What welfare state? Do you mean the universal healthcare that they claw away at any cost, like Mitch McConnell onto the podium?

social security, medicare

it's instinctive, people will readily be accept to be told they're wrong by an authority rather than a peer. people cant cast judgement without having earned to position to do so. similarly, people will not receive judgement when it doesnt come from a valid position of authority.

the answer is not to try and change human psychology, it's to reintroduce the hierarchies and structures where correction and judgement flows through the correct channels.

Still cant put html snippets in a readme on bickbucket

> but it's not really historically high

i dont think the inflationary seventies and eighties are great lodestar

low interest rates are historically a sign of a stable polity and economy. so if anything, we want the conditions for prolonged low interest rates, rather than prolonged high interest rate.

You cant convince anybody an ikea chair is just as good

It easy to convince a college student with $20 that an ikea chair is good. Artisanal is overkill for plenty of scenarios, and definitely those where time or money are constrained.

What does it matter the world gets better when your neighbors do worse?

If all but one of my neighbors were improving, why would I focus on the one that insists on repeatedly shooting itself in the dick?

The other people in the world who aren’t your neighbors are also people.

But no one in their right mind cares more about other people in the world more than about himself and those closest to him.

people became millionaires writing html 30 years ago. there's been these shifts in the past.

People became billionaires from domain names in the dot com era.

haha! do you know details, what domains?

Mark Cuban sold broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7bn

It was a bit more than a domain name - they had 330 employees and $13.5 million in revenue for a quarter - but that acquisition was definitely peak dot-com boom.

paul graham sold a bunch of buggy lisp macros to yahoo too for a few billion. Wild times.

thanks!

i would love another bubble. i feel like tech has been in a corner for going on ten years now (covid spike was so brief). it's so concentrated in ai it sucks up everything.

a usa with fewer people would be quite nice. more liebensraum for everybody, true affluence, a spacious rowhome in a walkable city and a rustic cabin in the woods for everybody. population decline is really only a problem in welfare states. it took less than 2 generations to demonstrate this.

much easier too investigate and solve though. a few lines of paint here, a bollard there.

> another car sees a gap and changes lanes in front of you.

it's largely a problem in the left lanes, thats where drivers will bunch up most. the subjective feeling is mostly a reptile brain issue though, the feeling you're getting done over. driving is 90% id, sadly.