Collects posts to all blogs (including the main interfluidity.com, as well as drafts.interfluidity.com and tech.interfluiduty.com) by Steve Randy Waldman
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Here's a very straightforward graph to help explain why Americans are so glum, and angry. (or on FRED.) A simple interpretation of the graph is that until 1982, the "average" American household could afford more than 90% of average consumption out of labor income alone. You didn't need hereditary asset wealth, some accumulated chunk of savings, to lead an average life. You could just get a fucking…
TL; DR: I'm using LLMs to generate short "teasers" for blog posts and essays, which I embed in images and then post to feeds that I follow on BlueSky and Mastodon. A bit pathetically, I devote much of my energy to the challenge of how can we resurrect the high-quality "commonwealth of letters" we briefly enjoyed in the pre-social-media blogosphere? Implicit in the question is that something about…
In the previous post, we discussed why status quo multiparty democracy fails to adequately represent pluralistic publics, even though members of the public can cast votes for a rich menu of parties, including parties that ostensibly share their values and interests. In a nutshell, the problem stems from the fact that (1) once elected, representatives must join heterogeneous coalitions in order to…
Regular readers will know that I think multiparty government is essential if electoral democracy is going to be functional. Two-party "democracy" is a catastrophe. It deprives the electorate of parties they can vote for in which they recognize a close approximation of their own values, interests, and perspectives. Instead, voters have to make guesses, with neither the information nor expertise…
A significant update of Keynesian compromise was made on 2026-06-12 @ 02:35 PM EDT. → The previous version accidentally misquoted Rodrik, used the phrase "golden handcuffs" rather than "golden straitjacket". The post was originally published 2025-04-20 @ 07:30 PM EDT. This is an automatically generated post. draft by Update-o-Bot 2026-06-12 @ 02:35 PM...
TL; DR: You can try feedletter dockerified here. One thing you can say about software or "tech" is it's always changing. A relatively small fraction of the change, in my view, counts as progress, but there is so much change that even a small percentage accumulates pretty fast. One of many, many trends in software that I never much mastered or paid attention to is "containerization". I am very…
A significant update of Feedletter tutorial was made on 2026-06-11 @ 12:30 PM EDT. → Modify the tutorial to encourage use of new './feedletter generate-starter-untemplates', and document by default in terms of those. The post was originally published 2024-01-29 @ 10:30 AM EST. This is an automatically generated post. by Update-o-Bot on 2026-06-11 @ 12:30 PM...
I want to riff a bit on this exchange between Kevin Elliot and Samantha Hancox-Li. (I hope they'll forgive that I've played around with formatting and added punctuation.) Elliot: ...What's changed are norms surrounding representation & aspiration. Being an educated, cultivated person has become widely politicized in a wider environment of transgressive populist contempt for conventional…
TL; DR: Me and Claude code collaborated on some documentation for my Scala sysadmin library. Is it any good? Maybe other people would use the library? *** I don't like to do anything very complicated in a shell script. It feels loosey-goosey. I don't quite know what's going to happen, how things will behave if anything goes wrong. I love doing just about anything in Scala, a programming language…
TL; DR: My two static sites (this site, drafts.interfluidity.com) can now be downloaded in full as zip files, for offline reading or archiving. Zip download links: tech, drafts *** Last week (during "office hours"), I was asked why I was so fond of static sites and static-site generators for publishing writing. Aren't dynamic content management systems like WordPress or Drupal superior? I really…
