Steve Randy Waldman
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"Recalling the decades-old Lorax Rebellion to save trees at New College as more large oaks are razed" by #KerrySheridan https://www.wusf.org/environment/2026-01-29/decades-old-lorax-rebellion-save-new-college-trees-more-large-oaks-razed
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The best thing you’ll read about the great $140,000 poverty debate, and the fallaciousness of reasoning endemic to the kind of people who get off on calling out other people’s fallacies. by #DanDavies https://backofmind.substack.com/p/ways-of-vibing
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"When prevention works, the catastrophe doesn’t happen, making the prevention itself seem (retroactively) unnecessary." #JakeScott https://quillette.com/2025/08/08/rfk-jr-s-mrna-betrayal-how-political-ideology-trumped-nobel-prize-winning-science/
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“On our current trajectory, we might just get those jobs making tennis sneakers.”
// an excellent piece on China, encouraging sane industrial policy in the US, by #DavidAutor and #GordonHanson
// (good luck with that under the current administration)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/opinion/china-shock-economy-manufacturing.html
ht #BradSetser, #GregIp
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“To save its insurance industry, Taiwan probably needs to intervene massively to keep its currency weak. To save its export industry from the threat of “reciprocal” tariffs, Taiwan likely need to step back from the foreign exchange market and let its currency appreciate.” #BradSetser https://www.ft.com/content/d71c34a0-4ded-4cba-be1c-82384915a8fd
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“Apple’s strategy in China has resulted in a transfer of technology and know-how so consequential as to constitute a geopolitical event” #PatrickMcGee https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/technology/article/how-apple-helped-china-become-americas-biggest-tech-rival-8f83tttv5 ht #BradSetser
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is #NoahSmith’s portrayal of China’s not-so-great quality of urbanism fair? https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/thoughts-on-sinofuturism
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“The one thing that you should not be able to say about my work is that I am not telling you what I really think. That is the price of entry to the worthwhile part of the Ideas industry. We may be bastards, but we are not bullshitting you.” #HamiltonNolan https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/ideas-that-cannot-be-spoken ht @AliceMarshall
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“The phenomenon of induced demand is as real for transit as it is for highways: If you provide a more attractive service, more people will use it. If you cut service, riders will disappear.” #JonathanEnglish https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-14/the-toronto-suburb-where-the-humble-bus-is-king
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“nobody can be trusted with absolute power, least of all the demagogues who seek it. The one good thing Trump’s trade policies are achieving is to demonstrate this yet again. They are harbingers of chaos. The world’s challenge is to survive the folly. The US’s is to end it.” #MartinWolf https://www.ft.com/content/a3e6174c-25e9-4428-9109-16e37319e9e2
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“it turns out that a statistical aggregate economic gain does not produce an increase in real world human well being if all of that statistical gain is captured by a single, tiny powerful interest group.” #HamiltonNolan https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/an-international-minimum-wage
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my alma mater was once as close to a utopian community of playful minds as has existed in this country.
i am so sad and ashamed by what it has become, so angry at the moral pygmies so raucously undoing it.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/29/florida-new-college-fires-chinese-professor
ht @jennycohn
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“The reason you should care about this is not that it could happen to you but that it is already happening to others. It is happening to people who, we claim, have rights just because we are human. It is happening to me, personally.” #MashaGessen https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/opinion/trump-trans-denationalizing.html
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under this definition, hasn't Congress — the most important branch of the Federal government — been under "competitive authoritarianism" for decades?
see e.g. https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/reelection-rates
from #StevenLevitsky #LucanAhmendWay https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/path-american-authoritarianism-trump
ht @williamcb.bsky.social @casmudde.bsky.social
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"While it appears that it has never been easier for anyone to freely share their opinions with the world, the apparatus that shapes the public’s thoughts and sentiments has never been in the hands of fewer men. (And yes, they are all men.)" #JohnGanz https://www.thenation.com/article/society/last-days-discourse-electronic-plebescite/
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"The ultimate function of the entrepreneurial ethic was (and is) to reconcile workers to precarity." #BeccaRothfeld (@heideggirl?) reviewing #ErikBaker's "Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America" https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/01/03/make-your-own-job-entrepreneurial-work-ethic-erik-baker-review/ ht @SteveRoth
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“(You may notice that straightforward ideas like ‘fire everyone in Democratic Party leadership positions automatically after a national election loss’ do not appear to be on the table.)” #HamiltonNolan https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/so-what-does-that-mean-in-practice ht @costrike
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On BlueSky, #DanDavies asked
"ok then if we have a vibrant and intelligent EconSky community riddle me this: what would the microfoundations be for 'voters dislike inflation much more than they dislike unemployment, even in a rising real wage environment with strong asset values'? what preferences would make that true?"
I posted the following thread in response. https://bsky.app/profile/dsquareddigest.bsky.social/post/3lar3zczumc27
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from #ThomasFrank https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/09/opinion/democrats-trump-elites-centrism.html
(the piece is badly titled.)
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“Part of Trump’s genius is being bad in so many ways that no particular way stands out and it seems like he must not be that bad.” #ScottAlexander https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-endorses-harris-oliver-or-stein
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Tax cuts “are the political equivalent of someone chopping your house to pieces with an axe and then offering the remains back to you under a sign that says, ‘Free Firewood!’” #HamiltonNolan https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/why-republicans-love-to-offer-you
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The 8pm track projects the center of the eye coming right over the Sarasota/Bradenton Airport, maybe a mile from the Center of the Universe (Palm Court, #NewCollege).
That's where we used to have our end of the world parties, when lesser storms showed up. The music still echoes, provoking ghost noise complaints from now evacuated neighbors.
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Milton's forecast track is within 10 miles of #NewCollege of Florida.
By far the most wonderful place I ever lived, for the past two years vandals like Ron DeSantis and Chris Rufo have been dismantling the college at an institutional level.
Maybe the algorithm doesn't like what they've done. Maybe it's helping them finish the job. Mysterious ways.
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it’s cancel culture that controls the weather you see. https://www.ncf.edu/event/socratic-stage-a-discussion-on-crime-in-the-21st-century/
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“if China’s central government has fiscal space—and it uses that space in way that gives households the confidence to spend more—China might be able to recover from its property downturn on its own, without relying even more on exports.” #BradSetser https://www.cfr.org/blog/beijing-still-has-fiscal-space
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“As Milanovic dismissively concludes, neoclassical models of distribution related ‘to life on Earth about as much as the theories that astrobiologists have developed about life on Mars.’” @storracinta reviews #BrankoMilanovic https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/inequality-without-class/
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“we’ve taken on a model of argument in which data, regressions and modelling…are the standard of proof. And because of this, we’ve closed off all possible explanations…except those for which usable datasets can be found.” #DanDavies https://open.substack.com/pub/backofmind/p/me-versus-the-scatterplots
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"[D]ivide most politicians into two broad categories: Enemies, and Cowards. [E]nemies are…opposed to your policy goals. [C]owards…agree with your…goals, but will sell you out…to protect their own interests. Embrace the idea that we are…pushing to elect…cowards, rather than…enemies. [T]he…work …is not to identify idealized superheroes to run for office [but] to create the conditions…that make it safe for the cowards to vote the right way." #HamiltonNolan https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/how-to-think-about-politics- ht @ryanlcooper
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“Students at New College are becoming more and more isolated by various actions of the administration, including…new rules that prevent ‘unauthorized’ gatherings of 5 or more students.” https://ncffreedom.org/%5B-%5D-blog/f/the-death-of-community-gathering-at-new-college
// can this be for real?
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“The international ideological aspects of the decisions taken by the US and the European Union are seldom taken into account by the domestic decision-makers because the thinking about the rest of the world and development does not loom large for the politicians who deal with China, Russia, national security and the like. But the ideological development problem will not go away.” #BrankoMilanovic https://branko2f7.substack.com/p/the-third-framing
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None of Trump’s corruption, #DavidFrench?
Florida under #RonDeSantis is a cesspool of patronage, from Ben Sasse to Richard Corcoran and the people they hire to do minimal, mediocre work at exorbitant salaries.
from https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/08/opinion/maga-movement-trump-election.html
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“[T]oo much attention in the 1950s was paid to Democrats trying not to appear soft on communism, and too little attention to Republicans accepting most of the acquis of the New Deal in return for safety of private property.” #BrankoMilanovic https://glineq.blogspot.com/2024/09/the-end-of-great-order-under-heaven.html
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“Predicting the future is almost impossible, but one of the few predictions that I feel very confident in is that, a century or so down the road, people will look at modern car-centric America with the same disgust that we feel when we hear about old timey cities without modern sewage systems, where everyone just dumped their chamber pots in the street.” #HamiltonNolan https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/cars-have-fucked-up-this-country
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“at long last, regular folks are realizing again that it is totally feasible for them to work less, yet make the same amount of money or more.” #JonSchwarz https://theintercept.com/2023/09/03/four-day-work-week-labor-day/ ht @DeanBaker13 cc @dpp
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from “Confiscate Their Money”, by #HamiltonNolan https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/confiscate-their-money ht @scott
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“I’m suspicious of government, but I’m even more suspicious of new tech that aims to serve a tiny number of private individuals. Believe it or not, it’s actually easier to change the President or political regime than replace Mark Zuckerberg at Meta. (I’m not exaggerating, he literally cannot be fired by the Board, or anyone else.)” #TedGioia https://www.honest-broker.com/p/10-reasons-why-technological-progress
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Perhaps the “Great Awokening” is ending after all, just not in the way anti-woke reactionaries like #RonDeSantis and #ChrisRufo had hoped.
It has not, historically, been right-wing traditionalists who have owned a “mind your own damned business” ethos. Au contraire. It looks like the not-right-wing-traditionalists are taking it back now.
Maybe we're also taking back incautious expression, telling it like we see it, chips fall where they may.
See e.g. #AdamKotso https://itself.blog/2024/08/12/weird-conservatives-and-the-end-of-whiny-self-righteousness/
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“When Boeing and McDonnell Douglas sought to merge in 1996, the Clinton White House pushed for the approval of what was a clearly anti-competitive merger apparently based on the belief that the United States needed a company large enough to compete effectively with Europe’s Airbus. At the risk of stating the obvious, Boeing has not benefited from those indulgences.” #TimWu https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/13/opinion/google-antitrust-remedy.html