ANIMAL FARM is a great book, by the way. It's very annoying that conservatives have misinterpreted it as being an anti-socialist screed! If you actually read the book, it makes socialism as an idea seem both sensible and inevitable and its fury is for those who betrayed it and reinstated capitalism

US trying to goad Canada into regime-change operations

This is a very sharp point (she is 82). I still believe that the risks resolve differently, especially for federal office, over 75

There is a market for typewriters

Two years of Trump as president with a bicameral democratic Congress will see lots of events unprecedented in our nation’s history, even just in the preceding decade. He’s been creeping toward wholly usurping Congress’s power of the purse, and if they don’t oust him for it he’ll simply have done so.

You’re not worried enough about the war. I’m not worried enough about the war. But: we are both powerless to do anything about the war! Fortunately, every plausible outcome is, from the perspective of February, gallingly awful

It's truly amazing how Trump, having successfully executed a palace coup against the despot of a small, collapsing failed state, thought he could just knock over a big country with substantial military assets instantly with no complications or retaliation.

The Hormuz situation seems so so bad, like gonna-destabilize-half-the-globe-and-tank-the-economy bad, with no obvious resolution even plausible, and it’s still getting the “distant crisis mostly of interest to nerds that will work itself out” treatment in American press

"It would be really bad if they don't work out this Hormuz thing, so they'll figure it out some way" is still the prevailing attitude. Can see it in markets, media, politicians, public. Bad can't happen, people in charge know what they're doing, it's all content anyway. I find it... unsettling.

Ok so ARE nuclear weapons worth anything?

Copium War.

dawg would the US just straight up lose to the PLA??? bsky.app/profile/sky....

i'm sorry????  bsky.app/profile/lowr...

Hot take here, but I think it's bad that the US has started a war run by a White House brain trust that would be out of their depth managing the second shift at a suburban McDonald's.

this is only true if you’re talking about actual creature capture, not the card game simulating the activity

Baseball card collecting is midwest Pokémon

True, and also wine consumption is bougie drug addiction

One of the things that struck me from my visits to museums in Italy was that most of the Renaissance is really just Bible fan art

but the fact of the matter is that with the notable exception *of* the mid to late 20th century, every major change in our political system and government has been a partisan or ideological political project.

timeline pollution www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ytts...

art collecting is fancy pokemon

one of the best days on social media was in 2021 when trump was banned from every single network. you saw him repeatedly trying to make alts before each one got banned too, like a poster trying to escape a game forum permaban

Indiana's state legislators may have saved GOP seats by not gerrymandering

From Politico.

I've been saying "tactical success, strategic failure" but I'm reconsidering the partial credit

bait

Here's an important read for today: policymakers are encouraging students to learn trades that are costly to teach, but community colleges and apprenticeships don't have the capacity to meet demand. This sends students to the more expensive for-profit sector, where they take on debt.

SICARIO is a weird case tbh where I think there's a tension between the screenplay (which thinks Alejandro and Matt are cool guys) and the actual movie as directed by Villenueve (which clearly thinks they are the villains)

The strong mood affiliation between people who were telling us we needed jpgs of apes and people telling us AI would kill us all has made the product harder to appreciatw

I never cease to be amused by how this app has a community that hates the staff and a staff that hates the community and both sides are completely open about it this isn’t a retirement home it’s a Waffle House

There seems to be a widespread belief here on Bluesky that "AI" is not popular. I wish it were true; it's a dangerous technology with a lot of problems. But "AI" chatbots are very popular; many people are using them in preference to search engines.

Even if not outbid, spot market prices are so much higher that it’s going to hurt. At least PK’s solar boom makes it a little more cushioned relative to Bangladesh. Poor countries reliant upon LNG imports are in a bad place.

claudia goldin got shooters. NEVER let them forget that claudia goldin has got an army of defenders and fans

Everyone learning again that volatility targeting is at least as critical as level targeting

Still of the view that the biggest risk in this whole mess is widespread hunger in poorer countries leading to political instability.

Available to deliver a workshop on “Tradeoffs are not (just) a neoliberal bogeyman”

I hate this but it's also one of my favourite "we're not so different" moments: our ancestors avoided uttering certain words for fear of summoning forces beyond their understanding (that's eg how we got the word 'bear', literally 'brown') and here we are saying 'unalive'/'grape' to appease the algo

AI discourse has * extreme proponents * moderate proponents * squishy centrists <-- I AM HERE * * * people threatened/harmed by the tech [SYMPATHETIC] * extremophile opponents who deny the existence of anyone but paid shills I'm really unlikely to trust anyone in the last category now!

A lot of you people who used to complain about the imperial boomerang coming back to America are weirdly silent when a CIA officer engineers an election in the way you like. Curious.

In a nutshell, the ANES data shows: 📉 Social media use is shrinking; engagement collapsing 💥 Twitter/X posting has moved ~70 POINTS to the right 🧩 Platforms are splintering 🔊 Fewer people are talking — but those still talking are more politically extreme

Is social media dying? How much did Twitter change as it became X? Which party now dominates the conversation? Using nationally representative ANES data from 2020 & 2024, I map how the U.S. social media landscape has changed Here are the key take-aways 🧵 Full paper out now in in JQD:DM!

Truly I am in the middle of a revelation how so much of this is traumatized low trust people demanding high trust people do it their way.

Educational “innovation” needs to be regarded skeptically, like any business promoting its wares

seems like there are a lot of books and articles on english education about reimagining or innovating but what about just doing the same basic, solid thing for years

Editorial boards’ opinions are important to the degree they verbalize or influence an identifiable group of people, or to the extent they provide useful arguments. The current Washington Post board speaks for no group beyond Jeff Bezos, so there is no reason to be upset with it

Living in a dense urbanized city is one of the best choices you can make to protect the planet - a fun fact you can deploy against people who want to get all self-righteous about the supposed evils of cities.

Indeed. Complaints about redistricting are invalid. Republicans did it everywhere and invalidated a Constitutional Amendment so they could do it on explicitly racial lines. There are two choices: use the same levers of power as Republicans do, or let them win. There is no "principled" opposition.

one, you see, is represented by cowards