I'm (slowly) reading McCulloch's _Lower Than the Angels_ right now, which makes the same point about how often Christian theology of sexuality and marriage gets skewed by the association of piety with asexuality. Fascinating stuff.

We saw what economists can't model during early covid-19, and before that during the OPEC crisis. Theory of comparative advantage, and all the other arguments, assume that nothing can go wrong. If you outsource production of necessities, then anything that disrupts trade kills your own people. (2/2)

I have a long-running complaint about exclusively letting economists be the ones who talk about trade because everything they say turns into the proverbial "imagine a perfectly spherical cow in a vacuum radiating milk evenly in all directions." The models leave out what they can't model. (1/2)

I don't know about that, but Randal Munroe did do the "most mad scientists are actually mad engineers" joke?

I'm used to the US gov't requiring polygraphs for everything under the sun, they have a superstitious addiction to them. This is the first time I'd noticed that it wasn't them, this time, it was the partner gov't? Who else is falling for this pseudoscience?

Ah, yes. The backstory, if I'm remembering it right, to Ernest Callenbach's classic sci-fi novel about California secession, *Ecotopia.* Really looking forward to it!

The Long Kiss Goodnight starring Geena Davis. Followed pretty closely, I grant, by Albert Finney in Scrooge.

The question keeps legitimately needed to be asked, this whole year all year: "are the straights okay?"

Because tobacco farmers switched to kale.

Vivienne Madrano, who went to school in Los Angeles and who works in Los Angeles, is producing two animated series that are metaphors for living and working in Los Angeles.

Who was that, Nick Fuentes?

The popular phrase "hit and run ACCIDENT" does a lot of (im)moral heavy lifting. It implies it would be wrong to punish the driver for the kind of thing that "could just happen to anyone," the phrase (just by existing!) absolves them of negligence. It's like that classic gun-violence Onion headline.

According to moral foundations theory, the difference between conservatives and liberals is which is more important, truth over loyalty or loyalty over truth. Your average conservative can't imagine a much higher principle than loyalty.

"Democrats fall in love. Republicans fall in line."

LITERALLY every other developed country in the world has already solved that problem, so maybe do what they do?

Good for them. Corporate defense lawyers should feel uncomfortable.

Also, Times New Roman's unreadability isn't because it's a serif font. It's because it's got a tiny stroke width and an even more freakishly tiny m-width, and usually absurdly tight kerning. TNR wasn't designed to be comfortably readable, it was designed to be tiny. It was about saving paper.

Funny thing, too: while I was trying to figure out how she did it, I belatedly realized that the Google Streetview picture of that corner from June 2025 shows workers repairing that exact corner after a crash barely 18 months ago. But not one this insane!

Read the whole article, then look at Google Streetview for that address. I'm flabbergasted. How did she get that vehicle up to that speed, then threaded every obstacle on that corner, to hit a car parked that far off the street?!?

We're going to end up having to line every street with bollards.