cathyreisenwitz

"... the case was thrown out because Musk filed his lawsuit after a statute of limitations to bring such claims had expired." Seems like important info some of the other news sources for some reason did not include.

The incentives are perverse. It's not just about selling razors, but about getting attention. From Enlightenment 2.0: "You can blame the media, but obviously the media is just a part of a much broader trend. The problem is that, in the competition for attention, being rude (or vulgar) is a way of getting noticed. In order for it to work, however, you need to be ruder than everyone else. Everyone else, of course, is not about to stand idly by and let you steal all the attention. They will respond in kind. The result is a classic race to the bottom, where the level of rudeness gets steadily ratcheted up over time."

Algorithms in particular are problematic. And drive most new traffic to news websites.

Noah Smith:

"There is a growing body of careful research establishing causal links between social media and political polarization and extremism. But simply looking at the trend lines is enough to realize how much American society broke in the 2010s when everyone got a smartphone, Twitter, and Facebook. The 2010s are when perceptions of race relations in America fell off a cliff; when people began to perceive much more discrimination against themselves, despite declining discrimination in offline society; when progressives in particular became depressed en masse and started to experience mental health issues on an astonishing scale; and when young Americans started losing trust in their institutions at a rapid rate."

Very true

"Liberty is a California investor-owned utility." Well, that was probably not a good idea.

Making newsrooms beholden to donors is not ideal, but it's better than being beholden to advertisers.

"Back in the day, and I mean way back in the day, barely anyone could read or write. Nowadays, you can't find a single person who believes reading and writing is a useless skill."

One-fifth of US adults can’t read well enough to compare and contrast information, paraphrase, or make low-level inferences based on written text. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States

"The divide is not between smart and stupid people, but between people who can inspect the systems around them and people who are forced to accept those systems on the basis of trust."

I mean... a smart person can not understand the system, true. But a sufficiently stupid person cannot understand the system. So, it is a divide between smart people who understand the system on the one hand and smart people who don't along with dumb people who can't on the other.

I loved Pocket too. RIP.

I bet another reason women suffer less cognitive decline from early retirement than men is that women are less lonely and more integrated into their extended families and communities.

This is very interesting. Any other good reads on AI agents using cryptocurrency?

They need to legalize psychedelics https://psychedelicspotlight.com/can-psychedelics-help-veter...

I enjoyed this. But one mention of "farm bills" in 45 minutes???

"the political playing field is often tilted toward agribusiness. For example, the overwhelming majority of farm subsidies flow to the biggest and wealthiest agricultural operations. Less than a quarter of farms with annual incomes less than $100,000 receive any subsidies at all, while more than two-thirds of larger farms do. And, the larger the farm, the more likely it is to receive subsidies. One study found that between 1995 and 2021, the top one percent of farms received 27 percent of the total $478 billion in farm subsidies during this period. A second study showed that 60 percent of subsidies from three major programs—crop insurance, Agriculture Risk Coverage and Price Loss Coverage—are given to the top decile of farms. This study also indicated that large farms were more intensely subsidized. For example, the largest 10 percent of farms received an average of $29 per acre in crop insurance subsidies, compared to an average of $12 per acre for all farms. Moreover producers of meat, fruits, and vegetables are almost completely excluded from the core subsidy programs, while commodity crops such as wheat, corn, and soy are heavily subsidized." https://freopp.org/whitepapers/the-challenge-of-rural-povert...

“When populists get into power, the rhetorical discourse frames tend to be used to implement successive autocratic measures, such as limiting opposition through electoral manipulation, thwarting the free press, changing the constitution in their own favor, and circumscribing minority, civil, political, and economic rights. Populists are usually not against electoral democracy per se, but rather at odds with liberal democracy. Since they believe they represent the ‘true people,’ other people’s votes do not really count as legitimate. Consequently, they are hostile to the underlying values and principles of constitutionalism, pluralism, minority rights, and checks and balances.”

-Nils Karlson, Economist and poltical scientist, founder of the Ratio Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, former professor of political science at Linköping university, Sweden, visiting fellow at Hoover Institution, Stanford University, etc.

This is my blog: https://cathyreisenwitz.substack.com/

It’s got a recommendations list on the right rail. But I can also maybe offer recs based on your interests.

I'm still blogging. I'm still reading blogs. A lot of us are. Good points against social media. But that's still how people find bloggers these days.

I don't hate this. But I'm pretty knee-jerk opposed to licensure https://cathyreisenwitz.substack.com/p/fuck-and-i-do-mean-fu...

No one asked me, but I think a cause that is important, neglected, and (less-so, probably) tractable is loneliness/atomization/lack of meaning among Westerners in the bottom-half of income and education.

If fact, I think it might be the world's most underrated problem. I feel like it's neglected, but I'm sure someone somewhere is working on it. (I mean besides the populists and nationalists and others who are making things overall worse.)

Well, if the demand for people who can and do read full books stays steady and the supply decreases, then the value (or at least the price) will increase. Seems plausible to me.

Vegs should be at the top, meat & animal products under. Still an improvement. #1 health tip for poor autists w IBS: Half a bag of frozen vegs in a bowl + splash of water. Microwave 2 min. Stir. Microwave 1 min. Salt. Eat.

Did I miss something, or are none of the examples both Straussian and memetic/memes? I feel like if this were a real thing, one could imagine one example. Also, that's not how churches generally work.

"Blogging starts conversations with people I have never met. Blog posts become invitations that never expire. They wait patiently for the right moment to be found. Someone reads an old post, reaches out, and suddenly we are talking. Even in person, conversations start more easily because people already have a sense of who I am or what I care about." This is so true. I was just thinking, most of my BFFs came into my life because they or someone they knew read something by me and wanted to know more.

I wonder whether it might be useful to the continued existence of humanity to correct for the individualism bias in WEIRD countries with some collectivism

"Fat cells have many advantages... They are easy to obtain from patients." LOL. Also, we'll see if that's still true once everyone is on Ozempic.

Classic time blocking! I really thought OP was going to be about that. https://www.getclockwise.com/blog/what-is-time-blocking

Super interesting! More evidence that cities are here to stay.

"Visa and Mastercard are private companies and can do whatever they want." Not without DOJ pressure, unfortunately.

Sex workers prefer decrim to regulation because regulation ends up creating a white market dominated by a few anti-competitive players and a vast black market with all the existing problems.

2. Widespread promiscuity prevents marriage from happening.

But both promiscuity and marriage rates are down. How does that work?

The part about Latina women experiencing low racism stress when they're young and high stress when they're older is super interesting. And it's interesting that wasn't true of Black women. I wonder whether America's fetishization of Latina women and discrimination against Black women in the dating market provides a kind of buffer against racism that erodes as Latina women age.

GIVE PEOPLE CASH