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Another More Perfect Union critique, I guess

This time, a video on government-run grocery stores.

I feel like if you're arguing in favour of government-run groceries, you should probably spend more than 15 seconds on the municipal case studies (that all failed!) instead of talking about military commissaries.

This part was interesting:

So maybe you take all this to mean that it's true: the secret to all this is that taxpayers foot the bill for some giant subsidy. But actually, the subsidy is quite small. The defense budget is almost $1 trillion, and the subsidy for DeCA is roughly 0.2% for the whole defense budget. This is for almost 250 stores serving 8.8 million households

Saying that the subsidy is small compared to the whole defense budget is a sloppy rhetorical move. What matters is is it cost-effective, how does it scale, etc.

One thing I've noticed in the last few months of intentionally monitoring it - the headlines on the homepage of Fox News are always focused on specific people and characters. They're obsessed with AOC/Mamdani/Sanders and anyone else they can paint as a Radical Leftist.

There's never a story that's framed in the Vox/Atlantic way: “here's what's going on with this abstract problem”, let alone anything longform or curious.

There's also usually one scam-adjacent story about some new remedy for the elderly (in the same way that the NYT always has a story about some yuppies buying a million dollar apartment).

Paul Bloom writes

Scarcity generates pleasure, anxiety, and purpose. But a world that is post-scarcity in the sense that there is more than enough material resources for everyone will still have another form of scarcity—people’s respect, admiration, attention, desire, and love.

The bad news about a post-scarcity utopia is that we will still be unhappy much of the time. The good news is that our lives will still have meaning.

Part of my family’s canon is Spooner or Later, by Paul Jennings, Ted Greenwood, and Terry Denton.

A spoonerism is a kind of wordplay where you can swap the starting sounds of words in a phrase to make another valid phrase.

I turned my adblocker off youtube for a minute to see what it was like to have recommendations appear again.

Manbait everywhere.

Arm wrestling muscle beach in grandpa latex. NBA highlights but they get increasingly ____. So many prank videos.

I'm sure the videos are entertaining and they take a lot of time and effort to make and they've brought a lot of joy to the world. But the gestalt is so bleak to me now.

This movie should have been called Hisstopia because of how bad and about snakes it is.

I remember liking the first one as an effective buddy cop conspiracy with a lot of worldbuilding. This one's a complete rehash, but the main character's emotional progress has been inexplicably reset^🐇 which makes it feel somehow both painful and pointless to see her treat her best friend like shit for another entire movie (the main violation is that she consistently disregards his opinions and ignores his requests)

One of my friends just sent me a voice note making a couple of points:

Chorus

Shorty a lil' baddie (She a lil' baddie)

Shorty my lil' boo thing (Boo thing)

And shorty got the fatty

Shorty be catching mood swings

Every time I fuck without a rubber

I nutted on the covers

No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli. The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’.

There's a good version on Standard Ebooks. Greg Wagland's rendition is also great.^👂

For thirty years, I've sailed the seas and seen good and bad, better and worse, fair weather and foul, provisions running out, knives going, and what not. Well, now I tell you, I never seen good come o' goodness yet. Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men don't bite; them's my views—amen, so be it.