*Each crisis produces legislative architecture that concentrates power in institutions accountable to no voter.*

*The nervous system needs evidence that the truth is survivable in the room before it will start producing the truth at scale.* https://share.google/0y3dSeVGvHVDDeCxT

*Find the lie and you find the front line*

Perplexity: the state is not primarily a normative ideal but an emergent coordination device imposed by material and incentive constraints: States crystallize around culturally or geographically coherent blocs because: shared language, norms, and expectations reduce the cost of enforcing rules and extracting revenue, physical geography (rivers, mountains, coastlines) helps define clear, defensible boundaries for coercion and taxation. These relatively stable “constraint bubbles” allow: semi‑predictable law enforcement, semi‑stable property regimes, inter‑elite bargaining via institutions (armies, courts, bureaucracies) that partially internalize the incentive problem by tying rulers’ fates to some degree of order and long‑run revenue. ...the “state” is the least‑bad overlay of endogenous constraint on an otherwise unstable anarchic incentive landscape—functionally analogous to the way socialist planners, lacking market prices, try (and mostly fail) to impose exogenous constraints on the calculation problem

https://stacker.news/items/1481449/r/halalmoney

*There is no shortcut to finding intelligent or ethical people*

It’s a picture of the sky earlier today. Beautifully blue, but no clouds

TIL about anaphora: a rhetorical device where a word or phrase repeats at the start of successive clauses, sentences, or lines for emphasis and rhythm. Thanks, gents!

https://stacker.news/items/1477917/r/halalmoney

Not a single cloud…..

*Laypeople tend to want digestible, simple answers that feel actionable to them in the moment. Unfortunately, the truth is usually nuanced, complex, and the actionability is questionable or uncertain.* https://stacker.news/items/1477007/r/halalmoney?commentId=1477015

Ouch. Taxes plus Stockholm Syndrome 🫠 Breaking free won’t be easy.

A well designed tax system is indistinguishable from consensual oppression

*even if [tax] revenues do grow, what assurance is there that the political system will not respond by just ramping up spending and deficits even more? After all, the advanced economies are already very rich. In principle, they could have easily managed their finances better if their leaders had found it politically expedient to do so. But being rich has never been an obstacle to going bankrupt. Voters have hardly begun to adjust to the realities of a higher interest rate world, where demographic decline and vastly increased needs for defense spending have introduced major new costs. As the median voter grows older, systems already biased against young people will only become more so.*

KitKat turns chocolate bar packaging into Faraday smartphone cage - Notebookcheck News https://share.google/v6SES0xEAhMWhEhkg