Love is a Cradle

"Should we be rooting for the end of the world?"

 https://harpers.org/archive/2022/12/apocalypse-nowish/

 I use airplane mode to throttle my own bandwidth.

Our world is a cracked bell that no longer sounds

- Goethe

Adam Tooze

The cost of living crisis on the other hand is not properly speaking a macroeconomic issue at all. It is a problem of poverty, inequality, precarity and unequal power relations in labour markets. If one is serious about addressing those problems, the solutions are clear enough: Raise benefit levels substantially above the rate of inflation. Control the prices of essentials, if you must, but only for the purchases of those on the lowest incomes. Make the tax system more progressive and remove punitive benefit traps for those on low incomes. Rebalance the labour market by institutional reforms that empower trade and individual workers. Run positive labour market schemes. Redress the overlapping structures of racism and discrimination that concentrate poverty amongst minorities, single mothers and children. Do all of this not slowly, but with the urgency of the cost of living crisis at your back.

This cannot be a top down, drawing board exercise. Addressing inequality, discrimination, poverty is not as simple as conducting monetary policy. The world is designed to make central banks and their instruments pivotal to the economy. They are structurally empowered, designed to be the ultimate technocrats perch. By contrast, in the vast majority of settings welfare and social services are more or less deliberately underfunded, understaffed, underpowered and institutionally hemmed so as to ensure that they are unable to deliver real uplift and lasting and sustainable protection for their “clients”. They are not empowering but disempowering mechanisms both for those they serve and their staff. So a true answer to the “cost of living crisis” would be a question not just of more spending but of political organization and mobilization to create a state structure actually capable of securing a decent standard of living for those in the bottom half of the income and wealth distribution. 

https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-164-the-return-of-tina

OCSC

One of my favorite bars of grad school gets the royal treatment: a multi-page profile by Brian Howe in the Indyweek on the occasion of its 21st birthday.

氣

Bill McKibben

 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/10/06/where-will-we-live-climate-change-mckibben/

JLG RIP

 

 

 

 Community is a constant entrainment

I took a run yesterday and it began to rain before I got to the harbor.  Standing on the sand of the bay, the schooners and fishing boats lay in the distance, I did my Wim Hof breaths; after the 30th breath I held it beneath my rib cage and pushed out my belly and the xi sat right there and the mist and rain wiped away from my face I realized that this is all there is, this is the apex of of spirituality this moment and yet all moments that we move through this is all there is. 

substacks have successfully replaced blogs/rss, imperfectly

We ride upon this earth as if on the surface of a wave

 

This could be the human innovation decade

Digress, download, debrief

It is an electrified planet

This beer gives me everlasting life

 Hill Farmstead

Energy transition prospects

Dobbs Dissent

Roe and Casey were from the beginning, and are even more now, embedded in core constitutional concepts of individual freedom, and of the equal rights of citizens to decide on the shape of their lives. Those legal concepts, one might even say, have gone far toward defining what it means to be an American. For in this Nation, we do not believe that a government controlling all private choices is compatible with a free people.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf

Ezra Klein on Dobbs

 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show/id1548604447?i=1000567732834

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-guide-to-the-supreme-courts-rightward-shift/id1548604447?i=1000568416880

"It just drives me insane" - Klein

adam tooze

 

1-21-22

6-24-22

Bless Ezra Klein

 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show/id1548604447?i=1000566350184

Homelessness in America

 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-people.html

I don't believe he brought me this far to leave me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCV3QMsLiJQ

 

your reign on the top was short like leprechaun's

 

Intake light tokes

 

Inflation

Corporations are using the pandemic as means to raise prices (and profits) aggressively: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/05/opinion/us-companies-inflation.html

What we have learned is that demand for many items is inelastic, and that vendors have consolidated to the point that competition for many goods is limited. As a result, producers will push pricing to the point that it affects sales. We see this in the housing market, where there is little or no price point that consumers will not push through. Supply is more limited in this case in many markets, yet housing prices continue to inflate by ~20% per year or more. I see this as akin to the Japanese asset price bubble of the late 80's and early 90's where access to easy credit caused rampant speculation in the markets which carried over to consumer goods, such that being a tourist in Japan is now on a whole other level of expensive compared to the cost of visiting New York City, etc, and inflation there is continuing to rise against a backdrop of reduced manufacturing. I would be prepared for the higher costs for everything to continue at least five years.

Personally, I have seen this happening at the Bakery, where virtually all of our supplies and ingredients have risen by 20-50%.

Check out this substack from Chartbook. We are going through a relatively intense inflation cycle. I believe profits are actually going to go super high 1 year from now as inflating costs of goods sold will be passed on to consumers in the form of even higher prices. And they will pay it. Demand is relatively inelastic right now.

Altruism is its own form of madness

Life is a psychedelic experience

All the light that does not blind resides within the soul

And that’s when I embraced middle age, wearing both a cell phone holster and a dog treat bag on my belt

dogs love jazz

Who do you make art for? You certainly can't make it for the living, as they can't hear, and can't see

 

 

The Wokeness Trials

Money is cheap

What is the price of seasonality? Hundreds upon hundreds of trillions?

Blogging in Obscurity

The Great Smartening

The opportunity of the present is what I would call The Great Smartening. Or perhaps The Great Flattening. Meaning, anything we now want to do, we can just go and do it. If we want to install a new toilet, we watch a video. If we want to have better sex, there's a very effective Netflix series for that. If we want to cook or bake better, there are a million and one how-tos on Instagram. Anyone can make anything they want. It is all within reach. There are no more black boxes. It's not a question of success and failure, because whatever we want to do, we can do it. And as Anna Jaffe says, we can't fail, because the world is on fire.

Seven Bowls

 

Catching up

 

Throwback to February 2020

March 2020

Dumpster diving

 

Distillation of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict

 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/02/10/lost-illusions-israel-palestine-david-shulman

Camp Alton Alma Mater

"We hail thee night and day,

Praise to thee, Alton,"

"Thy stately pines so tall,

Heighten thy splendor"

"God keep you safe we pray

Praise to thee, Alton"

"Rugged men of strength and courage"

"We thee adore"

 http://campalton.com/index.php/all-things-alton/alton-classics/188-camp-hymn

To the people in your teens and twenties: There is no plan