Category: Post
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In the 1970s, the big question was why was Chicago so fiscally well run….Why did New York go bankrupt when Chicago didn’t?…in New York, the political machine died, and the result was…they gave money to everybody. Whereas in Chicago, people were either for or against the Daley machine. That machine had an incentive not to…
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Though Taylor Kitsch ultimately wound up landing the role, former Lost alum Josh Holloway has revealed that he was originally cast as Gambit in X-Men Origins I’m rewatching Lost, and it’s abundantly clear that Josh Holloway as Gambit could have anchored an entire franchise. Whoever decided to eliminate him missed big time. More here.
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For its part, eternalism is, in principle, hospitable to the idea of time travel. If the entire universe exists unconditionally, all spacetime with its varying regions simply be. We could travel to different times because all times exist. Traveling to different spatial locations is made possible by the existence of all spatial locations and the…
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Costco negotiates as a strong buyer with tremendous leverage, giving Americans the opportunity to live comfortably for low cost. What could this look like for medicine and health care?
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We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms – up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested – probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure…
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For decades, marketing leaders guided buyers through a neat sequence from awareness to purchase. Today, that linear funnel model is breaking down. Buyers now chart their own course — jumping between channels, self-educating via digital content and often engaging sales late, if at all. As buyers became harder to corral into a predictable path, marketers…
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whenever i hear a young person confidently assert that humanity is cooked, my first instinct is to ask for their screen time report. because, yes, if you spend more time scrolling than you do participating in real life, it’s actually quite reasonable to conclude that we’re hanging on by a thread — Read on stephstiner.substack.com/p/a-gen-z-guide-to-fixing-your-doom
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You could put higher consumption taxes on items the wealthy purchase to a disproportionate degree. Paintings and yachts, and so on. Tom Holden argues: “In a world in which capital is essentially the only input to production, taxing capital reduces the growth rate of the economy. Whereas at present capital taxes have only level effects.…
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those of us who do venture deeply into his work quickly discover something far more imposing. [Clark Ashton] Smith’s imagination is vast, luxuriant, and final, as though one had strayed into a world already immeasurably old, already in decline, and wholly indifferent to human ambition or consolation. — Read on grognardia.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-ensorcellment-of-january.html
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After a string of disturbing mental health incidents involving AI chatbots, a group of state attorneys general have sent a letter to the AI industry’s top companies, with a warning to fix “delusional outputs” or risk being in breach of state law. — Read on techcrunch.com/2025/12/10/state-attorneys-general-warn-microsoft-openai-google-and-other-ai-giants-to-fix-delusional-outputs/
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One of the goals of politicians is to get you to focus on taxing income. The psyop has worked for decades now and hopefully people are waking up to this sham. More here.
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I wrote my own version of Stranger Things 5. I wrote it as a safeguard, in case they screwed up the final season, so I would have a conclusion to the saga that at least satisfied me. I also wrote it as a fun fan-fiction experiment, to see how different our stories would be, and…
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“[It] was hardly a nursery for intellectuals, it was a hotbed of false values, it harbored an unattractive percentage of small-time crooks and con artists, and the chances of being successful there were minimal,” he writes. “But it was fascinating, and if you were lucky, it was fun.” — Read on www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/05/david-niven-memoir-scandals-old-hollywood
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Stranger Things was a show people loved because of the vibe. Now, Stranger Things is a show people watch because they remember loving that season one vibe, and they figure they might as well finish the rest of it. — Read on www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/scifi/stranger-things-vibe.html
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Africa will produce new variants of Christianity and Islam. Furthermore, many African regions have not been Christian or Muslim for very long, not by historical standards. That might boost the chances of innovation, since to them it is not a very fixed doctrine. — Read on marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/07/three-scenarios-for-the-emergence-of-new-religious-doctrine.html
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While the past midlife crisis model focused on breaking down confining bonds, chipping away at that adult façade to return to the fountain of youth, Xers are still in full construction mode. “I’ve made a list – it’s the ‘do-better’ list,” Leslie Mann’s character tells her husband in Judd Apatow’s flawed but occasionally insightful “This…
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“People want a fair deal from someone they like.” When questioned about his actions to get people to like him, he simply says, “I tell them that I like them.” — Read on fs.blog/joe-girard/
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You have to identify with this past of yours, and you have to find some way to make it make you stronger. If college was a quicksand pit of despair then you have to accept that and find some way to be empowered by it. Read more here.
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the U.S. is in the middle of a great shift — in the 19th and 20th centuries, high class in America was defined as “anything French”, while in the 21st century it’s defined as “anything Japanese”. Apparently the Japanese don’t realize it yet? More here.
Basement Whatever 