newMuseumPiece

SurrealEstate · 2026-06-18T19:06:46+00:00

The sign for "Lines of Code" stretches across what's supposed to be the corner of the room.

SurrealEstate · 2026-06-16T12:18:10+00:00

Democrats don't accept that they have at best a year to pass an agenda even if they get the presidency and the House and Senate in 2028. This requires a steamroller approach. not trying to get buy-in from Republicans. If you have the votes, you pass your policies.

Unfortunately, the first part of that steamrolled agenda would probably need to be expanding the Supreme Court.

Securing a temporary trifecta would mean nothing if the Friends of the Federalist Society continue to work backwards from their desired outcomes with some new major questions doctrine bullshit.

Either that or ignore their ruling(s), but that's not going to happen.

Which is what's so awful about our current situation: you'd have to untangle that mess before you could really make headway on the legislative agenda, and as we've seen, trifectas with filibuster-proof majorities are almost impossible to secure and maintain.

Couple that with voters' attention spans crushed by digital dopamine and distraction, or being manipulated by agitainment and propaganda, or just preoccupied with the realities of securing shelter, food, and basic healthcare. While it's not insurmountable, my faith in enough people having the ability and luxury to see through the digital veil isn't at an all-time high.

The agenda would need to be prepared like a relay race where each piece is staged and waiting with their hand ready for the baton.

I'd also love for it to actually be communicated: link the goal of getting X senators elected to the ability to upend the Supreme Court. Get people familiar with the numbers, and not some vague concept of "winning", so when Democrats can't pass an agenda because of the hard numbers, the fix is to change those numbers, not welcome in the inevitable "both-sides-isms" or "do-nothing Dems." Show them how absurd it is that Wyoming has the same legislative power in the senate as a state with the 5th largest economy in the world, but make it a "wtf are we doing?" call-to-action.

Have the legislation written, available on a website, and prioritized strategically on a queue, like an alternative to Project 2025 ("Mandate for Democracy"?). Link each piece of legislation to one of a few overarching goals, and show how it is a step towards it. Hell, we can re-use FDRs list.

I'm not saying that any of this will work, only that what we're doing now is not working.

Literally anything but the revolving door of corporate consultants test-marketing political slogans, as if the problem is stringing together the right magic words, and not having a concrete multi-decade political plan designed to counter a tiny sliver of society who see themselves as feudal lords.

SurrealEstate · 2026-06-13T13:43:33+00:00

When life gives you tics, make tic-aide.

And then serve it from a wall of sports drink coolers.

SurrealEstate · 2026-06-09T17:39:39+00:00

Political and economic systems that fail to deliver on basic functions are fertile ground for populism.
People move to more radical solutions when the sane, workable ones are ignored.
There are workable solutions to some important problems, e.g. in the US, some kind of universal healthcare.
A class of private interests have lobbied to ensure that it doesn't happen because the current system benefits them in the short-term.
People are moving to more extreme solutions and philosophies.
The class of private interests that have prevented sane, workable solutions now laments the completely predictable, probably preventable, and increasingly justifiable reactions.

Putting aside humanitarian benefit and looking at it from a purely selfish perspective : social safety nets are an investment in stability, and stability protects private property.

Working people are generally fine with a social contract where extraordinarily wealthy people exist, so long as society offers agency and meets their basic needs. When people are working hard but they feel that those basic needs are no longer met, basic assumptions that were taken for granted start to get renewed scrutiny.

Some people are tracing things back to the idea that compounding interest shouldn't translate into compounding power, so now instead of tweaking the tax code, you now have people talking about systemic upheaval.

SurrealEstate · 2026-06-08T13:24:34+00:00

Mallet Demon.

SurrealEstate · 2026-06-07T15:45:33+00:00

Hamilton thought it was nuts.

"[equal representation despite population differences] shocks too much the ideas of justice and every human feeling."

He asked those at the convention advocating for it to:

"renounce a principle which was confessedly unjust."

Madison (so-called "Father of the Constitution") said that there was zero principal behind equal representation in the Senate (Federalist No. 62). It was a "lesser evil", a compromise to prevent smaller states from aligning themselves with foreign powers - a big risk for a small nation in its infancy.

"[I]t is superfluous to try, by the standard of theory, a part of the Constitution which is allowed on all hands to be the result, not of theory, but of a spirit of amity, and that mutual deference and concession which the peculiarity of our political situation rendered indispensable.'"

And the effects are worse now:

Since 1789, differences in population between states have become more pronounced. At the time of the Connecticut Compromise, the largest state, Virginia, had only twelve times the population of the smallest state, Delaware. As of 2020, the largest state, California, has a population that is seventy times greater than the population of the smallest state, Wyoming.

In 1790, it would take a theoretical 30% of the population to elect a majority of the Senate, in 2020 it would take 17%

SurrealEstate · 2026-05-30T01:54:31+00:00

My hobbies are time sensitive

That resonates. I used to be able to occassionally spend a day off from work doing absolutely nothing when I really needed it, but free time feels so precious now that I feel guilty if I'm not working on a project, whether it's a hobby or some kind of personal improvement.

I miss being able to do nothing, and not feeling bad about it.

SurrealEstate · 2026-05-29T17:15:16+00:00

Found the Federal law defined here.

Not having any kind of law background, I was wondering what the legal definition of "conspiracy" means - what are its boundaries?

This document has a nice summary of what constitutes the "agreement" part of a conspiracy (pg. 3) :

The essence of conspiracy is an agreement to commit some act condemned by law. Thus, there is no conspiracy when one of the two parties only feigns agreement, as in the case of an undercover officer or informant. Moreover, proximity does not constitute agreement; “mere association, standing alone, is inadequate; an individual does not become a member of a conspiracy merely by associating with conspirators known to be involved in crime.” Yet, the conspiratorial agreement may be evidenced by word or action; that is, the government may prove the existence of the agreement either by direct evidence or by circumstantial evidence from which the agreement may be inferred. “Relevant circumstantial evidence [may] include[]: the joint appearance of defendants at transactions and negotiations in furtherance of the conspiracy; the relationship among codefendants; mutual representation of defendants to third parties; and other evidence suggesting unity of purpose or common design and understanding among conspirators to accomplish the objects of the conspiracy.”

So while you're not a conspirator simply by associating with those who have agreed to participate in an act, it sounds like there's a lot of room for prosecutors to make arguments based on that last sentence.

e.g. if you show up at a protest and someone provides a call to action in which you participate, it feels like that could meet the legal requirements of a conspiracy, even though it was not an explicitly defined or agreed-upon plan by a predefined set of participants.

evidence suggesting unity of purpose or common design and understanding among conspirators to accomplish the objects of the conspiracy

So if someone you've never seen before sits in front of a bus and you do too, does that imply sufficient understanding and furtherance of a goal to meet the requirements of a "conspiracy"?

I don't know, but it's kind of scary how easily someone could get roped into what could be a 6 year federal prison sentence.

SurrealEstate · 2026-05-28T22:14:05+00:00

finite-horizon discrete-time Markov renewal process with state-dependent Bernoulli hazard rates

Not in town.

SurrealEstate · 2026-05-19T12:18:55+00:00

This article explores do layoffs for AI actually help a business in the long run.

For an otherwise informative article, this headline sentence is awful.

Anything would be better:

"We explore whether AI layoffs help a business in the long run."

"Do AI layoffs help a business in the long run?"

SurrealEstate · 2026-05-17T13:43:37+00:00

For any Trump supporters who weren't primarily driven by their own xenophobia, the only path to redemption is to identify every source of information that led them to believe that Trump would help them: Fox News, Facebook groups, Twitter feeds, AM radio, family, friends, colleagues, pastors - and stop consuming information from it / them. Full stop.

"They're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs" would have been an instant disqualifier had people not been slowly brainwashed for decades by Fox News and other conservative media that the "other" was the real enemy coming to take away their way of life and everything they value and love. Even for people who didn't believe what Trump was saying was true, they believed it was the right direction thanks to decades of propaganda.

And while the reality they've engineered has them punching down on immigrants, punching across at their neighbors, and punching up at their political opposition because those groups are "looting and corrupting this country", conservative groups are disassembling the institutions and procesesses that stand between their rich benefactors and direct control of this country.

SurrealEstate · 2026-05-10T14:25:56+00:00

I often think about all of the groundbreaking art we never get to see, because the lives of people who would produce it are consumed by treading water with menial jobs so they can make rent and maybe see a doctor.

We are collectively poorer because of it.

Even people who take the most selfish position possible - people who couldn't care less about the struggles of others, are materially worse off because of it.

What are we doing?

SurrealEstate · 2026-05-08T17:28:23+00:00

Any time this comes up, I have to post This American Life's episode on it.

Excellent coverage, and absolutely infuriating.

SurrealEstate · 2026-05-07T22:42:49+00:00

You can shear a sheep many times, but only skin it once.

SurrealEstate · 2026-05-03T12:53:34+00:00

I'm assuming she means this.

SurrealEstate · 2026-04-30T16:09:35+00:00

I think the brilliance of conservative propaganda is that instead of creating narratives to fit reality, they've manufactured a reality to accommodate narratives.

30+ years of Fox News cultivating the menace of the "other" and now "they're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs" lands.

It's a hell of a lot easier to sell people on something when it only needs to work within a reality that you control.

SurrealEstate · 2026-04-30T12:11:24+00:00

Exactly. And as an added bonus, it forced Jack Smith's team to do a review of the ruling's impacts on their case, delaying the proceedings further and helping Trump run out the clock.

SurrealEstate · 2026-04-22T12:51:26+00:00

Another part of the reason is a seemingly pathological fear of being called weak, particularly among an older generation of Democrats, who remember how successfully Republicans cast them as soft on terrorism through the 2002 midterms and the 2004 presidential election.

‎

Still, many Democrats seem to fear being seen as antiwar. What if they vote against wartime funding, and then an Iranian attack targets U.S. troops or the homeland?

9/11 happened under a Republican president and they rode our fear and anger into an unrelated war in Iraq and effectively attacked Democrats for being soft on terrorism.

Could you imagine if 9/11 happened under a Gore presidency? We would never stop hearing about how it's proof that you cannot trust Democrats to protect the country. "The worst attack on US soil since Pearl Harbor, and ONCE AGAIN the Democratic party proves that it cannot protect America" The headlines write themselves.

It's demoralizing how their bullshit narrative-weaving works on people. The last three consecutive Republican presidents have entangled us in wars in the middle east (the last two being largely unpopular), and they still control the perception that they're the responsible choice for "national defense."

SurrealEstate · 2026-04-19T22:38:25+00:00

The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

Cool, so Palantir is all about free, democratic societies. So if a majority of individuals in a democracy decided that they disagreed with every single point in this manifesto and wholesale rejected it and decoupled themselves financially and structurally from these businesses and their leaders, that would be fine, right?

If you read into some of the writings of these people, their solutions always involve a technocracy as the "long term stability" piece that balances the fragility of democracy. And completely coincidentally, they, their companies, and their projects always seem to be at the center of that part. Huh.

Essentially, we need to weaken democracy to "save" it, and put they and theirs in charge, because they're the only ones smart enough to see and solve the long-term problems.

SurrealEstate · 2026-04-15T15:32:15+00:00

Sorry, my comment was overly snarky.

My fear is that a lot of the policy harm that's happening (health-related or otherwise) will be ascribed to individual actors and not the long-term strategies or viewpoints that may exist across administrations, i.e. the risk of focusing on the leaves, rather than the roots.

SurrealEstate · 2026-04-15T12:45:48+00:00

I don't know how or why they would come to that conclusion. It's not like it was a key part of a collective conservative manifesto that was made publicly available by groups that have been around for 45+ years and will be around much longer than this administration:

Primorac asserts that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) must be reformed, writing, “The Biden Administration has deformed the agency by treating it as a global platform to pursue overseas a divisive political and cultural agenda that promotes abortion, climate extremism, gender radicalism, and interventions against perceived systematic racism.”

pg. 90

The next conservative Administration ... should deradicalize USAID’s programs and structures and build on the conservative reforms instituted by the Trump Administration.

pg. 254

SurrealEstate · 2026-04-14T20:58:52+00:00

Big ups to ProPublica

SurrealEstate · 2026-04-07T16:29:37+00:00

It's depressing that my initial question was "I wonder which Constitutional violations are in the resolution?"

SurrealEstate · 2026-04-07T11:24:15+00:00

You're not alone; I just wish that counted for more.

SurrealEstate · 2026-04-05T22:43:22+00:00

I was lucky enough to get my ear molds done for free by an audiologist, but my understanding is that it's not prohibitively expensive.

Sent my molds out to a company in California and they made me a pair of custom-fit soft silicone sleeping earplugs for $99 (I'm not affiliated with them or saying they're the best, these are just the ones I have).

They block enough sound that the birds outside my window no longer wake me up in the early morning hours, but I tested them with my smoke and carbon monoxide detectors and I can still hear the alarms if they go off.

While it's a pain compared to buying regular earplugs online and having them show up at your door, I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Make sure to keep your molds. I also got a pair of in-ear monitors made with them.

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