iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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James Medlock @jdcmedlock.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

I think these charts are worth keeping in mind at the same time. 1. When we're talking about the typical person, wealth is largely a lifecycle phenomenon. 2. When we're talking about wealth, the typical person is largely a rounding error.

Line chart of median household net worth by age for Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers and Silent, in 2025 dollars on a log scale. At most ages, each younger generation is at or above the older ones. Millennials trail until about 30, then reach about $200K by 40. Boomers peak near $450K in their 70s. Data: Fed SCF.

Six bar charts of the share of net worth held by each wealth decile within age groups, 2025. In every group, the top 10% holds 60–70% and the bottom half holds roughly 0–3%. Under-35s are the least concentrated at the top (60%), and their poorest decile is negative (−4%). Data: SCF.

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Zoognosis with Joy! @zoognosisjoy.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Parents are poisoning their children because they know what's best for them. People are selling poison to children because it comes from an animal, how can it be dangerous, it's natural? The state is abdicating its prerogative to regulate food because the cranks cannot stop poisoning children.

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Charles West @pseudo-isidore.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

The passing of Chris Wickham is hard to take in. Few have made a bigger contribution to their field, with such personal warmth. He's going to be missed by a lot of people.

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mr. stupidbrain @mr-stupidbrain.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Mr. President, the American people are crying out for Seiko watches. In particular, we require import subsidies for the Seiko Prospex HBF001 “Marinemaster” 1968 Heritage Diver’s Watch. This is vital for purposes of national security and owning the Swiss bsky.app/profile/atru...

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mr. stupidbrain @mr-stupidbrain.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Harold Bloom would have loved this anime-inflected erotic fan fiction of a children’s book franchise, it’s just common sense

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Matthew Downhour @matthewdownhour.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

The fact that there is a social stigma around being a vegan is frankly embarrassing for us as a society. At absolutely worst, veganism should be accepted as a perfectly valid lifestyle choice in a liberal society, and imo it should be seen much more positively than that

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mr. stupidbrain @mr-stupidbrain.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Not to say annoying vegans do not exist, but they are significantly outnumbered by the number of people with Vegan Derangement Syndrome, both online and IRL.

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mr. stupidbrain @mr-stupidbrain.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I agree that this implies a narrow focus on the Jewish community alone is inadequate, but it clearly poses a specific danger to Jews (in a way it doesn’t to, say, non-Jewish white Americans) even if they aren’t in the same boat as Arabs or Somalians and so on.

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mr. stupidbrain @mr-stupidbrain.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Put another way: racializing other groups as subversive internal aliens is not only compatible with an ideological focus on the Jews as such, but indeed this seems to me to be the dominant framework for at least a substantial chunk of far right intellectuals.

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mr. stupidbrain @mr-stupidbrain.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I’m aware of the historical context, I just don’t agree it the only one anchoring antisemitic logic against Jews as such. Fears about Ostjuden have been changed to fears about the “third world,” but in the end most of them still think the great replacement is *set up* by Jews.

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mr. stupidbrain @mr-stupidbrain.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

At any rate if you want to reserve the term antisemitism for the racialized subordination itself rather than the political ideology inspired by it, that’s a semantic and not a substantive dispute. You still need to deal with the actors who are motivated by the ideology.

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mr. stupidbrain @mr-stupidbrain.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

It’s also inconsistent: you acknowledge Nazi antisemitism as such even tho it is temporally & spatially disconnected from racialized subordination of Jews in Weimar Germany, but somehow that same temporal/spatial disconnect in the US/contemporary Europe makes it not real antisemitism.

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mr. stupidbrain @mr-stupidbrain.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

So what you are disputing seems to be the idea that such an ideology is antisemitic, because it doesn’t take place in the context of racialized subordination of Jews. My counter argument is that if the belief in a Jewish world conspiracy is not antisemitism the term is meaningless.

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mr. stupidbrain @mr-stupidbrain.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

It seems beyond dispute that there are increasingly influential people and institutions who hold this ideology (cf Tucker Carlson) and that it is a motivation for sordid attacks against Jews. Also seems beyond dispute to me that rates of such attacks have increased.

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mr. stupidbrain @mr-stupidbrain.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Does something *like* this logic get applied to Arabs? Yes, certainly. But even in most versions of the “Great Replacement”, the underlying narrative of right-wing Islamophobia, it’s still the Jews qua Jews behind this subversion!

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mr. stupidbrain @mr-stupidbrain.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Does the lack of legal subordination of Jews prevent it from being applied to Jews themselves? Absolutely not! In fact, modern antisemitism arose in the context of Jewish emancipation and *in response* to it!

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mr. stupidbrain @mr-stupidbrain.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Indeed, the whole argument depends of emptying antisemitic ideology of its specific content. The “logic” of antisemitism is precisely that Jews qua Jews are an internal alien population working to subvert the body politic. It’s a belief in the (imagined) *power* of Jews.

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David Dayen @ddayen.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

One way tech oligarchs retain power is through dual-class shares, allowing them to cash in on public stock markets without giving up power over their companies. @ryanlcooper.com thinks this needs to end: Dual-class shares should be banned, or taxed in proportion to founder control over the company.

prospect.org

Here’s a Way to Stop Silicon Valley Megalomania - The American Prospect

‘Dual class’ shares are a fraud on the public market.

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James Medlock @jdcmedlock.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

The GOP cut funding to the IRS because *audits work* and they fundamentally don't believe rich people should have to play by the rules.

Line chart titled "Revenue per audit," subtitled "In-person audits, 2010-2014." It plots average revenue and average cost per audit by taxpayer income percentile, poorer to richer, from the 0–5th percentile to the top 0.1%. Source: Boning et al. 2023, "A Welfare Analysis of Tax Audits Across the Income Distribution."

Across the bottom half of the income distribution, revenue and cost track closely, both around $3,000–$6,000 per audit. Above the median, revenue pulls ahead of cost: about $10,000 vs. $5,000 near the 90th percentile, and about $17,000 vs. $8,000 at the 95th–99th. At the top, revenue jumps to about $31,000 for the 99–99.9th percentile and about $90,000 for the top 0.1%.

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mr. stupidbrain @mr-stupidbrain.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I mean there are plenty of ethical philosophers who dislike utilitarianism too, eg. Bernard Williams. Personally I don’t see how you convert utility between agents or define a discount rate for future utility. But without defining these, you can’t actually *do* utilitarianism. So it’s a non-starter.

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Philip Bump @pbump.com · 22/09/2026

I was at a hipster coffee shop in Park Slope yesterday and they paused Geese so that everyone could get out their mandatory prayer mats.

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Urban Land Rent 🇸🇴🚰 @urbanlandrent.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Filtering doesn’t take decades, growth in housing production can offer affordability benefits for new buildings within a few short years. Much work to be done. This doesn’t mean we don’t need more reforms or more subsidized housing money. But skeptics of filtering are lazy/lying to you.

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brasidas @brasidas.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

me and my friends would've killed Liberty Biberty with hammers i can tell you that much

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Capn Borscht @capnborscht.bsky.social · 22/03/2024

The best thing about this planet is that every few days I'll learn about an animal I've literally never seen or heard of before, like the Nilgai which is just a stupidly massive antelope

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mr. stupidbrain @mr-stupidbrain.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

By seats yes, but by popular vote? I’m more skeptical of that. Looking at the elections since 2015 it seems there are relatively stable left and right party blocs among the population, and most switching seems to happen within them (eg Labour voters going to Greens or Conservatives going Reform).

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Jacob T. Levy @jacobtlevy.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

W/o getting drawn into the "seriously or literally" / "it'll never happen" trap, we need to stomp *hard* on the continuing effort to undermine Article 1 power of the purse by saying that this or that revenue stream makes something outside the normal budget process. 1/ www.nbcnews.com/business/eco...

nbcnews.com

Lutnick says Trump’s $5,000 checks for Americans wouldn’t rely on taxpayer funds

A top White House official suggested Congress would use a budget process to fund them. Vice President JD Vance had said tariff revenues.

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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

social media overcame a lot of coordination problems for stupid people with bad ideas and allowed them bypass gatekeepers who knew better. now they're viable constituencies that can actually hold elected officials to account. this may kill us all.

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mr. stupidbrain @mr-stupidbrain.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

In the economic populism analogy, this would be like talking to the anti-immigrant political operatives rather than the workers.

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mr. stupidbrain @mr-stupidbrain.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

There are of course real problems with our medical system, especially for women/queer people/etc. Important to validate and steer their concerns. But AOC is talking about MAHA *activists*, and I don’t believe you can do that by talking to the snake oil sellers themselves.

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mr. stupidbrain @mr-stupidbrain.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

I’m aware direct challenges are not effective against true believers (unfortunately I have family who have been victimized by this). But we are talking about ordinary people who are scared/vulnerable but not yet sucked in. It is important not to give MAHA activists a veneer of respectability to them

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mr. stupidbrain @mr-stupidbrain.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

In order to actually distance them from MAHA you have to directly point out that MAHA is a pseudomedicine grift that exploits vulnerable and desperate people. If you just validate concerns about the healthcare system without doing this you just continue to undermine trust in real medicine.

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Regime Accountant, CPA ☠️🎢 @regimecpa.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

No, we should not have an FHA for car loans, that's fucking insane.

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Regime Accountant, CPA ☠️🎢 @regimecpa.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Are you fucking kidding me?

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mr. stupidbrain @mr-stupidbrain.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

I think the first part is a norm/practice that makes sense in the right context face to face, but not online. Many bad practices online seem to stem from not realizing this distinction.

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mr. stupidbrain @mr-stupidbrain.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

imo pretty bleak how the concept of social murder has been adulterated to the point where people online use it as a justification for literal murder. Part of a recurring problem online where critiques of social structure get collapsed into critiques of particular agents.

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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 30/08/2026

the older I get the more I deeply understand and envy Bill Watterson and his total disgust with pretty much everything in our culture. I can only imagine how he’s feeling right now.

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mr. stupidbrain @mr-stupidbrain.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

“Developed class consciousness” is also complicated because the actual base of European socialist parties was never coterminous with the proletariat strictu sensu. It was always strongly sectional and primarily rooted among workers in manufacturing, manual labor, & resource extraction.

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mr. stupidbrain @mr-stupidbrain.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

True in broad strokes but more complicated in detail. E.g. by the mid-19th century rural polarization meant a considerable amount of the rural population was already landless (or effectively so) and dependent on wage labor. So what Marx is predicting is really their employment into industry.

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mr. stupidbrain @mr-stupidbrain.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

That said that later evolutions of this argument in which the third world is the real revolutionary subject because something something imperial labor aristocracy is best understood as cope to avoid the conclusion that the working class isn’t inherently or even tendentially revolutionary by nature.

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mr. stupidbrain @mr-stupidbrain.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

tbf he did at least consider the potential implications of a revolution in Russia in his letters to Vera Zasulich, albeit in conjunction with a revolution in the west. This was the basis for Trotsky’s argument about the feasibility of a revolution in Russia.

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mr. stupidbrain @mr-stupidbrain.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

It’s more like both Graeber and contemporary right-wingers are drawing from the same (bad) populist idea that middlemen are useless.

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mr. stupidbrain @mr-stupidbrain.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

In other words, European civil law is a variant of sharia with its own indigenous madhhab developed by Roman and later Renaissance ulama in the great madrassas west of the Elbe.

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mr. stupidbrain @mr-stupidbrain.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Maybe Roman private law was just divinely inspired?

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mr. stupidbrain @mr-stupidbrain.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

The hallmark of a true watch guy is to know it’s objectively stupid but liking it anyway, so I say go for it

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mr. stupidbrain @mr-stupidbrain.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

I mean yeah for basically any watch in this price range (and even higher) it’s almost always cheaper to throw out the movement and replace it than to actually service it. That said I would still probably go for quartz chrono at this price point just to avoid the hassle.

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mr. stupidbrain @mr-stupidbrain.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Automatic chronographs, especially cheaper ones, can have unreliable movements + Chinese movements can often be hard to find service/find parts for (although idk if that’s the case where you are).

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