Oh, hi there I guess?
Hi. Hello. I am in fact alive. Let’s have some links, shall we? Here is an extremely cute photo of my dog to make up for my inconsistencies. Again.
My position on wealth, inequality, redistribution and so forth has long been, “I don’t worry overmuch about capping the ceiling, I want to raise the floor.” It’s why I want to see more policy experiments around Universal Basic Income, housing, replacing benefits with cash and so on. But the last few years and the extending results of COVID on wealth consolidation, among other things, are really forcing me to think harder about this. I’m not sure my views have fully resolved themselves, but I am finding myself more persuadable to this kind of argument.
Yeah…not NOT convincing me wealth should be cancelled.
Making beauty from dark times.
And speaking of beauty, once a year the great and good Sali Hughes gives us a banger of a budget friendly recommendation list.
Conspiracy thinking has rotted too many brains, see the absolute nonsense of “controversy” around so-called-15-minute-cities. There is a small but real subset of people who think this term means that a nebulous THEY want to corral humans into enclosures of some kind…because they are idiots. Don’t get me wrong, the idea that urban planning - something human beings have been doing for centuries - has always come with an agenda is not controversial. It’s a fact. But it’s just as much a fact of our current urban and suburban set ups as anything that people might want to do differently now.
Once again, annoyingly, I find myself thinking about men. In my defense it’s because so much is happening that makes me angry about being a woman, and that’s nothing new. But once again, unsurprisingly, F.D. Signifier is doing it much better than I am:
Slapstick nature tragedy has a somewhat nice ending.
A different kind of love story.
Continuing the unofficial theme of 2024 on this here website I guess, the internet and related services are getting worse and worse all the time. (I did a whole rant on this if you care.) Everything is an advertising platform now, and I hate it. But as Charlie Warzel write, we are creeping up on a new and somehow still worse version of this where we own less and less of the products and services we actually buy. This seems pretty…anti capitalistic to me in a way that I think should make even the most ardent capitalists uncomfortable. It has some complicated and wide reaching implications for us socially, philosophically, and legally. Or as the very funny and also deadly serious meme account Leftist Gamer Memes put it…
TODAY I LEARNED ABOUT THE ORIGINATOR OF THE ARIZONA LAW THAT MAY REMOVE ABORTION RIGHTS AND HE’S AS HIDEOUS AND WILD AS YOU COULD IMAGINE.
Vital investigative journalism.
At some point there is going to another shakeup in perceptions of what is a “little luxury” which average consumers can reasonably enjoy, and what is actually luxurious in terms of the resources it requires to access. It’s not going to be a good time for a lot of middleclass people.
