Oh OK

No that is the means, the political project of Republicans has been to reverse the 20 century and it started from the second FDR was elected.

it is incredible that legalizing watergate has been the overriding ideological project of the american right for fifty years

the true believers around nixon genuinely saw him as some kind of embodiment of the people and thought that congressional attempts to corral his authority were illegitimate on that basis. straight line from them to the executive power fetishists on the supreme court.

congratulations to Rand Paul on inventing *checks notes* single payer healthcare

Wage Repression theory of everything: a lot of people have a lot of things they really need another human being's help with and they get told to ask the internet and get by on their own instead because capitalists don't want to pay for skilled labor.

They violated the neoliberal social contract of consumer-goods deflation in exchange for wage repression and asset inflation.

To a certain extent, i think access to cheap consumer goods has papered over a lot of structural problems like housing costs and income inequality and they just ripped the bandaid off an open wound.

Apply this to all of science! IF WE FIGHT BACK, WE WILL WIN. If we comply in advance, make ourselves small, and allow leadership to play us like a fiddle, we will lose. www.thenation.com/article/soci...

The problem is electricity is too expensive! My electric bill nearly doubled recently so now propane will make sense until I get at least 200-300KWH of battery energy

Hello from rural NJ. The real competitor is propane which is cheaper, cleaner, and easier to store; doubly so since electric costs (thank you PJm) have doubled so heat pumps are now uncompetitive if it gets sustained cold which it does in your Ithica, Syracuse, Albany Romes etc

This is really a huge part of why upper management is so in on AI. They think it will let them manage computers the way they currently manage the people who make the computer work. It will not.

Spread the word: I'm looking to hire a postdoc to explore the concept of attention (as studied in psych/neuro, not the transformer mechanism) in large Vision-Language Models. More details here: lindsay-lab.github.io/2025/12/08/p... #MLSky #neurojobs #compneuro

i get the really strong impression that most academic philosophy is primarily finding a way to adversarially generate prose that other people in philosophy take a really long time to either read or respond to i had to be talked into admitting that the endeavor, separately, sometimes matters

It’s the “security” bit:

I really think people should put serious thought and effort into what their idea of a good society is, and only think about how to get there much later, because it's the vision you need to sell first and foremost

(As Labour in the UK is showing, nostalgia for postwar social democracy is not it either. You can build on something like that, but you need to be clear that your vision is unapologetically for the realities of 21st century society)

The inability to have a positive vision of the future is one of the biggest tailwinds the populist Right has at its back, because then politics becomes about RETVRN, and the Right is always going to beat the Left at that game

There's been much talk about the "Just a Job" piece in Nature Human Behavior — absent an ability of many to read it. The author is here, @laraffington.bsky.social. In the post below, she shares a link available to all.

my one very sincere piece of business advice to universities: it takes *a lot* of indignities to kill the goodwill of people who choose to work at universities but managing to do so is not something to be proud of

Oh no Talib Kweli making me rethink my stance of "Slam Frank was a bad idea"

Interesting paper that I think gets at something housing reformers have been banging on about since the rate hikes: making it more expensive to borrow will not bring down the cost of housing amidst the shortage, it just makes it more expensive to build our way out of the shortage.

seems increasingly clear that underneath the moment is, in fact, defined by elites violently defending their turf against meritocratic strivers

I’m excited to share the first preprint from my PhD project! Together with Daniel Kaiser (@dkaiserlab.bsky.social), we investigated how internal models shape inter-individual differences in the perception and neural processing of natural scenes. Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps... 1/n

He’s redistributing money from the urban cores that they’re terrorizing with ethnic pogroms to pay off his base for their loyalty

hey a fun thing is that if congress is delegating authority to an independent agency then by definition that agency is not "unaccountable." it is still accountable to congress. and it is interesting (read: extremely frustrating) to me that these people just write congress out of existence here.

old soviet joke about the difference between an optimist and a pessimist a pessimist complains surely things can’t possibly get worse while the optimist knows things can always get worse

ok it’s legitimately funny that they can’t even throw red meat to Catholics without falling into heresy

We show that the revolutionary overhaul in inheritance laws in 1793 was a key driver of France's early fertility decline. In dismantling the Ancien Régime, the revolutionaries inadvertently triggered the world's first fertility transition, at least half a century ahead of any other country. (9/9)

These reforms reduced parents' economic incentives for having children to avoid land fragmentation among many heirs and production falling below the subsistence threshold. Indeed, we find that the effect is driven by locations where soil conditions made small farms more prevalent. (7/9)

Honestly i feel like a lot of this is explainable by a sort of crude class materialism, because given the political lean of most of the tabloids, trying to mock anyone using a tribunal would be in line with the ideological worldview they're trying to reproduce among their readers

honestly i think you could probably describe the vast majority of American media, political, and corporate elites as decadent nobody knows how bad things can get

lol so to me when I see yt folks on the left be like "omg give X the keys to democracy" I'm just like... Why don't y'all want to do the work it takes to save yourselves? Why are you always asking someone else to do your homework?

at this point my default assumption is that any purportedly-autonomous thing is either following a prewritten script or is actually teleoperated

See, you can make cases of the latter - Musa's work "WE HAVE NEVER BEEN WOKE" is an attempt to work through the woke moment, but there is a *legitimate* argument being made: Lewis doesn't seem to want to hear a critique of her associates, I fear.

I am once again saying that what the average conservative really, actually needs in life is to be bound in BDSM gear and whipped.

it is essential that the right wing coddle and nurture local lunacies like 'constitutional sheriffs' and suburban gun psychos because they know they will not ever have popular support for their awful vision of america and rely on the implicit threat of extra-legal violence

I wonder how long it'll be before SCOTUS decides to tear down all vaccine requirements by mandating bullshit religious exemptions. Part of their overarching goal of destroying public school in part by making it unsafe for middle class parents to send their kids to

nervous system because that improves our chances of survival. Again, this is not inefficient, it is a valid evolutionary strategy. Many energy efficiency arguments in neuroscience are actually about energy consumption, saying that (for example) the number of action potentials is minimized. 5/

intentionally waste ATP for the sole purpose of generating heat. This is because an elevated body temperature improves our bodies' performance. The energy expenditure of this is immense, with the smallest mammals consuming their entire body weight in food every day! Is this inefficient? No! 3/

can't stop watching this clip of a tesla Optimus teleoperator taking his headset off before properly logging out the robot

Cost of 1 spike: 10^8 ATP (~3-7 bits) Cost of adding 1 nucleotide to a string: 1 ATP (2 bits) Cost of releasing 1 typical extracellular vesicle (exosome ~100nm): ~10-100 ATP Conjecture: it's more energy-efficent (in bits/ATP) to communicate between neurons with RNA packaged in exosomes

yeah the key to understanding all of this is they genuinely believe their own shit that Dems import voters as immigrants and by killing immigration, the democratic base is non-existent little to no attention on their side about actual demographic politics

Finally someone treats "The Diamond Age" like the dystopian hellscape it actually was.

The thing to understand about all these network states is: (1) they require a permanent underclass to do all the labor that keeps cities functional, (2) they have no answers to how or why free people en masse would sign up to be that permanent underclass And (3) that’s because they want slaves.

The Democrats need to run Jobby McJobson on a platform of jobs. finance.yahoo.com/news/us-layo...