Steve Randy Waldman

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

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Last Notes

2026-05-22 00:54:47 UTC

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

2026-01-28 12:25:22 UTC

they hate us for our freedoms.
https://cdn.masto.host/zirkus/media_attachments/files/115/972/710/158/436/323/original/9d5ed4935fe1cbfb.jpeg

2025-12-16 02:25:43 UTC

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

2025-12-15 01:54:27 UTC

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

2025-10-29 14:54:43 UTC

if we think of Jeffrey Epstein as a kompromat op, isn't AI erotica served by centralized platforms likely to become Jeffrey Epstein blitzscaled?
i don't mean to draw a moral equivalence. no children are harmed indulging a weird fetish with Mistress GPT. but it'll become a blackmail treasure trove.

2025-10-16 23:34:51 UTC

i know we’re all supposed to hate the groups, but i say we start a group called “citizens united against citizens united”.

2025-09-28 08:58:48 UTC

why are they referred to as “scare quotes”? who is supposed to be scared?

2025-08-26 16:09:14 UTC

when will The State be reified as a chatbot you can talk to?

2025-08-26 01:21:10 UTC

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i think a lot of what contemporary platforms do ought to be public goods provided by the state. meetup.com would qualify. the basic criterion is network effects are created by and should be owned by the public. if the value of a thing comes from network effects, it should be public, either like the public internet (decentralized, participatory) or if that’s not practical managed in the public interest by the democratic state (if/when we have one of those).

2025-08-21 15:53:54 UTC

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you’re making me feel so old. Woolworth’s is still around in Mexico I think!

2025-07-08 11:31:28 UTC

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I don’t think there was a golden age, but it’s also not true all ages have been the same. This is a very different age than the late 20th Century I grew up in, in some ways better (more viewpoints get a wider hearing), but in important respects much worse (less conducive to using reason — with inevitable unfortunate biases but still — to converge upon a widely shared, pretty functional, consensus understanding of reality).

2025-06-19 13:13:23 UTC

suppose you cut medicaid, but create a “stabilization fund” to hold hospitals harmless, prevent rural hospitals from shuttering.
all you’ve done is created income for hospitals without requiring—or even allowing—them to actually do the work of helping those who would have been medicaid recipients.

2025-05-05 12:32:57 UTC

“french films” undermining our morals again.

2025-05-03 17:38:51 UTC

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i agree with all of this.
(i don't think eliminating single family zoning would go too far in getting a lot of multifamily built in affluent SFH neighborhoods. but the fact that we continue to build out and zone new SFH neighborhoods is SAF (stupid as fuck). and our collective habit of building this way drains the potential market for better ways of living in all the ways you describe.)

2025-05-03 15:25:02 UTC

i think housing policy should put its thumb on the scale for dense, multifamily, LARGE apartments.
great buildings are where families are raised, not post-college dorms for singles and young couples.

2025-05-01 12:39:31 UTC

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yes! Ricardo’s comparative advantage presumes balanced trade, but not necessarily bilaterally balanced. ( i’m explicit about that in this one https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2025/04/27/how-can-taxing-foreign-investors-balance-trade/index.html )

2025-05-01 01:50:36 UTC

[new draft post] Overall but not bilateral balance https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2025/04/30/overall-but-not-bilateral-balance/index.html

2025-04-30 02:01:43 UTC

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not working extra hard because of hate. falling into line, obeying the leader unconditionally, because of love of ones community in the face of an insidious enemy that existentially threatens it.
see https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/03/05/what-is-fascism/index.html

2025-04-30 01:56:11 UTC

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i certainly agree, but the counterclaim would be that sufficiently demonizing a minority outgroup unlocks a kind and quality of coordination (i think a horrible, ugly kind and quality) worth the cost in conflict and the sacrifice of potential collaborators.

2025-04-30 01:38:46 UTC

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just an idea!

2025-04-30 01:36:06 UTC

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you just treat every press organ that is not absolutely fawning of you as different faces of the same enemy, one blob emitting “fake news” whenever it is news you find unhelpful.

2025-04-30 01:32:59 UTC

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as steve jobs would say, stay tuned.

2025-04-30 01:29:15 UTC

maybe the answer is your faction should always loudly accuse the press as being and enemy and out to get you. it seems to work. they go every extra mile to prove they are evenhanded and unfairly maligned.

2025-04-29 14:01:13 UTC

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you might consider replacing them with your phone!

2025-04-29 13:59:45 UTC

our phones are trying to make themselves our spouses, completing our sentences for us when we are half way through them.

2025-04-28 12:57:37 UTC

andreeson used to chat widely, than he blocked anyone who might say anything he might find uncomfortable to hear. in retrospect that has proven consequential.

2025-04-16 17:11:38 UTC

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ha!

2025-04-16 17:08:14 UTC

2-squared / 4-squared / 5-squared

2025-04-16 14:27:08 UTC

“You cannot restrict unfreedom to a particular class of people. It will metastasize to consume the entire society.” [@jbouie](https://threads.net/@jbouie/ ) https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/opinion/trump-court-order-constitution.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare ht @npub1esh…ggsa

2025-04-10 05:19:00 UTC

you can just do things. stupid things.

2025-04-02 22:29:09 UTC

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but are you her boyfriend?

2025-04-02 22:11:42 UTC

my son: “i feel like apostrophes can sometimes be really possessive.”

2025-04-02 13:57:06 UTC

i love the smell of liberation in the morning.

2025-03-30 15:49:10 UTC

a firm is a human organization to accomplish something. recruiting and appeasing all stakeholders, generating cash flow sufficient to pay the bills, these are *constraints* a firm faces, not the goal or function or purpose of the firm.

2025-03-30 00:32:53 UTC

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USAID was much more than an ad campaign! it’d be kicking ass and saving lives in Myanmar and Thailand right now, saving lives as a matter of course throughout Africa. An ad campaign would be a weak tea kind of soft power move for a someday liberated America, and USAID was justified as a source of soft power, but USAID was so much more.

2025-03-29 23:56:42 UTC

we should form a group called the “real americans” and raise huge sums for ad campaigns throughout the free world apologizing for our country’s behavior under possession, thanking them for staying sane and free, praying we will soon rejoin them after a difficult exorcism.
https://bsky.app/profile/thomashansen.bsky.social/post/3lljncadhqs2y
ht #WilliamCullerneBown

2025-03-29 18:13:05 UTC

cc @npub144u…adjw https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/734089

2025-03-28 15:58:10 UTC

from @npub1edf…tqa5 https://resnikoff.beehiiv.com/p/living-with-a-murderer
https://cdn.masto.host/zirkus/media_attachments/files/114/240/878/201/064/565/original/9d4f8b7d759d7e4b.png

2025-03-28 00:32:56 UTC

i think much of the Republican coalition is tacitly sure they can do what they’ve persuaded themselves is called for, and the pointy-headed liberals who warn them of consequences will be wrong because God will reward and protect the USA they will have sanctified.

2025-03-26 22:47:56 UTC

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You may condemn that too, or you may consider it a justified response to Israel’s actions in Gaza. But these aren’t killings coming from one side out of nowhere. Whichever of the many linked parties you consider more or less culpable, they are all — the US, Houthis, Israelis, Hamas, etc — prosecuting murderous military actions. /fin

2025-03-26 22:46:03 UTC

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War is bad. But it is also not one-sided. I’m not inclined to give the current US administration, which I consider lawless and fascist, much benefit of the doubt. I think it likely this leadership are reckless with civilian life to the point of war crime. But these melees are in response to hostilities from the Houthis that have also resulted in deadly consequences. 1/

2025-03-26 22:26:53 UTC

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I don’t revel in the deaths of Russian soldiers either, though of course it’s legitimate for the Ukrainians to kill them. It would have been legitimate for the Houthis to kill these servicemembers too—this is war—but I am very glad that did not happen, despite the severe intelligence breach. War is tragedy upon tragedy upon tragedy. Mass death may eventually help exhaust support for war, but that doesn’t make it virtuous or desirable. There are better ways to peace.

2025-03-26 16:50:08 UTC

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( as more information comes out, the case that military planners were not in fact adhering to obligations to protect civilian life and proportionality grows stronger. after the fact, we may well conclude there were war crimes. but again, that's not something servicemembers executing these orders could have judged and refused. https://bsky.app/profile/eliothiggins.bsky.social/post/3llcabku2xk25 )

2025-03-26 13:10:45 UTC

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Orders to bomb targets carefully selected for military importance are not *prima facie* a war crime such that a servicemember could or should refuse such orders. Questions of proportionality might lead to accusations *ex post* of war crime, that risks or harms to civilians were beyond proportionate to legitimate military objectives, but that is beyond the duty or capacity of servicemembers to judge in real time. They had no basis to refuse these orders.

2025-03-26 12:28:17 UTC

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the servicemembers acting as ordered, on a mission that is not a war crime, are not the people responsible. their deaths are not to be sought or excused. in consequential terms, had incompetence led to their deaths, the probability of an escalation for all involved, leading to more civilian and noncivilian catastrophe, would be very high. it may already be high, but severe escalation (eg restarting full civil war) may also yet be avoided.

2025-03-26 03:34:21 UTC

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It would have been, yes.

2025-03-26 01:52:10 UTC

The war-plans thing is bad, but I think it's far less of a scandal than lawlessly decimating USAID, CFPB, NSF/NIH, etc.
It would have been a terrible tragedy if US servicemembers had been harmed due to their leaders' miserable opsec. But what those mfs have done to USAID alone will kill many more.

2025-03-25 14:36:45 UTC

Donald Trump has no mandate at all. The majority of people who voted in the 2024 election voted against him.
He won a plurality of the popular vote. He achieved not even the barest majority, which itself would not constitute any kind of a mandate.

2025-03-24 14:39:43 UTC

Excellent, from #MattBruenig, on “Abundance”. https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2025/03/24/the-abundance-agenda/ ht @npub1c2d…c2yj

2025-03-19 21:29:49 UTC

the way you reduce Federal interest outlays is you retire debt with wealth taxes.

2025-03-19 15:03:21 UTC

one thing i’d not have guessed is it’s the rich who’ve decided to burn it all down. recruiting the discontent and fanning the cynicism of the not so rich, sure. but the rich are in drivers’ seat of uprooting the foundations of their own extraordinary lives. great wealth turns people stupid.

2025-03-13 15:18:50 UTC

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you'd much rather be a surplus country than a deficit country in a time of growing trade barriers. the main benefit to deficit countries is they can learn to become more like surplus countries. /fin

2025-03-13 15:18:31 UTC

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further, surplus countries that produce high-value goods tend to have metacapacity — they know how to build competitive industries. deficit countries less so. 3/

2025-03-13 15:18:16 UTC

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obviously this is oversimplified, because the goods and services previously exported by surplus countries won't precisely match the goods and services domestic publics will want to buy. directed subsidies can help ameliorate this. 2/

2025-03-13 15:17:56 UTC

re: https://bsky.app/profile/rajakorman.bsky.social/post/3lkbdfilsfs27
persistent trade surplus countries just have to write a check to their own people, then deal with higher accounting deficits or tax the rich. any inflation is limited because, well, excess supply.
persistent deficit countries have to build industries they've forgotten or never known how to run. 1/
#economics

2025-03-12 03:11:58 UTC

ambitious sociopaths are drawn to MAGA. rule by unvarnished, unapologetic exercise of power is their highest ambition made real. there are plenty of ambitious sociopaths among democrats. you can see them. they feign disdain but they slip, pulled toward that bright light of ruthless control.

2025-03-11 21:55:25 UTC

"Overall, we find that gains associated with ideological moderation are relatively modest and likely secondary to turnout effects."
// a bit sad from a persuasionist perspective, but seems consistent with recent experience, e.g. relentlessly moderating Kamala Harris damned by turnout more than swing
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5172049

2025-03-06 23:21:20 UTC

“I think Trump is modeling himself to be our Caesar, ending the Republic and creating an Empire. He would be far better off, as would we all, if he modeled himself after Solon, the forgiver of debt.” https://econcrit.blogspot.com/2025/03/trumps-address-to-congress.html

2025-03-06 15:32:37 UTC

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i still build my world around RSS! (you can subscribe by mail if you want.)

2025-03-06 14:59:33 UTC

i think all social media posts should begin with a land acknowledgment that blogs were here first and sincere expressions of contrition for colonizing the place and destroying the culture.

2025-03-06 06:57:06 UTC

i’ve had my issues with ActBlue, but debilitating Democratic fundraising infrastructure would be an obvious “competitive authoritarian” play. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/us/politics/actblue-democrat-fundraising-resignations.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

2025-03-05 14:39:52 UTC

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you can be charitable and describe them as blinded by epistemological caution, or be more accurate and describe them as handmaidens for the ideology that conferred prestige upon their discipline.

2025-03-05 14:32:47 UTC

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only growth is not an answer to that critique. not in the least. it’s a non sequitur, a diversion.

2025-03-05 13:57:30 UTC

“economists” falsely presume a quantitative resource constraint rather than undesirable patterns of deployment and remuneration. under poor deployment and inequitable remuneration, greater public share can be welfare increasing, even when much must be spent on unconsumable war preparedness.

2025-03-04 15:11:56 UTC

Suppose that Congress resolved, by a simple majority, that Trump engaged in insurrection and is therefore ineligible for any office of the United States?
Such a resolution shouldn’t be necessary, under the Constitution’s plain language, but after Trump v Anderson, that would do it, right?

2025-03-03 18:17:53 UTC

it's remarkable the term gaslighting was invented prior to this administration.
cf @npub178m…w32e on Schroedinger's CFPB. https://prospect.org/economy/2025-03-03-cfpb-we-didnt-mean-stop-work-russell-vought/

2025-03-02 18:18:52 UTC

do you ever wonder what the kompromat is on Rubio?

2025-02-27 15:16:37 UTC

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the rest of us (well, looking in the mirror, the rest of you) are left with burdens of care and the economic cost of "accommodations". the weak and old should want to die for the greater good of the nation the young and strong would build and vigorously enjoy. /fin

2025-02-27 15:16:15 UTC

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the problem isn't that vaccines don't work or that they have side effects. the problem is that they do work, and interrupt a "natural" culling of the runts. 2/

2025-02-27 15:15:57 UTC

part of the fascist ethos is that the weak and disabled should die to render the larger community stronger and more beautiful. i think this explains some of Republicans' elite-level accommodation of anti-vax stuff. Republican elites know vaccines are safe and effective. 1/

2025-02-26 17:34:52 UTC

people think the “five questions” thing is about evaluating employees, or more cynically coming up with pretexts to fire them, but i think he’s trying to get government workers to generate data in order to train his AI.

2025-02-26 02:00:11 UTC

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(thanks for looking!)

2025-02-26 00:47:50 UTC

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i would appreciate any help. to my knowledge my domain has never been used for anything nsfw or sketchy. i did recently have some kind of breach of my notes server, maybe there was something not-great placed there? in any case, i’d like to understand and remedy this.

2025-02-25 18:39:24 UTC

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that's very strange! thanks for letting me know. it's up for me. can i ask whether are you trying https://drafts.interfluidity.com/ or https://www.interfluidity.com/ or are both unavailable? (only) if you are comfortable saying so, where are you physically located?

2025-02-24 16:36:33 UTC

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you are too good to.

2025-02-24 15:42:04 UTC

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i know you won’t.

2025-02-24 14:27:39 UTC

you can just do things. terrible things.

2025-02-23 04:46:34 UTC

can’t finance anybody’s primary from a prison cell.

2025-02-20 17:16:19 UTC

microsoft always astonishes me. it's allegedly an IT company. i renewed my Excel subscription yesterday, after i let it expire. today they write me — twice, same e-mail — "Your Microsoft 365 subscription has expired" asking me to renew.
it was queued yesterday or whatever. information technology.

2025-02-20 01:32:51 UTC

Suppose the President and Vice President and Speaker of the House were impeached and removed.
Under a somber President Chuck Grassley, there comes a change of leadership at DOJ, eager to restore rule of law, and to vigorously hold to account people who violated the law from positions of trust. 1/

2025-02-20 00:55:15 UTC

i find it a bit weird how little we hear from Kamala Harris or Joe Biden. Biden is old, i guess. but Harris could be at the rhetorical ramparts.
i think it would help. the quiet of the people we supposed our leaders is devastating.
thank you aoc, pritzker, bernie. more, more, more.

2025-02-19 14:18:56 UTC

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i think you are right this was not true of New Deal and Warren Court Democrats. but i think he is right that, overall, “liberals” as defined by the Democratic Party have backed away from this kind on courage in insisting on the preeminence of a normative beyond legalism.

2025-02-19 14:16:53 UTC

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i think he’s not drawing distinctions within the Democratic Party, but suggesting (accurately) that, in recent years, overall the party has defined the normative by past practice and legalistic intent, and sought to protect those “norms” from flamboyant and dangerous violations on the right. but sapped of their own calling out to deeper forms of legitimacy, its an ouroboros that eventually deprives itself of moral oxygen.

2025-02-19 13:40:10 UTC

“Law always points beyond itself, toward the principle of justice, and that principle means that law can always be called into question. When law claims to be fully self-sufficient, it betrays itself and becomes a tool of injustice”
Excellent and true by @npub1ls6…wsev https://itself.blog/2025/02/18/law-and-justice/

2025-02-18 05:15:38 UTC

what Musk has done i turn Twitter into 14chan.

2025-02-15 17:25:32 UTC

You've read your last free article.

2025-02-12 14:07:44 UTC

no one told us how entertaining the apocalypse could be.
or alternatively, the road to hell is paved with engaging content!

2025-02-11 19:50:40 UTC

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the voters can't perform the Congress is intended to perform. Congress exists because voters can't be expert on the mechanics and happenings of government. direct democracy, in that sense, can't be "smart". so we hire professionals to learn our interests and values, and then capably represent those in government.

2025-02-11 19:48:32 UTC

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says CBS. 47% says Pew. and polls are noisy, fidgety things, not meaningful endorsement.

2025-02-11 19:47:02 UTC

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close enough is not in fact a majority. 50.2% of those who came out did so to pull the lever for someone other than Donald Trump. most of the country never endorsed any of this. most voters, even, never endorsed any of this.

2025-02-11 13:55:20 UTC

on the anti-US-imperialist left (“tankies”), i wonder if part of Trump’s appeal, perhaps only semiconsciously, is that he’d be openly as bad as they were always sure the United States always was. they’d be proven right, and no more of what they perceived as hypocritical sanctimony.

2025-02-10 15:13:48 UTC

This point is so obvious is should fit in one post.
Elon Musk’s role is plainly illegal. The “advice and consent” clause of the Constitution is obviously intended to prevent a President from such powerful delegations of authority without explicit Congressional consent.

2025-02-09 18:55:47 UTC

do the never-Trump former neocons now agree that every billionaire is a policy failure?

2025-02-09 18:13:01 UTC

“voters are pleased to have a president who's taking some kind of decisive action and making sure we know he's taking decisive action.”
// that last part was Biden’s weak spot https://mstdn.social/@nomoremister/113975256174998286

2025-02-08 22:46:24 UTC

[new draft post] Might Elon Musk be personally liable? https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2025/02/08/might-elon-musk-be-personally-liable/index.html

2025-02-07 03:06:23 UTC

everyone should be in favor of a democratic people’s republic. seems obvious.
from https://xcancel.com/lexfridman/status/1887587308087427072
https://cdn.masto.host/zirkus/media_attachments/files/113/960/391/955/923/368/original/c7028fa268827ff7.jpeg

2025-02-07 02:56:02 UTC

we should have understood there’s no real moat around LLMs when Musk was able to stand up a near-frontier model so quickly. only the myth of Musk’s specialness allowed us to ignore homegrown evidence.

2025-02-03 21:42:05 UTC

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truly a pleasure! i think so well of you too, my dear interlocutor who is fine with people who worked with USAID in good faith getting tortured so Elon can play USAID files, thinks that would serve a larger, noble purpose.

2025-02-03 21:39:21 UTC

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if you say so. you are really a delightful person to share a discussion with.

2025-02-03 21:35:04 UTC

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i agree secrecy is overused and abused by the bureaucracy.
that doesn't mean secrecy never has a role, or that it's legit and not evil to undo it basically randomly.