P.O.S.S.E.
“The hope for any book you write or publish is that it will be meaningful to people. Maybe not to everyone. Maybe not even to a lot of people. But you want some people to find it worth their while, whether it entertains them or elevates their perspectives or validate their feelings or expands their knowledge. You want it to somehow connect. It’s a pleasure to see it happen in real time”
“Reference multiple conspiracies at the same time. If you only mention one conspiracy, folks have a straightforward path to getting to the truth. But if you mention 3-4 at the same time? Only the true masochistics like myself will even attempt to pull it apart.
Rarely, if ever, state your full accusation. For any single conspiracy, always allude to it. Don’t make a full, comprehensive case that allows someone to see the full picture. Let your audience sit with the uncertainty. You don’t need to win the argument, you only need to sow doubt and fear.
Attack every misstep, no matter how obscure. Sooner or later, your victim will make mistakes. When they do, attack. No matter how small or obscure, blow it up into a major drama. Hype, distort, and magnify”
“The same thing happened in the 2008 great financial crisis. There was the underlying economic activity — people building and buying houses — and then there was the financial gimmickry. It turned out that the finance gamesmanship far outpaced the actual economic behavior, and things got out of hand, and then the whole house of cards came crashing down”
https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/the-ai-economy-is-full-of-financial
“The “imperial boomerang” is the concept that all of the methods of oppression that a mighty nation visits upon its far-flung imperial subjects will one day be turned back upon its own population. And here we are. This is a decades-long process, ratcheting up in earnest since the post-9/11 War on Terror, and any declaration of the moment when the boomerang’s sharp edge finally buried itself right in America’s skull is surely an arbitrary one. But last night will do as well as any”
https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/we-are-all-domestic-terrorists-now
“the actual decision was that there were two proximate causes of the student flats being blown up – the dropping of the bomb in 1942, and its explosion in 2021. Neither cause could have destroyed the flats without the other (if the bomb had exploded in 2021 in a museum in Dresden or whatever, it wouldn’t have triggered this insurance policy). And the rule for insurance cases is that when there are two causes, one of which is excluded and one which isn’t, the exclusion prevails”
“Labour’s committees are a maze with no centre. They lead to no destination and are not intended to. They are intended to take the something-must-be-done activist spirit of its members and contain it, so that it can walk the hallways of this maze with a sense of purpose and without ever realising that it has undertaken a journey to nowhere. Having been safely sequestered where it can do no harm, the spirit can then be bottled and used as an energy source to power the party’s leafleting and door-knocking operation, getting the vote out on polling day”
https://iandunt.substack.com/p/god-save-us-from-conference-season-627
“I just don’t think it’s possible to base your theory of growth on deregulation, cutting red tape and supporting builders over bureaucrats, while simultaneously championing workers’ rights and restricting immigration of construction workers. The single biggest interaction that most employers have with the state is through employment law (and its overlap with immigration law) – if you’re going to be regulatory about that, business is not going to thank you no matter how easy you make it to concrete over the newts and bats”
“After the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991, Ukraine had the third-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. In exchange for Ukraine’s giving up those weapons, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia agreed to secure Ukraine’s borders. In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, they agreed they would not use military force or economic coercion against Ukraine. Russia violated that agreement with its 2014 and 2022 invasions”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-8-2025-friday
“Worse than that is the fact that these data centers will be, by definition, non-performing assets, and one that inflicted an opportunity cost that’ll be almost impossible to calculate. While a house, once built and sold, technically falls into that category (it doesn’t add to any economic productivity), people at least need somewhere to live. Shelter is an essential component of life. You can live without a data center the size of Manhattan.
What would have happened if companies like Microsoft and Meta instead spent the money on things that actually drove productivity, or created a valuable competitive business that drove economic activity? Hell, even if they just gave everyone a 10% raise, it would have likely been better for the economy than this”
“Elara Voss is not a real person. Nor is she a public-domain literary character. Nor–yet–a figure of myth or folktale. She’s not really anything at all except for name: A string of tokens that has proven irresistibly attractive to a number of different large language models when responding to prompts involving character names and science-fiction and fantasy stories. That is, “Elara Voss” is the text that L.L.M.s seem to have have collectively arrived upon as the best response to a prompt like “what should I name the character in the story I’m writing?”