AI: Practical Advice for the Worried

A Word On Thinking For Yourself

There are good reasons to worry about AI. This includes good reasons to worry about AI wiping out all value in the universe, or AI killing everyone, or other similar very bad outcomes.

There are also good reasons that AGI, or otherwise transformational AI, might not come to pass for a long time.

As I say in the Q&A section later, I do not consider imminent transformational AI inevitable in our lifetimes: Some combination of ‘we run out of training data and ways to improve the systems, and AI systems max out at not that much more powerful than current ones’ and ‘turns out there are regulatory and other barriers that prevent AI from impacting that much of life or the economy that much’ could mean that things during our lifetimes turn out to be not that strange. These are definitely world types my model says you should consider plausible.

There is also the highly disputed question of how likely it is that if we did create an AGI reasonably soon, it would wipe out all value in the universe. There are what I consider very good arguments that this is what happens unless we solve extremely difficult problems to prevent it, and that we are unlikely to solve those problems in time. Thus I believe this is very likely, although there are some (such as Eliezer Yudkowsky) who consider it more likely still.

That does not mean you should adapt my position, or anyone else’s position, or mostly use social cognition from those around you, on such questions, no matter what those methods would tell you. If this is something that is going to impact your major life decisions, or keep you up at night, you need to develop your own understanding and model, and decide for yourself what you predict. (...)

Overview

There is some probability that humanity will create transformational AI soon, for various definitions of soon. You can and should decide what you think that probability is, and conditional on that happening, your probability of various outcomes.

Many of these outcomes, both good and bad, will radically alter the payoffs of various life decisions you might make now. Some such changes are predictable. Others not.

None of this is new. We have long lived under the very real threat of potential nuclear annihilation. The employees of the RAND corporation, in charge of nuclear strategic planning, famously did not contribute to their retirement accounts because they did not expect to live long enough to need them. Given what we know now about the close calls of the cold war, and what they knew at the time, perhaps this was not so crazy a perspective.

Should this imminent small but very real risk radically change your actions? I think the answer here is a clear no, unless your actions are relevant to nuclear war risks, either personally or globally, in some way, in which case one can shut up and multiply.

This goes back far longer. For much longer than that, various religious folks have expected Judgment Day to arrive soon, often with a date attached. Often they made poor decisions in response to this, even given their beliefs.

There are some people that talk or feel this same way about climate change, as an impending inevitable extinction event for humanity.

Under such circumstances, I would center my position on a simple claim: Normal Life is Worth Living, even if you think P(doom) relatively soon is very high. (...)

More generally, in terms of helping: Burning yourself out, stressing yourself out, tying yourself up in existential angst all are not helpful. It would be better to keep yourself sane and healthy and financially intact, in case you are later offered leverage. Fighting the good fight, however doomed it might be, because it is a far, far better thing to do, is also a fine response, if you keep in mind how easy it is to end up not helping that fight. But do that while also living a normal life, even if that might seem indulgent. You will be more effective for it, especially over time. (...)

On to individual questions to flesh all this out.

Q&A

Q: Should I still save for retirement?
Short Answer: Yes.
Long Answer: Yes, to most (but not all) of the extent that this would otherwise be a concern and action of yours in the ‘normal’ world. It would be better to say ‘build up asset value over time’ than ‘save for retirement’ in my model. Building up assets gives you resources to influence the future on all scales, whether or not retirement is even involved. I wouldn’t get too attached to labels.

Remember that while it is not something one should do lightly, none of this is lightly, and you can raid retirement accounts with what in context is a modest penalty, in an extreme enough ‘endgame’ situation - it does not even take that many years for the expected value of the compounded tax advantages to exceed the withdraw penalty - the cost of emptying the account, should you need to do that, is only 10% of funds and about a week in the United States (plus now having to pay taxes on it). And that in some extreme future situations, having that cash would be highly valuable, none of which suggests now is the time to empty it, or to not build it up.

The case for saving money does not depend on expecting a future ‘normal’ world. Which is good, because even without AI the future world is likely to not be all that ‘normal.

Q: Should I take on a ton of debt intending to never have to pay it back?

Short Answer: No, except for a mortgage.

Long Answer: Mostly no, except for a mortgage. Save your powder. See my post On AI and Interest Rates for an extended treatment of this question - I feel that is a definitive answer to the supposed ‘gotcha’ question of why doomers don’t take on lots of debt. Taking on a bunch of debt is a limited resource, and good ways to do it are even more limited for most of us. Yes, where you get the opportunity it would be good to lock in long borrow periods at fixed rates if you think things are about to get super weird. But if your plan is ‘the market will realize what is happening and adjust the value of my debt in time for me to profit’ that does not seem, to me, like a good plan. Nor does borrowing now much change your actual constraints on where you run out of money.

Does borrowing money that you have to pay back in 2033 mean you have more money to spend? That depends. What is your intention if 2033 rolls around and the world hasn’t ended? Are you going to pay it back? If so then you need to prepare now to be able to do that. So you didn’t accomplish all that much.

You need very high confidence in High Weirdness Real Soon Now before you can expect to get net rewarded for putting your financial future on quicksand, where you are in real trouble if you get the timing wrong. You also need a good way to spend that money to change the outcome.

Yes, there is a level of confidence in both speed and magnitude, combined with a good way to spend, that would change that, and that I do not believe is warranted. One must notice that you need vastly less certainty than this to be shouting about these issues from the rooftops, or devoting your time to working on them.

Eliezer’s position, as per his most recent podcast is something like ‘AGI could come very soon, seems inevitable by 2050 barring civilizational collapse, and if it happens we almost certainly all die.’ Suppose you really actually believed that. It’s still not enough to do much with debt unless you have a great use of money - there’s still a lot of probability mass that the money is due back while you’re still alive, potentially right before it might matter.

Yes, also, this changes if you think you can actually change the outcome for the better by spending money now, money loses impact over time, so your discount factor should be high. That however does not seem to be the case that I see being made.

Q: Does buying a house make sense?

A: Maybe. It is an opportunity to borrow money at low interest rates with good tax treatment. It also potentially ties up capital and ties you down to a particular location, and is not as liquid as some other forms of capital. So ask yourself how psychologically hard it would be to undo that. In terms of whether it looks like a good investment in a world with useful but non-transformational AI, an AI could figure out how to more efficiently build housing, but would that cause more houses to be built?

Q: Does it make sense to start a business?

A: Yes, although not because of AI. It is good to start a business. Of course, if the business is going to involve AI, carefully consider whether you are making the situation worse.

Q: Does It Still Make Sense to Try and Have Kids?

Short Answer: Yes.

Long Answer: Yes. Kids are valuable and make the world and your own world better, even if the world then ends. I would much rather exist for a bit than never exist at all. Kids give you hope for the future and something to protect, get you to step up. They get others to take you more seriously. Kids teach you many things that help one think better about AI. You think they take away your free time, but there is a limit to how much creative work one can do in a day. This is what life is all about. Missing out on this is deeply sad. Don’t let it pass you by.

Is there a level of working directly on the problem, or being uniquely positioned to help with the problem, where I would consider changing this advice? Yes, there are a few names where I think this is not so clear, but I am thinking of a very small number of names right now, and yours is not one of them.

You can guess how I would answer most other similar questions. I do not agree with Buffy Summers that the hardest thing in this world is to live in it. I do think she knows better than any of us that not living in this world is not the way to save it.

Q: Should I talk to my kids about how there’s a substantial chance they won’t get to grow up?

A: I would not (and will not) hide this information from my kids, any more than I would hide the risk from nuclear war, but ‘you may not get to grow up’ is not a helpful thing to say to (or to emphasize to) kids. Talking to your kids about this (in the sense of ‘talk to your kids about drugs’) is only going to distress them to no purpose. While I don’t believe in hiding stuff from kids, I also don’t think this is something it is useful to hammer into them. Kids should still get to be and enjoy being kids. (...)

Q: Should I just try to have a good time while I can?

A: No, because my model says that this doesn’t work. It is empty. You can have fun for a day, a week, a month, perhaps a year, but after a while it rings hollow, feels empty, and your future will fill you with dread. Certainly it makes sense to shift this on the margin, get your key bucket list items in early, put a higher marginal priority on fun - even more so than you should have been doing anyway. But I don’t think my day-to-day life experience would improve for very long by taking this kind of path. Then again, each of us is different.

That all assumes you have ruled out attempting to improve our chances. Personally, even if I had to go down, I’d rather go down fighting. Insert rousing speech here.

Q: How Long Do We Have? What is the Timeline?

Short Answer: Unknown. Look at the arguments and evidence. Form your own opinion.

Long Answer: High uncertainty about when this will happen if it happens, whether or not one has high uncertainty about whether it happens at all within our lifetimes. Eliezer’s answer was that he would be very surprised if it didn’t happen by 2050, but that within that range little would surprise him and he has low confidence. Others have longer or shorter means and medians in their timelines. Mine are substantially longer and less confident than Eliezer’s. This is a question you must decide for yourself. The key is that there is uncertainty, so lots of difference scenarios matter.

by Zvi Mowshowitz, Don't Worry About the Vase |  Read more:

Image: via Linkedin Image Generator

Elizabeth Warren’s Plan for a Revived Democratic Party

This is a dangerous moment for America and for the world.

A global contest is escalating between democratic institutions governed by the rule of law and lawless dictators who seek to enrich themselves and their cronies.

Here at home, President Trump’s tariffs are driving up costs for families. Millions of Americans have lost their health insurance so that Republicans could fund tax breaks for rich people. ICE is sowing chaos and terror in our communities, resulting in the tragic killing of Renee Good in Minnesota. And Donald Trump’s view of the First Amendment is that he gets to say whatever he wants, AND he gets to use the power of government to silence, extort, bankrupt, or even prosecute anyone who criticizes him. Acting like the wannabe dictator he is, Trump is trying to push out the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and complete his corrupt takeover of America’s central bank – so it serves his interests, along with his billionaire friends. And he has invaded Venezuela to boost the profits of oil companies and announced that he will “run the country.”

None of this would be happening if Democrats hadn’t been wiped out in 2024. According to some self-described experts, Democrats lost power because we were too progressive. For a lot of powerful people—wealthy people from Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Washington—“too progressive” is code used to undermine any economic agenda that favors working people. They put it more politely, but those movers and shakers want the Democratic Party to respond to the 2024 losses by watering down our economic agenda and sucking up to the rich and powerful, claiming that a less progressive Democratic Party will win more elections.

They are wrong. Americans are stretched to the breaking point financially, and they will vote for candidates who name what is wrong and who credibly demonstrate that they will take on a rigged system in order to fix it. Revising our economic agenda to tiptoe around that conclusion might appeal to the wealthy, but it will not help Democrats build a bigger tent, and it definitely will not help Democrats win elections. A Democratic Party that worries more about offending big donors than delivering for working people is a party that is doomed to fail—in 2026, 2028, and beyond.

Let’s start with some basic math. By definition, the top 0.1% of the economic ladder doesn’t have a lot of votes. So when the question is raised whether Democrats should build our tent by sucking up to the rich, it’s sure not about attracting their votes. It’s about attracting their money.

There are, of course, extremely wealthy people who are also deeply public-minded. For some, it’s about living their values. For others, it’s recognition that massive economic instability is ultimately bad for business. Either way, these very wealthy people advocate for better health care and universal childcare. They embrace sensible regulations to stop corporate scammers. They press the government to raise taxes—including on themselves and their businesses. Over and over, they push for an economy that works for everyone.

But there is a different, and frankly much larger, group of extremely wealthy people trying to influence policy. This group might align with the Democrats on some social issues. They certainly are not MAGA Republicans. But they’re also not interested in changing an economic game that is already rigged in their favor. In exchange for their financial support, they insist that the Democratic Party turn its economic agenda in a direction that mostly benefits the wealthy and further undermines the economic stability of tens of millions of families all across this country.

These people push Democrats to embrace candidates who will slow-walk popular economic policies. They lobby for deregulation and special tax breaks that will pad their own bottom lines. They promote making big-time corporate lawyers federal judges. They pressure presidents to appoint tepid leaders at regulatory agencies—people who, once in office, seem positively allergic to enforcing the law when that might make life uncomfortable for big business interests.

In their effort to shape the Democratic agenda, the ultra-wealthy wield outsized power. And we all know why.

● Rich people can fund super PACs to prop up political campaigns for their chosen candidates.

● They can fund their own lobbying efforts.

● They can build or simply buy whole media empires in order to bend the news to their liking.

● And, as we’re seeing right now with AI and crypto, they can try to crush anyone who gets in the way of their business interests.

Over the past generation, the wealthy have avoided accountability time and again. Regular Americans must play by every rule or face real consequences. You don’t need to read every news article about Jeffrey Epstein and his good buddies like Larry Summers and Donald Trump to understand how consistently rich and powerful insiders protect each other, regardless of politics and regardless of how obscene the situation has become. The Epstein scandal is real and enormous, but the slew of white-collar pardons issued in recent months by President Trump reflects the same the-rules-only-apply-to-someone-else mentality that pervades Washington.

So how does this affect winning elections?

After the 2024 election, pundits sliced and diced demographic groups—across race, age, religion, and geography—to show how Democrats need to grow our coalition in order to win again. Yes, we need support from rural voters, men, and voters without a college degree. And yes, in 2025 we won back some of those folks, partly because Democratic candidates from every wing of the party ran against Trump’s betrayal of working people on affordability issues.

But in the long run, to build a strong Democratic party with a sturdy big tent, it is not enough to simply attack Trump. Democrats need to earn trust—long-term, durable trust—across the electorate. Trust that we actually understand what’s broken, and trust that we have the courage to fix it—even when that means taking on the wealthy and well-connected.

Democrats weren’t always just the default option when the other guys were worse. Once, we were trusted by working people to fight for their interests. And we delivered—even against tough Republican opposition. Social Security, strong unions, the 40-hour workweek, overtime, Medicare, Medicaid, homeownership for veterans and first-time homebuyers, the Affordable Care Act. Over and over, we showed that we could fight and we could deliver.

I understand the temptation—in this moment of national crisis—to sand down our edges to avoid offending anyone, especially the rich and powerful who might finance our candidates. But we can’t win unless we rebuild trust. And we can’t rebuild trust by excommunicating Biden administration law enforcers who, for the first time in decades, actually fought to hold corporations accountable for driving up prices. We can’t rebuild trust by calling up Elon Musk when he tussles with Trump and offering him whatever he wants if he’ll come back to our side and kick in a few nickels to our candidates. We can’t rebuild trust by staying silent about abuses of corporate power and tax fairness simply to avoid offending the delicate sensibilities of the already-rich and powerful.

I understand that, because of our broken campaign finance laws, Democrats need to raise a lot of money, and I don’t believe in unilateral disarmament against the Republicans. But money is not the only ingredient for a successful election. When Democrats water down their economic platform to appeal to wealthy donors, whether the transaction is explicit or subtle, we squander trust with working people and the money just isn’t worth it.

Yes, Democrats need a big tent. But there are two visions for what a big tent means. One vision says that we should shape our agenda and temper our rhetoric to flatter any fabulously rich person looking for a political party that will entrench their own economic interests. The other vision says we must acknowledge the economic failures of the current rigged system, aggressively challenge the status quo, and chart a clear path for big, structural change.

If we are going to pick up the broken pieces from the 2024 election and build a durable big tent, we must acknowledge a hard truth: The Democratic Party cannot pursue both visions at the same time. Either we politely nibble around the edges of change, or we throw ourselves into the fight. Either we carefully craft our policies to ensure that the rich keep right on getting richer, or we build a party that ferociously and unapologetically serves the needs of working people. Democrats have a choice to make—and the first step in rebuilding trust is to admit that we have to choose. (...)

So what does it mean to focus our agenda on an aggressive economic vision? At its core, the goal is simple and easy to measure.

● It means boosting pay and making life more affordable for working people.

● Building more affordable homes and cracking down on corporate landlords.

● Increasing the size of Social Security checks.

● Providing universal child care.

● Passing price gouging laws with real teeth.

● Guaranteeing the right to repair your own cars, machines, and business equipment.

● Strengthening unions.

● Building universal health care.

● Taxing the wealthy and giant corporations.

● Increasing the minimum wage.

I could go on and on—and in fact I have, with detailed plans and legislative proposals. We are not short on good ideas. (...)

I believe in markets and a market economy, and I have spent my entire career trying to make them work better so our economy works for everyone. I celebrate success. I don’t think billionaires are bad people just because they are billionaires. Or that corporations are evil because they pursue profit.

And let me say it again: There is a big difference between a billionaire who spends his fortune to advance the interests of working people and a billionaire who uses his money to entrench a rigged economy. Ideas are not better because they come from a rich person offering to open his wallet and advance his own financial interests—and our leaders should stop acting like they are.

by Elizabeth Warren, The Nation |  Read more:

Image: Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Families Over Billionaires
[ed. Big fan, and always have been. This is what a true populist looks like.]

ChatGPT Self Portrait

[ed. Do AI's have feelings?]

@gmltony: Go to your ChatGPT and send this prompt: “Create an image of how I treat you”. Share your image result.

via: Zvi Mowshowitz, (Don't Worry About the Vase)

[ed. Yikes. It does make one think a bit more about the question of AI rights and legal personhood. More at the link.]

Fever Dreams

[ed. Hard to keep up with all the stupid, outrageous, criminal and destructive things this guy has inflicted on the world in just over a year, but what's even more disgusting is that at least a third of the country and half of Congress still support him. You have to wonder what those enablers would consider a bridge too far. Probably nothing. Not even dementia. See also: Trump’s Politics Are Not America First. They’re Me First (excellent); What Restrains Trump Now? (NYT); January 20, 2026 (LfaA); and, The Billionaires Who Already Bought Greenland (UtD).] [Update: Confusing Greenland with Iceland (The Intercept).]

It's Not Normal

Samantha: This town has a weird smell that you're all probably used to…but I'm not.
Mrs Krabappel: It'll take you about six weeks, dear. 

-The Simpsons, "Bart's Friend Falls in Love," S3E23, May 7, 1992

We are living through weird times, and they've persisted for so long that you probably don't even notice it. But these times are not normal.

Now, I realize that this covers a lot of ground, and without detracting from all the other ways in which the world is weird and bad, I want to focus on one specific and pervasive and awful way in which this world is not normal, in part because this abnormality has a defined cause, a precise start date, and an obvious, actionable remedy.

6 years, 5 months and 22 days after Fox aired "Bart's Friend Falls in Love," Bill Clinton signed a new bill into law: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA).

Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, it's a felony to modify your own property in ways that the manufacturer disapproves of, even if your modifications accomplish some totally innocuous, legal, and socially beneficial goal. Not a little felony, either: DMCA 1201 provides for a five year sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense.

Back when the DMCA was being debated, its proponents insisted that their critics were overreacting. They pointed to the legal barriers to invoking DMCA 1201, and insisted that these new restrictions would only apply to a few marginal products in narrow ways that the average person would never even notice.

But that was obvious nonsense, obvious even in 1998, and far more obvious today, more than a quarter-century on. In order for a manufacturer to criminalize modifications to your own property, they have to satisfy two criteria: first, they must sell you a device with a computer in it; and second, they must design that computer with an "access control" that you have to work around in order to make a modification.

For example, say your toaster requires that you scan your bread before it will toast it, to make sure that you're only using a special, expensive kind of bread that kicks back a royalty to the manufacturer. If the embedded computer that does the scanning ships from the factory with a program that is supposed to prevent you from turning off the scanning step, then it is a felony to modify your toaster to work with "unauthorized bread":

If this sounds outlandish, then a) You definitely didn't walk the floor at CES last week, where there were a zillion "cooking robots" that required proprietary feedstock; and b) You haven't really thought hard about your iPhone (which will not allow you to install software of your choosing):

But back in 1998, computers – even the kind of low-powered computers that you'd embed in an appliance – were expensive and relatively rare. No longer! Today, manufacturers source powerful "System on a Chip" (SoC) processors at prices ranging from $0.25 to $8. These are full-fledged computers, easily capable of running an "access control" that satisfies DMCA 1201.

Likewise, in 1998, "access controls" (also called "DRM," "technical protection measures," etc) were a rarity in the field. That was because computer scientists broadly viewed these measures as useless. A determined adversary could always find a way around an access control, and they could package up that break as a software tool and costlessly, instantaneously distribute it over the internet to everyone in the world who wanted to do something that an access control impeded. Access controls were a stupid waste of engineering resources and a source of needless complexity and brittleness:

But – as critics pointed out in 1998 – chips were obviously going to get much cheaper, and if the US Congress made it a felony to bypass an access control, then every kind of manufacturer would be tempted to add some cheap SoCs to their products so they could add access controls and thereby felonize any uses of their products that cut into their profits. Basically, the DMCA offered manufacturers a bargain: add a dollar or two to the bill of materials for your product, and in return, the US government will imprison any competitors who offer your customers a "complementary good" that improves on it.

It's even worse than this: another thing that was obvious in 1998 was that once a manufacturer added a chip to a device, they would probably also figure out a way to connect it to the internet. Once that device is connected to the internet, the manufacturer can push software updates to it at will, which will be installed without user intervention. What's more, by using an access control in connection with that over-the-air update mechanism, the manufacturer can make it a felony to block its updates.

Which means that a manufacturer can sell you a device and then mandatorily update it at a later date to take away its functionality, and then sell that functionality back to you as a "subscription":

A thing that keeps happening:

And happening:

And happening:

In fact, it happens so often I've coined a term for it, "The Darth Vader MBA" (as in, "I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further"):

Here's what this all means: any manufacturer who devotes a small amount of engineering work and incurs a small hardware expense can extinguish private property rights altogether.

What do I mean by private property? Well, we can look to Blackstone's 1753 treatise:

The right of property; or that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.

You can't own your iPhone. If you take your iPhone to Apple and they tell you that it is beyond repair, you have to throw it away. If the repair your phone needs involves "parts pairing" (where a new part won't be recognized until an Apple technician "initializes" it through a DMCA-protected access control), then it's a felony to get that phone fixed somewhere else. If Apple tells you your phone is no longer supported because they've updated their OS, then it's a felony to wipe the phone and put a different OS on it (because installing a new OS involves bypassing an "access control" in the phone's bootloader). If Apple tells you that you can't have a piece of software – like ICE Block, an app that warns you if there are nearby ICE killers who might shoot you in the head through your windshield, which Apple has barred from its App Store on the grounds that ICE is a "protected class" – then you can't install it, because installing software that isn't delivered via the App Store involves bypassing an "access control" that checks software to ensure that it's authorized (just like the toaster with its unauthorized bread).

It's not just iPhones: versions of this play out in your medical implants (hearing aid, insulin pump, etc); appliances (stoves, fridges, washing machines); cars and ebikes; set-top boxes and game consoles; ebooks and streaming videos; small appliances (toothbrushes, TVs, speakers), and more.

Increasingly, things that you actually own are the exception, not the rule.

And this is not normal. The end of ownership represents an overturn of a foundation of modern civilization. The fact that the only "people" who can truly own something are the transhuman, immortal colony organisms we call "Limited Liability Corporations" is an absolutely surreal reversal of the normal order of things.

It's a reversal with deep implications: for one thing, it means that you can't protect yourself from raids on your private data or ready cash by adding privacy blockers to your device, which would make it impossible for airlines or ecommerce sites to guess about how rich/desperate you are before quoting you a "personalized price":

It also means you can't stop your device from leaking information about your movements, or even your conversations – Microsoft has announced that it will gather all of your private communications and ship them to its servers for use by "agentic AI": (...)

Microsoft has also confirmed that it provides US authorities with warrantless, secret access to your data:

This is deeply abnormal. Sure, greedy corporate control freaks weren't invented in the 21st century, but the laws that let those sociopaths put you in prison for failing to arrange your affairs to their benefit – and your own detriment – are.

But because computers got faster and cheaper over decades, the end of ownership has had an incremental rollout, and we've barely noticed that it's happened. Sure, we get irritated when our garage-door opener suddenly requires us to look at seven ads every time we use the app that makes it open or close:

But societally, we haven't connected that incident to this wider phenomenon. It stinks here, but we're all used to it.

It's not normal to buy a book and then not be able to lend it, sell it, or give it away. Lending, selling and giving away books is older than copyright. It's older than publishing. It's older than printing. It's older than paper. It is fucking weird (and also terrible) (obviously) that there's a new kind of very popular book that you can go to prison for lending, selling or giving away.

We're just a few cycles away from a pair of shoes that can figure out which shoelaces you're using, or a dishwasher that can block you from using third-party dishes:

It's not normal, and it has profound implications for our security, our privacy, and our society. It makes us easy pickings for corporate vampires who drain our wallets through the gadgets and tools we rely on. It makes us easy pickings for fascists and authoritarians who ally themselves with corporate vampires by promising them tax breaks in exchange for collusion in the destruction of a free society.

I know that these problems are more important than whether or not we think this is normal. But still. It. Is. Just. Not. Normal.

by Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Anything labeled 'smart' is usually suspect. What's particularly dangerous is if successive generations fall prey to what conservation biology calls shifting baseline syndrome (forgetting or never really missing something that's been lost, so we don't grieve or fight to restore it). For a deep dive into why everything keeps getting worse see Mr. Doctorow's new book: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025.]

Sony Goes for Peanuts

It wasn’t so long ago that purchases of American institutions by Japanese companies sparked outrage in the United States. When Mitsubishi bought the Rockefeller Center in 1989, a local auto dealership ran a TV spot that invited Americans to “imagine a few years from now. It’s December, and the whole family’s going to see the big Christmas tree at Hirohito Center… Enough already.” Sony’s purchase of Columbia Pictures that same year caused such unease that chairman Akio Morita felt the need to declare “this is not a Japanese invasion.” A Newsweek poll of the era revealed that 54% of Americans saw Japan as a bigger threat to America than the Soviet Union. Many exploited this fear of Japan for their own ends. Politicians grandstanded by smashing Japanese products and demanding investigations into purchases. Predictably, Donald Trump’s first public foray into politics was a jeremiad against Japan in a 1989 appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show.

Contrast this to yesterday, when Sony announced that it had paid nearly half a billion dollars for another American icon: Peanuts Holding LLC, the company that administers the rights to the Peanuts franchise. Talk about A Charlie Brown Christmas for shareholders! The reaction to this Japanese acquisition of a cultural institution? Crickets. This speaks to how dramatically the relationship between the US and Japan has changed. It also speaks to how dramatically Peanuts changed, how Peanuts changed Japan, and how that in turn changed all of us. But perhaps most of all, it illustrates (pun intended) how stories need products, and products need stories.

There are countless stories out there, and countless products. But crossing these streams — giving stories products in the form of merchandise, or products stories to make them more than just commodities, can supercharge both. It can create international empires. Peanuts is a perfect case in point.

When Charles Shultz’ Peanuts debuted in October of 1950, it was utterly unlike any cartoon Americans had seen in the funny pages. The very first strip’s punchline involved an adorable tyke declaring his hatred for Charlie Brown. Li’l Abner creator Al Capp described the cast as “good mean little bastards eager to hurt each other.” Matt Groening of The Simpsons fame recalled being “excited by the casual cruelty and offhand humiliations at the heart of the strip.” To Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury, it “vibrated with fifties alienation.”

A hint of darkness made Peanuts stick out in a crowded comics page. But it’s hard to square these comments with the Happiness Is a Warm Puppy-era Peanuts I remember from my childhood. By that time Schultz had sanded the rough edges off those “little bastards,” distilling them into cute and lovable archetypes. More to the point, he de-centered the kids to focus on Snoopy, who had morphed from his origins as a four-legged canine into a bipedal, anthropomorphic creature with a bulbous head and a penchant for tap-dancing and flying biplanes.

The vibe shift seems to date to 1966, when the animated It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown devoted roughly a quarter of its screen time to Snoopy’s solo flights of fancy. Schultz was already lauded for his short-form social satire: his characters had graced the cover of Time the year before. But he seems to have grasped that the way to riches would be only found by looking at the brighter side of life.

This new Peanuts, less mean, less casually cruel, less alienated, was arguably also less interesting. But there was no question that it was way, way more marketable. You might have identified with one or another of the human characters, with their all too human foibles, but anthropomorphic Snoopy was someone anyone and everyone could inhabit. Kids in particular. You didn’t even have to be American to get him.

This later, kinder, gentler incarnation of Peanuts, and Snoopy in particular, would charm Japanese audiences, thanks to the efforts of a serial entrepreneur named Shintaro Tsuji. He was a would-be poet turned wartime chemist, then a postwar black-market bootlegger of moonshine, and an inveterate hatcher of business schemes ranging from silks to produce to kitchenware. You are undoubtedly familiar with the most successful of his ventures. It is called Sanrio — the home of Hello Kitty.

Tsuji, long interested in American trends, played a key role in importing many of them to Japan. He forged a relationship with Hallmark to translate their greeting cards, and negotiated with Mattel for the rights to Barbie. He acquired the license to Peanuts in 1968, when his company, then known as the Yamanashi Silk Center, was at a low. Snoopy-branded merchandise proved so popular that it put his struggling company back in the black within a year. Snoopy wasn’t the first cute animal to hit big in Japan; Tsuji himself had scored a big hit in the mid-sixties with merchandise featuring Mii-tan, a cute cat designed by the artist Ado Mizumori. But Snoopy’s runaway success seems to have sparked an epiphany in Tsuji.

As he later put it, Japan was “a world in which ‘making money’ meant ‘making things.’ I desperately wanted to leapfrog the ‘things’—the ‘hardware’—and make a business out of the intellectual property—the ‘software.’ I suspect everyone around me thought I was nuts.”

He was nuts. Merchandising characters from hit stories was common sense, then as now. Many Japanese companies did that sort of thing. Creating hit characters without stories was fiendishly difficult, bordering on impossible. Stories breathe life into characters, bestowing them with an authenticity that standalone designs simply do not possess (or need to earn in other ways). Yet Tsuji would not be deterred. In 1971, he launched an in-house art department, staffing it with young women straight out of art school. In the wake of Peanuts’ continuing success, he gave the team a singular directive: “Draw cats and bears. If a dog hit this big, one of those two is sure to follow.”

Two years later, he renamed the Yamanashi Silk Center “Sanrio.” (There’s a whole story about how that came to be, which you can read in my book, if you’re so inclined.) The year after that, in 1974, one of Sanrio’s designers struck gold, in the form of an anthropomorphic cat with a bulbous head and a penchant for hugging: Hello Kitty. Soon, Kitty products were a full-blown fiiba (fever) in Japan. And this time, Tsuji didn’t have to split the proceeds with anyone, because Sanrio owned the character outright. Schultz needed decades of narrative to make stars of Peanuts’ menagerie of characters. Tsuji upended this process by making characters stars without any story at all.

Sanrio famously insists that Hello Kitty isn’t really a cat; she’s a little girl who happens to look like a cat. I take no particular stance on this globally divisive issue. But I think you can make the case that she wouldn’t exist at all, if it hadn’t been for the trail Schultz blazed with Peanuts, shifting away from social satire to make an anthropomorphic dog the star of the show. Tsuji’s genius was realizing that you could make a star without a show — provided you had the ability to print it on countless school supplies, kitchenware, and accessories. That was the trick up his sleeve. The medium is the message, as they say. In essence, Kitty products, ubiquitous to the point of absurdity, became her story.

by Matt Alt, Pure Invention |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: Super Galapagos (PI):]

***

Once the West feared Japan’s supposed technological superiority. Then came the schadenfreude over Japan’s supposed fall. Now a new generation is projecting upon the country an almost desperate longing for comfort. And is it any wonder? The meme centers on companies producing products that make the lives of consumers easier. That must feel like a dreamy fantasy to young folks who’ve only known life in an attention economy, where corporations are the consumers and they’re the products.

To them, Japan isn’t in the past or the future. It’s a very real place — a place where things haven’t gone haywire. This is Japan as a kind of Galapagos, but not in a pejorative sense. Rather, it’s a superlative, asking, a little plaintively: Why can’t we have nice things like this in our country?...

I agree that Japan is a kind of Galapagos, in the sense that it can be oblivious to global trends. But I disagree that this is a weakness. The reason being that nearly everything the planet loves from Japan was made for by Japanese, for Japanese in the first place.

Looking back, this has always been the case. Whether the woodblock prints that wowed the world in the 19th century, or the Walkmans and Nintendo Entertainment Systems that were must-haves in the Eighties, or the Pokémania that seized the planet at the turn of the Millenium, or the life-changing cleaning magic of the 2010s, or the anime blockbusters Japan keeps unleashing in the 2020s – they hit us in the feels, so we assumed that they were made just for us. But they weren’t.

Bills Move On

Sean McDermott has been fired as head coach of the Buffalo Bills, the team announced Monday.

The 51-year-old McDermott was hired in 2017 and led the Bills to five AFC East division titles and eight playoff appearances in nine seasons.

While McDermott will exit the franchise, general manager Brandon Beane got a promotion, and will now be President of Football Operations. He'll lead the search for a new coach.

"Sean has done an admiral [sic] job of leading our football team for the past 9 seasons," owner Terry Pegula said in a statement. "But I feel we are in need of a new structure within our leadership to give this organization the best opportunity to take our team to the next level."

by Sean Leahy, Yahoo Sports |  Read more:

Image: X

[ed. The NFL is becoming North Korea (produce quickly or be banished). I don't know anything about McDermott but that's not a bad record.]

Jeanne Amato, 'Morning Light'
via:

Time Passing

So here's the problem. If you don't believe in God or an afterlife; or if you believe that the existence of God or an afterlife are fundamentally unanswerable questions; or if you do believe in God or an afterlife but you accept that your belief is just that, a belief, something you believe rather than something you know -- if any of that is true for you, then death can be an appalling thing to think about. Not just frightening, not just painful. It can be paralyzing. The fact that your lifespan is an infinitesimally tiny fragment in the life of the universe, and that there is, at the very least, a strong possibility that when you die, you disappear completely and forever, and that in five hundred years nobody will remember you and in five billion years the Earth will be boiled into the sun: this can be a profound and defining truth about your existence that you reflexively repulse, that you flinch away from and refuse to accept or even think about, consistently pushing to the back of your mind whenever it sneaks up, for fear that if you allow it to sit in your mind even for a minute, it will swallow everything else. It can make everything you do, and everything anyone else does, seem meaningless, trivial to the point of absurdity. It can make you feel erased, wipe out joy, make your life seem like ashes in your hands. Those of us who are skeptics and doubters are sometimes dismissive of people who fervently hold beliefs they have no evidence for simply because they find them comforting -- but when you're in the grip of this sort of existential despair, it can be hard to feel like you have anything but that handful of ashes to offer them in exchange.

But here's the thing. I think it's possible to be an agnostic, or an atheist, or to have religious or spiritual beliefs that you don't have certainty about, and still feel okay about death. I think there are ways to look at death, ways to experience the death of other people and to contemplate our own, that allow us to feel the value of life without denying the finality of death. I can't make myself believe in things I don't actually believe -- Heaven, or reincarnation, or a greater divine plan for our lives -- simply because believing those things would make death easier to accept. And I don't think I have to, or that anyone has to. I think there are ways to think about death that are comforting, that give peace and solace, that allow our lives to have meaning and even give us more of that meaning -- and that have nothing whatsoever to do with any kind of God, or any kind of afterlife.

Here's the first thing. The first thing is time, and the fact that we live in it. Our existence and experience are dependent on the passing of time, and on change. No, not dependent -- dependent is too weak a word. Time and change are integral to who we are, the foundation of our consciousness, and its warp and weft as well. I can't imagine what it would mean to be conscious without passing through time and being aware of it. There may be some form of existence outside of time, some plane of being in which change and the passage of time is an illusion, but it certainly isn't ours.

And inherent in change is loss. The passing of time has loss and death woven into it: each new moment kills the moment before it, and its own death is implied in the moment that comes after. There is no way to exist in the world of change without accepting loss, if only the loss of a moment in time: the way the sky looks right now, the motion of the air, the number of birds in the tree outside your window, the temperature, the placement of your body, the position of the people in the street. It's inherent in the nature of having moments: you never get to have this exact one again.

And a good thing, too. Because all the things that give life joy and meaning -- music, conversation, eating, dancing, playing with children, reading, thinking, making love, all of it -- are based on time passing, and on change, and on the loss of an infinitude of moments passing through us and then behind us. Without loss and death, we don't get to have existence. We don't get to have Shakespeare, or sex, or five-spice chicken, without allowing their existence and our experience of them to come into being and then pass on. We don't get to listen to Louis Armstrong without letting the E-flat disappear and turn into a G. We don't get to watch "Groundhog Day" without letting each frame of it pass in front of us for a 24th of a second and then move on. We don't get to walk in the forest without passing by each tree and letting it fall behind us; we don't even get to stand still in the forest and gaze at one tree for hours without seeing the wind blow off a leaf, a bird break off a twig for its nest, the clouds moving behind it, each manifestation of the tree dying and a new one taking its place.

And we wouldn't want to have it if we could. The alternative would be time frozen, a single frame of the film, with nothing to precede it and nothing to come after. I don't think any of us would want that. And if we don't want that, if instead we want the world of change, the world of music and talking and sex and whatnot, then it is worth our while to accept, and even love, the loss and the death that make it possible.

Here's the second thing. Imagine, for a moment, stepping away from time, the way you'd step back from a physical place, to get a better perspective on it. Imagine being outside of time, looking at all of it as a whole -- history, the present, the future -- the way the astronauts stepped back from the Earth and saw it whole.

Keep that image in your mind. Like a timeline in a history class, but going infinitely forward and infinitely back. And now think of a life, a segment of that timeline, one that starts in, say, 1961, and ends in, say, 2037. Does that life go away when 2037 turns into 2038? Do the years 1961 through 2037 disappear from time simply because we move on from them and into a new time, any more than Chicago disappears when we leave it behind and go to California?

It does not. The time that you live in will always exist, even after you've passed out of it, just like Paris exists before you visit it, and continues to exist after you leave. And the fact that people in the 23rd century will probably never know you were alive... that doesn't make your life disappear, any more than Paris disappears if your cousin Ethel never sees it. Your segment on that timeline will always have been there. The fact of your death doesn't make the time that you were alive disappear.

And it doesn't make it meaningless. Yes, stepping back and contemplating all of time and space can be daunting, can make you feel tiny and trivial. And that perception isn't entirely inaccurate. It's true; the small slice of time that we have is no more important than the infinitude of time that came before we were born, or the infinitude that will follow after we die.

But it's no less important, either.

I don't know what happens when we die. I don't know if we come back in a different body, or if we get to hover over time and space and view it in all its glory and splendor, or if our souls dissolve into the world-soul the way our bodies dissolve into the ground, or if, as seems very likely, we simply disappear. I have no idea. And I don't know that it matters. What matters is that we get to be alive. We get to be conscious. We get to be connected with each other, and with the world, and we get to be aware of that connection and to spend a few years mucking about in its possibilities. We get to have a slice of time and space that's ours. As it happened, we got the slice that has Beatles records and Thai restaurants and AIDS and the Internet. People who came before us got the slice that had horse-drawn carriages and whist and dysentery, or the one that had stone huts and Viking invasions and pigs in the yard. And the people who come after us will get the slice that has, I don't know, flying cars and soybean pies and identity chips in their brains. But our slice is no less important because it comes when it does, and it's no less important because we'll leave it someday. The fact that time will continue after we die does not negate the time that we were alive. We are alive now, and nothing can erase that.

Greta Christina, Greta's Blog |  Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Repost from, actually quite a while ago (folks should really check out the archive). Something reminded me of this essay today, and I'm glad it did, because it's a favorite. Unfortunately, I think the link is dead (as we all shall soon be... haha), but it's all here.]

The Boring Reason We Don't Have $7 Rideshares

New York, Baltimore, and DC have a rideshare app called Empower that charges 20-40% less than Uber. Drivers like it too because they keep 100% of the fare. Drivers pay a monthly fee instead.

The most common fare I’ve paid on Empower over the last six months is $7.65.

For a recent trip from downtown to the airport, Uber wanted $32. Empower wanted $17.25.

I use it constantly, and so do a lot of car-less people I know. That price difference is a pretty big deal!

For many, it can be the difference between getting to the clinic or skipping an appointment. Between getting a ride after a night shift or walking home alone after buses stop running.

DC is trying to shut Empower down, primarily over liability insurance. DC law requires $1 million in coverage per ride.

The $1 million requirement isn’t sized to typical accidents. When $100,000 is the limit available for an insurance claim, 96% of personal auto claims settle below $100,000.

The high ceiling shifts incentives: plaintiffs' attorneys have reason to pursue cases they'd otherwise drop and push for larger settlements. Fraud rings have emerged to exploit these policies. The American Transit Insurance Company, which focuses on NY rideshare insurance, estimates 60-70 percent of its claims are fraudulent. Uber recently filed racketeering lawsuits against networks of law firms and clinics allegedly staging fake accidents in New York, Florida, and California.

That $1 million requirement traces back to Uber’s early days. When the company was fighting for legality across America, taxi commissions called ridesharing dangerous. To win over skeptical politicians, Uber proposed $1 million in coverage, matching limousine services and interstate charter bus companies, not taxis. It became the national template. Had Uber aimed to match taxi limits, the mandates would be $100,000 to $300,000.

Now Uber is advocating to lower the $1 million mandates. The company (and its drivers) complain that insurance is around 30% of fares, particularly in states like California, New Jersey, and New York which also require additional $1 million uninsured motorist coverage and/or no-fault insurance. Even in DC, with very strong anti-fraud protections, the base $1 million requirement makes up about 5% of every fare—roughly a quarter of Empower’s advertised price advantage. (...)

Empower shows people want options. The app doesn’t let you schedule rides in advance, store multiple cards, or earn airline miles. Drivers don’t always turn off their music. Empower’s not trying to target the same audience as Uber. But the New York Times estimates Empower handles 10% of DC’s ride share market. People are comfortable with the rideshare industry’s scrappy options.

I think the core question is: now that society has accepted rideshare, should we revisit the rules that helped us get there?

Coverage of the potential shutdown rarely focuses on who stands to lose most: price-sensitive riders. Most coverage focuses on Empower’s lack of commercial insurance without explaining that the mandate is three to ten times higher than what taxis carry. Few explore whether or how Empower’s model actually differs: drivers can set their own prices. Drivers fund the platform through monthly fees rather than a cut of each fare. Drivers who get commercial insurance can also use it for private clients.

People now trust and rely on this mode of transportation. Ridesharing has become pseudo-infrastructure for car-less Americans and a tool against drunk driving. In areas of Houston where rideshare first rolled out, drunk driving incidents appear to have dropped 38%.

We should want rideshare to remain affordable, especially as we build the excellent public transit we need.

by Abi Olivera, Positive Sum |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Learn something new every day. I'll certainly look into this new company. The pricing of Uber is getting crazy (I've never used Lyft). Unfortunately, expansion won't be easy. As noted: High mandates also act as a moat. In DC, becoming a licensed rideshare company requires a $5,000 application fee, a $250,000 security fee, and infrastructure for that $1 million coverage. You have to be well-capitalized before you serve your first rider. This is likely why we see few bare-bones apps or local competitors to turn to when Lyft and Uber are surging.]

So You Want to Abolish Property Taxes

A lot of people in the Republican party have been talking about abolishing property taxes lately. This is a bad idea with unintended consequences, and they shouldn’t do it.

Doing so would undermine economic growth and housing affordability gains certain red states have recently seen. Worse, we’ve already run this experiment and know where it leads: a California-style de-growth death spiral that slams the door in the faces of young working families.

I begin by explaining why property tax elimination is a bad idea:

1. States will never actually do it

2. The alternatives are worse

3. Blue state experiences serve as a warning

Then, I conclude by showing how to pragmatically reform property taxes in a way that delivers both meaningful tax relief and the sustainable pro-growth, pro-family, results craved by red and blue states alike.

1. States will never actually do it

The first reason eliminating property taxes is bad is that local politicians don’t have the guts to actually pull the trigger. As soon as it’s time for implementation, intra-party fighting overwhelms the legislative process, causing lawmakers to throw up their hands, slap on a band-aid, declare victory, and go home.

Why you can’t eliminate property taxes

In my home state of Texas, Republicans have tried and failed twice in back-to-back legislative sessions to eliminate property taxes. This is despite the fact that Texas has been under complete Republican domination for over twenty years.

First, it’s just too expensive. In 2024, the legislative budget board found that replacing property taxes would cost $81.5 billion dollars, more than the annual state budget of $72 billion. Read here:

“This is not something that you can find $81 billion on a per-year basis and not have a major impact on the remaining sales tax rates, because that is a huge amount of money to be able to replicate,” said state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican and [Lt. Governor Dan] Patrick’s chief lieutenant on property taxes.

Second, replacing all property taxes with sales taxes would require raising the sales tax rate to over 19%, according to the Texas Taxpayers and Research Association. Just in case state leaders don’t think prices on everyday goods have risen high enough yet, they should note that inflation is the number one most important issue1 among Republicans. [...]

Property taxes are less hated than you think

At least according to recent polling, the #1 most hated tax is not the property tax, but the Federal Income tax: [...]

Note the change in the last two decades: a net 20 percentage point swing in most-hated status between property tax and federal income tax. The large drop in housing affordability over that time period has surely contributed towards that change in sentiment...

Also, if property taxes are so desperately hated, why do states keep voting to keep them in place?

Every single state has some form of state or local property tax. Meanwhile, over a quarter of states opt out of at least one of sales, corporate, or income taxes.

In short, while it is often claimed that property taxes are the least popular tax by stated preferences, if we look at revealed preferences, they could actually be the most popular local tax. Perhaps this is why every time a red state tries to abolish property taxes, strident opposition crops up from unexpected places: [video]

But maybe you don’t care. In that case, pick an alternative.

2. The Alternatives are worse

An OECD report ranks different taxes by which are the most harmful to growth:

1. Corporate taxes (worst)

2. Personal income taxes

3. Consumption/sales taxes

4. Property taxes (best)

Overly high corporate taxes cause investment to flow to other states instead, and sufficiently high income taxes are a commonly cited driver of outmigration from blue states to red states. Modest sales taxes are the least distortionary of the three, but they’re still worse for growth overall than a well run property tax.

In conservative states like Texas, raising income and corporate taxes is already dead in the water (if not explicitly banned in the state constitution), which just leaves sales taxes. Since people say they hate property taxes more, shouldn’t we just bite the bullet and go all in on sales taxes?

The problem with this line of thinking is that the polling is based on sales taxes at current rates. The highest sales taxes in the nation cap out at 10%—rates as high as 19% are completely unprecedented. Even worse, the Texas Taxpayers and Research Association found that at those levels you start triggering tax avoidance, so you will inevitably have to raise the rate even higher to compensate, pushing it well past 20%.

We don’t even need to argue about whether this is popular or not because this exact proposal has been proposed twice already in Texas and it’s failed twice. Texans do not want to replace all property taxes with 20% state-imposed inflation on goods and services.

Ironically, reducing property taxes might actually be hardest in red states like Texas, precisely because the state is so anti-tax that there just aren’t many alternatives left. It’s no surprise then that the most famous instances of states that have “succeeded” in undermining property taxes are blue states.

The results have not been good.

3. Blue state experiences serve as a warning

Don’t California my Texas

One anti-property tax measure is not to lower tax rates so much as to completely undermine the entire system of property valuation itself, and there is no example more infamous than California’s Proposition 13. This 70’s-era reform fell far short of abolishing the property tax, settling for simply unleashing one of the most wildly unequal and unfair taxation schemes in the nation instead.

Prop 13 works like this:

• Assessed values are frozen at their 1976 valuations

• The tax rate is limited to 1%

• Increases in assessed values are limited to 2% a year

• New reassessments are allowed only for new construction or when property changes hands

Various propositions in the following decades added yet another privilege: a property’s Prop 13 status may be passed on to children and grandchildren, thereby literally establishing a class of hereditary landed gentry.

The results have been an absolute disaster for both housing affordability and any semblance of basic fairness. Side-by-side houses have wildly unequal property assessments (source):

Again, complete property tax elimination never actually arrives. What arrives instead is special treatment for one class at the expense of everyone else in the state. But that’s not all; on top of the much higher property tax burdens young working families face for the audacious crime of moving in last year, the state has extra treats in store (source):

The state’s top marginal individual income tax rate of 13.3 percent is compounded by a 1.1 percent newly uncapped payroll tax, bringing the all-in top rate to 14.4 percent. Additionally, nonresidents must file income taxes if they work even a single day in the state, and California is one of only four states to still impose an alternative minimum tax.

Don’t forget that California also has among the highest corporate taxes in the nation as well, just in case you were thinking of starting a business, or investing in one.

Honestly, the fact that it’s taken this long for California to start to bleed population really shows you what an incredible natural advantage California has long held over every other location in the United States. Even though the game has always been California’s to lose, if you spend multiple decades repeatedly punching yourself in the face, the crown eventually slips from your head.

NOTE: as much fun as it is to get high huffing California schadenfreude, Republicans would do well to remember that Prop 13 was pushed for in large part by members of their own party.

Unfortunately, California isn’t the only blue state with gorgeous weather and Edenic geography that’s been steadily sending its children into exile.

Aloha ‘Oe

The state with the lowest property taxes in the nation, at an effective tax rate of 0.27%, is Hawaii. Incidentally, Hawaii has the second highest top income tax rate at 11%. It also has the third highest net domestic outmigration rate of all US states between 2020-2024.

Even worse, the overall population “natural change” (births minus deaths) is steadily shrinking:

What’s not shrinking is the size of billionaire landholdings. Just 37 billionaires own more than 218,000 acres of Hawaii, roughly 5.3% of all land in the state, a figure equal to 11.1% of all privately held land.

Just one of those billionaires owns more than 1.27% of the entire state—Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, who owns 98% of the entire island of Lānaʻi.

Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan have seen their landholdings in Kaua’i more than triple, from 700+ acres in 2014 to over 2,300 acres today over the last ten years. Oprah Winfrey now owns over 1,000 acres on Maui after a recent purchase, the same island on which Jeff Bezos owns 14 acres. But what Jeff lacks in quantity, he makes up for in quality: he paid $78M for his land in La Perouse Bay, a full $13M more than Zuck paid for his 1,000-acre Kawai’i purchase in 2025.

As a quick aside, this underscores another problem with rock-bottom property taxes: it turns real estate into the perfect speculative financial asset in which to park money. When so little cost to hold it, real estate becomes an attractive passive investment, and over time tends to take up an ever-increasing share of bank loans, as expertly illustrated in the paper The Great Mortgaging, by Jordà, Schularick, and Taylor. This has a double-whammy effect on the economy: real estate sucks up all the loans, bidding up its price, while leaving all other sectors (like actually providing productive jobs) with less investment...

Making real estate the perfect speculative asset for the ultra-rich is never a good idea, but Hawaii faces other problems too: the top reasons cited for leaving the state include high cost of living, limited economic opportunities, housing challenges, quality of life concerns, and education. That last one is exacerbated by chronically underfunded public schools.

Hawaii’s high income taxes and low property taxes have done little to curb the island state’s steady transformation into a paradise for the rich, but a port of exile for the young working families its future depends on.

Five thousand miles away, on the cold and distant far shore of the mainland, another blue state grapples with a similar challenge. [ed. hint: New York]:

In any case, whether it’s Texas, Florida, Hawaii, California, New York, or any of the other forty-five of these great United States, there’s a solution out there that meets everybody’s needs.

It delivers meaningful property tax relief to the median homeowner, without excluding renters and businesses or pitting seniors against young working families, all while driving overall economic efficiency and setting the state up for a pro-growth flywheel that keeps the budget balanced and taxes competitive.

That policy is Universal Building Exemption.

3. Universal Building Exemption is better

There is a problem with property taxes: it’s a good tax combined with a bad tax. The bad part of the tax is the portion of the tax that falls on buildings and improvements. We’re in a housing crisis, so why are we taxing houses? We’re in an age of rising unemployment, so why are we taxing workplaces? We want more construction, not less.

A universal building exemption fixes this by shifting the tax off of buildings and onto the unimproved value of land. Crucially, it’s revenue-neutral: it raises the same amount of property tax dollars as before, so it doesn’t break the budget.

Here’s why it’s the solution to the property tax debate:

Economists and key conservative thinkers support it

1. It balances the budget

2. It’s pro-growth and pro-natal

3. It’s better than the homestead exemption

4. It’s politically viable 

[specific details...]

Okay, but am I just talking my own book here, coming up with a tax shift that will just personally benefit me, a middle class Texas homeowner and father of three?

No, because the beauty of universal building exemption is that the biggest losers are the ones holding the most valuable downtown urban land out of use, and the chief beneficiaries are everybody else.

Who are the losers? The big losers are surface parking lots and vacant land, particularly those situated downtown next to skyscrapers. This shifts the tax burden off of locations people actually live in, to massively valuable locations where nobody lives.

This isn’t just a handout to homeowners, developers, and landlords, either—it’s a carrot and a stick. The carrot of building exemption rewards everybody who actually contributes more of what contributes to growth in our society—namely, homes, neighborhoods, and jobs—a category which includes the best kinds of property managers and builders. The stick of a higher effective tax rate on land pokes everyone in the butt who is sitting on the most valuable locations—which includes the worst kinds of slumlords and land-banking “developers”— to either build something already, or sell it to someone who will.

Lars Doucet, Progress and Poverty |  Read more:

Images: uncredited/Gallup/James Medlock

[ed. Agree 100%. There should be some kind of penalty for developers holding dead land and letting it appreciate through scarcity and the sacrifice of their more productive neighbors. Also, the California Prop 13 issue is insane. Didn't know that's how it all played out. For a new way of taxing property (and easing the tax burden on productive businesses), see this video (and transcript) of LVT (land value taxes) that encourage more building and less vacant land speculation here.]

Matsuyama Miyabi, 'Self-Portrait: Pt. 12 The Wave', 2023.
via:

Yoshikazu Tanaka
via:

I Think My Boyfriend is Quiet Quitting Our Relationship

Dear Wanda and Wayne,

I think my boyfriend is breaking up with me without actually breaking up with me, and it’s slowly wrecking me. We’ve been together a little over two years. Nothing explosive happened. No cheating, no big fight, no obvious reason for this to be ending except that, slowly, it feels like it is.

Over the past few months he stopped initiating plans. Conversations are short and surface-level. Anything emotional or future-related gets dodged with “I’m just tired” or “I don’t want to overthink things.” The warmth faded, replaced by politeness and distance. We still see each other often, but it feels like he’s going through the motions and it’s something he has to do instead of wants to do.

He hasn’t disappeared. He texts back. He shows up. He says he cares about me. But he doesn’t ask questions anymore. He doesn’t share what’s going on in his head. He doesn’t talk about us unless I bring it up — and when I do, I get vague reassurance that somehow leaves me feeling more alone. He says he’s not going anywhere but emotionally, it feels like he already has.

I’ve tried to address it directly. I’ve asked if he’s unhappy, if he needs space, if something has changed. He insists nothing is “wrong,” just that life is stressful and he’s figuring things out. I want to believe him, but the silence feels intentional and I don’t know what he’s trying to figure out. And I’m trapped in between: not single, not secure, constantly analyzing effort, tone and energy. I don’t want to force someone to choose me, but I also don’t want to slowly disappear from a relationship that still exists and has a future as far as I’m concerned.

So what do you do when someone won’t leave, won’t commit and won’t talk honestly about what’s happening? Is this avoidance disguised as kindness or ambivalence? Is he just phoning it in now? Is he in a real funk? And how long is too long to wait for someone who hasn’t officially gone but seems like he isn’t staying?

Wanda says:

We’ve heard about people quiet quitting their jobs. It could be that your boyfriend is quietly quitting your relationship. First off, women’s tuition is a real thing: Trust it. You know this guy pretty well after two years of dating. You know what’s normal and you know what’s off, and your spidey senses are tingling because something is for sure off. Indeed, it could be that he’s grappling with a truth too many of us have had to face down: While relationships are hard, breakups can be even harder, and it’s really hard to break the heart and hopes of someone who’s a great person and hasn’t done anything wrong.

But say that isn’t it. Maybe he loves you just fine, and he’s perfectly happy with your relationship, and the source of his malaise and discontent isn’t the relationship, or you: It’s him. Yes, it’s incredibly cliché to say “It’s not you, it’s me.” It’s also sometimes true.

The turning of the calendar into a new year is a time for great introspection, taking stock of our lives, our health and wellness, our earnings and shortcomings, our goals and shortfalls, and for some, it’s a tough time of year. On top of that, it’s the middle of winter, and I think the average person would agree that times overall are a bit unsettling — certainly not calming or peaceful, can we agree?

So while it’s possible he’s doing a passive slow-motion retreat from your two-year relationship, it’s also possible that he’s actually just in a funk and doesn’t have the energy to give. The only way to know is to dig in with deep conversation. You said you “don’t know what he’s trying to figure out.” Why don’t you know? Ask him! Ask him and tell him that it’s important he be honest with you because you’re starting to absorb and internalize his anxieties and it’s affecting you and your relationship. That puts the ball in his court.

Wayne says:

So he hasn’t disappeared, but it feels like he’s packing his bags while dragging his emotional baggage around whenever you’re together. That’s not pleasant, not sustainable and certainly not fertile ground for a healthy relationship or a comfortable space to coexist, let alone communicate.

Whether this is avoidance or ambivalence, burned out or bummed out, the real issue is that he doesn’t grasp how deeply this is also affecting you. Someone who won’t engage emotionally, explain what they’re processing — or even admit that they don’t know what’s wrong — and won’t offer meaningful reassurance is effectively dumping their anxiety, stress and uncertainty onto their partner. That’s not cool, and it’s not fair.

by Wayne and Wanda, ADN |  Read more:
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