Interesting Things on the Internet: December 1st 2025 Edition

• You probably shouldn’t block AI bots from your website. An excellent polemic. The Museum in a Box website has been getting hammered by bots for a while now; I should install iocaine to improve matters for the humans who visit.
• The American Pay Cut That Gave Us Obama and Trump, Twice. I haven’t checked the numbers, but the time-taken-to-afford-X framing seems a sensible approach. And I think this, and the middle- and political-classes’ insistence that the only options are rearranging deckchairs rather than things to make life better for all, helps to understand both Brexit and the popularity of Reform. And doing more than rearranging deckchairs is really hard but also, you know, the work that politicians should be doing.