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Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
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14 Jun, 5 tweets, 1 min read
10% of graffiti looks really good, and 90% looks bad. We need some sort of voting or rating system for graffiti artists so that we can get some quality control around here.
Actually, I have a friend who was a graffiti artist in Japan, then got arrested for illegally painting on stuff. It made him famous, and now his wall art is in high demand at trendy Tokyo shops.
OK I'm thinking about how to implement this. How about:

1. Graffiti artists spray-paint unique personal QR codes that let passers-by send tokens to a crypto wallet

2. If you get enough tokens, the city hires you to do graffiti on officially reserved walls
Private businesses can also hire successful graffiti artists to do wall art. Like my Japanese friend, but without having to get arrested in order to get fame.
Also this would probably require making graffiti *legal* on public buildings.

1uplegal.com/california-law…

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More from @Noahpinion

Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
16 Jun
America is a highly stratified class society, with class consciousness present in almost everything we do. But because our racial and ethnic divisions are more pressing, we don't even really get a chance to think about class stratification.
Living in a less class-stratified society feels like having a great weight taken off your back, that you never knew was there. It's impossible to describe how different America is to people to have only ever lived in America.
It's not as simple as saying "there are places where top college grads will marry construction workers, and private equity people will invite fry cooks to their dinner parties". Because that doesn't tell you *why* they do that, or how they think about it.
Read 7 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
15 Jun
1/I wrote this post the other day, but I didn't do a thread about it. Let's remedy that.

Americans are thinking very zero-sum these days. It's a big problem for our nation.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/americas-sca…
2/I've been reading about the 70s, when high gas prices and inflation (not matched by wage increases) created real scarcity for Americans. They turned to the selfish, every-man-for-himself attitude of the 80s.

I worry that something similar is happening now...
3/Have you ever heard of "self-expression values" vs. "survival values"? It's one way political scientists measure attitudes in different countries. And over the last 10 years, America has shifted dramatically toward the "survival" end of the scale. ImageImage
Read 16 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
13 Jun
It's interesting how the tankies and assorted other Cold Warriors have become incredibly strong on Twitter, but they've so far failed to gain any real political influence. Even Ilhan Omar doesn't even slightly buy into their bullshit.
On Twitter you'll get ratioed to hell and back for saying the U.S. helped the Soviets beat the Nazis (which is obviously true).

In real life, the Representative who's thought to be the most leftist on foreign policy is denouncing China over the Uyghur repression. ImageImage
The tankies are the purest illustration of how Twitter lets a few bad actors look like the voice of the public, and of how limited and ineffectual that apparent influence is beyond the confines of this website.
Read 4 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
12 Jun
@McReynoldsJoe @wesyang Whether or not this discomfort is a widespread trend in reality, it certainly seems like this is an *aim* of at least some branches of wokeness -- to make White people as uncomfortable as Black and Asian people have been forced to be heretofore.
@McReynoldsJoe @wesyang In other words, faced with a nation where White people felt like a comfortable majority and Black and Asian people felt like uncomfortable minorities, one popular "solution" is to minoritize White people as well, so that *everyone* is an equally uncomfortable minority.
@McReynoldsJoe @wesyang But is this the optimal solution? Instead, I wish we could have become a nation in which *no* groups of people feel like uncomfortable minorities; in which everyone feels like a respected, safe member of the American majority.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-…
Read 4 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
11 Jun
An important racial difference in poverty in America:
Idea for a reverse inheritance tax: If your family has been poor for three generations, you get $150,000.
I mean, obviously we'd have to make it not a strict cutoff. But this policy would obviously have zero perverse incentives, and back-of-the-envelope calculations it would cost only 1% of U.S. total wealth.
Read 4 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
11 Jun
Biden's defeat of Trump has led to a sharp rebound in opinions of the U.S. among developed countries.
Confidence in Biden vs. confidence in Trump.

Simply astounding.
Confidence in U.S. democracy has fallen precipitously. A majority say the U.S. used to be a good example of democracy, but has not been a good example in recent years.
Read 13 tweets

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