As I said before, I don't want to make too much of this analogy, but you could do multiple of these ads just on Trump's abortion quotes. | Continue reading
Kristi Noem: The politician who has the guts to tell you to kill your dog. https://t.co/u68uxR3b4o — Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 27, 2024 Trump VP contender Kristi Noem defends shooting her puppy to death, saying it makes her “tough” pic.twitter.com/BofGjW41Wh — Biden-Harris H … | Continue reading
This is Joseph. Canada recently proposed an increased capital gains tax: Under the proposal, the inclusion rate for annual capital gains realized above $250,000 for individuals would be taxed at a rate of two-thirds, up from the current 50 per cent. Any gains under that bar would … | Continue reading
For around two years now, we've been hammering the point that much of the political impact of Dobbs would be from the secondary and tertiary affects the ruling. Secondary and tertiary is mainly where the unintended consequences lurk, women with miscarriages being denied urgent me … | Continue reading
Regular readers of the blog have probably noticed that I am at least mildly obsessed with the technology of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We have run countless posts largely consisting of pictures and often articles from Scientific American published from 1880 to 1910. … | Continue reading
How news organizations filled with smart, dedicated, ridiculously overqualified people can be manipulated into making serious and seemingly stupid mistakes. Uri Berliner's controversial article about his now former employer, NPR, didn't have much to recommend it directly, but it … | Continue reading
The more you read about what people thought about technological progress one hundred and twenty or thirty years ago, the more you come to question the standard line that technology always exceeds our expectations. Tuesday, April 17, 2018 People in the late 19th century fully expe … | Continue reading
This, my friends, is a soundbite. On the house floor today Laurel Libby (R-Auburn) stated "Let’s talk about the nazis…I would like to know what they did that was illegal." We won't stand for this MAGA extremism in Maine. Check out who we have running against her: https://t.co/d9J … | Continue reading
Musk said "Let's get the bad news over with first" So the manager sends him a link. Musk is quiet for a long time. Then he takes a deep breath and asks, "What's the good news?" The manager sends him another link... ... and says "You could have invested in DJT." For those who insi … | Continue reading
Friday, April 15, 2011 Weekend pop culture blogging -- comic strip edition The birth of a medium invariably consists overwhelmingly of crap (think Sturgeon's Law raised to the next level), but new media also has a way of producing the occasional work on stunning originality. An o … | Continue reading
... or try to draw too many inferences from the similarities, but there are some notable parallels between this election and 1964. In the years that followed the election there was (perhaps still is) a tendency to get all warm and fuzzy about Goldwater. It's easy to forget what a … | Continue reading
It's a shame "stentor" didn't catch on One of the conclusions I've come to after digging though the history of 19th and 20th century technology is that when there's a real demand for specific functionality, it will express itself as soon as (and sometimes even before) the technol … | Continue reading
I had a fun repost of some cool turn-of-the-century tech ready to go then this happened... Phillip: That Arizona law is nearly 160 years old. Lawmakers wrote it when Arizona was not even a state, when Abraham Lincoln was still alive, when professional baseball did not exist. When … | Continue reading
Despite predictions in the immediate aftermath of Dobbs that abortion would not be that big a deal compared to issues like inflation, it has only grown in importance. Republicans are scared and Democrats are smelling blood because there is no position for GOP politicians in any b … | Continue reading
First of all, there's the timing of this. The surprise Robo Taxi announcement certainly came at a fortuitous moment for Musk. Before the news broke, Tesla was having a really bad, awful, totally nogood year ... ... followed by a really bad, awful, totally nogood day thanks to the … | Continue reading
"EMPLOYMENT OF HIGH-FREQUENCY CURRENTS IN THERAPEUTICS." I was about to start speculating about the propensity of Turn of the Century scientists to announce major discoveries only to have the effect sizes later turn out to vanish entirely, but then I realized I wasn't entirely su … | Continue reading
Josh Marshall had a recent post entitled "A Few Thoughts on Florida" that closed with this: Then we get to the question of the potential impact on the November election in Florida. I’d guess it could be fairly significant. We’ve all kind of concluded that Florida is now a red sta … | Continue reading
Segundo de Chomón and the pushbutton age Regular readers have noticed we've been spending a lot time on the history of technology, particularly the explosive changes around the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One of the things I find most fascinating about the period is the n … | Continue reading
Last Friday's post was running long so I decided to put the reproductive rights tweets in a post of their own. Lots of political analysts argued in the wake of Dobbs that this issue wouldn't be that big of a deal. One of the many mistakes they made was assuming that support for a … | Continue reading
Muzak has been around a disturbingly long time. As previously mentioned, there is a popular narrative among those trying to explain away the apparent failure of a new technology. The story goes that the under-performance is not due to the technology being badly designed or servin … | Continue reading
Starting off with a follow-up to Joseph's earlier post. Very much worth a listen. Rampell: I’m surprised that Kevin wasting his good name defending fraud and lies… pic.twitter.com/DVWJ5MKhTA — Acyn (@Acyn) March 19, 2024 PayPal Mafia and PayPal Mafia adjacent As mentioned before, … | Continue reading
Tuesday, April 1, 2014 Being a management consultant who does not suffer fools is like being an EMT who faints at the sight of blood An April 1st post on foolishness. When [David] Coleman attended Stuyvesant High in Manhattan, he was a member of the championship debate team, and … | Continue reading
UPDATED (Anyone else remember Pam Bondi?) In case you haven't heard, Donald Trump's net worth just got much bigger. Incredible. Trump’s Republican billionaire skeptic became his Republican billionaire friend by giving him billions of dollars in exchange for policy favors on TikTo … | Continue reading
This is Joseph. One interesting development in the Trump justice process, despite his generally favorable treatment, is that it challenges people's intuitions about how the justice system works. I have long understood that there are a lot of things that are illegal that seem like … | Continue reading
Of course, the 2012 me had no idea what kind of VC-driven insanity the 2024 me would witness. Thursday, March 22, 2012 Venture capital and the growth fetish Felix Salmon has another smart post on venture capital and the way he feels it distorts American business: Another way to l … | Continue reading
Remember what we've been saying about range of data? To the extent that political scientists understand the effect of money on elections, it's an understanding limited to the precedented (or at least its general neighborhood). That's how predictive modeling works, at least the ki … | Continue reading
Starship will have a small spin on the way to Mars. Even a tiny gravity vector is better than none. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 6, 2024 With a radius of less than ten meters, any perceptible spin will only serve to make the crew sick. That's not to say that there aren't reasons … | Continue reading
As we've discussed at some length, there is a strange inconsistency in much of the mainstream media's coverage of the election (actually, there are many strange inconsistencies, but we'll just focus when one for the moment). In the run-up to the primaries, papers like the New Yor … | Continue reading
Something about this tweet was familiar... First story with @NehaWadekar is here https://t.co/2Hair2LKEY — Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) March 14, 2024 It took me a minute to realize that we had written about Bridge in two posts back in 2017. Bring red flags, lots of red flags – part I: … | Continue reading
When talking about alien visitation believers, Tyler Cowen is definitely one of the sharp ones. He's a smart guy. As far as I can tell, he never fell for Grusch and company's transparently absurd claims (which puts him one up on the New York Times). He was also one of the few bel … | Continue reading
Pretty much average for a Colbert monologue, but it connects with four of our favorite topics. (how does the fourth tie in? Check out the artist's rendering of the giant sheep hybrid after the break. Assuming the jump break still works on Blogger.) | Continue reading
We really should have come back to this one more often. We also should have spent more time reminding everyone what a terrible writer, thinker, and human being Steven Landsburg is. Not to be confused with Steve Landesberg. That guy was great. Friday, March 16, 2012 How our inabil … | Continue reading
This was originally part of our Tuesday tweets post, but I decided the ETs deserved a spot of their own. UFO believers have been having a bad couple of weeks. For starters, once highly respected astrophysicist Avi Loeb watched still more of his reputation go into the wood chipper … | Continue reading
A "bust out" is a fraud tactic, commonly used in the organized crime world, wherein a business' assets and lines of credit are exploited and exhausted to the point of insolvency. from Wikipedia. Subject to debate: Trump’s takeover of The RNC will make it much easier for the Dems … | Continue reading
Polls... Still can't get over this. FL Atlantic Univ released a poll of Minnesota with a sample size of 125 people; Vermont 111; Colorado 170. That's just not how this works. — Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) March 9, 2024 ... and politics Did Biden’s State of the Union address ease con … | Continue reading
Three Proposed Changes to Daylight Savings Time The first (from XKCD's Randall Munroe) has some obvious issues. Monroe also suggests an alternate solution in the title text, averaging out the spring and fall changes and setting clocks 39 minutes ahead year-round. While Monroe's 3 … | Continue reading
Like Frank Bruni, Ezra Klein is a good soldier. I doubt that deep down Klein believes that we really need to seriously entertain claims of warehouses full of alien bodies and football field sized spaceships acquired by the government through a conspiracy involving Mussolini, the … | Continue reading
Former NYT editorial page editor James Bennet's book length op-ed is stunningly bad by every standard we would conventionally use to judging editorial. I sent a link to a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist I greatly respect (I quote him often enough you may be able to guess who). … | Continue reading
Michigan is the fourth state in a row Trump has underperformed public polling. Trump and the GOP are weak, not strong. They've been having performance problems since Dobbs, and we are seeing these problems, their struggle, in early 2024. More 👇https://t.co/6fa2YKK1V1 — Si … | Continue reading
... apply to more than just the police. From Gardner's Up for Grabs | Continue reading
This is Joseph.So I think that this line of thinking is misguided:Why? Well, the first problem is that purity tests, in general, have a tendency to be abused. The question of whether one's political beliefs make one capable of doing a job, seem like something that goes wrong. Eve … | Continue reading
And make sure to drive safely. | Continue reading
In case this blog is your only source of news.Boebert Appeared to Fondle Date’s Penis in Packed Theater as She Put His Hand on Her Breasts Lauren Boebert has perhaps shown a desire to reach across the aisle here.— Michael McKean (@MJMcKean) September 16, 2023 "Behaving disruptiv … | Continue reading
Basically what we said about the storm Sunday morning, butt now in the past tense... except for the earthquake. I was sitting on the couch watching the local news that afternoon. I'd taken a walk a little while earlier to see how things were looking. The rain had been mild but st … | Continue reading
Friday, July 19, 2013 First assume a fairy godmother... This is one of those stories illustrates just how bad journalists have gotten at covering life in the bottom quartile. Here, from Marketplace, is the set-up: The fast food chain teamed up with Visa to create … | Continue reading
Apologies for running tweet-heavy for a while, but the weekend's craziness in Russia when the fog of war combined with the fog of mutiny to bring visibility pretty close to zero for a while was one of those moments where Twitter at its best (which still exists despite Musk's effo … | Continue reading
Because this is a feel good story.This is a feel-good story on an individual level. If your heart does not go out to Olga, if you don't feel sad for what the woman went through and if you can't share in her happiness at finally getting some measure of security, comfort, and digni … | Continue reading