That doesn’t disprove him at all: if the average one lasts 200 years and not all last exactly 200, then some will necessarily last more than 200. This is a mathematical consequence of what an average means.
what better way to celebrate the democracy by combining it with a celebration of the birthday of the Great Leader, with a soviet style military parade and an admonition that any protest will be met with the harshest of consequences.
I know that math makes it harder to come up with political zingers but if there are two civilizations; one lasted 150 years and the other lasted 250 years the average is 200.
That was only true because the internet wasn't completely saturated -- many people didn't get online until the late 2000s [0]. This was a major barrier to entry keeping brick-and-mortar stores ahead.
The only thing holding back "Agentic Purchasing" is convenience. It's much easier to do a conventional search and click "Buy" then it is to have a conversation with some chatbot. If I walk into a store, most of the time I don't want to talk to a salesperson, I just want to grab the thing I came for and leave; this is also true for online shopping. The chatbot is another barrier to the purchase.
Someone else owns all the other credit. This is the 1st domino.
The liquidity challenges of a $1.2T shock to the economy is meaningful, because it has knock on effects on equity as well.
When private credit (which is propping up private valuation) falls, private equity also falls and then everyone realizes that everyone else has been swimming naked.
The core fiction that enables the university to work is a dedication to 'truth' and progress through discussion. Safety and freedom is part of that bargain. Universities have failed on those accounts.
That breaks down when there isn't open discussion on campus. Communists were jeered but essentially allowed on campus in the 60s and 70s, even at the height of the cold war.
The left now holds a place of orthodoxy in the universities and power structures. Whether the 'right' can break it back into an enforced balance is yet to be seen.
Until then, the central tie of an otherwise diverse institution will break down and break into fragments. Which would be a shame. The opposition needs to "live" somewhere!
I think its better to take aim at "safetyism" rather than the left or right. The last couple years have seen the right become increasingly good at weaponizing it although the left did have a head start.
Note that the current wave of attacks are all justified by safetyism, they're pushed by an anti-semitism task force that's encompassed any anti-war sentiment.
I think these comparisons between left and right, always break down when one side clearly does not want others to live. I am fine with opposition when we can both agree on the fundamentals that every person deserves to live (and probably a good life too not just barely scraping by). There are alot of people now again, that do not belive in this fundamental principle.
Not if they're systematically wrong about everything. There's no need to keep an intellectual disease vector in the academy any more than there would be a moral obligation to open your windows to the malaria mosquitos.
Climate change and medicine are the largest, most visible aspects of this, but it's intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
Note that this has got much worse since about the Obama era. There are no true small-c conservative intellectuals any more.
Safety and freedom is incompatible with direct political control. Respect for truth is a false value if what truth is is to be put to a vote or changed to match the whims of whoever is in power.
> That breaks down when there isn't open discussion on campus. Communists were jeered but essentially allowed on campus in the 60s and 70s, even at the height of the cold war.
I think that's a misleading telling of the history. During the 40s and 50s a lot of people were fired for suspected or real links to communism and some schools even demanded loyalty oaths. Courts struck down a bunch of laws that were used to fire people but many rulings didn't land until the 60s. Angela Davis was famously fired in 1969.
To play devil’s advocate since I’ve been a little energetic in this thread already, I’ll go ahead and agree that they’re probably correct about single-income, two-parent homes having better outcomes for children.
I disagree that it should always be the woman staying home (or always the same parent through the children’s adolescence, or that both parents should have different genders, or) but I think the premise is sound.
They’re also objectively correct that women should, on average, be having children earlier (but wrong when they want it to be before the age of majority, or when they want to lower that age, or permit child marriage, or want to deny that couple sound sex education and medical care.)
Having a single-income parent in a two-parent home was the norm for most of US history. It's also still the norm outside of the US. Where is the evidence that children are worse off because both parents work? Kids (5+) barely spend any time at home during a typical work day, so I'm not sure what "they" are correct about.
How is it objectively correct that women should, on average, have children earlier? Sorry, but this is purely a subjective statement and women are free to agree or disagree with that statement.
Having been raised by my grandparents, I personally believe the only secret for success is to show up for children, and love them and provide them a stable environment to thrive in. Everything else is just window dressing.
> Having a single-income parent in a two-parent home was the norm for most of US history.
You dont really have income and non income on a household farm. You have patriarch making decisions and everybody else working. This included slave owning farms where she had managing/organizing responsibilities.
Also, women in lower classes needed income and did worked for it. They did not had professional occupations and they were responsible for children, so it was things that fit into those boundaries - low income non professional work. But it was not really done for funsies. Then again, kids as small as 5 were left to handle by themselves and older kids were supposed to contribute.
It is really incomparable to being stay at home parent now, isolated and literally having nothing useful to do except existing and playing.
Sorry, I thought it was clear from the context that these are widely-held, American right-wing opinions that I happen to agree with.
> How is it objectively correct that women should, on average, have children earlier?
There are a few specific birth defects that are more common in younger mothers but most become much more common as the mother ages, and the overall risk of complication & death increases with maternal age.
> Having been raised by my grandparents, I personally believe the only secret for success is to show up for children, and love them and provide them a stable environment to thrive in. Everything else is just window dressing.
That’s a great sentiment but of little practical use in deciding policy.
Ah, sorry, I guess I'm not sure what it is you're actually debating needs to be fixed. Are children being born today with more birth defects and we (society) now want to concern ourselves with the issue that if parents want to have children, they need to plan for it and start earlier? Is that what a supposed objective policy would try to address?
Men also have a clock and birth defects are known to go up the older they are. So this can't be limited to women regardless of policy decisions.
I'm also not sure there could be any actual conversative government policy that could fix what is ultimately a financial incentives problem. Lots of parents would start earlier if they were able to have things like home ownership and space to raise kids in, and education systems that don't skew towards needing upper middle class levels of access to. Any potential new idea with any realistic long term fix would end up looking quite progressive and in our current hostile environment become a no-go for any conservative political appointee.
Just to also play the devils advocate, why SHOULD women be having children earlier. Its very much a very personal choice in their own freedom. I don't think this should be a political take at all. In this decision there is nothing any Government should have a say in.
> Just to also play the devils advocate, why SHOULD women be having children earlier.
Lower prevalence of complications, lower risk of death, lower risk of birth defects.
> Its very much a very personal choice in their own freedom.
We don’t disagree.
> I don't think this should be a political take at all. In this decision there is nothing any Government should have a say in.
Unfortunately, Americans don’t live in that world. The government makes decisions that impact the health of pregnant mothers and children all the time.
> It's not something government should regulate but it is something that government policy should incentivize.
Every time this comes up, there are numerous instances reported of welfare states in Europe, Asia, etc. trying this and it not working.
The west, and especially the US is falling out of love with republicans and liberal democracy as they learn that some problems need to solved with an iron fist.
The "iron fist" is merely creating new problems at an alarming rate. Sure, in theory a wise benevolent monarch could institute reforms that are hard in a democracy. In practice, the current crop is nothing but performative grifters and their cheerleaders are unwilling to draw the distinction.
Markets being completely free got us in this mess, and while sound on paper has so many potential ways to go wrong it should be controlled by the working class either directly or indirectly through voting
Theft is a symptom, not a disease. Eliminate the disease and theft effectively disappears
Educational choice deserves to be respected so long as it isn't being used to propagate objectively false information
> Markets being completely free got us in this mess, and while sound on paper has so many potential ways to go wrong it should be controlled by the working class either directly or indirectly through voting
Is that what got us into this mess? (Which mess?) Take medical care, for instance. Is that a free market? Not really, no.
I mean, there are clearly markets that can be too free. No, you can't put poison in food and call it "free market". You can't roll through the farmer's market with guns and take everybody's stuff and call it "free market". There is a level of regulation where markets work best, and they work worse with either too much or too little regulation.
But something like the medical market... most people can't shop around for insurance; their employer works with only one insurer. Most people can't shop around freely for doctors; they have to go to someone within their plan. And so on. That's not even close to a free market.
> Theft is a symptom, not a disease. Eliminate the disease and theft effectively disappears
Great. Now tell us what you think the disease is, and how you think we should eliminate it.
> Educational choice deserves to be respected so long as it isn't being used to propagate objectively false information
And who is going to authoritatively determine what is objectively false? You just appointed that person dictator of the educational system. (See previous remarks about free markets.)
The disease is poverty most of the time, if not directly then indirectly. Solving it is wealth redistribution at a massive scale but unfortunately our masters need another yacht
The educational system was working pretty well in terms of objectivity until the right wing started screaming about kids pissing in litter boxes and universities censoring right wing ideology.
The reality is that right wing ideology is unpopular when exposed to objective discussion. Turns out most people dont agree those concepts.
So now we have an administration who's actively working to censor universities to compel speech and censor ideas it doesnt like via lawsuits, executive orders, and funding elimination.
Neither of these is right wing value. They are right wing talking points right uses when it suits them and completely ignores when it does not suit them.
Oh no, a group consisting of people applying scientific methodology and 20 year olds is quite fond of an objectively scientific and idealist political philosophy. Color me shocked
Strongly disagree. This is just increasing the "political temperature". The only true solution is people learning to talk and disagree with each other without "taking their ball and going home". Sorting ourselves into ideological camps on everything is destructive.
What would “conservative” universities teach? The role of chemtrails in minority violence? Creationism? Why the Earth, despite being flat, is perceived as round? Cognitive differences between races of people? Why is climate change actually a Global Cooling?
Universities should be places where truth is sought without prejudice.
It’s funny how you talk about truth without prejudice and yet you did list one thing in there that’s essentially true, but definitely can’t be discussed at universities anymore. Not because of truth, but because of political correctness.
> The core fiction that enables the university to work is a dedication to 'truth' and progress through discussion. . . . That breaks down when there isn't open discussion on campus.
Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism”: “Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.””
> The left now holds a place of orthodoxy in the universities and power structures.
Eco: “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.”
> Whether the 'right' can break it back into an enforced balance is yet to be seen. . . . The opposition needs to “live” somewhere!
Eco: “However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
Smart business model decision, since most people and organizations prefer regular progress.
In the future this might be the reason enterprise software companies win - because they can use their customer funds to pay for faster tokens and adaptions.
Text from CEO email to impacted users in February for October Breach:
Hello,
I’m reaching out to let you know about a security incident that resulted in the email address and phone number from your Substack account being shared without your permission.
I’m incredibly sorry this happened. We take our responsibility to protect your data and your privacy seriously, and we came up short here.
What happened. On February 3rd, we identified evidence of a problem with our systems that allowed an unauthorized third party to access limited user data without permission, including email addresses, phone numbers, and other internal metadata. This data was accessed in October 2025. Importantly, credit card numbers, passwords, and financial information were not accessed.
What we are doing. We have fixed the problem with our system that allowed this to happen. We are conducting a full investigation, and are taking steps to improve our systems and processes to prevent this type of issue from happening in the future.
What you can do. We do not have evidence that this information is being misused, but we encourage you to take extra caution with any emails or text messages you receive that may be suspicious.
This sucks. I'm sorry. We will work very hard to make sure it does not happen again.
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