I've never been into Metal, but Ozzy was a beautiful, loving soul. RIP.
If you want a taste of Ozzy and Black Sabbath that wanders far afield of their usual heavy metal aesthetic, you should give Spiral Architect a try: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcQi7HP9Bjs Of all the things I value most of all
I look upon my Earth
And feel the warmth
And know that it is good
The album closer from Sabbath Bloody Sabbath starts with an arpeggiated acoustic guitar line that sounds like it comes straight out of a moody, early Genesis song. When the band comes in, it's built around strummed suspended chords that could be classic, early '70s Who, then this gives way to a chorus with a string arrangement - wholly unexpected, and hauntingly beautiful.
Ozzy's voice is not beautiful or versatile, but it is expressive and affective, and he uses it to great effect here.
Worth a listen, and it might make you appreciate Sabbath's musicianship and range a bit more. It's the song I keep coming back to since Ozzy's passing.
I was never a huge fan of Ozzy or Sabbath, but the metal bands I do love would never have been what they are without Sabbath's influence. Their music built a genre every bit as vast and varied as jazz. Their influence is staggering.
Here's a post from Keith Devlin working through some thoughts about the tension between calculation and mathematical thinking. https://devlinsangle.blogspot.com/2018/05/calculation-was-price-we-used-to-have.html For any mathematician alive today, mathematics is a subject that studies formally-defined concepts, with a focus on the establishment of truth (based on accepted axioms), with various forms of calculation (numerical, algebraic, set-theoretic, logical, etc.) being tools developed and used in the pursuit of those goals. That’s the only kind of mathematics we have known.
Except, that is, when we were at school. By and large, the 19th Century revolution in mathematics did not permeate the world’s school systems, which remained firmly in the “mathematics is about calculation” mindset. The one attempt to bring the school system into the modern age (in the US, the UK, and a few other countries), was the 1960s “New Math”. Though well-intentioned, its rollout was disastrous, in large part because very few teachers understood what it was about – and hence could not teach it well. The confusion caused to parents (other than mathematician parents) was nicely encapsulated by the satirical songwriter and singer Tom Lehrer (who taught mathematics at Harvard, and did understand New Math), in his hilarious, and pointedly accurate, song New Math.
As a result of the initial chaos, the initiative was quickly dropped, and school math remained largely unchanged while real-world uses of mathematics kept steadily changing, leaving the schools increasingly separated from the way people did math in their jobs. Eventually, the separation blew up into a full-fledged divorce. That occurred in the late 1980s. The divorce was finalized on June 23, 1988. That was the date when Steve Wolfram released his mammoth software package Mathematica.[...]
Devlin is really good on matters pedagogical, and always worth the read.
I do tend to think, though, that students will have a very hard time with understanding math (or written communication) if they have not had enough experience with doing the work, and not seen enough examples to get an idea of the possible range of approaches to doing the work, etc.. Early in my teaching I tended not to give enough examples, figuring that teaching the conceptual side would lead students to sort through their own database of examples to see the underlying principles. I've since learned that most students come in having seen and understood too few examples, and having no idea of more than one approach to the tasks they have been called upon to do.
I do a lot more modeling of approaches, and evaluation of those approaches, now that I'm finally starting to figure out this whole teaching thing.
I'm puzzled by this. I'm not good at languages, relative to my other skills, but switching alphabets - Cyrillic, Greek, Georgian... is trivial.
It's not onerous, no, but it is a factor on at least two levels in my experience.
First off, it can create some noise when particular letters look similar to letters in the other language that are not phonetically equivalent, and that usually triggers a bit of recursion in the reading process. It's not a lot of load on the system, but it is processing power that is not being used to make sense of the meaning. Writing English using the Greek alphabet barely affects reading comprehension when deciphering the message when one is fluent in English. Combine a lack of fluency with the need to decipher and the effects compound.
Second of all, it messes with the pattern recognition that one relies upon when skimming a text. When I'm reading Swedish or Spanish, I can skim the text fairly easily and a lot of the language has enough root-equivalency to make those reading skills transfer. That sort of whole-word pattern recognition doesn't fire the same way when I am faced with another alphabet.
All of these things mess with your language in the same way that when a student is asked to write about an unfamiliar topic with its own technical vocabulary, they often end up writing language that has a greater number of grammar and spelling errors than when they are writing about familiar topics. The familiar has a much simplified processing economy.
And again, with functional and transactional language, these difficulties are much less pronounced than when dealing with more complex and nuanced subjects.
At least that is my experience, and it seems to match with my observations of how my non-native student writers interact with texts. Actual linguists would likely have a lot to say about the places where I'm wallpapering over some complex topics, or missing the boat entirely.
Instant translation is fine for functional and transactional language, but it hits its limits pretty quickly as language complexity increases and becomes problematic for understanding as soon as there is an intertextual element at work. I see this a lot with my international students when they are working their way through English texts with the help of translation software. They miss a lot of the features that the authors are using to communicate - parallelisms, homophones, puns, etc.
To be fair, a lot of my native language domestic students miss those things too, but the international students have the reading skills to catch those elements in their own languages, and would notice those things if they were actually working with the original text.
One thing I can add that speaks to lj's first point. Language-wise I've studied Spanish, French, Swedish, and Ancient Greek. I can muddle through in Spanish, and would probably be able to attain fluency in any of the first three in a few months with immersion. Greek, however, never sticks particularly well, and the alphabet contributes somewhat to that difficulty. It's one more unfamiliar element (deciphering) that takes up processing power that would otherwise be used for linguistic sense-making.
In case anyone is interested in the subject (and in lieu of fraught AI summaries): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_a_lingua_franca
It's entirely possible that English will become the lingua franca for international communications, but if it does, I'd expect, like Hartmut, that it continues to shed irregular constructions and colloquialisms and that native dialects will be treated as quaint variants with charming local color. I also predict that both Americans and Brits will complain bitterly that ELF is "not proper English" when that happens, and resent any standard that treats ELF as the paradigm.
Here's hoping. And here's also hoping that they don't find a way to just destroy any evidence that does exist....
At this point you have to assume that there are many people who have seen the evidence - some in the Biden administration, and some, possibly Patel and Bongino, in the Trump administration.
The evidence could go missing, but to the people who have built influencer careers out of Epstein conspiracies, that would likely just fuel the fires of speculation.
And if I were Bondi, I'd be sure to stash the evidence somewhere that Trump couldn't get to it, rather than destroying it. Given all that we have seen from Trump in the past, the only way to protect yourself is to have leverage. If she were to get rid of it, she would have no leverage.
I think Trump simply believed that if he said that the evidence was not conclusive, his followers would rally around that. I think he's genuinely surprised that there are MAGA fanatics that are not following their cues.
The problem that he has, I think, is that there are two major MAGA factions (with some overlap - it's a continuum). There's the P2025 crowd that are in it for the Christian Nationalism and there's the QAnon crowd that are deeply invested in the "elite pedophile ring" narrative. The QAnon faction, and the people in the middle of the mix that are committed to both are all going to balk at Trump's avowals and assume that someone in the mix is a Deep State plant. My bet is that they land on Bondi for that, which would be fine for Trump so long as she doesn't keep an insurance copy to leak if he comes after her.
My other bet is that they are eventually going to land on the narrative that the Biden administration tampered with the evidence in some way that made it unreliable, and they will use that narrative everywhere that does not involve oaths and the risk of perjury charges.
But it's not going to simply go away, and it will take time and constant massaging to make the new narrative take hold.
I know that the mainstream Dem attitude is that all this conspiracy crap is bad and should not be encouraged, but this is a real fault line that could be a wedge issue. I'd et the infighting rage, and work to poke holes in the Trump cover story that there is nothing to be seen. All that is required is to remain skeptcally agnostic and ask questions. They'll do the rest themselves.
Used to work for a homebuilder in the Denver Metro. They were all about how much more a square foot of home was worth than a square foot of property. They'd buy a parcel of land and then figure out just how many homes they could tile onto it that were in the center of the bell curve for size and trendy features. They would pare down the lot sizes until they had the maximum number of (unnecessarily large) houses they could fit into the space.
FWIW, that's also the way of it in Southern California. The development philosophy is the same, but the climate and the demographics make for differences in home design.
But both places are run by the same real estate mafia.
Meanwhile, in "stuff that pisses off nous": https://www.propublica.org/article/newtok-alaska-climate-relocation Federal auditors have warned for years that climate relocation projects need a lead agency to coordinate assistance and reduce the burden on local communities. The Biden administration tried to address those concerns by creating an interagency task force led by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Interior Department. The task force’s report in December also called for more coordination and guidance across the federal government as well as long-term funding for relocations.
But the Trump administration has removed the group’s report from FEMA’s website and, as part of its withdrawal of climate funding, frozen millions in federal aid that was supposed to pay for housing construction in Mertarvik this summer. The administration did not respond to a request for comment.
These fucking people...
I can't wait for the ocean to swallow Mar-A-Lago like a bad case of reflux.
Well, I'm up to just under 1500 miles on the electric mountain bike. No problems with it so far (Trek Fuel EXe), and just about to change tires for the first time. Had it in the bike shop once so far to get the suspension serviced - not an inexpensive prospect, but far less expensive than replacing a shock or a fork.
Just did my favorite ride again this week - 18 miles with a bit over 2000 feet of climbing. Went in the morning as soon as the trails open and passed a Great Horned Owl sitting beside the trail and staring at me.
Just ordered a 529 Garage shield to put on my bike to protect it from theft. Have it registered at project529.com in case it goes missing.
Been doing a bit of research for gravel/ bikepacking bikes or a dropbar MTB that I might want to pick up if we are forced to retire and move someplace more flat. If there is anything good to be said for getting a full suspension emtb, it's that once you shell out for that, the price of a fancy modern gravel bike seems completely reasonable and the mechanicals seem dead simple.
Thinking of getting some bike mechanic training for retirement. Might volunteer at a community bike shop.
I've been thinking about inequality and authoritarian voting and pondering what research has been done to measure this effect. I'm linking to this op ed in the Guardian from George Monbiot not so much for his opinion and commentary as for his having gathered a lot of useful and publicly available research on the topic. There is strong evidence of a causal association between growing inequality and the rise of populist authoritarian movements. A paper in the Journal of European Public Policy found that a one-unit rise in the Gini coefficient (a standard measure of inequality) increases support for demagogues by 1%.
Why might this be? There are various, related explanations: feelings of marginalisation, status anxiety and social threat, insecurity triggering an authoritarian reflex and a loss of trust in other social groups. At the root of some of these explanations, I feel, is something deeply embedded in the human psyche: if you can’t get even, get mean. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/13/trump-populists-human-nature-economic-growth
You can't see it in the excerpt I quoted above, but Monbiot links to eight academic studies to establish the claims he makes in these two paragraphs and to support his own claim that this is about disaffection.
I'll also add that there seems to be some argument in political science circles about whether it is inequality itself (measured by the Gini coefficient that Monbiot mentions), or if it is perceptions of fairness around the distribution of economic reward that most drives this shift towards support for retributive authoritarianism.
I think Monbiot has, as he often seems to me to do, oversimplified his conclusion (taking inequality as the marker and not taking on the arguments of which sorts of inequality are most driving the trend), but I also understand that it's hard not to oversimplify when trying to distill so much information and make it accessible in a short piece aimed at a popular press readership.
FWIW, Donald, I didn't take lj's initial commentary as being aimed at you in particular, but rather being more meta-commentary about the current media environment.
I agree with lj that the social media algorithms are having a distorting and divisive effect on public discourse and on public policy discussions. That does not mean that I think that there is no good information to be found on X or Substack, it just means that I think these sites make it harder for the average person to practice good media literacy, and that I prefer it when any particular writer/commenter takes the time to either follow information back closer to primary sources or to do some work to evaluate sources and show their reasons for selecting a particular source to cite. I value an ethos built on transparency of information and of biases.
I also recognize that this is a) a more academic, less mainstream attitude to take towards information and b) a lot of work that takes time, and that often pushes one out of the conversation as the back-and-forth of social media flows on.
Having said this, though, it doesn't mean that I think that other commenters and bloggers have poor media literacy skills and that their own views are inevitably biased because their sources do not match my preferences.
I think you are quite well informed, Donald, and trust your information. If I comment on the venue, it's because I want other readers and lurkers to think about their own information literacy practices and not get swept away in the algorithmic current. I know from teaching research that a lot of readers do end up getting swept away.
I imagine that just how bad it will get depends a lot on how bad the effects of climate change become, but that's not a problem isolated to the United States. Things could get very bad for every country.
Just in terms of the US, though, absent major effects from climate change, I'd expect greater inequality and weaker federalism. Poor states will suffer. Tech hubs and coastal cities will continue to do relatively well. I wonder if we will start to resemble Brazil, with favelas rubbing shoulders with rich neighborhoods and militarized police maintaining the separation.
But the middle of the country is likely going to look like the land that time forgot.
Granted, I said the cause would be dealing with climate change -- which I still say -- and the people today are talking fighting between the fascist and non-fascist sides. Or between the urban and rural sides. Or between the fundamental Christians and everyone who isn't. Criticism tends to be limited to the fact that those divisions don't correspond well with existing state boundaries.
They can talk about all of those things and be right without it meaning that climate change is not a major factor in the situation. Climate change is a vulnerability/threat multiplier. It puts pressure on human systems and creates conditions that leave marginal populations desperate and exposed, and open to predation and exploitation. It drives urbanization and migration, and those are the issues that are driving the slide into xenophobia and authoritarianism.
It's all of a piece, and climate change sits there at the base of it all like expansive soil under a foundation.
Keith Richards has been undead since the '80s. He's keeping that phylactery safe and hidden.
That or Brian Jones gave him a ring for his birthday back in 1969.
Death by drowning...hmmm...
So Schumer or whoever wrote this can’t really be that stupid. And from reading my email he or the actual writer knew I would think any of that was true. We need a better class of liar in DC. Or maybe even honest people.
Assuming that anyone actually read it in any detail and stopped to consider what you were saying. I always assume that emails to representatives go to interns, who are mostly just skimming them for keywords and sending out form responses that are 80% LLM content. These letters aren't so much responses, from what I can tell, as position statements meant to address keywords in your email. They are meant to clarify the representatives position. In this case his position is the equivalent of hope and prayers.
But hey...your email probably did go into the tally on the side of Gaza that he uses to determine how much concern he has to express while refusing to intervene, and how much he has to worry next time he's up for re-election.
I'm starting to think that in the post-Citizens-United era the only way to actually get long time Dems to listen may be to organize (union, interest group, something) and throw support behind Democratic Socialists in primaries until we've picked off the ones with deep donor support.
Their worry with Mamdani shows that this is what they are running most scared from.
The people who downplay Ringo's drumming are the same people who go on about how Jimmy Page was a sloppy, overrated guitarist, and probably the same people that complain about what a terrible word "moist" is...mostly because that seems to be the sort of thing that other edgy people are saying and getting praise for saying. They've never actually sat down to really listen to the songs in any detail or approach them with an open mind.
Ringo had a feel and sensibility all his own, and knew how to leave space in the song for the other players' genius to show through. That's a rare thing. The other player that comes to mind for me right away with this trait is John Paul Jones.
I don't believe that Ringo and JPJ have ever collaborated on anything, but then I don't know that it would work, either. They might end up being too mannered and respectful with each other.
I'm a 13-year-old shiba inu raised by a murder of crows that were terrorized by some dude in a George W. Bush mask. If you know that, then the rest of my politics comes into focus.
Thanks CharlesWT, but Grok's summary is not particularly helpful. Mostly it underlines for me that we don't know much about the author(s) or what sorts of institutional connections or outside funding may be influencing the commentary.
I get that this is true for a lot of popular media sources, but I tend towards sources that do a better, more careful job of practicing research transparency.
CharlesWT - who is behind the Economics Explained channel and where does their information come from? They don't seem to feature much information about who they are, what sort of educational background they have, or what sort of information literacy practices they use to verify their information, which leaves me wondering.
Hard to know how much trust to put into commentary when there is so little transparency.
Genuinely curious, marginally skeptical, but not going to dismiss it out of hand.
I, too, read the substack and found it interesting - probably more informative than anything I have read about Abundance which seems to me to be more of a work of mythology than one grounded in an understanding of technologies and practicalities that it champions. I think Klein has far too credulous a faith in the techbros and has not read widely enough in the literature to see where the silicon valley marketing buzz is all greed and ketamine.
I do agree that the US needs big public works, but those works need to constrain the techbros and aim for slower and wider prosperity. Instead, we have modernity as a casino.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Motes and logs”
What Snarki said.
On “Everyone is a hero in their own story”
I've never been into Metal, but Ozzy was a beautiful, loving soul. RIP.
If you want a taste of Ozzy and Black Sabbath that wanders far afield of their usual heavy metal aesthetic, you should give Spiral Architect a try:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcQi7HP9Bjs
Of all the things I value most of all
I look upon my Earth
And feel the warmth
And know that it is good
The album closer from Sabbath Bloody Sabbath starts with an arpeggiated acoustic guitar line that sounds like it comes straight out of a moody, early Genesis song. When the band comes in, it's built around strummed suspended chords that could be classic, early '70s Who, then this gives way to a chorus with a string arrangement - wholly unexpected, and hauntingly beautiful.
Ozzy's voice is not beautiful or versatile, but it is expressive and affective, and he uses it to great effect here.
Worth a listen, and it might make you appreciate Sabbath's musicianship and range a bit more. It's the song I keep coming back to since Ozzy's passing.
I was never a huge fan of Ozzy or Sabbath, but the metal bands I do love would never have been what they are without Sabbath's influence. Their music built a genre every bit as vast and varied as jazz. Their influence is staggering.
"
I mean... Ozzy and Chuck Mangione are dead, why not America too?
On “The law of the letter”
Here's a post from Keith Devlin working through some thoughts about the tension between calculation and mathematical thinking.
https://devlinsangle.blogspot.com/2018/05/calculation-was-price-we-used-to-have.html
For any mathematician alive today, mathematics is a subject that studies formally-defined concepts, with a focus on the establishment of truth (based on accepted axioms), with various forms of calculation (numerical, algebraic, set-theoretic, logical, etc.) being tools developed and used in the pursuit of those goals. That’s the only kind of mathematics we have known.
Except, that is, when we were at school. By and large, the 19th Century revolution in mathematics did not permeate the world’s school systems, which remained firmly in the “mathematics is about calculation” mindset. The one attempt to bring the school system into the modern age (in the US, the UK, and a few other countries), was the 1960s “New Math”. Though well-intentioned, its rollout was disastrous, in large part because very few teachers understood what it was about – and hence could not teach it well. The confusion caused to parents (other than mathematician parents) was nicely encapsulated by the satirical songwriter and singer Tom Lehrer (who taught mathematics at Harvard, and did understand New Math), in his hilarious, and pointedly accurate, song New Math.
As a result of the initial chaos, the initiative was quickly dropped, and school math remained largely unchanged while real-world uses of mathematics kept steadily changing, leaving the schools increasingly separated from the way people did math in their jobs. Eventually, the separation blew up into a full-fledged divorce. That occurred in the late 1980s. The divorce was finalized on June 23, 1988. That was the date when Steve Wolfram released his mammoth software package Mathematica.[...]
Devlin is really good on matters pedagogical, and always worth the read.
I do tend to think, though, that students will have a very hard time with understanding math (or written communication) if they have not had enough experience with doing the work, and not seen enough examples to get an idea of the possible range of approaches to doing the work, etc.. Early in my teaching I tended not to give enough examples, figuring that teaching the conceptual side would lead students to sort through their own database of examples to see the underlying principles. I've since learned that most students come in having seen and understood too few examples, and having no idea of more than one approach to the tasks they have been called upon to do.
I do a lot more modeling of approaches, and evaluation of those approaches, now that I'm finally starting to figure out this whole teaching thing.
"
I'm puzzled by this. I'm not good at languages, relative to my other skills, but switching alphabets - Cyrillic, Greek, Georgian... is trivial.
It's not onerous, no, but it is a factor on at least two levels in my experience.
First off, it can create some noise when particular letters look similar to letters in the other language that are not phonetically equivalent, and that usually triggers a bit of recursion in the reading process. It's not a lot of load on the system, but it is processing power that is not being used to make sense of the meaning. Writing English using the Greek alphabet barely affects reading comprehension when deciphering the message when one is fluent in English. Combine a lack of fluency with the need to decipher and the effects compound.
Second of all, it messes with the pattern recognition that one relies upon when skimming a text. When I'm reading Swedish or Spanish, I can skim the text fairly easily and a lot of the language has enough root-equivalency to make those reading skills transfer. That sort of whole-word pattern recognition doesn't fire the same way when I am faced with another alphabet.
All of these things mess with your language in the same way that when a student is asked to write about an unfamiliar topic with its own technical vocabulary, they often end up writing language that has a greater number of grammar and spelling errors than when they are writing about familiar topics. The familiar has a much simplified processing economy.
And again, with functional and transactional language, these difficulties are much less pronounced than when dealing with more complex and nuanced subjects.
At least that is my experience, and it seems to match with my observations of how my non-native student writers interact with texts. Actual linguists would likely have a lot to say about the places where I'm wallpapering over some complex topics, or missing the boat entirely.
"
Instant translation is fine for functional and transactional language, but it hits its limits pretty quickly as language complexity increases and becomes problematic for understanding as soon as there is an intertextual element at work. I see this a lot with my international students when they are working their way through English texts with the help of translation software. They miss a lot of the features that the authors are using to communicate - parallelisms, homophones, puns, etc.
To be fair, a lot of my native language domestic students miss those things too, but the international students have the reading skills to catch those elements in their own languages, and would notice those things if they were actually working with the original text.
One thing I can add that speaks to lj's first point. Language-wise I've studied Spanish, French, Swedish, and Ancient Greek. I can muddle through in Spanish, and would probably be able to attain fluency in any of the first three in a few months with immersion. Greek, however, never sticks particularly well, and the alphabet contributes somewhat to that difficulty. It's one more unfamiliar element (deciphering) that takes up processing power that would otherwise be used for linguistic sense-making.
"
In case anyone is interested in the subject (and in lieu of fraught AI summaries):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_a_lingua_franca
It's entirely possible that English will become the lingua franca for international communications, but if it does, I'd expect, like Hartmut, that it continues to shed irregular constructions and colloquialisms and that native dialects will be treated as quaint variants with charming local color. I also predict that both Americans and Brits will complain bitterly that ELF is "not proper English" when that happens, and resent any standard that treats ELF as the paradigm.
On “Your Schadenfreude monitoring open thread”
Here's hoping. And here's also hoping that they don't find a way to just destroy any evidence that does exist....
At this point you have to assume that there are many people who have seen the evidence - some in the Biden administration, and some, possibly Patel and Bongino, in the Trump administration.
The evidence could go missing, but to the people who have built influencer careers out of Epstein conspiracies, that would likely just fuel the fires of speculation.
And if I were Bondi, I'd be sure to stash the evidence somewhere that Trump couldn't get to it, rather than destroying it. Given all that we have seen from Trump in the past, the only way to protect yourself is to have leverage. If she were to get rid of it, she would have no leverage.
"
I think Trump simply believed that if he said that the evidence was not conclusive, his followers would rally around that. I think he's genuinely surprised that there are MAGA fanatics that are not following their cues.
The problem that he has, I think, is that there are two major MAGA factions (with some overlap - it's a continuum). There's the P2025 crowd that are in it for the Christian Nationalism and there's the QAnon crowd that are deeply invested in the "elite pedophile ring" narrative. The QAnon faction, and the people in the middle of the mix that are committed to both are all going to balk at Trump's avowals and assume that someone in the mix is a Deep State plant. My bet is that they land on Bondi for that, which would be fine for Trump so long as she doesn't keep an insurance copy to leak if he comes after her.
My other bet is that they are eventually going to land on the narrative that the Biden administration tampered with the evidence in some way that made it unreliable, and they will use that narrative everywhere that does not involve oaths and the risk of perjury charges.
But it's not going to simply go away, and it will take time and constant massaging to make the new narrative take hold.
I know that the mainstream Dem attitude is that all this conspiracy crap is bad and should not be encouraged, but this is a real fault line that could be a wedge issue. I'd et the infighting rage, and work to poke holes in the Trump cover story that there is nothing to be seen. All that is required is to remain skeptcally agnostic and ask questions. They'll do the rest themselves.
On “An open thread on July 4th”
Used to work for a homebuilder in the Denver Metro. They were all about how much more a square foot of home was worth than a square foot of property. They'd buy a parcel of land and then figure out just how many homes they could tile onto it that were in the center of the bell curve for size and trendy features. They would pare down the lot sizes until they had the maximum number of (unnecessarily large) houses they could fit into the space.
FWIW, that's also the way of it in Southern California. The development philosophy is the same, but the climate and the demographics make for differences in home design.
But both places are run by the same real estate mafia.
On “Plus ça change…”
Meanwhile, in "stuff that pisses off nous":
https://www.propublica.org/article/newtok-alaska-climate-relocation
Federal auditors have warned for years that climate relocation projects need a lead agency to coordinate assistance and reduce the burden on local communities. The Biden administration tried to address those concerns by creating an interagency task force led by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Interior Department. The task force’s report in December also called for more coordination and guidance across the federal government as well as long-term funding for relocations.
But the Trump administration has removed the group’s report from FEMA’s website and, as part of its withdrawal of climate funding, frozen millions in federal aid that was supposed to pay for housing construction in Mertarvik this summer. The administration did not respond to a request for comment.
These fucking people...
I can't wait for the ocean to swallow Mar-A-Lago like a bad case of reflux.
"
Well, I'm up to just under 1500 miles on the electric mountain bike. No problems with it so far (Trek Fuel EXe), and just about to change tires for the first time. Had it in the bike shop once so far to get the suspension serviced - not an inexpensive prospect, but far less expensive than replacing a shock or a fork.
Just did my favorite ride again this week - 18 miles with a bit over 2000 feet of climbing. Went in the morning as soon as the trails open and passed a Great Horned Owl sitting beside the trail and staring at me.
Just ordered a 529 Garage shield to put on my bike to protect it from theft. Have it registered at project529.com in case it goes missing.
Been doing a bit of research for gravel/ bikepacking bikes or a dropbar MTB that I might want to pick up if we are forced to retire and move someplace more flat. If there is anything good to be said for getting a full suspension emtb, it's that once you shell out for that, the price of a fancy modern gravel bike seems completely reasonable and the mechanicals seem dead simple.
Thinking of getting some bike mechanic training for retirement. Might volunteer at a community bike shop.
On “An open thread on July 4th”
I've been thinking about inequality and authoritarian voting and pondering what research has been done to measure this effect. I'm linking to this op ed in the Guardian from George Monbiot not so much for his opinion and commentary as for his having gathered a lot of useful and publicly available research on the topic.
There is strong evidence of a causal association between growing inequality and the rise of populist authoritarian movements. A paper in the Journal of European Public Policy found that a one-unit rise in the Gini coefficient (a standard measure of inequality) increases support for demagogues by 1%.
Why might this be? There are various, related explanations: feelings of marginalisation, status anxiety and social threat, insecurity triggering an authoritarian reflex and a loss of trust in other social groups. At the root of some of these explanations, I feel, is something deeply embedded in the human psyche: if you can’t get even, get mean.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/13/trump-populists-human-nature-economic-growth
You can't see it in the excerpt I quoted above, but Monbiot links to eight academic studies to establish the claims he makes in these two paragraphs and to support his own claim that this is about disaffection.
I'll also add that there seems to be some argument in political science circles about whether it is inequality itself (measured by the Gini coefficient that Monbiot mentions), or if it is perceptions of fairness around the distribution of economic reward that most drives this shift towards support for retributive authoritarianism.
I think Monbiot has, as he often seems to me to do, oversimplified his conclusion (taking inequality as the marker and not taking on the arguments of which sorts of inequality are most driving the trend), but I also understand that it's hard not to oversimplify when trying to distill so much information and make it accessible in a short piece aimed at a popular press readership.
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FWIW, Donald, I didn't take lj's initial commentary as being aimed at you in particular, but rather being more meta-commentary about the current media environment.
I agree with lj that the social media algorithms are having a distorting and divisive effect on public discourse and on public policy discussions. That does not mean that I think that there is no good information to be found on X or Substack, it just means that I think these sites make it harder for the average person to practice good media literacy, and that I prefer it when any particular writer/commenter takes the time to either follow information back closer to primary sources or to do some work to evaluate sources and show their reasons for selecting a particular source to cite. I value an ethos built on transparency of information and of biases.
I also recognize that this is a) a more academic, less mainstream attitude to take towards information and b) a lot of work that takes time, and that often pushes one out of the conversation as the back-and-forth of social media flows on.
Having said this, though, it doesn't mean that I think that other commenters and bloggers have poor media literacy skills and that their own views are inevitably biased because their sources do not match my preferences.
I think you are quite well informed, Donald, and trust your information. If I comment on the venue, it's because I want other readers and lurkers to think about their own information literacy practices and not get swept away in the algorithmic current. I know from teaching research that a lot of readers do end up getting swept away.
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I imagine that just how bad it will get depends a lot on how bad the effects of climate change become, but that's not a problem isolated to the United States. Things could get very bad for every country.
Just in terms of the US, though, absent major effects from climate change, I'd expect greater inequality and weaker federalism. Poor states will suffer. Tech hubs and coastal cities will continue to do relatively well. I wonder if we will start to resemble Brazil, with favelas rubbing shoulders with rich neighborhoods and militarized police maintaining the separation.
But the middle of the country is likely going to look like the land that time forgot.
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Granted, I said the cause would be dealing with climate change -- which I still say -- and the people today are talking fighting between the fascist and non-fascist sides. Or between the urban and rural sides. Or between the fundamental Christians and everyone who isn't. Criticism tends to be limited to the fact that those divisions don't correspond well with existing state boundaries.
They can talk about all of those things and be right without it meaning that climate change is not a major factor in the situation. Climate change is a vulnerability/threat multiplier. It puts pressure on human systems and creates conditions that leave marginal populations desperate and exposed, and open to predation and exploitation. It drives urbanization and migration, and those are the issues that are driving the slide into xenophobia and authoritarianism.
It's all of a piece, and climate change sits there at the base of it all like expansive soil under a foundation.
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Keith Richards has been undead since the '80s. He's keeping that phylactery safe and hidden.
That or Brian Jones gave him a ring for his birthday back in 1969.
Death by drowning...hmmm...
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So Schumer or whoever wrote this can’t really be that stupid. And from reading my email he or the actual writer knew I would think any of that was true. We need a better class of liar in DC. Or maybe even honest people.
Assuming that anyone actually read it in any detail and stopped to consider what you were saying. I always assume that emails to representatives go to interns, who are mostly just skimming them for keywords and sending out form responses that are 80% LLM content. These letters aren't so much responses, from what I can tell, as position statements meant to address keywords in your email. They are meant to clarify the representatives position. In this case his position is the equivalent of hope and prayers.
But hey...your email probably did go into the tally on the side of Gaza that he uses to determine how much concern he has to express while refusing to intervene, and how much he has to worry next time he's up for re-election.
I'm starting to think that in the post-Citizens-United era the only way to actually get long time Dems to listen may be to organize (union, interest group, something) and throw support behind Democratic Socialists in primaries until we've picked off the ones with deep donor support.
Their worry with Mamdani shows that this is what they are running most scared from.
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The people who downplay Ringo's drumming are the same people who go on about how Jimmy Page was a sloppy, overrated guitarist, and probably the same people that complain about what a terrible word "moist" is...mostly because that seems to be the sort of thing that other edgy people are saying and getting praise for saying. They've never actually sat down to really listen to the songs in any detail or approach them with an open mind.
Ringo had a feel and sensibility all his own, and knew how to leave space in the song for the other players' genius to show through. That's a rare thing. The other player that comes to mind for me right away with this trait is John Paul Jones.
I don't believe that Ringo and JPJ have ever collaborated on anything, but then I don't know that it would work, either. They might end up being too mannered and respectful with each other.
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I'm a 13-year-old shiba inu raised by a murder of crows that were terrorized by some dude in a George W. Bush mask. If you know that, then the rest of my politics comes into focus.
On “From the Chinatalk substack”
Thanks CharlesWT, but Grok's summary is not particularly helpful. Mostly it underlines for me that we don't know much about the author(s) or what sorts of institutional connections or outside funding may be influencing the commentary.
I get that this is true for a lot of popular media sources, but I tend towards sources that do a better, more careful job of practicing research transparency.
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CharlesWT - who is behind the Economics Explained channel and where does their information come from? They don't seem to feature much information about who they are, what sort of educational background they have, or what sort of information literacy practices they use to verify their information, which leaves me wondering.
Hard to know how much trust to put into commentary when there is so little transparency.
Genuinely curious, marginally skeptical, but not going to dismiss it out of hand.
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I, too, read the substack and found it interesting - probably more informative than anything I have read about Abundance which seems to me to be more of a work of mythology than one grounded in an understanding of technologies and practicalities that it champions. I think Klein has far too credulous a faith in the techbros and has not read widely enough in the literature to see where the silicon valley marketing buzz is all greed and ketamine.
I do agree that the US needs big public works, but those works need to constrain the techbros and aim for slower and wider prosperity. Instead, we have modernity as a casino.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.