Incredible single panel from today's @smbccomics.bsky.social

Noooooooooooooooooo

I ask again...what is the point of having a rainy day fund if you can't use it during a rainstorm? oh mighty ratings agencies, am I allowed to help poor people?

sometime it's hard to put down an article; other times the author makes it easy

F&*k'n journalism. Just saw that Jon Keller was let go from WBZ. One of the few people seriously and skeptically covering policy issues in the #mapoli.

This is what a federal judge just said to the Trump administration. Seems to apply pretty well to #mapoli too, though. We have money in reserve. A (maybe *the*) core safety net program is at risk. Use the money!

Someday I will understand what the #mapoli rainy day fund is for.

This graph may or may not say a lot about the world over the last decade.

Incredible stuff from the city of Boston. We checked rents in 4 cities and proved taxes don't correlate with rent!

BREAKING: BITCOIN Q3 EARNINGS: - EPS: $0.00 vs $0.00 est. - Revs: $0 vs $0 est. - Divs: $0.00 up $0.00 - Q4 guidance unchanged

Uhhh...

Sitting pointlessly beside the top businessman was...

A new gene therapy trial slowed Huntington’s Disease by an average of 75% in patients. It involves delivery of a modified but safe virus that produces microRNA in the brain to counteract mutations in the huntingtin gene. We can achieve amazing things when we fund science!

smh...

smh...

my kids went to diff't driving schools in Mass. Both had this weird idea that we should teach them to drive first, then they could go to driving school. You guys have the cars with dual breaks! And the experience teaching people to drive!

think I'm the only person who fully embraced "oxt." But it's such a useful word!

Cherry-picking favorable numbers in the #mapoli jobs report was a bad look last month. Now, with Trump undermining the legitimacy of BLS, it's just unconscionable. Stop it.

The issue with GPT-5 in a nutshell is that unless you pay for model switching & know to use GPT-5 Thinking or Pro, when you ask “GPT-5” you sometimes get the best available AI & sometimes get one of the worst AIs available and you can’t tell and it might even switch within a single conversation.

Playing with GPT-5 and my initial feeling is: powerful but slightly annoying. - Asked for help converting a markdown syllabus to html and it added a bunch of new (summary) info - Spent time tweaking to get it right and it started outputting partial versions

sure whatever why stop at 100% at this point. Let's do 200%. 350%. 1,245%. 3 billion percent. Two kabillion percent. Seventeen Brazilian percent. One Google percent.

-A historic capex boom can’t lift 1H real GDP growth ex-noise beyond the 1%’s -A modest housing recession hasn’t dragged the overall economy into recession Both are true/are related.

Line not go up, #mapoli

I think the universe of voters who are: -anti-crypto -anti-gambling -anti-algo -pro-vax -pro-choice -anti-gun is less than 40% so it’s about thinking about what you can live with.

This crypto ratio stuff is like asserting that Matchbox 20 is properly worth exactly four Maroon 5's, even though the numbers have no substantive relationship to anything in the real word or to one another.

We need to take this seriously in Boston when considering how costly Wu’s move to up #IDP requirements from 13% to 20% has been for #Boston. In a time when new construction is at record lows and prices are record highs every lost unit is a huge cost. #BosPoli #MAPoli #BuildMABuild

Doesn't seem like a sign of health at @cwbeacon.bsky.social

What an incredible sentence...

The slipperiness of the term "affordable" makes it impossible to talk clearly about #mapoli and #bospoli housing policy. People want rent+housing costs to go down (affordable=not too expensive) The city is pushing for more subsidized properties (affordable=rent not set by market)

Tip for aspiring #mapoli advocates...If you pick the right counterfactual, you can make almost any argument. commonwealthbeacon.org/opinion/offs...

If you had to choose...

Candlemakers Union petitions #mapoli to block out the sun www.bostonherald.com/2025/06/24/d...

Doesn't seem great...

BofA: "We think the outlook is bimodal. If the labor market holds up ... there will probably be enough tariff-driven inflation to prevent the Fed from cutting. But if something is going to break ... we think it will happen over the summer. In that case the Fed would probably cut by at least 75bp .."

Happy Monday #mapoli www.bostonglobe.com/2025/06/16/o...

yeesh @benadida.com

The inventory tsunami is slowly but methodically spreading from Florida and Texas to the rest of the Sun Belt and western US and it’s coming for the Midwest and northeast:

Office values in Boston are likely to fall further than anticipated, leaving #bospoli with a stark choice: 1) raise taxes on homeowners, or 2) align spending with new revenue expectations These are the main estimates from our latest report with @bostonpolicyinst.bsky.social #mapoli

South Korea gender divide update 😲 Young men lean right by 50 points (74% conservative vs 24% centre-left) Young women lean left by 22 points (58% centre-left vs 36% cons)

-Resale housing inventory has normalized in much of the country and continues to rise -Home prices are falling in much of the country -Continuing jobless claims are rising faster than labor force growth -Construction spending is falling -The Fed is not yet dovish

If: -housing inventory is rising (it is) -home prices are falling (likely happening in at least 30% of the country now) -continuing jobless claims growth is outpacing labor force growth (it is) That’s a very difficult environment to get inflation or better-than-mediocre economic growth.

Redfin says there are 500,000 more home sellers than buyers, the biggest disparity on record (going back to 2013): www.redfin.com/news/sellers...

Updated paper by physicians at Harvard, Stanford, and other academic medical centers testing (the now obsolete) o1-preview for medical reasoning & diagnosis tasks: “In all experiments—both vignettes and emergency room second opinions—the LLM displayed superhuman diagnostic and reasoning abilities.”

I just watched an orangutan tie a knot. You should see it too.

Guy who'll vote for the candidate who knows which block group they live in

We live in a time of miracles, and we're not nearly as awed as we should be. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/15/h...

Sincere question for @massbudget.bsky.social @massteacher.bsky.social and others in #mapoli pushing a GILTI tax... What about the DOR finding that it would only raise like 20m per year? Is that just wrong? Why should we think so?

Many of the most important “prompt engineering” skills are just management skills: clearly understanding the task to be done and what information is needed to do it; explaining the task to the AI; giving useful feedback to improve outputs; & generalizing lessons learned into a process.

It happened...I finally found the limit of my nerdiness