u/Sad_Newspaper4010

They were stronger in my first war against them, but it definitely feels way more possible to exploit France during the hundred years war. It seems to genuinely be something that weakens them now.
Also, if you guys want to play on the beta patch right now, I highly recommend making a one line change in the files to fix the broken economy shown in this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/EU5/comments/1txmzsu/a_temporary_fix_to_broken_economy_in_13_kinda/

Kind of like how in EU4 you got policies for having different combinations of idea groups

Idk if anyone else has this experience, but my mom is an empty nester and has a 4 bedroom house that she refuses to move out of. I've tried to convince her to sell but she tells me that if she sold shed have to buy a larger house to avoid paying capital gains taxes lol. I've tried telling her that avoiding paying taxes at all costs isn't always the right move financially.

I think part of the problem is that if your home isn't costing you much because you have a paid off mortgage, its easy to not think about the positive trade offs. People sometimes have an easier time thinking "if I sell my home and downsize I'd cut my mortgage in half" rather than "If I sell my home and downsize I can fund all my vacations for the next 15 years". I think for a lot of the empty nesters they aren't making the connection that living in a larger home than they really need is causing them to live a less luxurious life.

screenshot is from Matt Yglessias's substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/seniors-arent-living-on-fixed-incomes?r=1nkbwq&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

The reels react segment was pretty hilarious he should do it again lmao

A common conflation I see very often that Derek Thompson is making here, is between populism and ideology. I think this is wrong, to me populism and ideology exist on separate axes. In my opinion its perfectly compatible to be both a populist and a liberal, or not to be a populist and be illiberal. The two characeristics are simply in different categories. Populism is a rhetorical style in politics that is centered around framing political problems as a conflict between society at large and specific groups of people (the "villains"). If you really wanted to you could use populism to push a liberal policy proscription.

In the case of Abundance, you could push for Abundance's policy agenda while being extremely populist. This would look something like: "land owners and other rent seekers are screwing over the rest of society by making housing more expensive for their own gain". Whether using populist narratives to push Abundance is a good idea or not is a separate conversation that I won't opine on here.

If I were to guess the reason why many liberals, not just Derek Thompson keep thinking about populism in terms of ideology, it would be because the kind of people that populist rhetoric appeals to tend to be people who are already further left or further right than the mainstream. So when Derek argues with a group of leftists online he sees a lot of populist rhetoric, since this is the style of rhetoric that has become fashionable among them. But just because that right now there is a correlation between populism and the adherence to specific ideologies does not mean that populism is an inherent characteristic of any particular ideology, but rather a consequence of the way algorithmic social media operates.

For reasons I won't get into here, I believe populism is naturally suited to the current form of social media delivered politics. Its not at all surprising to me that on average, NYT reading liberals are not populists and that twitter scrolling leftists are.