cream, because it is a very delicious and nourishing food.”

important soviet discourse

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We still early days ofc but I should also add that there has been much discourse around how AI was being used to cheat in classes, or as a tutor replacing teachers and so on, and wondering "will college even be valuable anymore?" And while there will be impacts I have been very skeptical of that concept, and the above is a great illustration as to why.

For another perspective, I help with undergraduate recruiting in a white-collar role that a lot of students from top colleges fall into (banking, consulting, finance). We used to primarily hire from top schools (“targets”) but also leave the pipeline open to cold applications from other schools. The quality of cold applications was usually lower, but there were always a few standouts.

But the sheer volume of non-target applications, influenced by AI, has led us to drastically cut back non-target hiring. We literally can’t read them all. And so now we hire even more from our target schools, which means that the decision that most affects an applicants post-grad placement is whether an admissions counselor let them into Columbia or Duke at age 17.

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For another perspective, I help with undergraduate recruiting in a white-collar role that a lot of students from top colleges fall into (banking, consulting, finance). We used to primarily hire from top schools (“targets”) but also leave the pipeline open to cold applications from other schools. The quality of cold applications was usually lower, but there were always a few standouts.

But the sheer volume of non-target applications, influenced by AI, has led us to drastically cut back non-target hiring. We literally can’t read them all. And so now we hire even more from our target schools, which means that the decision that most affects an applicants post-grad placement is whether an admissions counselor let them into Columbia or Duke at age 17.

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Yeah but this is just a roundabout way of stating the same problem - laws preventing large scale layoffs are really bad and a notable part of why for example Europe is ~30% poorer than the United States (and a *huge* part of why India specifically has struggled to grow). Good social welfare policies (which I am not saying the US has, we aren't great in this department) cushion the blows of market forces and use redistribution to boost aggregate consumption and directly target the individual; they do not lock people into inefficient jobs and produce zombie companies. The average private equity purchase is a good thing precisely because they remove those, and many countries are plagued by the drag on their economy attempts to stop this have created.

Now averages are precisely that, you can absolutely point to say private equity buyouts in nursing homes - a field where markets very famously do not function and government regulation is the name of the game - to find examples of negative impact. But that instinct to oppose the churn of firms in the economy is exactly the "vibes over reality" opposition being discussed. They are hated for the good things they do as much as the bad things they do, while the rentier class that is say doctors or car dealership owners gets a cultural pass.

It is fair to say that precisely because the US has not-great welfare program (one that might get notably worse in a few days!), the impacts of churn are quite painful in the short and medium term. This is true! But the past 30+ years of modern economics have shown how badly the answer of "just stop finance from happening" has gone for countries, you just have to have a better welfare system and more fluid labor markets. You can't blame the baker for the price of bread, and you can't blame the investor for the price of the stock.

Discussions on private equity are weird, because it's like having concerns about natural gas electric generators, and seeing that 90% of discussions discuss them as if they purely exist to pump out CO2 and smog.

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This is the perennial curse of US political economy discourse - we do have a class of parasitic rent seekers who drag down "net wealth" by some real, large number. It is just that those people are say car dealership owners, doctors, dock workers, and small-plot farmers. Private equity people are just dudes making money with all that entails, but they don't have some explicitly delineated government monopoly forcing you to bribe them - outside of them buying companies in said explicit government monopolies, obviously.

Discussions on private equity are weird, because it's like having concerns about natural gas electric generators, and seeing that 90% of discussions discuss them as if they purely exist to pump out CO2 and smog.