Wonder how long before we see a Suno-style "Meaningful Consumption Experience" AI for personalized romance novels. And I'm not specifically talking about self-insert stuff (some people may be into that or not), just allowing all readers to hone exactly what they want from romance novels forever.

Maybe? Not as familiar with the boundaries of magical realism as I would like, but my suspicion is anything like this has a very different vibe due to being a 'highly speculative real-event explainer'. Wild-ass guessing isn't super magical, generally.

I presume it's "Lightly fictional narrative strictly constrained by real world events", though it certainly suggests relatively fantastical explanations for why real world events occurred.
I could see the phrase being used to describe making a narrative work from speculative conspiracy theories.

An additional cognitive load: The sense that many of the people who "think we are deranged" can blame us for all negative consequences that follow because somehow our earlier actions caused them. If anything good happens it's because they beat us; If anything bad happens it's our fault.

Also, I can't agree with virtually anything the Libertarians say generally, but I have to give them credit that they were ahead of the curve on the "US imperial presidency is bad" bandwagon.

So much of this comes back to the Roberts' court bending over backwards to open the doors for Trump's excesses while trying to leave some way to close the door should Democrats hold power in the future. The presidency wasn't designed clearly enough to overcome a deeply complicit supreme court.

Mine is the music version. "Buying Gear is nice, but have you tried using the gear you have, or finding people to play with?"

Mine are still the various people at the opposite fringes of the hyperextended friend groups I've accumulated over the years, as well as a few family members that I never friended on some sort of separation-of-groups principle.

And I'm not totally unsympathetic to the notion that "it has always been thus, if you were observant enough", but it feels like a bit of a false equivalence. It's the feeling that our previous mooring in the possibility of a better world and generally shared facts have diminished in my lifetime.

Liberal, maybe; But radical?

People are really starting to get into the dual state thing. Normative state for 'us', prerogative state for 'you', with only quibbling over the definitions of the groups.

Of course, they'll argue in turn that non-government-entities will step in and alleviate suffering, and that it's more just since it's voluntary. It's just offloading the problem to empathetic suckers while the people with means just avoid the suffering masses.

Mostly raising armies and police forces to protect us from external entites and each other respectively. From this perspective,suffering is just a civil disorder problem. Suffering people run at cops and get shot: TaDa! No suffering people. They can also die peacefully if they prefer.

"Only a government indifferent to suffering is truly fair". Basic libertarian logic where using the government to force people to be generous to the needy is itself cruelty that should be stopped.

Soup is the food of humanity, but filled-starch is the food of civilization.

Runs a mega-successful campaign, trounces all competition except one person whom he actually trusts and stays in the race on principle, then drops out of the race and airs out all of the dirt at once.

I'd go up to four, and have a different sort of Old-retired-batman story. Zero action, still some gadgets. I'm imagining Semi-retired billionaire philanthropist political skullduggery, but any sort of "non-world-saving adventures that a ridiculously perceptive could take on" could work.

This feels like a renovated jack-and-jill bathroom that went off the rails.

There is some neat tech behind it, but I don't like the idea of decentralized currency. It's hard to peg it to real value, even the 'guns and taxes' backing of fiat currency. It's like trying to live on calorie free food. There's no 'there' there. 'Mineable decentralized currency' is even worse.