People severely, severely misprice and misunderstand risk.

Climate change is a good example. If there is even a 0.25% chance that climate change will be as damaging as the worst predictions, it’s worth spending quite a lot of money to ameliorate it or prevent it. And arguing that there is not even a 0.25% chance is frankly fucking stupid given the history of our planet and the science available now.

Climate change is only one example — risk is mispriced in house purchases, retirement plans and so many other areas.

By the way, for climate change if it is as relatively-harmless as even the most rosy scientifically-valid but also unlikely-to-occur predictions, it still means spending hundreds of billions a year.

Yup:

Merkel: marriage is between a man and a woman
Trudeau: I support DAPL
Macron: Africans are uncivilized
Liberals: we need even more centrists

— Run the Jules 🇲🇽 (@SubcomandanteX) July 10, 2017

A bit shocking how delusional and clueless those older than 45 or so are about the experience of younger people in the economy.

my fiance has a degree in biotechnology and cytogenetics and worked at bed bath and beyond and older people would always ask him, “so did you go to college?” and when he said yes and told them his degree they would say, “wow!! then what the heck are you doing working here??” and if that doesn’t tell you how disillusioned and ignorant the older generations are to the situation many millennials are in right now i don’t know what will

So lucky that I strayed into a field at exactly the right time where jobs were relatively plentiful and for which fancy degrees were not required.

My life has been a series of lucky decisions. Yes, some skill — but honestly, mostly luck.

Isn’t it, though?

This tweet is all truth.

incredible that half the NYT op ed page is just bored and vaguely horny dudes just kind of rambling about sandwiches they ate or TV they saw

— Tom McKay (@thetomzone) July 12, 2017

The NYT opinion pages and their spew are worse than the opinion columns that appear in local small-market papers named after cattle.

USA #1!

it was hands down one of the best, most thoughtful shows on TV and it deserved an Emmy for its final season

— Sarah Jones (@onesarahjones) July 13, 2017

Oh yes. The Leftovers. So sad it’s over, but glad it did not drag on and become enervated and repetitive for eight seasons or more.

Carrie Coon’s monologue in the final episode is all of humanity in a few hundred words. She is disturbingly good. Just so captivating, mesmerizing, convincing. Acting as a force of will. Shared dream; the art she builds is built with you too and that’s what makes her great.

Things that frequently got me beat up in North Florida:

1) Liking and befriending girls, and treating them as people, not as interchangeable mindless sex objects.

2) Being friends with black people.

This isn’t a complete list. I don’t have time to type all the “reasons” I got my ass kicked over the years. And ya’ll don’t have time to read 100,000 words.

But the above was two big reasons that I found myself in the dirt over the years. Sometimes, the other guy found himself there, too, but it took me a lot of fights to get good at fighting.

3 % rates means RE prices 25 % lower

— James Marsh (@JamesMarsh79) July 12, 2017

I’d guess more like 15%, but it won’t be small.

Real estate is a bubble, but not a mega-bubble like 2006. We’d considered buying recently, but glad in retrospect that we did not.

I had seven meetings yesterday.

I have seven meetings today.

At least today no one scheduled a meeting during my lunch time because they were unable to find any other free block on my calendar.

When, you might ask, is any work supposed to occur on days like these?

My friends, I have no idea.

FML.

No one seems to comprehend it from this angle, but this also helps to destroy the open internet:

Life Is About to Get a Whole Lot Harder for Websites Without HTTPS.

This is being pushed by Google et al. because mandated encryption makes it more difficult for regular users to handle publishing their own sites. It’s also designed to penalize non-Google ad networks which are much further behind on implementing HTTPS.

If you aren’t looking for where the money is going and why, you are looking in the wrong damn place (which is what most people do most of the time).

To all the idiots who say that “intention is irrelevant” when someone you don’t like makes a mistake, first of all you are as mentioned an idiot.

But let me introduce you to the concept of mens rea.

Yes, intention matters very much and pretty much always should.

I know, Tumblr tools aren’t bound by notions of traditional English-derived common law. But they should be at least bound by common sense.

I’m more like a porpoise than a person, and when I was a kid I used to seek out rip currents as they were the easiest way to get far from shore, which is where I liked to be in those days.

I feel bad for those people. I’ve always just been comfortable in water. A rip current to me was great fun. And anyway, how do you have trouble treading water in the ocean? It’s hard not to float since it’s so dense. And it sounds as if at least two of them had boogie boards. What?

I truly don’t mean to be a jerk but I can’t understand. I am glad the people were rescued but a rip current is only dangerous if you battle it. When I was young and lithe and relatively fit, I’d use those to swim sometimes nearly a mile out. I didn’t measure but I could barely see the people on shore so it had to have been about that far.

We’ll choose most of #1 and some of #2 (insert your own micturition and scatological jests and japes here).

Climate change lays out 3 basic options:
1. Unmitigated disaster
2. Eco-apartheid
3. Massive state action and control over the economy

— Kate Aronoff (@KateAronoff) July 10, 2017

It doesn’t have to be. But we don’t seem to be able to alter course.

i love the faction of galaxy-brain twitter that insists overpopulation isn't a real problem

— Sarah Jones (@onesarahjones) July 10, 2017

The politics of the Left insists that overpopulation can’t be a problem because, like, eugenics and stuff.

It’s a political view, not a practical one. If the human population of the earth were 500 million instead of 7 billion+, our problems would be much more manageable and vastly easier to solve — while we could still live a at a very high technological level.

Overpopulation and the Malthusian trap are not behind us, no matter what you read.