I think a lot of folks rightly observe and articulate the problems of modernity—atomized communities, deteriorating metabolic health, ever-more industrial consolidation, etc—and assume they result from the natural progression of a humanity imperfectly directed by a central planning authority. In their view, fixing them requires a better authority rather than no authority at all. Examples: Wendell Berry advocates for price controls in agriculture and different types of price supports, many New Urbanists seek new/different land use prescriptions and federal infrastructure subsidies, etc. My sense is they advocate for these things with a kind of resignation: "It's just too that bad people, if left to their own devices, can't freely collaborate toward a better world. It's just too bad that people must have some sort of authority giving them direction." But the more I pick at any failure of modernity, the more it seems to me that it is precisely the authorities' inevitable misdirection that caused the problem. In the case of land use and the changing patterns of human settlement (an area about which I know more than a little) it seems so inescapably obvious nowadays that even those who are politically inclined toward central planning reluctantly acknowledge it. And the more I learn about agriculture, the more I see the same pattern repeating itself there. So, I don't quite get the pessimism. We don't need to try to solve the unsolvable problem of creating a better authority. If someone hangs on to that as the necessary path, I can see why they'd be pessimistic; history shows us that can't be done! But we can begin cutting Gordian knots. Ending intervention. Ending interference. Ending micromanagement. Ending central planning. Etc etc. When enough people appreciate that the central planners caused the problems, we will end the central planning. And more people appreciate that now than a decade ago. And more appreciated that a decade ago than the decade prior. So while I hear weariness and pessimism in the voices of some wise and battle-scarred critics of modernity, I'm optimistic: The path forward seems so obvious to me, and every year that passes, it seems to become increasingly obvious to more and more people. Before one can walk the way, one needs to know the way.

I hate when people try to kill your vibe and are always negative

I wonder what company will become the Mailchimp of agricultural robotics?

It's my last night in Osaka. I went out for beef tip omurice, oysters, sipped plum wine and sketched the chef at work I love that in a year, I went from not being able to draw to being able to capture slides of life like this

As much as I love seeing good people get paid for their loyalty, commitment, and contribution, there is something about a founder being congratulated on an IPO that has never sat right with me. Is a child better off if a thousand extra parents adopt him? Of course businesses are categorically different than progeny, but there is something in there that has always seemed off to me. None of the new owners on the cap table will care as much as the founders do. Do founders tend to become more proud of their businesses ten years after IPO than they were the moment they went public? Or less? It's a strange thing, at least to me.

Reminder: It may be legal, but that doesn’t make it right. yeomanpodcast.com/2026/01/05…

“…almost the main work of life is to come out of our selves, out of the little dark prison we are all born in. [Intellectual] Masturbation is to be avoided as all things are to be avoided which retard this process. The danger is that of coming to love the prison.” - CS Lewis

In America today, it's nearly impossible to get financing to build new buildings like the ones on the left. The building on the right is easy to finance.

Problem solved.

having spent my military career mostly in the South, between NC and GA, the interior and the coastal, coming from the North, I completely empathize with the Germans now experiencing it. I too was struck with wonder seeing the canopies of Spanish moss hanging from the old oaks.

"When a useful tool becomes detrimental to society, but incumbents prevent fixes, those involved are an enemy." Yes.

I wish I had the capacity to expand on @GordMagill's point in a way that was both both simple and sufficiently nuanced way that it rightly assigns responsibility and describes how we got here without indiscriminately vilifying everyone in FIRE—because it's plainly true that the vast majority of people in those fields are good and upstanding and doing their best to earn a living and make their little place in the world better for everyone around them, AND the last thing I want is for the pendulum to swing in the opposite direction. My soundbite is, "I think it's good that institutional private equity, insurance, etc exist, and at their core, they do are important and valuable and necessary industries, but it's very bad that tax, banking, and finance policies have directly and indirectly encouraged FIRE to metastasize and become extractive." I want to just say, "Don't hate the player; hate the game" and leave it at that, but then I see so many hate-able actors that it becomes hard to stay focused on the litany of insane policies that effectively institutionalize psychopathic behavior on a giant scale.

The complexity of this stuff seems intentional at times, kind of how every level of government diffuses responsibility across their own areas and then on to other levels of jurisdiction. Makes it difficult to hold any one node to account.

Hot take: NYC is the most overrated city in the world and people destroy their lives attempting to live there when they really belong (and would be happier) in a much smaller city.

1) A huge percentage of what Americans (and probably people in all developed nations) pay for things is syphoned directly or indirectly toward work that adds more cost than value. See Graeber's "bullshit jobs". 2) Americans pay for negative ROI systems that were mostly created and institutionalized more than 75 years ago (eg zoning, public school, social security, auto-dependency, policy-induced chronic illness). 3) Keeping-up-with-the-Joneses effect (eg large houses, fancy cars, hifalutin college tuitions). I wonder how big a portion of every dollar we spend goes toward covering the negative ROI satellites orbiting around all the actually-useful-enjoyable-and-productive things we buy.

As a person who is not part of any inherited BBQ culture whatsoever, I feel that Carolina vinegar-based BBQ is the best there is.

I have one of each.