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Feel free to suggest names for my weekend reading list/column in the comments here.

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Weekend Reading was fine. When I subscribe please make it send an email that says "you are now getting Fisted by Foucault."

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is salo ded?

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Jun 5, 2021Liked by Niccolo Soldo

I find these weekend summaries most insightful!

Hunter gatherers practice ancestor worship. Which essentially means they only cooperate through kinship and marriage. And certainly not in gatherings with strangers in some sort of spiritual communion. See: extremely high rates of violence in primitive societies.

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Jun 5, 2021Liked by Niccolo Soldo

How would low interest rates make it harder for first time buyers to buy? I'm no expert, but it seems like it would be a wash-- lower interest rates make home prices go up, but monthly payments remain the same. Also, "growing populations"?? I though we are in the midst of a multi-generation baby bust. ??

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One wonders whether it would be best if the German Greens win: For the last two or three decades the Greens have dominated German policymaking with consistently less than 10% of the vote. They can do so because they are the party of social science departments, the party of the bureaucracy, of the NGOs, and, most importantly, of the journalists (Weischenberg in 2005 & Berghofer in 2010 showed that journalists are four to five times as likely to vote Green than the average voter - I'd be curious to know if similar studies exist for other western countries).

A Green Chancellor thus wouldn't change much policy-wise (as German politics already serves as a global blueprint for progressive idiocy), but at least for once would make the negative fallout insperable from those in power (including social science departments, bureaucrats, NGOs and journalists).

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Exciting stuff regarding old civilisations. It does seem to be hard to come to any sure-shot conclusions based on just the cave paintings, but the fact that we have no proof of farm settlements in the site does lend credence to the theory that it was the final hold against agriculture

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Please bring salo back nic

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Overproduction of elites a result of extensive post-secondary education, which results in excessive degrees of unkillable debt, further shoving back the abilities of these new elites to buy their own pied a terre, exacerbating their sense of lost entitlement and further incentivizing oligarchs to soak up housing.

I love it when a plan comes together.

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A government led by technocrats is fitting for Italy. They have always been known as a naturally analytical, dispassionate people. Leave it to an Italian technocrat to look beyond personal biases and cut through bureaucracy.

Wait no, I'm not thinking of Italy. I'm thinking of the reptilian nation-state from the desert planet X93-Delta7.

Draghi is from there afaik

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Niccolo, Niccolo, Niccolo. Sorry I haven't read your newsletters in a while, but I do have one thing to add about the effects of widespread Blackrock ownership and renting - it's going to make life difficult for many local governments.

Property taxes are a big breadwinner for many local governments, and owner-occupied homes (even after deductions for owner living there) get higher assessed values than rentals due to different assessment methodology, not even counting the lower quality of many people who rent bringing down neighborhood values. Higher values mean more funds for local governments and school districts to do business. By converting homes to rentals, it's going to starve these governmental units of their own independent revenue and make them more dependent on state and federal funds to survive, and the states/feds can make those funds dependent on complying with all sorts of restrictions...

The end result will likely be a combination of furthering America's favela-ization where those who can afford to pay for private services and governmental units which might want to take steps towards being based having to serve as an outpost of the Global American Empire in order to make payroll.

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