From a slack conversation

Say you have a grandmother, who has lived in her house for sixty years and you accidentally break a lamp of hers – you go to replace it run into the following problem: The lamp itself is 60 years old and they don’t make it anymore.
No problem you say the world of lamps is diverse and varied – however her house has evolved over the past sixty years as things have worn out and been replaced. Nothing is in any way “Standard” (like it would be for a 19 year old’s first apartment where anything is fine). You find that they don’t really make a lamp that “goes” anywhere near as well as the original lamp. The varieties of lamp have increased arithmetically, whereas the complexities of Grandma’s house have increased exponentially – and finding a replacement is more tied to that – so, therefore

Time Spent Finding Perfect Lamp = 1/Number of Lamps Available * Complexity of Grandmas’s house,
where complexity of grandma’s house is a function of age (cognitive decline), wealth, and time spent in house

The comparisons would be existing interest groups, the perception of Pareto optimality as “fair”, all of the existing public and private programs, etc

You need some degree of Pareto optimality since everyone has some degree of veto power, “log rolling” used to be the solution to these sorts of things. That becomes less possible with more complex interest group relations

From this Arnold Kling post

If the printing press helped produce the Enlightenment, then perhaps the iPhone is producing the Endarkenment

From this article

Partly that is a matter of pure economics, but partly it is also a result of the fact that policy decisions are dominated by the people who are most comfortable with a more entrepreneurial and less predictable model of work. That is a big part of what has populists of the Left and Right riled up at the moment, even though many of them cannot quite articulate their complaint. The critics have a point, but what they do not have is an alternative

The great songwriter Steve Earle, who involves himself in a lot of silly left-wing political activism, says that he is a “romantic,” that he is interested in “the way the world should be, not the way the world is.” That is a lovely and poetical sentiment, and, like most poetical sentiments, it offers a good reminder of why it is better that we are not governed by poets.

From Tim Ferriss’ newsletter

“I will have to remember ‘I am here today to cross the swamp, not to fight all the alligators.’”
— From The Art of Possibility by Rosamund and Benjamin Zander

From HP Lovecraft

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

From this blog post

What do the progressives want the authorities to do? Build a prison cell inside his prison cell and another one inside of that to create a turducken of felonious intent?

Turducken of felonious intent is one of the greatest word sequences ever.

From this video by Indy Neidel – here is a saying started by the Finns in the Finnish – Soviet War of 1939

They are so many, and our county so small

Where shall we find room to bury them all?