That's the first time I've seen the name Kahneman mentioned without Tversky.

Well now I feel bad.

Tversky got screwed out of the Nobel too. He died too soon.

The Nobel people have set up a very perverse incentive structure.

Tontinesque even.

That's why scientists were so good about masking during covid.

I guess I didn't notice that covid-related grief, anxiety, or whatever was something I was experiencing until it let up enough for me to remember the before times. I wasn't really lonely and no one I was really close to got sick, so I didn't think it affected me at all beyond the obvious differences in grocery shopping.

I'm ten days in to a shitty cold: feel sorry for me!

I think the unjustified but relentless pounding on Biden from the media is a bigger part of it than covid.

They don't like him, that's true.

I'm sure the pandemic trauma is part of what's going on, but in general, I feel like I have very little idea what other American voters think, know, believe, or care about. There's not much political center, there's a wider and more fragmented media landscape than in the past (this increases every year, from what I can tell), there is a lot of de facto isolation for a lot of people. The sense of generalized complacent, irritable chaos is pretty unsettling.

I also worry that after two decades or so of social media and especially short-form video, people's mnemonic capabilities are broadly trashed. I have no evidence, nor do I know what you would even measure. It's just a fear.

I can't personally identify with the Atlantic piece in any way, and I am dubious about the application of this bit of psychological wisdom to a social phenomenon.

Admittedly, I came through the pandemic largely unscathed. I didn't lose anyone, and I think my kids were less damaged by it than others in their age cohort.

But I think there is an accurate sense in the US that our social consensus has fallen apart. We live in a country where, for example, a major public figure advocated the internal use of disinfectant to fight a disease. He and his numerous followers correctly feel they were mocked and shamed for this; on the other hand, many people are appalled that he was not laughed out of public life.

People feel that their deepest intuitions about the world's moral order are being called into question. They -- we -- are right about that, and it's disturbing.

I'd take the Atlantic piece more seriously if the authors had tried to account for the actual data -- particularly the discrepancies between people's views of their own situation vs. their view of the country, and the differences in the outlooks of Democrats and Republicans. Krugman and others have thought this through with considerably more discipline.

They just have feels there.

7.2: Agree. Especially on inflation.

Also, covid-related or not, there is a longing for "simple" solutions among many.

Why "simple" redounds to Trump left as an exercise to the reader.

You see this less now, but one of the most consistent things about the ideas to deal with the post-covid worker shortage is that, without saying it in so many words, they all either lowered compensation or worsened working conditions or both. The simple idea is that whatever happened, someone else should pay for it.

What's simple is tuning out all the details and instead paying attention only to the entertaining aspects of government. Problems seem difficult, but Marjorie Taylor Greene has the solution! Watch what she does next!

I feel like the media was very hard on Clinton through his scandals, and the public only got more positive on him.

You're saying Biden should find an intern willing to blow him?

10: I read a link to a lefty economist on twitter who said that despite increased wages at the bottom, the picture is not rosy for many. Household income in some places has gone up because adult children in lower wage jobs still live at home, and their inc9me is attributed to the household. But they don't feel great about their situation, because they can't afford to move out.

Bit of a self own here but I couldn't help but think of this https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/f0e5ea73-06f2-4d89-8824-f868925a248b/gif

19 to 17 of course

18: Covid seems to have led to an increase, but in 2022 (the latest data I'm seeing) it's back to 2016 levels.

Moby, with all your canvassing and other ground-game work, do you have a sense whether people doing virtual kinds of support make a positive difference? I'm kinda stuck over here in Germany, but I would like to do something useful for Democrats. And pretty much everyone Here is way over on the left edge of the party, and has a plan to vote, and isn't stupid enough to abandon Biden because he can't un-elect Netanyahu. So local efforts are kinda taken care of.

But I'd like to lend a hand somewhere, somehow.

8- I get that media owners hate Biden- he'll raise their taxes and Trump sells product (democracy dies in darkness, but subscription and ad revenue is up!) but why do rank and file reporters hate him? He just gave a speech where he praised and validated the lofty myths they have about the media profession even though it's kind of become a joke. Meanwhile the other guy literally threatens to have his supporters hang them. Is it that they think under Trump they'll have the opportunity to be brave and famous? Is it just self loathing? It's self-loathing isn't it.

I have no idea. I know that when I said I would go door knocking but fuck phone calls, they were fine with that.

I'm choosing to believe this is like 2012, and Biden can count.

"They" being the paid organizers who seemed to know what they were doing.

You could see if the Summer Lee campaign wants help for the primary. She's our Congressional Representative and is facing a primary challenge from a candidate that is AIPAC-backed. It's the only way I have to vote against Israel.

You could also campaign for her opponent if you're genocide curious.

18: Despite strong economic numbers I do not doubt that there are a lot of people in situations where they are worse off in various ways or even more so perceive they are given the psychology of inflation. At some level, "no shit!" We just went through a massively disruptive global pandemic. When really big bad things happen in the world it has a long after effect.* Here's where I could and do fault the awful context-free media** coverage of in part. But the more general problem is don't take over in the middle of a big crisis given current US politics and media.

*For instance 2008. and the anemic Obama-era response led to a long slow climb back which Trump got the benefit of the tail-end of.

**Might have related this here before but one of the most infuriating examples was during the '22 Dem primary debate for PA senator. Moderator asked Fetterman to give Biden a grade;he said B+; moderator shot back "So you like inflation?"

I voted for Lamb in the primary.

Same. And at that debate Kenyatta actually had far and away the best performance.

I didn't watch the debate. I just remembered that Lamb beat the one fuck.

23: Trump's secret sauce has always been that he knows the media better than the media knows itself and that it won't believe its own lyin' eyes. Journalists and editors out there are going "if Trump really was calling Democrats 'vermin', praising North Korea, and threatening us with violence SURELY we would be holding him accountable". Not realizing their business models render them literally incapable of doing that.

I think that's different from, say, McCain, who was cool grandpa that flew a fighter jet and always gave the press a lot to work with.

I think a large part of what's going on with inflation is that American, being the individualists they are, are attributing their higher wages to their own individual efforts but higher prices to nefarious conspiracies that Biden isn't fixing. Higher wages -> more spending -> supply issues and strained service sector -> inflation isn't too intuitive.

I also worry that after two decades or so of social media and especially short-form video, people's mnemonic capabilities are broadly trashed.

This has been sticking with me all day and I'm wondering if maybe Duolingo won't both improve my memory and give me something to do on my phone during brief periods when I would scroll Reddit or something just to pass some time. But I don't know what language to try.

I'm studying Irish to go with my shiny new citizenship. I'm not expecting more than to be able to read signs and so on.

I thought that was Augury.

36: Congratulations! I didn't see if you mentioned the achievement before.

Not an achievement as such, I just cashed in an immigrant grandfather.

Did it have to be your own?

23: Trump's secret sauce has always been that he knows the media better than the media knows itself

My bitterly favorite illustration of this is that when he "asked" Russia to find the 30,000 HRC emails, he said they would probably "be rewarded mightily by our press."

And in the event, every dump of emails was met by a dedicated cadre of journalists to pore over and often misreport their content.

21: Compared to 2000, the increase has been huge. Can't blame Biden per se, but it's tough to graduate from college, move out, but a home and have a family - what a lot of people want, at least compared to much of the post-war period.

39- Still a lot of paperwork and bureaucracy, right? We did Italy and it was like level 10 on the adult paperwork game (level 1= college applications, level 3 = doing taxes, level 5 = buying a home, level 8 = setting up estate documents)

Did you have to learn Italian?

I guess you might have already known it.

My ratings:

acquiring Luxembourgiah cotizenship: 8
gender transition: 7
getting legal title to your own backyard when the yard is in a different polity from the house: 10

I guess 1) and 2) overlap in that Luxembourgiah citizenship was originally acquired under some guy's name before getting recertified under my own (they were cool about it), and 2) and 3) also overlap in that the Lutheran church that was our yard's owner of record seemed more likely to deed it over to a straight couple, which delayed the name change stateside. Anyway now when lurid mows the lawn we're more arguably building equity.

47: I can't copy your comment about the Lutheran church on my iPad, but seriously? I thought the ELCA was pretty liberal. Most Episcopal churches outside of the South wouldn't care about the sexual orientation or gender of a couple. They might be fiercely protective of property and not want to deed it over to anyone but that's a different story.

41: Maggie Haberman and Kara Swisher are the only celebrity journalists off the top of my head who get that the path to career advancement and notoriety is kayfabe. Not that corruption and access journalism is anything new, but their pathways make it beyond explicit that they knew what they were doing.

24, 26: Thanks! I'll probably try to sign up for somewhere in the South, maybe NC or GA since they're not hopeless places (for the presidency) like where I grew up or where I'm registered now.

28: I've spent enough time in Central Europe that I am in no way, shape or form curious along those lines. I'm reluctant to use the word, and am still dispirited by how quickly (and with what apparent glee) some people on twitter wanted to toss it at Israel.

I just made an Aperol spritz and am actually enjoying it. Red, white, and green by Monday?

Speaking of genocidal hellscapes:
https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/burma/kachin-resistance-claims-huge-gains-in-march-offensive-against-myanmar-junta.html

Speaking of genocidal hellscapes:
https://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/tea/news/east-africa/thousands-have-taken-refuge-near-drc-s-virunga-national-park-will-it-survive--4561900

Speaking of genocidal hellscapes:
https://www.barrons.com/news/two-decades-on-sudan-s-darfuris-fear-world-has-abandoned-them-3a100a14

Speaking of genocidal hellscapes:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-67732586

50.last

There was a faculty letter regarding the situation sent to the president of our university that was circulated 10 days after October 7 that I refused to sign. I was uncomfortable with the "genocide" word at that point in time despite there being multiple clear genocidal statements from Israeli government officials from Netanyahu on down and there already being a clear pattern of indiscriminate bombing of civilians; there was also no clear condemnation of the Hamas atrocities. But now? How can there be any other word to describe where we're at and have been at for quite some time. Most of Gaza has been rendered uninhabitable, civilian infrastructure destroyed, health care system systematically targeted and destroyed along with health care workers (what is the point of destroying CT machines and oxygen tanks after you've already cleared the building?), agricultural infrastructure destroyed, cultural heritage deliberately destroyed including archeological sites some of which go back millennia, museums, libraries, cemeteries, etc. Every single university demolished, after having been cleared by IDF too. And a steady stream of war crimes on a daily basis. And now catastrophic famine. What else would one call it?

She's so good https://x.com/repaoc/status/1771238247449899285?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ

Wife and kids got it automatically by heritage, regardless of fluency. If I want citizenship as a spouse of an Italian I would have to pass a B-level test. I have an 1152 day Duolingo streak but they won't accept that as an alternative. I've gotten very good at choosing fill-in-the blank answers; speaking Italian not so much.

56: I have no real opinions about the technical term, but I think the response is completely disproportionate and horrifying. Not sure what we should be doing, other than maybe not providing Israel with arms.

We should compromise and provide them with crappier arms.

58: Funny, my Duolingo Chinese streak is almost exactly the same, at 1151 days.

My Spanish streak will be 2, unless I don't do it today.

Moby, I'm driving through Pittsburgh today with the family. Where do I want to have lunch or brunch that would give me a sense of the place?

Speckled Egg downtown is good for brunch. The setting is old Pittsburgh fancy and the food is good millennial brunch.

Nice, that's what googling had turned up. Thanks!

It might be hard to get a table. Also, there's a Jones Day office across Grant Street.

Made a reservation. Will definitely wave to my friends.

Oh, I was definitely going to pitch Pamela's. (Which has multiple locations.)

That's a good one too, but I keep forgetting about it because the Squirrel Hill location has been closed for so long. The Speckled Egg has better food unless you want pancakes or breakfast potatoes.

Plus, that building is really nice.

Now that I have a two day streak on Duolingo, I have some complaints. First, the excerises where you are supposed to translate a sentence give you huge clues because the first word always has a capital letter. Second, they are teaching tú forms instead of usted and I dislike the forced informality.

The capital letter thing seems to have stopped now that I'm up a level.

Usted comes up later on. (As well as Irish, I'm 600 days into Spanish. I am terrible at languages and so this means that I do not meaningfully do what can be called speaking Spanish, but if my interlocutor is committed to trying hard, I can spend an extended period of time communicating without speaking any language that isn't Spanish.)

72 I was in Austria last month, and a local woman shared their saying that above 1,000 meters, everyone is Du. Keep to the higher elevations in Spain, Mexico, Peru, and you'll be fine.

74-71

I'm apparently incapable of having more than 2 languages in my brain at any given time, and so when I want to speak French, German comes out.

ikr?

So... I taught first-year Spanish at my graduate university, which meant (among other things) I had to pass an oral proficiency interview at a highly advanced level, and the teaching coordinator (a native speaker) complimented my Spanish and reassured me that I shouldn't feel insecure about it. I speak the language at a higher level than most Anglo-Americans in the U.S. who learned it at school. I also have lots of opportunities to speak Spanish in daily life, living in California. But I never do. Ever! I never switch to Spanish with a clerk in a store or restaurant, even if they seem to be struggling a bit with English. I know all the words, but I have zero confidence that I can be understood. I mumble and speak quietly in general, and I think I have an easier time forming the sounds of languages like German or French, which are a bit closer to English. (A Russian tutor also complimented me on having just a slight accent in Russian, which was super flattering because my vocabulary is nonexistent, but apparently those 50 words sound okay?) It's so frustrating. lourdes is as proficient as I am in Spanish, but I feel like she's much better at the basic task of making herself understood. It's not that I have a strong accent per se, it's something more insidious and individual.

tl;dr: I just suck at talking. And yet, polyglossia is my passion [image of clip art frog with 5 tongues -- ogged can spin this up via genAI for me].

Oh, this building is nice. And downtown is cool. Appears out of nowhere coming down from the north.

You're supposed to come in through the Ft. Pitt tunnel.

77: That's sort of where Newt is. He and Sally both came out of school with very strong Spanish by school standards (like, when Newt's robotics team was giving a presentation at another school, and they found out without warning that it had to be in Spanish, that wasn't a problem), but he would very much rather never speak it because he feels dumb in Spanish. I figure he'll either need it for real sometime or he won't, and if he does he'll revive it.

In Spain, I pretended not to speak English because this guy I found annoying was asking me for a cigarette and I was running out of cigarettes. I'm not sure if he believed that I didn't understand the word "cigarette".

Speaking of Russian, and hellscapes, just saw the news out of Moscow. More to grieve.

82: Yes.

I'm not sure whether my faith allows me to adopt the concept of hostis humani generis, but if it's a sin -- hell, of course it is -- the temptation to apply it to IS is strong indeed.

Caput lupinum!

48: the neighbors are LCMS, not ELCA. I still have no reason to believe they're actually bigots and the whole thing might have gone okay, but we were in a position of trying to negotiate a purchase with the entire board where they had no obligation to sell and were basically just agreeing to work with us as a courtesy, so given that the process had taken a year and a half already it seemed foolhardy to queer the deal, as it were, with a last-minute curveball.

The Methodist church near my sold the parsonage that went with their church to someone with a really loud dog that, while safely fenced, lunges at me when I walk by. The house doesn't have a back yard so much as ready access to a very old graveyard.

75: Something like that is why I apparently speak Russian like a Polish aristocrat. (Not that I've really tried any Russian in about a decade.)

76 My BIL was married to an Elsaesserin, and it's true that her farm-dwelling grandparents spoke Elsaessich. She was raised speaking French and, in a way that benefited me, could never bring herself to address our mutual in-laws as Du.

Thank you for 74.

86:Missouri Synod is a different story. When I was in college, the Masternof my House was a Div school professor and a Lutheran (ELCA). There was a guy that all my friends were encouraging me to go out on a date with, and the Master was at the dining table. He was generally pro any kind of socialization, so he supported my friends. One evening, we were clearing dining hall trays, and he asked me what had ever happened with that guy. I said, "it turned out he was Missouri Synod." His response: "Ahh, I understand."

I completely gave up on Czech via Duolingo as it just doesn't teach the stuff I find hard. I am good at remembering vocabulary anyway and Czechs tell me that my pronunciation, including ř is pretty good.

I used Duolingo assiduously for 6 - 7 months and added a few hundred or more words to my vocabulary, but made shit-all progress with grammar, and grammar is the challenging part. In a language like Czech, for example (quoting wiki):

"In Czech, nouns and adjectives are declined into one of seven grammatical cases which indicate their function in a sentence, two numbers (singular and plural) and three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter). The masculine gender is further divided into animate and inanimate classes."

There is zero chance of picking that up by osmosis/example in noddy Duolingo sentences.

Are all females assumed to be animated?

The weeb republic of central Europe.

I believe my wife's brother has begun the process for Austria and my wife has considered doing the same (their father). She is not overly enthusiastic given current political trends there as well as the past (we still have her father's red "J" labelled passport.).

"Just Ken"?

A last thought on the Biden slamming. It is clear that the demonization of Biden has succeeded. I probably did not think they could do it so successfully, and suspect Biden finds it hard to believe as well (which I think has made him slow to respond appropriately). I think the combo of the current R party and the indulgence of same by the media means we are at "A Democrat, but not *this* one*" for any Dem candidate. Biden mostly avoided it in 2020 (the laptop was their last minute Hail Mary on that which is why they were so furious about its initial treatment and of course they have subsequently roped in much of the media).

*Provides a bit of perspective on HRC's purportedly unique unfavorables. Of course they had 20+ years to do so led by the braying jackasses at the Times. Not that I'm bitter...

96: Jury duty.

"A Democrat, but not *this* one*"

97 is a really good point. I hadn't thought about how neatly the Biden discussion fits within that frame.

77:lurid, maybe when it's your turn with the clerk, you could say something like "I hope I'm not imposing, but if you speak Spanish, I'm just learning how, and if you would be OK with it, I'd like to try to conduct our business in Spanish ?" Either in English or (haha, maybe better) in Spanish ?

Also: When I lived & worked in France, I would start in French and go until I ran out of words, and then very apologetically say "I'm sorry, I'm just beginning to learn French, and I don't have many words, do you please speak English ?" It always worked: they always spoke English. But I've seen loud Americans start in English, finish in English, and get louder and louder, and .... those same French clerks would profess no knowledge of English.

What I mean is, if you're nice and apologetic about it, I'm sure the clerk(s) will be open to helping you.

97: "Provides a bit of perspective on HRC's purportedly unique unfavorables."

Oh, indeed! I think many Dem voters have simply not reckoned with the almost mechanical manner in which the G(r)OPers attack our candidates. It's just a matter of time for them to enact the vilification (with the media's assistance) to the point where "I would gladly vote for a Dem, just not this one" seems ..... completely sane and normal, instead of the absolute gaslighting that it actually is. And they're getting better and better, faster and faster at it. Combine that with "Dem candidates must be excellent, truly excellent" and "G(r)OPer candidates are perfectly acceptable even if they bite the heads off bats and bay at the moon on the regular" and it's just an impossible situation. We have to start fighting back, and I don't see it happening. Though yeah, Granpa Joe is at least starting.

he would very much rather never speak it because he feels dumb in Spanish

I have definitely found that having a part of my personality that is totally comfortable looking ridiculous* makes it WAY easier to speak Spanish in everyday situations. I just start from the assumption that I'm inevitably going to screw things up or look silly in some way, and that good will and not taking myself too seriously will help. And then I muddle through.

It has worked perfectly 99.9 percent of the time, and that 0.1 guy in Spain was just a jerk (or maybe a snob).

*e.g. running pell-mell down a train aisle shouting for medical help when another passenger had a seizure, wearing my clothes backwards while running errands as a sociological homework assignment, etc.

I will say, though, that all of my language learning has come from my very good university classes (50%), private tutoring (30%), reading (10%) and everyday interactions (10%). I tried Duolingo diligently for a year and it didn't move the needle at all on my facility with the language or my vocabulary. I think I just don't learn things very well at all via apps.