Imo it's really hard for online shopping to settle at an equilibrium that values quality- e.g. you can't judge the quality of a dress from pictures easily, but the price is the price, and that ends up being the site of competition.

Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈@maxdubler.com · 3d ago

I think my most genuinely unpopular take is that a widely held and genuine consumer preference for cheaper, lower-quality goods, not private equity, is driving the decline in quality of consumer goods like clothing and housewares.

investigator: and you’re saying the charts don’t account for inflation? suspect: prices are up 30% investigator: but this is showing real wages, not nominal. is this your knife

Will Stancil@whstancil.bsky.social · 6d ago

Well some nutjob of some description definitely thought they were doing something hardcore here

I misread "Pape" as "the Pope" and I was really surprised he was writing about air superiority.

B. A. Friedman@bafriedman.bsky.social · last wk.

Man, sometimes Pape can still drop bombs. (I’d probably quibble with the air superiority part).

NEW BLOG POST! Some thoughts on Christopher Nolan's adaptation of The Odyssey, the historical context of the Bronze Age Collapse, the Sea Peoples, and the legends of the Trojan War, and whether Nolan's movie is "historically accurate" or not, and what that even means.

Did Odysseus Cause the Bronze Age Collapse?

We were all set for The Odyssey to be our summer discourse. Battle lines had been drawn, takes had been prepared. Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s 8th century BCE epic poem was…

nathangoldwag.wordpress.com

Creating a vector database of nearly 10k LGBTQ related bills from 2004-present. This will allow for semantic search on bills as well as novel textual analysis. It'll include all bill meta data along with hand coded values by the legialerts team. I don't think anything like this has been done before.

Ok, I've got a beta up and running with full semantic search along with agentic RAG to enable insights from the full corpus database. In plain terms, it allows you to ask questions and it will answer using the full legislative database. Given the costs to run, it'll be invite access only.

Alejandra Caraballo@esqueer.net · 2w ago

Creating a vector database of nearly 10k LGBTQ related bills from 2004-present. This will allow for semantic search on bills as well as novel textual analysis. It'll include all bill meta data along with hand coded values by the legialerts team. I don't think anything like this has been done before.

New Interview: www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

Is Germany ready for single life? Fighter jets don't just get built. They get into messy international relationships. We break down the latest breakups, gossip, rebounds, and love triangles in defence aviation here: hushkit.substack.com/p/the-future...

Tbh Twitter has more tankies on it, but almost no left-of-center intellectuals. So it's a right wing/tankie dialectic, which is very strange.

CANDIDATE RAMIUS: What books? EZRA KLEIN: Excuse me? RAMIUS: What books did you write? KLEIN: I wrote Abundance, about deregulation for economic growth. RAMIUS: I know this book. Your conclusions were all wrong, Klein.

The thing about what we categorize as religion and what we categorize as philosophy, and why I am more interested in religion is that it is about making beliefs manifest in the world.

#FreeRuth | “Now when that hour arrives, there are no words, no new things to consider. Only silence.” In a @nytimes.comopinion piece, Louis Benavides writes about the pain of living one year without Ruth López after her arbitrary imprisonment in El Salvador. 🔗 Read it here sl1nk.com/1mlrk1q

Opinion | My Wife Disappeared Into El Salvador’s Prison System. When Will She Come Home?

nytimes.com

The Cohen brothers are ruining Homer's legacy. Odysseus never records a hit song. This is an assault on western culture. I am very smart.

it has four doors. the trunk opens and closes. the floor is covered in crumbs. i feel like a certified public accountant driving it. i can't explain it it just makes me feel like a gross frumpy idiot dork. i am a person who drives a bright orange saab 80mph through farmland under a harvest moon

I just finished the newly released (as of a month ago) new mini series Something Very Bad is Going to Happen, and I am screaming because oh my god this is about transmasculinity although dollars to donuts no one will actually allow that to be said. www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMc_...

Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen | Official Trailer | Netflix

YouTube video by Netflix

youtube.com

A nationwide warrant has been issued in the first criminal charges against an ICE agent for on-duty actions during the enforcement surge in Minnesota.

ICE agent charged with two felonies for pointing his gun at motorists during Operation Metro Surge

Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said a nationwide warrant has been issued in the first criminal charges against an ICE agent for on-duty actions during the surge.

bit.ly

ChatGPT: you’re right you’re so much smarter than him. He’s so schlubby and you’re so suave. Columbo will never catch you.

These charts are all irrelevant to the point, labor share of GDP is down, but real wages up, productivity has risen more than wages, but wages have risen, CPI tells you overall inflation but is useless without a wage comparison. Here is a relevant graph.

David@daviderroll.bsky.social · 4mo ago

I'm usually on board with lots of your comments but I think you're missing the point a bit. It's true the "don't have money" comment is not well crafted. But jobs don't pay the same and rent and healthcare consume larger portions sounds like more than just a subjective feeling? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I re-watched The Village (2004) today, the M. Shyamalan movie that has been my favorite since it came out, when everyone hated it. web.archive.org/web/20200509...

M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village is an underrated masterpiece

It’s a movie about the blind spots of nostalgia and the dangers of always wanting to be safe that is always relevant.

web.archive.org

As of tonight, licenses of trans people across Kansas are being invalidated en masse, enabling the overnight criminalization of an entire group of people for going about our lives. It’s often said you never know when you’re living through history, so let me assure you: that’s what’s happening now.

Veterans accuse him of stolen valor. His international arms company is deep in debt. He had a restraining order placed on him last year. And he's widely disliked. Read my profile of Florida Republican Congressman Cory Mills here: www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Everybody hates Cory

Sex workers, bankruptcy, stolen valor, a restraining order, and Trump's “Complete and Total” endorsement for Congress.

motherjones.com

CBP didn’t give her or anyone any water; she asked 3 times accg to other reports. CBP killed a 7yr old. “8 hours after the girl & her father were taken into custody, she began having seizures & her body temperature was measured at 105.7 degrees by emergency medical technicians. shorturl.at/d2OTJ

7-Year-Old Migrant Girl Dies Of Dehydration And Shock In U.S. Border Patrol Custody

The girl's death underscores the crisis precipitated by large groups of families seeking asylum where there are inadequate facilities to detain them.

shorturl.at

expand on your definition of "best", like is the goal to get out of depression or to channel your inner Bella Swan

- The chestnut-necklaced partridge (Tropicoperdix charltonii) is a species of bird in the family Phasianidae. - Photo courtesy of HO Sung Wee, Malaysia.

Because they constantly make arrest threats, and they haven't been able to successfully charge or hold anyone. You can either run in blind terror or you can realize it's a bluff and call it.

This land is your land@thislandisyourland.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Why are you doing this? To get a court case? To show people it's ok? How they treat you might be better or worse than how they treat other people. Be careful. Doesn't help if you are detained for days.

Yeah. People are used to pooh-poohing procedural reforms, but there are procedural reforms that (a) sound entirely like standard uncontroversial things in other contexts, and (b) would make the deportation machine grind to a halt.

This is an important, credible, and damning article about the IDF in Gaza by Andy Milburn, a retired US Marine Raider colonel with combat experience from Fallujah and Mosul who maintained close contact with IDF officers during the war (while keeping a low public profile). Read the whole thing.

Gaza and the Conduct of Urban War: Civilian Harm, Risk, and Responsibility

Urban warfare is often invoked as an alibi: dense terrain, an embedded enemy, human shields, imperfect intelligence. These conditions are real but they do

warontherocks.com

Ok I lied one more for the night. This one took me six times down in the ground and back up and I got to tell you my knees don't like that. So even though I could never get the perfect shot with the bird lined up, I think the edit turned out pretty damn good. 🪶

The American Revolution started over less

Now requires a disambiguation page