jakke

Mar 25 2021 ∞
“ Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion in Torres v. Madrid closes an alarming loophole that lower courts had carved into the Constitution, clarifying that the Fourth Amendment prohibits “unreasonable” police shootings even if a wounded suspect still flees the scene.
— So the Supreme Court has declined to chip away at previous precedent by affirming that if the cops shoot at you then that counts as a seizure under the Fourth Amendment - even if they’re just haphazardly shooting at your car because you got scared when someone tried to open your car door with no warning and drove away. Usually when Democrats think about courts it’s about abortion but to me it seems like there’s significant scope for courts’ ability to circumscribe this kind of full-on dystopic power. This particular decision basically just upholds the status quo rather than allowing further slide but you could imagine a future court that e.g. put meaningful limits on qualified immunity.

7 notes

Mar 23 2021 ∞

Not All Millennials

Honestly hard not to quote this entire article. (Except the part about why assets got expensive in the first place, because I think they missed the mark there, but that’s not really the point.) Millennials are now in our late twenties through late thirties. It’s about time to confront the reality that on aggregate our generation is going to be the greatest beneficiaries of intergenerational wealth transfer in history. I know that a big part of millennial self-perception is that we’ve all been equally burned by the double whammy of the Great Recession and covid - but that’s not true, and it’s going to become less true over the next decade as inheritances and other wealth transfers ramp up.

I’m not optimistic about changes to tax policy that could shift this dynamic - especially because so much of the wealth is in the form of housing, and requiring every estate to liquidate the home of the deceased to settle a tax debt would be devastatingly expensive for families of moderate means and easy to circumvent for the very rich. And because wealth begets wealth so rapidly there’s no way that closing all the various societal gaps in income would fix this inequality either - like, even if the racial pay gap somehow disappeared tomorrow, wealth inequality would continue to grow. I guess it’s possible that cultural attitudes towards wealth accumulation could shift but the whole myth that millennials are all equally suffering is just so strong (especially among the affluent millennials who tend to dominate social media and mass media) that this seems very unlikely.

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Mar 22 2021 ∞

came to my senses about the whole “moving in four weeks; mustn’t buy any more groceries until then” train of thought

Just ate an actual whole bowl of pasta for the first time in days and feeling drastically more human.

18 notes

Mar 20 2021 ∞

Miami Beach Freaks Out Over Massive Spring Break Crowds, Declares State of Emergency

The fourth wave is coming but this time it’s only going to affect people who are not affluent or well-connected enough to already be vaccinated (especially in states like Florida that are actively prioritizing the wealthy) and so all the urgency from the media and politicians will have vanished. I think this kind of raucous outdoor party (click through for video of an absolutely packed public space) is how every city will look by this summer as public pressure grows to ease lockdowns once half or two-thirds of the population gets vaccinated. On one hand I completely get this and I am still desperately sad all the time that I can’t go out and be loud and irresponsible with my friends but on the other hand wow this is going to be a lot of throwing everyone who can’t obsessively refresh the vaccine website and then get to the vaccination site at 2 pm on a Tuesday into really hazardous situations so that everyone who could do that can party.

12 notes

+ ∞

last night I dreamt I was trying to sell my place in Baltimore

The real estate agent said “we got an offer” and handed me a piece of paper that said “302,000″ on it. In my dream I knew that was significantly more than twice what I’d paid. I said “oh, okay, this must be for an assemblage then” and the real estate agent said “yes” and I woke up. 

Anyway I’ve been spending all day wondering if there’s something wrong with me that my dreams are this literal.

12 notes

Mar 19 2021 ∞
The Bloomberg super-yacht tracker is exquisitely designed to make you angry about the society we live in just by looking at it. The “Pct. New.” column refers to super-yachts built since 2016, by the way - because super-yachts are a booming business...

The Bloomberg super-yacht tracker is exquisitely designed to make you angry about the society we live in just by looking at it. The “Pct. New.” column refers to super-yachts built since 2016, by the way - because super-yachts are a booming business right now. On a totally unrelated note, is there any particular reason pirates aren’t still a thing?

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+ ∞

doing DE&I work stuff in a city like Seattle is a challenge

Because the kind of people who wind up on these committees are all super socially conscious and come with suggestions like “we should hold graduate-level seminars on critical race and gender theory” but the problem we’re actually trying to solve is more like hiring managers asking candidates if they know current employees of the same ethnicity with similar last names.

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+ ∞

the mortgage application process is such a window into consumer finance regulation

I could definitely get a very long mortgage with a very small downpayment for a property that is very likely to end up underwater (in the negative equity sense; possibly also the floodplain sense) over the lifetime of the mortgage if I wanted to. However I do need to read and sign a series of forms promising that I understand that it’s bad to fall behind your payments. One of the forms had a little script about how to shop around for mortgage rates. The massively technical aspects with the greatest potential for misleading products and hidden fees are full on Ayn Rand but the parts that are obvious to anyone who’s ever interacted with the economy have dozens of pages of unhelpful tips. The aspect where it’s like “maybe people default on their mortgages because they don’t know how to budget or shop around” seems p r o b l e m a t i c (and unsupported by the evidence!) but I guess regulators don’t want to rock the boat too steeply on the whole mortgage industry.

10 notes

Mar 18 2021 ∞

one of the people I play D&D with (not in one of the games I run) lied to get vaccinated

Their father owns a large business in an essential non-work-from-home industry and they don’t work for the business (or work at all - they’re ostensibly trying to make it as a writer despite not actually writing much) but they were able to claim they worked for it and now they’re celebrating all over social media. They are too fragile to accept any criticism about anything they do and I really don’t want to have to play D&D with them anymore if they’re going to keep talking about this? TL;DR very ready to go back to most of my social interactions being with the near-strangers I habitually bring home from the bar instead of the awful nerds who are available for weekly Zoom D&D.

20 notes

Mar 17 2021 ∞

work is once again posting ads like “senior researcher 10+ years experience” and then interviewing applicants fresh out of grad school as junior researchers

I don’t understand the rationale for this but the only potential junior researchers who apply for jobs that require 10+ years experience are the ones who are completely detached from reality about their own abilities (e.g. “I’m not done my PhD just yet but my undergrad is from a very elite liberal arts college so that should count as industry experience”) and they are exhausting to interview (I don’t get to choose them but I do have to interview them) and terrible for diversity. Anyway we cannot be the only employer doing this so if you see an ad that requires 10+ years experience I guess just apply for it?

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