Culture creates new ideas downstream. Without new IP, it’s like trying to feed yourself by eating your own arm.

So: moratorium on re-using IP in movies. The UK makes heavy use of movie subsidies. We should use this to disincentivise anything sits inside an existing franchise. If a movie’s success is likely more to do with existing mindshare than its content, don’t support it.

Radically reduce copyright down to 10 years or something. More than that: invent a new super-anti-copyright which actively imposes costs on any content which is too close to any existing content in an AI-calculated vibes database or something.

i.e. tax unoriginality.

Trump tried as much as he could to overthrow the Constitution. That his was an almost farcical and shambolic attempt at an autogolpe does not change the gravity of what happened. And yet Trump isn’t just a free man; he is, once again, the president of the United States.

The myth of America says that this can’t happen. But as we see, our history tells us a different story. Our history says that we struggle to hold the powerful accountable. Our history says that we would often rather look the other way than contend with what it means for presidents and other high officials to break their oaths and turn their power against the Republic. Our history says that with enough power, and if you’re the right kind of American, you can escape consequences altogether and die a citizen in good standing.

The “working poor” … are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone.

There will be people who tell you to give up, and there will be days when hope feels distant[…] But it is through understanding the threats we face, maintaining connection with one another, and quietly, relentlessly finding ways around policies meant to erase us that we continue to survive. We carve out space not because it is given to us, but because we insist on it. And when history does bend toward justice—as it always eventually does—it will be because people like us were there, hands on the arc, bending it.