Incredible Alexander Pope passage; I think about “too wise for pride, too good for power” all the time:

You, that too wise for pride, too good for power,
Enjoy the glory to be great no more,
And carrying with you all the world can boast,
To all the world illustriously are lost!

This David Golumbia passage makes a nuanced point: Isn’t DRM both a clever technical solution and a key freedom within software design? His Cyberlibertarianism will irritate you, but it’s full of truth nukes like this.

Anecdotal storytelling is exhausting now. Not every article about like basic water conservation has to begin with “One crisp summer day in 1965, Diane Noname drove up to a remote lake house <continues for 800 more words>.”

“Why does Mickey Mouse wear gloves?” is a seemingly innocuous question that leads to some disturbing places.

Yeah I’m a dentist ¹. My passion is sending birthday emails to patients I haven’t seen in decades.

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1. I’m not. ↩︎

Bacon sampler from The Farmhouse in Indiana

They just invented something that if you buy it, it makes you happy.

Tariffs on Canada (and Mexico and the EU and everywhere else) are inevitable because without them, China and to a lesser extent Korea and Taiwan will just route their trade surpluses through third countries. Only a global tariff can counter trade distortions that cause deindustrialization.

Mike Masnick is shocked that a site built entirely on opposition to Elon Musk is also opposed to generative AI. Next he’ll be stunned that gambling happens in casinos daringfireball.net/linked/20…

It’s wild how many people were able to pose as “environmentalists” while advocating unfettered data center construction and praising China, the world’s largest green-house gas emitter and material polluter by far

FiiO FT3 headphones with balanced 4.4mm plug connected to a FiiO DM13 CD player. Also, a #cat

Guy who takes a “hunt and peck” approach to mowing the lawn

The attempt to move away from X has been a clear failure. Bluesky is still irrelevant and media people in particular are realizing they’ll be out of the loop if they’re not on “the bird site” (remember when people called it that?) schwarztech.net/snippets/…

Thinking that difficult media is inherently superior (“deeper”) is what I like to call “the Dark Souls fallacy.” Masochistically subjecting yourself to opaque and frankly sloppy design in works like FromSoftware games and DFW novels is no different than performing Catholic penance for imagined sins.

One of the best arguments against getting a degree in English is that you’ll spend lots of time reading disreputable French and German theorists who, on top of being impenetrable, couldn’t have cared less about English per se.

The affinity that many have for gold as “real money” and their obsession with the “national debt” are legacies of Watergate. Nixon ended the convertibility of dollars into gold, making the debt meaningless; fiat money reigns supreme. But since he’s a historic villain, this action becomes suspect.

Something that will change your life is realizing that the German word “Spätkapitalismus,” almost universally translated “late capitalism,” is just as valid rendered “capitalism, lately”. It doesn’t imply that capitalism is ending.

A soccer homecoming

Even Americans indifferent to soccer¹ can easily become bogged down with the England national team. The common language and the erstwhile “special relationship” between the two countries means that the “can England finally win it all again?” narrative is as heavy as the smell of ash and petrichor after a wildfire and an ensuing June shower during every World Cup.

Since 2018, the speculation has been given the extra glow of “Is it coming home?”, a narcissistic reflection that shimmers with both the British² origins of the sports and the forced nostalgia for the 1996 song “Three Lions,” written for the occasion of UEFA Euro 96, which England hosted and lost in the most England way: On penalty kicks after a 1-1 draw with Germany. Its chorus incorporated the tournament’s slogan: “Football’s coming home,” a grand pronouncement that sounds comical to American ears, which at least for me synthesize this line into an image of the anthropomorphized rugby-inspired ball of American football driving down a highway.

The 1960s were a different planet

England won its first and so far only men’s World Cup final in 1966. Here are some facts about international soccer in 1966:

• There were no yellow or red cards.
• You couldn’t make tactical substitutions.
• You could backpass the ball to the goalkeeper for him to pick it up.
• The offside rule was even stricter.
• Argentina, France, and Spain had yet to win their first World Cup finals.

Since that time, England has never gotten back even to the final, let alone won it. Smaller nations such as the Netherlands, Croatia, Poland, and Sweden have come at least as close to winning the title in the last 60 years³ as England, the birthplace of “football.”

CRT memories

I began watching England’s 1998 round of 16 match against Argentina on a CRT TV at my parents' house, and finished it on an even bigger tube TV at my grandpa’s house, next door—it was such a drawn-out match that I had to walk over to the latter for dinner, during which I got my first experience with the added 30 minutes of extra time and the penalty-kick shootout. Likewise, I saw them eliminated by Brazil in 2002 in my parents' living room, by Portugal in 2006 at my grandpa’s, by Germany in 2010 on a grainy feed in my first real apartment, and by Croatia in 2018, France in 2022, and Argentina in 2026 in my house. Even as someone who’s not an England fan, the country’s struggles with its own game have been apparently unmissable.

Soccernomicist

Shouldn’t they have won more, though? That’s the sentiment underlying the pervasive coverage that’s so disconnected from their actual success. Probably not: Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski’s Soccernomics, first published in 2009 as Why England Lose, has exhaustively cataloged the reasons why England hasn’t matched its 1966 title: It’s smaller than Germany, Italy, France, and Brazil, its teams disproportionately attract blue-collar players who differ from those in other countries, and it’s been unlucky.

But the narrative of “This is England’s year, right?” persists, and the games are spectacles that look back at us from TV to TV in our different homes across time, in part because, well, it’s all in English. We get it at some level, without having to decode extra linguistic and cultural context like we would with a place like Switzerland.

Just as Kuper and Szymanski were confident they didn’t have to worry about England winning the 2010 World Cup right after their first edition was published, so too can I be confident in my answer to my title question: England don’t win because they can’t beat elite national sides at the World Cup level.

An elite failing

Let’s define “elite national sides” as the seven other nations that have won the men’s World Cup: Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Uruguay. Since winning the 1966 final, England is winless in eight knockout matches against this group, with three exits apiece against Argentina and Germany and one apiece against Brazil and France.

Twice England has also failed to escape the group stage, and in each time the failure was caused by a member of this group: They failed to get a victory against Spain in 1982 (the 0-0 draw wasn’t enough) and lost 2-1 to both Italy and Uruguay in 2014, going out before they’d even played their final match against Costa Rica. Overall, England has been eliminated at least once by every one of its fellow champions. Its only exits that came to sides outside this group were to Portugal in 2006 and Croatia in 2018.

By the time the 2030 World Cup commences, England’s title drought will have reached 64 years. I’d take a bet that even a country that hasn’t won yet—Portugal, Switzerland, Belgium, or the Netherlands being the best candidates—will win their first before England wins its second. But England is hosting Euro 2028, so expect “Three Lions” to get more nostalgia, even if “62 years of hurt” sounds like someone whining about lower-back pain rather than reminiscing about soccer.

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1. “Soccer” is maybe the most British word imaginable: A piece of 19th-century Oxford slang derived from the Football AsSOCiation, the name of the sport’s national governing body. It helped distinguish this type of “football” (association football) from others (such as rugby union football). ↩︎

2. England’s decision to compete separately from Wales and Scotland has undoubtedly hamstrung its ambitions and success. ↩︎

3. “Three Lions”' most famous line is “30 years of hurt/never stopped me dreaming”. Already, the song is closer to the 1966 final than to the present day. ↩︎

It’s the grist of thousands of Instagram and X posts: Why do 35 year olds look so much younger today than their counterparts did 40-50 years ago? The actors Danny DeVito and John Ratzenberger, who both crossed the 35 threshold in the 1980s, are common literal faces of this meme, as they both were chubby and balding before they even reached 40.

The explanations for the visible disparity often fixate on vices—smoking, alcohol, and so on. These defining habits have likely affected aesthetics, but there’s more threads here. I’ll start with them and then explore some others.

Less indoor smoking

When I was ten, I remember helping at a bingo hall in which everyone was smoking. The deleterious effects of tobacco on the skin are well-known, but it wasn’t until the early 2000s that indoor smoking began to vanish. By 2005, it was gone seemingly everywhere in the USA.

Less drinking?

I use a question mark because the decline in alcohol has not been nearly as quick or severe as that in smoking. Moreover, alcohol is bad but not as manifestly bad as tobacco. It’s dehydrating and damaging to the liver, but you’re not literally setting a fire in your lungs.

Hydration obsession

Speaking of hydration, the culture of watermaxxing—bringing huge water bottles everywhere, drinking “eight glasses” per day—is recent.

Gym culture

Gyms became big in the 1970s, especially after gay liberation. I figure that the ensuing fitness culture has helped stave off obvious age markers such as having a beer gut.

Hair drugs and operations

Joe Biden is a great illustration of how terrible baldness cures used to be; huge hair plugs that only became inconspicuous when his hair went white. The introduction of 5alpha-reductase inhibitors in 1992, 5% OTC minoxidil in 1997, and better hair restoration surgery over the years have all made hiding baldness much easier.

Lead abatement

The 1970s were awash in lead—it was in gasoline, paint, pipes, and sauter. It hasn’t gone away completely, but many of the biggest sources are gone.

Medical aesthetics

Botox, facelifts, injections, lasers—there are so many options now for refining your face subtly and continuously.

Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, economists and seemingly everyone else couldn’t stop talking about how much money the USA “owed” to China. The sentiment was so ingrained that it became a plot point of Gary Shytengart’s truly stupid novel Super Sad True Love Story —Chinese creditors “calling in their loans” to America. The idea lent itself to numerous creative metaphors—e.g., the “Chinese credit card,” something that a haughty Huffington Post moderator insisted that multiple U.S. administrations had used to finance everything from the Iraq War to the 2009 stimulus.

Ok, I’ll admit that the amount of money China has loaned the USA is staggering. Are you ready to hear the amount?

It’s $0.

A money printer doesn’t need to borrow

You’re likely wondering how this is possible. I mean, you may have heard about how America has gotten “trillions” of dollars from China. But before I explain why this is a convenient fiction, ask yourself two questions:

• Where is China getting its U.S. Dollars?
• Why is the U.S. government borrowing in a currency that it can create any amount of?

The USA is the sole issuer of U.S. Dollars, a fiat currency that can be issued at any time and in any amount. China is not printing any dollars. So there’s your answer to the first question.

The second one is a little weirder because, as per the answer above, the U.S. government doesn’t need bonds (or taxes, for that matter) to fund itself. There’s no reason to borrow if you have a money printer. Basically, it’s just selling them to help set an overnight interest rate and to pay interest to people who want and need it, such as pension plans or mercantilist regimes (like China) that need to recycle their dollars. The interest that bond holders get paid by the government doesn’t strain the budget, because it can always be afforded—after all, it’s denominated in dollars.

These bonds are called U.S. Treasury securities, or “Treasuries.” Until the late 2010s, China was the top holder of these instruments; they’ve since been surpassed by Japan and the UK, which has had the effect of deflating the “Chinese credit card” discourse, although it still comes up as a potential weapon that China could wield against the USA, i.e., selling all its debt.

“Borrowing” is a misnomer

The terminology here—that China holds American “debt” that we have to “repay” because we “borrowed” it—is misleading because none of the transactions here are at all similar to household borrowing. The process goes something like this:

1. The USA creates new dollars to purchase goods or services from China.
2. Once received as payment, these dollars go into what is essentially a “checking account” that China has with the Federal Reserve, i.e., the institution that actually issues all U.S. Dollars.
3. China moves this money from its Fed checking account to the equivalent of a Fed savings account, i.e., a Treasury that pays interest.

That’s it! Now, explain how the U.S. “owes” anything here. This is nothing like credit card debt!

The rationale for the rhetoric

So why do we hear so much about how we “owe” all this money, or how we’re passing down debt to our grandchildren and so on?

It’s mostly ideological. The U.S. center and right wings want to limit our horizons by acting like we’re too “indebted” to do anything. They’d prefer a world in which the government is hemmed in by fake concerns about the need to “tighten its belt”.

There’s also the issue of the European Union, which many economists either assume is the norm for how currency regimes work and/or see as superior to the profligate “indebted” USA. But countries such as Greece that use the euro face a completely different set of constraints than the U.S., China, Russia, the UK, or any other sovereign issuer of fiat currency.

That’s because they don’t control the central bank—the European Central Bank is not something they can commandeer to print more money as needed. They really can face a situation in which they wouldn’t be able to supply the euros to fund themselves.

On the other end of the spectrum from the EU is Japan, which has long been the bane of mainstream western economic theory. Despite running enormous “debts”, Japan has low interest rates and a very high standard of living. This is because the Bank of Japan buys Japanese Government Bonds, showing that debt management it’s all a policy game rather than something dictated by an exogenous, apolitical “market.”

Ignore the national debt

Now that China is no longer the biggest buyer of Treasuries, we don’t hear quite as much about how much we “owe” them. But we still hear a lot about the national deficit and the debt.

They’re nothing to worry about. All government debt is someone else’s asset—it has to be, because it’s just money that’s been spent. The national “debt” is really just a ledger of private sector prosperity—all the dollars that have flowed into households and businesses. This is why the few times that the government ran a surplus—like in the 1920s and 1990s—presaged economic disaster: Money was being sucked out of the private sector.

So yeah, debt in your household is a real thing, but the U.S. government is not a household and it can never go “bankrupt.”