Convert, chant singer, Ann Arbor attorney, Catholic Culture community organizer, Harvard economics BA favoring Distributism, recovering pro-life activist
Joined August 2011
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Paul Schultz ن retweeted
Mass illiteracy doesn’t mean we cease being able to sound out words. It means totally misconstruing the intent of a tweet. It means being unable to parse a paragraph of a Victorian novel. It means a growing number of people who’ve not heard of, say, Hamlet. We are already there.
It’s not that people will become entirely illiterate, it’s that reading comprehension and people’s ability to understand the central point of what they’re reading will become so terrible that meaningful discourse will become nearly impossible because people will increasingly respond to what they think someone is saying rather than what is actually being written. Many who pay attention can already see this happening.
Paul Schultz ن retweeted
This fault line is going to determine American politics for the next 20 years.
Why? Boomers vote for young people before those young people existed to cover a $40T deficit for boomers.
If you're a boomer, you see that as "I am owed what I was promised". If you're a young person, you see that as "you guys promised yourselves you'd rip me off and I never agreed to this".
Mark my words, the parties will be forced to re-align around this question and take sides.
Keep your promises vs. no taxation without representation.
You're going to have to pick one, as a politician. And it's going to get really ugly.
Paul Schultz ن retweeted
unfathomable damage done to America. You could have abundant, cheap, emission-free electricity flowing to your home right now if it weren't for these people.
Ralph Nader, 1997: “When we came out against nuclear power in the early '70s, the government had predicted that there would be 1,000 nuclear plants by the year 2000 in the United States, and there's 109 and shrinking, as more and more get shut down.” pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline…
Paul Schultz ن retweeted
"We didn't have enough kids to finance the benefits we promised ourselves, so the kids we did have are obligated to make up the difference."
Well, if you wanna change the bargain because it’s to your benefit, then I don’t think I’m going to feel very guilty about using my power to not let you do that.
I don’t see you or your generation not wanting what security Social Security provides. When I see them is not wanting to pay their share of it, which means paying the previous generation. That doesn’t sound like a very good deal to me so we’re not going to do that. I am willing to listen to ideas that don’t involve me getting screwed and no one else.
Paul Schultz ن retweeted
Either cut senior benefits on your own, or surrender national sovereignty. That is the choice the 21st century offers you.
"A 30% cut to pensions is what the IMF and ECB will demand if a reasonable agreement isn't reached between the French."
Paul Schultz ن retweeted
Kids, we had something called Bowl Season. It mattered very much for its own sake. It was a month long, championship bonanza for teams in every record bracket, starting in early December and ending on New Year's Day
Players left bowl victories as their legacy to the classes that followed, to match or beat. We voted on a national champion and, if we had two teams we liked, we split it, but it really didn't matter, it was the journey we all cared about
This was a unique game called College Football, there was nothing like it. They killed it off back in '98 but it took a few decades before everyone figured it out
Paul Schultz ن retweeted
New newsletter: WHY AMERICANS STOPPED FALLING IN LOVE
An interview with @dcoxpolls on his new book, Generation Uncoupled, including the following facts, claims, and questions:
- the share of 40-year-olds who have never been married has quadrupled since 1980
- For all the viral essays about (surely, very real cases of!) educated people finding it harder to get together these days, the entire decline in marriage rates since 1990 have come from women without a college diploma
- According to one analysis of the General Social Survey, “most of the overall downturn [in American happiness] is attributable to decline in marriage post-2000"
- Men with larger social circles tend to have much more romantic success. But that’s only true for men! The number of close friends a woman has seems to have little bearing on her ability to go on dates.”
- "attention infidelity," or "the experience of [a partner who] disappears into their smartphone and leaves us, perhaps only for a moment, but in doing so they undermine a sense of trust and understanding that builds between two people who are sharing an experience"
Paul Schultz ن retweeted
Want to be involved in your busy children's lives?
Offer to help them. Watch the kids so they get a date night. Come over in the morning and help get the kids ready and take them to school. Offer to cook dinner and clean up after.
Refrain your mindset from "Why aren't they giving me attention" to "How can I make their lives easier."
I guarantee this will lead to you being more included.
Paul Schultz ن retweeted
It doesn't necessarily follow because "agency" as a clear concept is incoherent. At what point does someone gain agency? Lose it? The lines are very unclear.
Men don't even have the agency that "men" have. We just treat people as if they have it. What we've found though is that treating men as if they have full agency produces huge gains and a few losses (there are injustices for low-agency men).
Treating women as if they have "full agency" has not produced much in the way of gains, and has produced much tragedy.
Reconciling this with 20th century liberal political theology is proving impossible.
Paul Schultz ن retweeted
It's great that Auron is assisting the Total Boomer Luxury Communism awareness campaign, but Western democracies have repeatedly reformed public pensions:
• New Zealand, 1992–2001: Raised retirement age from 60 to 65.
• Sweden, 1994–2001: Tied benefits to contributions and life expectancy, and introduced automatic financial balancing. Benefits fell repeatedly.
• Canada, 1997: restrained new benefits, and expanded invested pension reserves.
• Germany, 2004 and 2007: Linked pension growth to the pensioners / contributors ratio. Gradually raised the retirement age, 65 to 67.
• Britain, 2010–2020: Raised the female retirement age from 60 to 65, and then raised both sexes’ age to 66.
• Italy, 1992/1995: Switched pension increases from being based on wage growth to inflation, and moved new workers to a lifetime-contribution-based benefit formula.
• Australia, 2017: Doubled the asset-test pension reduction, while raising allowances to protect less-wealthy retirees.
• United States, 1983: Phased in a full retirement-age increase from 65 to 67. Benefits claimed at 62 went from 80% to 70% of the full benefit.
We can do this. We just need the political will, and to assemble a coalition of the productive against the idle, entitled rich.
Paul Schultz ن retweeted
Silicon Valley keeps building me a husband when what I really want is a wife lol
I don't want an agent that only does one-off, random tasks that are nice but not life-changing: booking flights, making dinner reservations, or buying tickets
I want an AI wife who knows what’s on the family calendar, remembers there’s a birthday party Saturday and we haven’t bought a gift then sends me options, realizes we’re almost out of diapers and buys them, knows which bills are coming up, remembers someone needs a dentist appointment and books it, figures out what the hell we’re eating all week and what we need from the grocery store, and generally keeps track of the 47 things that need to happen before anyone else even realizes they need to happen.
So, who's building me an AI wife that carries the mental load instead of an AI husband that waits for me to give it a chore??
Paul Schultz ن retweeted
I think this is a great use of AI but I am very curious what it will look like when a much broader swathe of the population thinks to use AI to submit forms to government or public infrastructure departments
Basically any public resource becomes DDOS-able, in a sense
I’m slowly cleaning up the suburbs with Muse.
Saw this mess of wires on a pole. Took a picture and asked Muse to contact Verizon to get them cleaned up.
It went to their website and got to work.
There is a 0% chance I would’ve sat in a Verizon support chat over this. I would’ve just been mildly annoyed every time I walked past it for the next five years.
“Someone should do something about that” is now a prompt.
🤝 @alexandr_wang
