One thing that worries me a lot is that the economy is basically a Ponzi scheme. Older people's wealth is tied up in their houses. They are depending on ever-rising asset prices that they can borrow against. Younger people would like to buy houses. But policymakers have been pushing up asset prices to shore up the boomers. Now, there is nobody to buy the houses at the prices they are at, and nobody selling wants to lower the prices. When asset prices start to fall, overleveraged homeowners will start defaulting. But if asset prices stay where they are, younger people can't buy homes.

Stuy is New York’s most prestigious high school because it admits the highest-performing students as determined entirely by scores on an objective, unbiased test. Seats at Stuy are not allocated by race. They are not given out through a subjective process that can be influenced by politics or favoritism or money. The kids who got in did the best, and the kids who did not do the best cannot get in, no matter how much rich parents or woke politicians want to corrupt the fair and objective admissions competition. People like Lincoln Restler think Stuy is prestigious for reasons other than the fact that it has a rigorous objective admissions standard. He thinks the prestige these kids earned through their excellence can be redistributed to the students who are not the best that he would prefer to pretend are the best. But these students are not prestigious because they go to Stuy; Stuy is prestigious because these students go there. And if different students — inferior students— went there, then Stuy would no longer be the school that is a magnet for the smartest kids in New York and its prestige and reputation would dissipate rapidly, just like the University of California system’s has. Or maybe Restler knows this, and he just wants to destroy Stuy, because he wants to prevent these students’ talent from being measured and identified, so they can be scattered into low-performing schools where they will languish instead of having their talent cultivated. Regardless, his ideology of racial grievance and destruction is a monstrous evil masquerading as “social justice,” and it will not be tolerated.

The @EFF is abandoning X because they say views of their posts have fallen from more than 500 million in 2018 to around 10 million last year. They imply that they are being throttled by the platform. What they aren’t telling you is that their 2018 era impressions were massively boosted artificially by backend algorithmic policies that pushed their content into the feeds of millions of users who didn’t read or care about it. I looked at @EFF tweets from December of 2018 and their engagement during that period was anemic. Most of their tweets had fewer than 50 likes, and single digit numbers of replies and retweets. On average, they were getting fewer than 500 likes and retweets per day on between 1.5 and 3 million impressions. That is extremely low. This does not suggest people were actively looking for or engaging with @eff content — instead it suggests that the old algorithm was strongly amplifying content from this account — either because it was a blue-check organization with a lot of followers or because Twitter was amplifying tweets from activist organizations during that period. But the people being shown these tweets were ignoring them. I also looked at their page on Bsky, and, while their most recent posts there were slightly elevated by their post announcing that they have flounced from X, most of their posts more than a few days old get fewer 50 likes on that platform.