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Then you're 32, hoodie, coffee shop, white earbuds, working your hip/corporate job and you ask yourself: "My God, what have I done?"
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Brendan Mortimer ๐บ๐ธ
3.4K posts
Brendan Mortimer ๐บ๐ธ
@bmortimer
This will not end well.
Portland, OR ๊ฐ์
์ผ Kasฤฑm 2008
138 ํ๋ก์167 ํ๋ก์
Reminder: you should be very skeptical of *technologists* (who are often very smart but very blinkered, self-interested, and broken people) but very optimistic about *technology* (which is, on net, good for society)
Alec Stapp@AlecStapp
GLP-1 drugs are the ultimate validation of the techno-solutionist approach to society's most challenging problems. The obesity crisis seemed liked it would just get worse and worse forever. Scolding from public health officials didn't work. Proposals to completely overhaul our food systems were dead on arrival. Instead, we invented a weekly shot (based on Gila monster venom!) that fixes obesity directly. And now, thanks to the economic incentives in our biomedical industry, we have follow-on drugs that will be cheaper, even more effective, and easier to administer (by taking a pill instead of a shot). Policymakers should be focused on figuring out how we can get more breakthrough drugs like GLP-1s (and faster). They also should think hard about which slopulist ideas might inadvertently kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
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Brendan Mortimer ๐บ๐ธ ๋ฆฌํธ์ํจ
Elon DOGE:
-didnโt actually save any money, deficits increased
-destroyed state capacity
-killed tons of people
Zohran DOGE:
-cut wasteful government funding
-ended McKinsey contract
-brought skills in-house to save money and increase state capacity
Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani@NYCMayor
Government must deliver for working peopleโand every dollar in our budget should work as hard as they do. Thatโs why I directed every agency to cut waste and help close our budget gap. Hereโs some of what we found.
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Brendan Mortimer ๐บ๐ธ ๋ฆฌํธ์ํจ
Doing the reading is a superpower, and it's even better in a world where "no one" is doing the reading. (Inspired by a conversation I had with some college students.)
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@patchdj It's:
- workers have no choice because housing is such a high fixed cost
- lack of competition, especially at the hyper local level
- brick & mortar struggling to compete with online due to higher costs
- fewer boutique/marginal businesses, more professionalization
- etc. etc.
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@patchdj I've become radicalized on "housing theory of everything" the last few years. The cost of real estate is the number one cost for nearly everyone -- all individuals, most small businesses -- and once you see how it distorts behavior you start to see it everywhere.
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This is a huge problem. The American people gave companies *tons* of grace during the pandemic, and they saw precisely how much slack they had and decided to take even more. I don't know the incentives to fix this, but unionization & making owners/managers miserable is a start.
Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein@robinsreport
1/ As I reported my book, I noticed something that has completely changed American life: widespread chronic under-staffing. It leads to, among other things, deadly medication errors at pharmacies, flight delays, messy stores, and the crime wave. From me today @TheProspect
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@patchdj I haven't compared them side by side but eyeballing it, this tracks pretty closely to the polling @lxeagle17 / @TheArgumentMag released a few weeks ago too, as well as a bunch of surveys before that.
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This is incredibly good, smart polling. Americans actually do want fairness and equality for trans people, but get really twitchy over school bathrooms and are INSANE about sports. (Thatโs why Fox loves platforming that one conversation so much.) 1/2
Adam Carlson@admcrlsn
Searchlight did an extraordinary job with this polling. This is not an easy issue to test, and this is an excellent resource for candidates and the public. I was deeply saddened by a lot of the results. But harsh truths are still truths. Itโs critical to know where the American public is at on these things so we can figure out the best path forward on codifying protections on anti-discrimination/safety, persuading the public, and determining the most effective strategic path forward in advancing the cause of trans rights.
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Brendan Mortimer ๐บ๐ธ ๋ฆฌํธ์ํจ
Do you think Andreessen could have written a world-famous essay like 'A Time to Build' while simultaneously leading the fight against housing construction in his area if he'd been wasting any precious time on introspection?
I don't think so.
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I don't generally recommend taking personal advice from @mattyglesias but this is genuinely excellent advice.
open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglโฆ
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As if the tweet replies and the nonchronilogical feed wasn't bad enough, I'm now seeing tweets by folks I don't follow in my following feed, even without replies from follows or ads.
Bluesky is a toxic cesspool of blue slopulism
Twitter is a toxic cesspool of Nazis
Bums me out
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Brendan Mortimer ๐บ๐ธ ๋ฆฌํธ์ํจ
Each frontier AI model seems to use a little under a year's worth of a square mile of farmland's water to train. I think about this as the country having 4 square miles of farmland sectioned off to grow some of the most popular consumer products in history.
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Brendan Mortimer ๐บ๐ธ ๋ฆฌํธ์ํจ
Last year, The Atlantic gave me $10K to gamble with. What started as a journalistic gimmick turned into something more... unnerving.
My cover story on the online betting boom warping sports, culture, politics, and the psyches of millions of young men: theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/โฆ
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Brendan Mortimer ๐บ๐ธ ๋ฆฌํธ์ํจ
The moral panic over institutional investors owning single-family homes is peak slopulism.
Banning institutional investors from owning homes will make the housing crisis worse, not better.
But blaming Wall Street for our problems polls well, so politicians dish out the slop.
Marginal Revolution@MargRev
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevoluโฆ
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Today a chatbot that is a couple months old told me to say hi to a 90 year old fish.
I wonder what the fish thinks about that?
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@EvidenceAction As someone who donated to this particular initiative, I appreciate your honesty, thoughtfulness, and follow-up study and I am more inclined to donate again in the future because you were public about your failures as well as your successes.
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Following the evidence means seeking it & acting on it โ even when hard. We sought an independent evaluation that found ~70% fewer people benefiting from our dispensers in Uganda & Malawi than indicated. Why we're scaling back & reallocating resources: bit.ly/UGMWdispensers
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@AndyMasley If you have a background in analytical philosophy, even if you come to Econ late, once you learn the basics of micro and of macro and the complexity of navigating externalities, a lot of the world...just makes sense?
It helps to go in with an open mind + a principle of charity.
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A lot I still didn't know that turned out to be important, but I basically read some Hayek papers, a lot of Joseph Heath, and Economics for the Common Good, and it all just struck a depth that most critics of capitalism I had been exposed to didn't seem to even acknowledge was there
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I really wish I had more of a scales falling from my eyes story about being converted to capitalism but in reality I was just a vague lefty in grad school who had been meaning to learn more about econ for a while, picked up this specific comic book explainer as a good jumping off point, and it got across so well that mainstream econ had much more satisfying answers to most of the big questions I had about society than any rival ideology I had been exposed to at the time that I was sold on the spot. Read a lot since, but the power of a good very simple introduction is underrated.
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New milestone: today I learned the word "idempotent" thanks to Claude. It's one I never recall hearing in my previous 42 years.
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Iโm missing Sailbury and I canโt 100% recall if Iโve actually been to Cambridge or Havre de Grace. And I wasnโt even born here. The average Marylander needs to get out more.
Baltimore Memes@BaltimoreMemes
How many have you been to?
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Brendan Mortimer ๐บ๐ธ ๋ฆฌํธ์ํจ
Say what you like about Effective Altruism, Pete Hegseth is not ranting about Kantians or virtue theorists trying to thwart his mass surveillance/autonomous weapons programs.
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@moseskagan I don't see how this argument is compelling, even if I agree that teens are not fully free.
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@bmortimer Free citizens are supposed to vote
Children are, in some very important ways, not fully free
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