Thomas Katterton Williams

@matthewstoller If there’s one thing we’ve learned since 2022, it’s that revisionist wars of choice against entrenched, nationalist foes are a breeze

@matthewstoller It’s not his to give, nor could China likely take it. D-day but with drones, and an untested military?

I predicted Trump would hand over Taiwan to China. @ElbridgeColby should resign, but of course, he won’t.

If you need a DVD player I’m 2026, there’s only two I’d recommend: * the Onn player, which is tiny, cheap, USB-powered, and easy to make region-free via a remote code * the Sony DVP-NS775V, which has the rare combo of Super Audio CD playback and 6x RCA jacks

Thinking of an idea so powerful it would’ve destroyed all online music forums circa 1995-2005: “Frank Zappa back catalogue reissued on Super Audio CD”

This mentality is a huge reason things suck in general

@wideofthepost This is a big reason why Abundance libs waste so much time lashing out at NIMBYs despite a preponderances of more urgent issues—they resent how NIMBYism has a much larger and more natural constituency than their own side’s shilling for developers, landlords, and Silicon Valley

Anti-data center nimbyism represents like 100x the scale of the abundance movement, but gets only a fraction of the attention. Abundance wanted to help elites strip these communities of their local means for fighting back.

Basically any commentary that uses “white people” as its frame is useless

@SBakerMD Right, whereas if you change your diet or exercise habits, that’s a one-off and you never have to worry again

If you go on a weight loss drug such as a GLP-1 or similar just to shed a few pounds, you will likely become psychologically dependent upon these drugs for life. If you stop and regain the weight, which almost all do, you will find it extremely difficult to lose the weight again without the drugs. You then will be forever dependent on these drugs, something you may not have considered, The folks that “hop on a cycle of Reta” to get lean for the summer are going to be stuck on these drugs for life, or at least the vast majority will. Just watch it play out!

@culturecanceler Ruthless early-days Uber/Rahm Emanuel tactics, but for installing jukeboxes with surge pricing

dynamic pricing for touchtunes is end times stuff

Checking Craigslist on a Saturday morning

I’m not suggesting that issuing bonds or bond markets are right or wrong, but the term “borrowing” is a misnomer When you borrow from a bank they set your interest rate When government sells bonds it’s akin to a savings account THEY set the interest rate NOT THE BOND MARKETS!

The most leftist person you can imagine on here will talk all day about how evil the U.S. empire is, and then praise China. It’s just inverted American exceptionalism and just as stupid

@DKThomp You could monetize the debt and pay it off today. However, by doing so, you’d deprive millions of people, including yourself, of income; the question is why you think it’s necessary to pursue this insane goal.

New pod: NOBODY HAS ANY IDEA HOW TO ACTUALLY REDUCE THE US DEFICIT Right now, everybody thinks someone deserves a tax cut. For the Trump administration, it's: rich people, seniors, and business owners. For Democrats, it's everybody except rich people. In this morning's CNBC interview, Jeff Bezos said nobody earning under $75 should pay taxes. Great, wonderful. Nobody should pay taxes. Understood. One problem with that: Nobody knows how to cut spending, either. Elon Musk and his team of 20something genius lads spent months spelunking through the US budget wrecking havoc and they managed to cut no more than ... 0.1% of federal outlays. One problem here is a massive gap between outsiders' confidence that deficit reduction is easy (just find the waste! it's right under that chair! go to the budget document and control-f for "fraud"! bingo!) and insider understanding that cutting $1 trillion in govt spending is a career-ending, and potentially party-destroying, risk. The US govt is, per the old economic joke, an insurance company with a standing army, where the vast majority of spending goes to health care payments, social security checks, and military ops/personnel/procurement. Meanwhile, America's annual deficit is skyrocketing toward $2 trillion, interest payments now rivaling total military spending, and even liberal and center-left economists are worrying that the U.S. is running out of fiscal space and something awfully freaky could happen if we hit a recession that causes tax revenue to plummet, automatic spending to increase, and the deficit to blow open. "American debt crisis" has been a boy-cries-wolf story for decades in American politics. But as @JustinWolfers tells me, the wolf is getting awfully close to the door. youtube.com/watch?v=OXKAfc…

@Noahpinion Why do you want to reduce the deficit anyway? It’s the money supply

Everybody knows how to actually reduce the U.S. deficit. Cut spending and raise taxes. Nobody WANTS to reduce the U.S. deficit.

@mattyglesias They’re not. The taxes aren’t funding the social services; new spending is.

I want to bring back MMT and discuss the macroeconomic implications of financing an ongoing stream of new social services with a tax on unconsumed wealth. How are the real resources being reallocated in this scenario?

$161 in June 2006 is equal to $264 today.

@HeerJeet Kagi

Are there any good search engines left -- genuine question! I need a replacement.

Christopher Marlowe:

The United States literally has presidents that are older than the People's Republic of China

Weird post. IP law violations were always bad, sorry it took something that offended your particular aesthetic preferences for it to finally hit home