Steve Randy Waldman

https://zirk.us/@interfluidity

Blog: https://www.interfluidity.com/
Github: https://github.com/swaldman

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Last Notes

2026-08-26 16:00:24 UTC

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Ha! It all depends on the retrofuture. Some merit retrieval! Others are retro for good reason.

2026-08-19 18:21:19 UTC

Why do politicians who once touted “modernization” now try to sell us the 1950s? #ChrisDillow https://chrisdillow.substack.com/p/the-politics-of-cher ht [@markreckons](https://home.social/@markreckons )

2026-08-10 21:27:30 UTC

“You cannot save your way to the life your parents had, because the life your parents had is now priced in a currency (asset wealth) that wages do not convert into.”
// this by #HenryFudge is wonderful. ht @npub1clv…szjr
https://henryfudgeofficial.substack.com/p/degeneracy-is-a-symptom

2026-08-08 17:46:44 UTC

"The trade regime that began in the early 1990s was designed for (and often by) large retailers, low-wage-seeking manufacturers, and the world’s largest pharmaceutical, financial, and agribusiness companies… [It] also required countries to adopt pro-monopoly policies." #LoriWallach https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/right-way-balance-trade

2026-08-08 17:33:03 UTC

the audience for a piece of music is not an individual but a community and music makes very little sense as a commodity for a single individual to "experience" or "enjoy" absent some community that gives it social meaning and effect. this is a large part of why in our society we become less musically engaged as we are isolated from broader communities by work and family life.

2026-08-07 16:52:59 UTC

we’re toast anyway but our kids shouldn’t have to grow up into anything like this.

2026-08-06 20:44:40 UTC

“the one i’m using now it’s covered up with fear and filth and cowardice and shame” https://youtu.be/nirEM4vBR2I

2026-08-06 03:18:49 UTC

Your session has expired. No further information is available.

2026-08-04 23:07:43 UTC

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although the actual banyon tree is amazing, the new mascot “tree” is ugly as f.
https://cdn.masto.host/zirkus/media_attachments/files/117/039/750/321/579/866/original/3605a4e195dd9350.jpeg

2026-08-04 17:01:20 UTC

“Democratic Socialism Gets Serious” by #MattMcManus https://www.liberalcurrents.com/democratic-socialism-gets-serious/

2026-08-04 03:38:05 UTC

"The best writing is inevitable, but not predictable" @npub109f…3mc6 https://brennan.day/the-itch/

2026-08-04 03:36:31 UTC

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kind of an intellectual’s corollary of Minsky's insight that financiers who want to remain in the business can’t just sit out the madness. prudence is punished long before it is rewarded, and harshly enough that practitioners are unlikely to survive.

2026-08-03 11:08:49 UTC

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https://zirk.us/@interfluidity/117031251228518463

2026-08-03 11:06:16 UTC

i accidentally deleted this one, because i thought i had mistakenly repeated it, while i was trying to hedge my too-eager endorsement of it by appending a reply. i am an experienced user of the cyber networks.
https://cdn.masto.host/zirkus/media_attachments/files/117/031/251/133/600/109/original/22f3f7a4ccd493ed.jpeg

2026-08-03 02:35:44 UTC

lots of controversy surrounding this one. i think the core point in the paragraphs i excerpted is right on, but i agree there's a lot in terms of how the author describes the social commons and its decline that is a bit off. i think there has been such a commons, and its enclosure or extraction is the obverse of our measured wealth. but particulars of the account i ought not have endorsed so fulsomely. https://zirk.us/@interfluidity/117027161791298205

2026-08-02 23:36:34 UTC

“Working with these tools is like swimming in a pond where the ground drops off sharply. One minute you’re wading comfortably and there’s support under your feet. Then suddenly you cross a specific line, and you’re back to swimming on your own. This analogy is my best way to explain what it feels like when the model goes from helpful to clueless.” [@matthew_d_green](https://ioc.exchange/@matthew_d_green ) ht @npub13w4…2jsf https://defcon.social/@jianmin/117027353249950094

2026-08-02 22:26:41 UTC

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thanks for the suggestions!

2026-08-02 22:24:15 UTC

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because it’s long and i didn’t want to split it into multiple posts.

2026-08-02 17:48:11 UTC

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via #NicholasGruen whose discussion should not be missed. https://nicholasgruen.substack.com/p/social-fabric-the-price-of-what-survives

2026-08-02 17:46:16 UTC

This is excellent, by #JohannKurtz https://becomingnoble.substack.com/p/young-adults-are-poor-despite-every
https://cdn.masto.host/zirkus/media_attachments/files/117/027/161/722/676/698/original/871e25e14f5f6577.png

2026-08-02 17:06:22 UTC

"very often, legacy software is simply software that solved a problem so well nobody felt the need to replace it." @npub1hx4…lchq https://perlhacks.com/2026/08/the-future-isnt-evenly-distributed/

2026-08-01 05:40:58 UTC

i find it tiresome when people are mean to people.

2026-08-01 05:18:02 UTC

civil society is the name we give to how the demos constitutes itself. its development and formation is the essential prerequisite of democracy.

2026-07-25 04:32:18 UTC

when we remember are we haunting the past?

2026-07-23 21:09:19 UTC

when you are young you are seeking novelty when you are old you are staving off uncertainty.

2026-07-20 22:27:39 UTC

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indirectly you are talking to lots of other humans!

2026-07-20 12:06:14 UTC

software is a practice not a product. nothing about contemporary AI changes that.

2026-07-20 10:54:05 UTC

only the young die good.

2026-07-19 23:35:20 UTC

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the great thing about business investment is you can spend all the money on it and the spending doesn’t reduce the profit you report to shareholders. the same money that is nvidia’s profit can be oracle’s. oracle may be taking more risk (to the extent it’s reinvesting more than nvidia), but ROI realizations are next year’s and perhaps somebody else’s problem.

2026-07-19 21:50:47 UTC

the current iteration of AI begins with a faltering cloud computing industry's need for a growth driver. so high compute burden and improvement via brute-force scaling begin as features rather than bugs.
but brute-force scaling was always going to become a China comparative advantage.

2026-07-18 14:40:41 UTC

We are holding the Table Leg responsible for the Pain Inflicted when it aggressively encountered our Pinky Toe.

2026-07-18 13:05:14 UTC

China is able to keep pace with the AI frontier while maintaining a wide and diversified portfolio of industrial activities. The US is betting the farm not only on AI, but also its consolidation into companies with Google/Facebook/Microsoft style margins.
cf https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/business/china-ai-moonshot-kimi.html ht Dean Baker

2026-07-18 12:07:01 UTC

sentience. sapience. subjectivity.

2026-07-17 07:59:43 UTC

we really need to roll back the normalization of murder. however hypocritical and based on ignorance it may have been, we were much better off when the culture was scandalized by official killing than now, when we shrug it off.

2026-07-16 19:37:29 UTC

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are 401ks / iras treated as pensions or just assets held by households?

2026-07-16 15:57:13 UTC

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using equity as “liabilities” at market value is a pretty good approach! although it brings in the issue of foreign holdings.

2026-07-16 15:55:05 UTC

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if wr could break out the equities portion of defined benefits pensions, then i’d think it should be included. i don’t think it’s likely to change the picture that much, but if it can be it should be included.

2026-07-16 15:52:10 UTC

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it’s a question of the price of what we get. consumption is what we get. balance sheet equities represent the price we attach to the things that deliver it. i’m not trying to suggest consumption spending alone causes equity value (although indirectly sure), i’m pointing out that for the same consumption, the price of equity (that must be supported by cashflows!) is much higher than before.

2026-07-16 12:25:39 UTC

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i prefer consumption, because consumption is the base, investment spending is derivative, it happens to support consumption.

2026-07-15 23:58:05 UTC

substack converted some people who used to be interesting writers into car dealerships.

2026-07-15 17:15:55 UTC

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Of course nothing says profit margins and valuation multiples *have to* revert. We could, to coin a phrase (it's really Irving Fischer’s phrase) have just reached a “permanently high plateau”. It's fair to say I am skeptical. /fin

2026-07-15 17:14:31 UTC

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It also might suggest financial fragility, that the prices at which we value equities relative to the value of what the firms produce are unusually high, and could mean revert (either because profit margins revert, get competed down to traditional norms, or because "multiples”, how much investors pay for each dollar of profits or dividends or other payouts returns to smaller, more historically normal values. 4/

2026-07-15 17:06:27 UTC

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Households don’t hold "more”. They always, in aggregate, effectively hold ownership of the businesses that serve the economy. What this ratio is telling you is the *price* at which they are valuing those businesses. If we used raw numbers, all kind of inflations would make comparisons very difficult. But if we describe that price as a share or multiple of the total amount households spend on consumption — from which business values derive — we try to get apples to apples. 1/

2026-07-15 09:55:43 UTC

“Even if the AI companies themselves are not particularly (or at all) profitable, AI-related investment spending is probably an important factor in raising aggregate profits. Just like the California gold rush generated plenty of profits for somebody, even if the vast majority of prospectors themselves went broke.” @npub1afx…dru7 https://jwmason.substack.com/p/profits-payouts-and-equity-prices

2026-07-14 23:12:31 UTC

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yes. the bad bank now would be the US dollar system, rather than just the private financial system.

2026-07-14 14:24:26 UTC

one way to understand contemporary politics is we are collectively playing an ultimatum game, capital has made its proposal and this is what it looks like when the rest of society struggles to say no.

2026-07-14 14:18:24 UTC

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i hope it doesn’t go beyond that.

2026-07-14 14:15:37 UTC

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we all mostly live or die on accidents. i'm glad you tripped into a good spot.

2026-07-14 14:12:19 UTC

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yes. though in theory it is possible to stabilize an economy through a financial crisis, and it has arguably happened occasionally (remember the 1987 stock market crash?), usually financial crises do result in economic crises.

2026-07-14 14:10:29 UTC

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a financial crisis under current conditions might be much more disruptive, because it is foreign enthusiasm for US financial assets that currently sustains the value of the US dollar. that was not really the case in 2008, when official reserve flows (e.g. from China) supported the dollar. treasuries and the dollar were a “safe haven" post-2008, empowering the US government to cut checks to bail out influential parties, and have those checks be valuable and effective. 7/

2026-07-14 14:08:07 UTC

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assetholders grow rich, and intervene ever more aggressively in politics to ensure there are flows to validate asset prices and the wealth they have come to rely upon. those who hold relatively small asset nest eggs are net payers, and eventually object or refuse or just throw over the table in some form or other. ultimate outcomes are not very predictable, especially over longer timeframes. our politics remain mostly just aftermath of the great financial crisis now. 6/

2026-07-14 14:06:01 UTC

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but the cash flows that support financial asset values must come from others. your income, even if it takes the form of dividends or interest or capital gains, is ultimately someone else's expense. 5/

2026-07-14 14:05:13 UTC

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financial assetholders come to "bank on” the value of their financial assets, which they understand in theory are at risk of losing value, but which in practice they've made plans against they'd not be willing to concede with assertive political intervention to prevent or undo the losses. 4/

2026-07-14 14:04:00 UTC

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the financial crisis we are on the verge of has simply to do with the huge share of wealth and income embedded in financial assets and returns, wealth levels sustained by prices only justifiable if those returns continue indefinitely at rates much faster than the growth of the economy as a whole. a financial crisis is ultimately a form of social conflict. 3/

2026-07-14 14:01:41 UTC

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a financial crisis is not the same thing as an economic crisis. there are many economic crises that don’t provoke financial crises, and there can at least in theory be financial crises without serious economic crises (though in practice that is rare). 2/

2026-07-14 14:00:44 UTC

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if AI puts everyone out of a job, that's an economic crisis. if it puts everyone out of a job by doing the work just as well but more cheaply, the state can address that by redistribution, sending cash flows back to the people who lost jobs, and the extra purchasing power for the more cheaply could be devoted to care work, yoga classes, whatever things humans still prefer humans for, reemploying many. 1/

2026-07-14 12:51:20 UTC

the thing about the past is though it was not then, it is now, a safe place.

2026-07-14 12:31:34 UTC

in orthodox economics, the value of firms is entirely derivative of the value of consumption by final purchasers. providers of intermediate "capital" goods are valuable because they contribute to production of consumables. with that in mind…. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1X3BM
https://cdn.masto.host/zirkus/media_attachments/files/116/918/332/205/804/510/original/2d31013b46552c9c.png

2026-07-14 11:41:28 UTC

two things can simultaneously be true: (1) contemporary AI is real and revolutionary technology; and (2) we are courting the greatest financial crisis in the history of humankind.

2026-07-14 11:40:20 UTC

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our job to make sure there is.

2026-07-14 11:38:39 UTC

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ask my wife how pleasant i am to be around…

2026-07-14 00:40:10 UTC

it’s important to distinguish success from sociopathy.

2026-07-11 12:22:55 UTC

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i devoted several years of my life to an idealistic version of crypto that, as far as i can tell, has simply disappeared. perhaps, sure, i'm in some kind of ghetto and not seeing it. but i sure used to see it. https://www.interfluidity.com/files/EthSV-engineering-economic-security-2014-06-29.pdf https://www.interfluidity.com/uploads/2017/04/small-biz-crypto-light-edit-to-publish.pdf https://www.interfluidity.com/uploads/2018/03/TokenizedRealEstate-light-edit-to-share.pdf https://www.interfluidity.com/uploads/2019/08/sbt-ethereum-presentation-2019-08-29.pdf https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/7153.html

2026-07-08 13:41:42 UTC

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But the US legislature is not representative. We don't see many Gingriches in multiparty democracies with proportional representation. The US Congress, at least under current electoral and political practices, does not really qualify as a representative body. It is an institution subject to capture that superficially takes the form of a representative body, that has become (in part due to Gingrich!) too captured and atrophied to accomplish anything at all.

2026-07-07 23:37:07 UTC

charismatic human beings are both seductive and unreliable. that's why we invent and rely upon institutions. we should leave a much, much smaller role for charismatic human beings in our politics. heads of state should be ceremonial.

2026-07-06 21:26:40 UTC

does anybody make a case for crypto anymore or is it just there because it’s there now?

2026-07-05 16:54:08 UTC

"If your website has a 'See more' link, I assume that indicates that the rest of the article or site is unimportant or uninteresting, so I basically never click on it. Why would I?" @npub1dwe…fxlw https://www.philipbrewer.net/2026/07/05/see-more-or-not-see-more/

2026-07-04 09:51:13 UTC

preliterate and postliterate are both varieties of illiterate.

2026-07-01 18:43:49 UTC

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i find it hard to invest in enterprises or games i think are terrible. but that hasn’t been a very lucrative conceit.

2026-07-01 18:05:10 UTC

why is there no ETF that simply coinvests in whatever the President and his family have a stake in?

2026-06-28 08:35:47 UTC

from their perspective they are the protagonists and we are the chorus.

2026-06-25 14:47:11 UTC

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yes.

2026-06-25 14:43:48 UTC

look. i know people claim air conditioning cools them. i do want to respect people’s “lived experience”.
but the science is very clear. on average, air conditioners heat rather than cool the areas immediately surrounding them.
i suggest we look to the dynamics of contemporary social media to better understand the disconnect.

2026-06-08 19:23:52 UTC

These people were kind enough to include a proposal of mine in the project.
Despite that lapse I am very excited to read the whole collection.
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-reconstruction-papers/

2026-06-08 10:35:36 UTC

“when people opt to devote their energy to tracking the latest TikTok star or scrolling content instead of nurturing interpersonal relationships, they are effectively amusing themselves to death.” @npub1u2k…nxuj https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20563051261437487

2026-05-22 00:54:47 UTC

the thesis “contemporary social media contributes dysfunctionally to a collective sense of pessimistic nihilism” is, i think, correct.
it is not inconsistent, however, with the thesis “a great deal is terrible about Americans’ material conditions, and worse in a variety of ways than previously”
it seems kind of dumb to me that there has emerged a discourse that treats these hypotheses, which i’d characterize as mutually reinforcing, as if they were mutually inconsistent, there can be only one.

2026-05-16 21:19:33 UTC

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I have! Come visit!

2026-05-16 19:04:36 UTC

AM radio, 2026.
https://cdn.masto.host/zirkus/media_attachments/files/116/585/809/494/691/904/original/14c3375729882e72.jpeg

2026-05-13 12:04:48 UTC

[new draft post] The fiduciary class https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2026/05/13/the-fiduciary-class/index.html

2026-05-10 18:21:21 UTC

someday we’ll have a monument to the new solarpunk plenty and there will be a great gold statue of donald trump just like there is a giant visage of andrew jackson on the twenty dollar federal reserve note.

2026-05-05 21:58:19 UTC

incentives matter. that's why we need to dramatically reduce them.

2026-05-04 00:08:19 UTC

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the places you’d cut are also the limbs.

2026-05-03 21:28:20 UTC

[new draft post] The $200,000 standard deduction https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2026/05/03/the-$200000-standard-deduction/index.html

2026-05-03 21:08:58 UTC

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at the moment things are bad. but things have been better, and many things remain better in other places. the point of productive pessimism is to figure out what to do rather than concede nothing can be done to forestall bad outcomes.

2026-05-03 20:17:02 UTC

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I agree that human nature is corruptible! And institutions are of course made of human actors. But I am more optimistic than you are that the susceptibility to corruption inherent in human nature is somewhat malleable to institutions and so culture, so I think a mix of institutions that encourage and reward virtue, along with checks and balances that impose accountability, can enable effective coordinated action at scale with tolerable losses to corruption and malfeasance.

2026-05-03 19:37:57 UTC

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I guess I'd say to shape rather than limit. The higher the quality, the greater their scope and effect might virtuously be. Since no institutions are perfect, and large-scale formal institutions will always face information problems, there will always be need for some limits. But as we get better at shaping coordinating institutions (if more than as at the moment), we might accomplish much by doing more with them. (My perspective as a social democrat may differ from yours as a libertarian)

2026-05-03 18:59:22 UTC

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I guess I'd say in any collectivity, there are institutions. Often large-scale or formal institutions don't develop. But family is an institution, parenthood. Warlord and submission thereto are institutions. Large-scale, formal institutions are prerequisite to what we consider success in modernity, but they also have profoundly catastrophic failure modes, they're double-edged swords. The work is to both develop those and to ensure their quality. Otherwise, modernity and prosperity fail.

2026-05-03 18:51:10 UTC

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Sure. I prefer the word “institutional” to "cultural”, though, because "culture” often becomes a kind of a residual, an unclear blob of how some collectivity behaves or is conditioned. It can be used to explain almost everything but affect almost nothing. Institutions are malleable, subject to rational critique. Although it is true that institutions are downstream from culture, in social affairs the arrows go both ways, institutional reform can also reshape culture.

2026-05-03 18:44:30 UTC

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Almost everywhere, there is incredible intelligence at an individual level among the population. But in some polities, that contributes meaningfully to success (success at a social level is prerequisite, beyond a few outlier warlords, for success at an individual level), and in other polities it's basically wasted. It’s what happens at the social, the institutional, level I'd argue that is the core differentiator.

2026-05-03 18:37:30 UTC

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That, my friend, is your prerogative to judge. I am the person saying it, as a individual.

2026-05-03 17:58:21 UTC

intelligence and rationality are much more social than they are individual characteristics.

2026-04-26 16:21:46 UTC

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(my post was a critique of a certain kind of scientism, not of having children. my kid is — entirely unscientifically — the best!)

2026-04-26 15:08:04 UTC

the costs of child-rearing are straighforwardly measurable and quantifiable. the benefits of child-rearing are wooly and hand-wavy and entirely nonquantifiable. therefore child-rearing is irrational, as a matter of science. your arguments to the contrary are non-falsifiable.

2026-04-04 21:26:57 UTC

if we want to restore social trust, we need to make sociopathy less remunerative.

2026-04-04 21:16:31 UTC

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we need to write some good stories about cyanibacteria hauntings.

2026-04-04 17:41:30 UTC

what if running the global economy on the liquefacted corpses of ancient beings somehow cursed us?

2026-03-28 14:14:22 UTC

somewhere in these ashes there is a phoenix.

2026-03-27 14:04:49 UTC

the guilty massacre the guilty. and then the tables are turned.

2026-03-27 05:06:28 UTC

if you define victory in term of destruction of the other side, then war becomes a positive sum game, both sides simultaneously can be victors!

2026-03-26 11:28:28 UTC

sometimes when you rip off the bandaid you just bleed out.