Steve Randy Waldman

Blog: https://www.interfluidity.com/
Github: https://github.com/swaldman

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Last Notes

2026-07-16 15:55:05 GMT

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if wr could break out the equities portion of defined benefits pensions, then i’d think it should be included. i don’t think it’s likely to change the picture that much, but if it can be it should be included.

2026-07-16 12:25:39 GMT

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i prefer consumption, because consumption is the base, investment spending is derivative, it happens to support consumption.

2026-07-14 11:41:28 GMT

two things can simultaneously be true: (1) contemporary AI is real and revolutionary technology; and (2) we are courting the greatest financial crisis in the history of humankind.

2026-07-09 00:16:44 GMT

someday i'd like to meet The People.
we might have a spirited conversation.

2026-07-08 13:41:42 GMT

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But the US legislature is not representative. We don't see many Gingriches in multiparty democracies with proportional representation. The US Congress, at least under current electoral and political practices, does not really qualify as a representative body. It is an institution subject to capture that superficially takes the form of a representative body, that has become (in part due to Gingrich!) too captured and atrophied to accomplish anything at all.

2026-07-07 23:37:07 GMT

charismatic human beings are both seductive and unreliable. that's why we invent and rely upon institutions. we should leave a much, much smaller role for charismatic human beings in our politics. heads of state should be ceremonial.

2026-07-06 13:32:06 GMT

[new draft post] Why are Americans so unhappy? https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2026/07/06/why-are-americans-so-unhappy/index.html

2026-07-05 16:54:08 GMT

"If your website has a 'See more' link, I assume that indicates that the rest of the article or site is unimportant or uninteresting, so I basically never click on it. Why would I?" @npub1dwe…fxlw https://www.philipbrewer.net/2026/07/05/see-more-or-not-see-more/

2026-07-04 09:51:13 GMT

preliterate and postliterate are both varieties of illiterate.

2026-07-01 18:43:49 GMT

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i find it hard to invest in enterprises or games i think are terrible. but that hasn’t been a very lucrative conceit.

2026-07-01 18:05:10 GMT

why is there no ETF that simply coinvests in whatever the President and his family have a stake in?

2026-06-28 08:35:47 GMT

from their perspective they are the protagonists and we are the chorus.

2026-06-25 14:47:11 GMT

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yes.

2026-06-08 10:35:36 GMT

“when people opt to devote their energy to tracking the latest TikTok star or scrolling content instead of nurturing interpersonal relationships, they are effectively amusing themselves to death.” @npub1u2k…nxuj https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20563051261437487

2026-05-26 12:02:30 GMT

"This is the era of the hollowed-out government… We did not just outsource the janitorial services or the cafeteria. Instead, we outsourced the thinking… The result is not a 'leaner' government. It is a government that has forgotten how to learn." #IsraelKolawole https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-empty-architect/

2026-05-22 00:54:47 GMT

the thesis “contemporary social media contributes dysfunctionally to a collective sense of pessimistic nihilism” is, i think, correct.
it is not inconsistent, however, with the thesis “a great deal is terrible about Americans’ material conditions, and worse in a variety of ways than previously”
it seems kind of dumb to me that there has emerged a discourse that treats these hypotheses, which i’d characterize as mutually reinforcing, as if they were mutually inconsistent, there can be only one.

2026-05-21 12:37:21 GMT

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(my AI-dar is not so good. i tend to assume authors are human, perhaps too naively.)

2026-05-21 11:18:58 GMT

i find it funny when people holding big retirement nest eggs in index funds wag about how they want to reduce the deficit.

2026-05-21 10:21:42 GMT

“In most companies, alignment is just the corporate name for silencing dissent. It doesn't mean everyone agrees. It means nobody says out loud that they don't. Those are different things.” https://phpc.social/@flowcontrol/116611921964285062

2026-05-16 21:19:33 GMT

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I have! Come visit!

2026-05-16 19:04:36 GMT

AM radio, 2026.
https://cdn.masto.host/zirkus/media_attachments/files/116/585/809/494/691/904/original/14c3375729882e72.jpeg

2026-05-03 21:28:20 GMT

[new draft post] The $200,000 standard deduction https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2026/05/03/the-$200000-standard-deduction/index.html

2026-01-21 23:26:56 GMT

very few administrations have resolved as many serious crises they created in such a short period of time.

2026-01-21 22:08:14 GMT

perhaps it's too early to say, but i am heartened by the prospect of peace between the United States and NATO.

2026-01-20 18:42:01 GMT

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north or south, we can form an exiles club.

2026-01-20 12:31:21 GMT

i like to sign up for expensive classes so i can have the pleasure of skipping school again.

2026-01-19 02:52:28 GMT

[new draft post] Where am I? https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2026/01/18/where-am-i/index.html

2026-01-15 04:16:24 GMT

you can abolish ICE and still enforce immigration law. it’s called e-verify + fines to employers of the unverifiable.
(i would like our immigration laws to be more hospitable than they are. but effective enforcement of our current laws does not require detention or violence.)

2026-01-10 07:06:05 GMT

morons learn lessons.

2026-01-10 00:36:51 GMT

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So you burn down the forest and then are shocked to see the trees don’t thrive.

2026-01-10 00:22:33 GMT

the fundamental mistake the contemporary right makes is to confuse the product of successful institutions with personal characteristics of the people that perform them. since they think good outcomes are about good people, they happily dismantle the institutions under which people become good.

2026-01-08 06:47:39 GMT

the credo of the contemporary US, articulated pretty directly by its political leader, is that to be smart is to cheat, if and as much as you can get away with it.
most of the country’s preeminent tech industry has this as the basis of its business model.

2026-01-07 07:16:38 GMT

i myself am not so fond of Crown Prince Stephen.

2026-01-06 16:00:51 GMT

Verifying you are human. This may take a few seconds… With you, it may take a bit longer.

2026-01-06 15:42:00 GMT

doxxing is dickish, even of dicks.

2026-01-06 04:59:40 GMT

if AI is so good and the US is the world leader, wouldn’t you expect us to act with more intelligence?

2026-01-05 16:15:29 GMT

who do you have to kidnap to run Greenland?

2026-01-05 08:03:24 GMT

“We have, in Western society, managed to simultaneously botch the dreams of democracy, capitalism, social coherence, and techno-utopianism, all at once. It's embarrassing actually. I am embarrassed. You should be embarrassed.” [@apenwarr.ca](https://bsky.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/apenwarr.ca ) https://apenwarr.ca/log/20211201

2026-01-04 20:23:04 GMT

as i grow old, i live in fear of someone confronting me: “Have you no recency, sir, at long last, have you no recency?”

2026-01-04 17:33:07 GMT

on the one hand it’s good to live a long full life but on the other hand the longer you are around the more the more is taken from you.

2026-01-04 06:13:49 GMT

a thing about history is you can tell the same story a hundred different ways and all of them are true.

2026-01-04 04:57:43 GMT

i condemn this knife in your back i have my palm wrapped around.

2026-01-03 00:21:51 GMT

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I wish you the very best as well!

2026-01-02 19:30:28 GMT

You have notifications.

2026-01-02 16:17:55 GMT

I want to see a lot of public sector LLMs. In fact, I think most of what contemporary tech platforms do should be migrated to the public sector.

2026-01-02 15:33:33 GMT

it’s weird how the current view from the right is most of us are lazy leeches and moochers but we’re not making enough of us.

2026-01-01 17:04:53 GMT

the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft a-gley. but failing to plan at all is worse.

2025-12-31 04:05:36 GMT

the best feeling is when you hit an "unsubscribe" link and it 404s.

2025-12-30 19:32:27 GMT

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The best societies in the world use government more, not less. The Nordics, Japan. In general, growing scale and scope of are necessary (but very far from sufficient, lots of pathological cases for sure!) components of increases in civilization and general welfare.

2025-12-30 19:29:36 GMT

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in developing countries, for example, universal electrification has sometimes been a hard sell politically because the rich can afford generators, why should they accept taxation on behalf of the other 90%?
you don’t want a class of people who live by separate infrastructure. you want a public that broadly shares interests, which means preventing the richest from substituting unusual infrastructures that only they can afford in place more scalable, widely accessible goods.

2025-12-30 19:26:02 GMT

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government is the technology that makes civilized life possible. you see the bad reception on some channels without noticing the miracle of the TV.

2025-12-30 17:24:18 GMT

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often discomfort is good discomfort.

2025-12-30 17:09:24 GMT

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it is simultaneously true that we need to tax a whole lot more and conventional fiscal math is a red herring. /fin

2025-12-30 17:09:11 GMT

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with respect to neither of these purposes is the formal accounting debt or deficit very useful or informative. 3/

2025-12-30 17:08:54 GMT

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we need to tax the very wealthy because wealth that confers political influence or leads to lifestyles detached from our political community, people who have no use or interest in our commonweal, is dangerous and should not exist. 2/

2025-12-30 17:08:24 GMT

we need to tax the middle class much more to finance universal social benefits (though much of that will just replace expenditures like private insurance premiums), without provoking inflation. 1/

2025-12-30 16:26:46 GMT

unconditional love conditioned as a practical matter on continuing and continual interaction is potentially the most powerful force in politics.

2025-12-30 15:41:25 GMT

dear all of you.
i don’t like it when any of you die.
please take that under advisement.
thank you.

2025-12-29 22:08:38 GMT

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have you noticed Big Year gets Bigger every Year?!?

2025-12-29 22:04:32 GMT

billionaires are the sad victims of an inadequate tax code, which has allowed them to become surrounded by an isolating bubble of sycophants, severed from participation in community and ordinary fellowship. we owe potential victims of this condition prevention, and those already suffering remedy.

2025-12-29 18:19:51 GMT

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whatever you want!

2025-12-29 17:35:20 GMT

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ass — artificial super sycophancy

2025-12-29 17:31:05 GMT

sycophancy as a service.

2025-12-28 22:29:20 GMT

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Thanks!

2025-12-28 22:06:34 GMT

[new draft post] Constant real wages can hide a lot of pain https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2025/12/28/constant-real-wages-can-hide-a-lot-of-pain/index.html

2025-12-28 16:52:54 GMT

if you want to get shit done, rather than a “strong man”, instead of autocracy, have you considered a democratically elected unicameral legislature which directly appoints and can remove the executive?

2025-12-28 16:26:37 GMT

the fraction of communication we experience — across all media, excluding what is explicitly fiction — that is in one form or another a lie is extraordinary.

2025-12-27 16:14:33 GMT

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yes! ( https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/12/28/how-to-regulate-ai/index.html )

2025-12-26 18:35:16 GMT

since AI is going to solve all the medical miracles now, we can dispense with the exorbitant patent rents, right?

2025-12-26 17:49:59 GMT

so much of civilization is keeping one’s vexations to oneself.

2025-12-26 15:24:42 GMT

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Thank you! You too!

2025-12-26 01:49:54 GMT

nowadays if you’re naughty he just farts into it because natural gas is cleaner.

2025-12-22 22:33:12 GMT

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they always find a way to escape, i tell ya…

2025-12-22 20:49:48 GMT

you can never find scissors. not when you need them. never. so you end up buying another pair. until you move. then they all appear, come out of the woodwork, hundreds of them, snapping at you.

2025-12-21 01:34:42 GMT

“There is no point in criticizing something if some law of nature means that it must be so. But there is, despite claims otherwise, no law of nature which says we have to be bastards to each other or to the species we share this world with.” @npub149r…7zya https://www.ianwelsh.net/we-dont-have-to-live-in-hell/

2025-12-20 06:22:05 GMT

love it when a university i attended 20 years ago writes to let me know they've been hacked and they've leaked my social.

2025-12-19 00:36:54 GMT

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i suppose whatever the good guys in star wars were trying to do.

2025-12-19 00:36:07 GMT

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that’d be the root of all good too.

2025-12-18 19:48:39 GMT

we’ve been gaslighted into believing that gaslighting is a thing.

2025-12-17 23:27:20 GMT

i like to think i could have made a failure of myself no matter what my race or gender — or nationality or religion or sexual preference — had been.

2025-12-17 21:31:47 GMT

A great piece that explains succinctly why Congressionally defined independent agencies, far from undermining executive accountability, are prerequisite to it. by [@jbouie](https://threads.net/@jbouie/ ) https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/opinion/trump-presidential-power-miller-vought.html

2025-12-17 21:15:47 GMT

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In policy terms, often people talk in terms of numbers of units, as though building barracks would address our housing issues. It would be better for the homeless than not building barracks! But when we think about how we want to address what is a real crisis in housing for people who simply want to live well, we should think about what kind of neighborhoods should accommodate them, and how to build those, not merely how to augment the number of units.

2025-12-17 20:59:04 GMT

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as an individual one might prefer to live in the wilderness. a liberal society can accommodate diverse preferences. but as a society, that is not going to be a common preference or practical as a widespread norm. most people will want and need a grocery store, along with more social kinds of amenities, pretty near by.

2025-12-17 20:31:25 GMT

The relevant unit of housing is not the unit. It's the district or neighborhood. Housing in contemporary society is not to about glorified tents, just to keep the rain off. Homes are the literal structure of society. Their most important characteristics are in relationship to other elements.

2025-12-16 20:20:09 GMT

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au contraire.

2025-12-16 14:42:45 GMT

how is AI slop affecting / likely to affect geolocation of photos?

2025-12-16 13:44:01 GMT

we are getting bad at managing migration just before when we will need so much of it. https://fediscience.org/@rahmstorf/115729127242139985

2025-12-16 04:59:01 GMT

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what a coincidence! i answer to that as well!

2025-12-16 02:25:43 GMT

i’m 55 years old, but when i talk to myself i still refer to myself as “kid”.

2025-12-15 18:06:51 GMT

"According to the…annual Harris Poll, for the first time, a majority of Americans believe billionaires are a threat to democracy. A remarkable 71 percent believe there should be a wealth tax. A majority believe there should be a cap on how much wealth a person can accumulate." https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/14/opinion/billionaires-politics-money.html

2025-12-15 16:23:53 GMT

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you’ve got to have the courage to do something better at the same time. i wouldn’t have wanted Biden to restore Obama trade policy. i would have wanted him to make an affirmative case for balance-promoting capital controls, though, as an alternative to the Trump tariffs he inherited.

2025-12-15 16:14:21 GMT

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(no country is linking military expenditure to trade deficit that i know of. Japan i think now runs a small trade deficit but its overall balance of payments remains positive. it’s really the overall current account deficit that represents the demand drag fiscal policy, potentially military, gets called to fill. one wldn’t expect, if a country did this, it would improve relations with surplus powers. the point is to make surplus countries perceive themselves as “financing” a threat.)

2025-12-15 16:04:22 GMT

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i agree it’s good to move beyond “free trade” dogma. i just think tariffs are for the most part a really terrible tool, so terrible in fact they may well discredit my view that the balance and composition of trade is a necessary and legitimate object of policy, and give succor to foolishly dogmatic “free trade” under the usual neolib “see, TINA. we told you so.”
trade balance should be regulated on the regulatory, that is capital-account, side.

2025-12-15 05:54:34 GMT

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(taking control of balance of payments is far from a shitty goal, though! it’s just that there are much better tools, on the capital side, to do that.)

2025-12-15 05:45:06 GMT

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it really makes little sense to tariff China either. tariffs are very shitty tools. the only kind that make any sense are narrowly targeted to sectors rather than sources. the US has not matched increasing trade deficits with increasing military expenditure, and certainly has not efficiently implemented conversion of fiscal inputs to military outputs. the US “provides demand” by running large fiscal deficits, but not linked to military menace.

2025-12-15 03:48:53 GMT

if the world lifted all tariffs but deficit countries committed to filling any domestic demand gap created by trade imbalance with efficiently implemented military build-up, perhaps surplus countries would seek a more balanced path.
(not really recommending this. it’s a thought experiment.)

2025-12-15 03:36:38 GMT

life marinated in contemporary communication technologies is neverending moral injury.

2025-12-15 01:56:49 GMT

my favorite platform is the public internet.

2025-12-15 01:54:27 GMT

pricing power is the root of all evil, except of course when you’re the one doing the pricing.

2025-12-14 14:09:21 GMT

principle is like kryptonite to the unprincipled.