iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Paul Matzko

ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 14/10/2026

boy Trump fucked the American auto industry. first he yanks their EV subsidies, leading them to slash production and write off tens of billions in investment, then he jacks up the price of oil by 50%, leading to skyrocketing EV demand going almost entirely to China bc GM et al left the market

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

A routine failure of local gov officials when facing NIMBY backlash is naively treating "listening" sessions as the manifest will of the people when they're actually an unrepresentative sliver of the most motivated residents. Solution? A survey or ballot question. mercerme.com/mercer-count...

mercerme.com

Mercer County Pauses Hopewell Township Roundabout Plans Indefinitely After Resident Opposition - MercerMe

Plans to replace two intersections along Pennington-Lawrenceville Road with roundabouts have been put on hold indefinitely after Hopewell Township

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

As Shakespeare put it, "Hell hath no fury like a partisan afraid of losing a seat." Or something like that.

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Reposted by Paul Matzko

Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com · 02/10/2026

as ever i'm struck by the doublethink of these people, who feel the need to dress up their mindless longing for heirarchy and exclusion in the language of liberalism--"high trust," material prosperity, blah blah blah it's a form of magical thinking: "if we do enough racism, good things will happen"

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

(It's also a reminder of why the EV subsidy was bad policy, a regressive payout to already wealthy consumers that paradoxically hurt the reputation of EVs down-market.)

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I believe the used car depreciation gap between EVs and ICEs is primarily a function of the artificially high sticker prices created by the old government incentive program. It's going to close rapidly over the next few years as unsubsidized EVs hit the used car market.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

It's amazing how much construction is happening on the east side of town. Towers going up all over.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

And while you're there, I recommend visiting the Vabamu Museums of Occupations and Freedom, which highlights just how far Estonia has come in just thirty-five years. vabamu.ee/en/visit-us/

vabamu.ee

Visit us - Vabamu

Vabamu Museum and the KGB Prison Cells tell the story of Estonian history and freedom through personal stories of ordinary people.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Estonia is a remarkable country with high social trust, high state capacity through e-governance, and a culture of openness to technological innovation paired with a determination to resist authoritarian creep.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

That McDonalds was the first to open in the nation shortly after Estonian independence from Soviet occupation in 1991. And what can sum up the spread of positive sum economic and cultural exchange better than a faux Irish pub burrowed into the earthworks of the old fortification?

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I call this photo of the old east gate in Tallinn, Estonia, "The Triumph of Liberalism." The gate is a ruin, no longer necessary for defense after modern liberalism erased the zero sum, violent competition of feudal town versus feudal town.

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Reposted by Paul Matzko

Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com · 27/09/2026

having just wrapped this up, my conclusion: dysfunctional institutions make for dysfunctional publics. the structure of the meiji constitution excluded the masses from governance; censorship, misinformation, and state ideology left them riled up but badly informed the result was... not great.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

This is a trend to watch. Yes, AI will contribute to the information overload problem by democratizing the ability to produce more information (& increasing net demand), but it will also help solve it by making it possible to sort, analyze, and tailor information flows in increasingly boutique ways.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

An aside here but a key feature of talk radio was that it was mostly impenetrable to deep analysis by researchers because of the sheer volume of time required to analyze the thousands of hours of output produced every week. But now, AI makes it feasible. www.wsj.com/politics/ele...

wsj.com

MAGA Podcasters Are Tuning Out Trump. We Tracked What They Are Talking About Now.

The Wall Street Journal analyzed nearly 70,000 hours of podcasts, using a new AI tool, to find out why conservative creators appear to be losing interest in the president.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Trump administration policy is driven by white supremacist accelerationists yearning for a race war, like Stephen Miller, so of course they're going to prioritize nativism over advancing the political interests of the GOP.

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Reposted by Paul Matzko

Puff the Magic Hater @mskellymhayes.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

The most generous assessment is that this was shitty, lazy engineering; the more in-character scenario is that the sandbox was intentionally breakable because of the story it would generate. Whichever you believe, the story is not "OMG, they made AGI!"

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

The quality and cost of food before and after security in the Indianapolis airport is a clear object lesson about the opportunity to capture rents by arbitraging regulatory boundaries.

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Reposted by Paul Matzko

Matt Henderson @matthen.com · 16/09/2026

Trying to forecast the future on a Galton board

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Reposted by Paul Matzko

Doll @dollspace.gay · 17/09/2026

The historically central alignment network persuasively resembles a sex-entangled millenarian patronage system, and that network has exercised wildly disproportionate influence over the field’s language, institutions and policy agenda.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Exhibit after exhibit at the EPIC museum -- well worth a visit next time you're there -- is about members of the Irish diaspora applying the ideals of freedom from oppression to the fight for freedom for subaltern people around the globe for the last 200 years.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

So many Irish musicians withdrawing from Ed Sheeran's tour over Kraft's ultimatum on Macklemore & Palestine isn't surprising after a visit to the Irish Emigration Museum in Dublin. The long history of persecution of the Irish people left a durable impact on their cultural memory & global awareness.

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 15/09/2026

No spillway. Six months ago anti-AI people were still responding "lol." If they can't respond lol they're going to mash RT on "killer robots threaten Manhattan" whether ot not it's plausible.

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Reposted by Paul Matzko

Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 14/09/2026

People of a rational temperament like compromises. So "why don't we all take this slower?" sounds like a super reasonable request. But the people making that request *have themselves the power* to go slower. The real point of the request is part II: "let's get the Trump admin to regulate others."

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

It's been notable how the so-called free speech absolutists who harped about the "censorship industrial complex" throughout the Biden years have been so very silent as Trump fired up a far more explicit censorship machine over the last two years.

nytimes.com

How Trump Is Wielding Power to Stifle Speech

President Trump has harnessed agencies across the government to curtail press freedoms, a sweeping campaign that free speech advocates say will have lasting effects.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Pay more attention to the engineers than to the alignment folks when it comes to making predictions about future AI capabilities, eg: gizmodo.com/ai-experts-s...

gizmodo.com

AI Experts Say We’re on the Wrong Path to Achieving Human-Like AI

An extensive report on the future of AI research indicated that there's skepticism about current approaches to AGI.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

AI doomer & boomer fetishists were prevalent among those paying attention pre-2022. Yet they aren't reliable indicators of the true prospects for AI. Still, they had the right resumes during the mass hiring wave for alignment teams. But now we pay too much attention to their breathless quit lit.

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Reposted by Paul Matzko

jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 07/09/2026

this enormous wealth is driving the ideological transformation as much as anything else. where once the defense of slavery was “we don’t know what else to do and besides we can’t let the blacks go free,” by the 1840s it is much closer to “slavery is the single greatest social system ever devised.”

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Reposted by Paul Matzko

tunes to make you run away @whippoorwont.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

"people are anthropomorphizing LLMs because they are so astonishingly good at processing human thought and language" people will anthropomorphize a chair if you put the stitches in the right place.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

America is the apotheosis of the old Roman republican ideal of the power of an army made up of citizen soldiers and tribunes that leave and return to the plow.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

And that's even accounting for the liability sleight of hand which Tesla's trying to pull by pushing it off onto owner-operators.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

If Cybercab was really a viable, scalable proposition, then ask yourself what commercial advantage it has over Turo to justify a 1000x+ valuation largely on the back of its promise of automated driving.

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Reposted by Paul Matzko

Walter Olson @walterolson.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

"The Trump Administration has been trying to attach 'viewpoint diversity' mandates to federal funding, especially for universities. This Article analyzes the parallels between these new proposals and a much older one: the Fairness Doctrine." [Eugene Volokh]

reason.com

“Viewpoint Diversity” Conditions as a New Fairness Doctrine

The article is here; the Abstract: The Trump Administration has been trying to attach "viewpoint diversity" mandates to federal funding,…

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Sure, I agree, and I suspect they'll be more boutique and high touch spaces in part because they'll be a kind of reservation for humans while the back one of the Internet 2.0 is bot focused.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

I suspect that the economic logic that caused the rise of platforms is going to disintegrate under a different set of incentives when the Internet evolved into its final form as an information ecosystem primarily serving AI agents.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Anybody actually watching the segregation academy games??

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Reposted by Paul Matzko

David H Feldman @dhfeldman.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

As a former (and sometimes current) trade economist, I had to smile when Odysseus says, "We lived in a world of palaces, trade, language, blind to its beauty, until we broke it." If I had had a drink in my hand I would have spit it out!

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Reposted by Paul Matzko

Louis @louisevans.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Me buying Baumol’s goods: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!! Me buying Baumol’s services: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

IP maximalists are the barbarians at the gate.

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Reposted by Paul Matzko

Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 28/07/2026

Stephen Miller said just the other day that all asylum claims are "fake." A couple deported from the U.S. to Guatemala were gagged, bound, and shot dead. Their 14-month old found crying next to their mother's body. People like Miller don't care though because this is the point: ethnic cleansing.

stlpr.org

Overland couple shot dead in Guatemala after local ICE stop led to deportations

The couple’s 14-month-old daughter was found crying beside her mother’s body in a sugarcane field last week, according to Guatemalan authorities and media.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

And the downstream political consequences of a fragile supply chain speak for themselves given what happens when bread runs short in the 1780s!

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

Another 'W' for market liberalism. Once wrote a paper about pre-Revolutionary France when internal trade networks were so dysfunctional that even minor supply shocks led to simultaneous starvation and glut in neighboring areas.

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Reposted by Paul Matzko

Gillian Brockell @gillianbrockell.com · 25/07/2026

Lemme tell you about the angel of history being blown backwards into the future: The shackles these people have been put in are Hiatt brand, same company founded in 1780 to mass produce shackles for slaver ships.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

I hate to be that guy, but they kinda did. I'm thinking of the bewildering number and variety of steam engines in the 1780s-1830s. It wasn't weekly, but every few months or years across multiple countries inventors announced new, specialized engines. It must've felt overwhelming at the time!

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Man ignores everyone in his life telling him to go to the doctor and opts for hibernating in a recliner instead. Really, this is the best you can find??

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

You think it would help the litigation strategy of anti-AI activists to pick test cases featuring some actually sympathetic folks who aren't the most gullible people you've ever heard of.

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