Check out this major new refresh of the Trade Tracker! Excellent work from Asha & Kari’s capable hands! 🙌🏼

www.hamiltonproject.org/data/trackin... The best way to follow whether the money is going out is with @hamiltonproject.org's federal outlay tracker, as it has a SNAP line item.

This Army ten miler gonna be so wet 💦 🌧️😔🤙🏼

We are deeply concerned about where the economy is headed and about OBBBA SNAP policy. And we come with RECEIPTS. Read alllllll about it here: www.hamiltonproject.org/publication/...

August 2025 CPI “was released on September 11” at 2.9% yoy. wow thanks google Gemini for predicting the future 😐 (I am gonna pass out if this is actually spot on)

ML/AI tips! -> imo why you should use both point-performance metrics AND distributional metrics for predictive analytics tasks Point-performance metrics (like RMSE or MAE) are useful for model selection, tuning, and straightforward comparisons but… (1/2)

How I wish America’s congestion-obsessed transportation engineers understood Paul Krugman’s point here paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-limits...

“you should ingest via data lake” “you should process through data pipelines” “you should centralise the data warehouses” i should be by the sea. i should be in the mountains. i should be awestruck and rendered speechless by the majesty of the natural world. if you even care

From trade tracker www.brookings.edu/articles/tra... Massive yoy percent increases in duties for March 2025 among top trading partners.

Amidst troubling economic uncertainty, Congress is trying to cut SNAP, one of the most effective and efficient tools we have for responding to a recession. Diane Schanzenbach and I explain step-by-step why the SNAP cuts that passed the House are harmful: www.hamiltonproject.org/publication/...

They're literally doing the meme

Outraged and heartbroken by the news of two young people killed last night in DC in a targeted act of antisemitic violence. This is the opposite of advancing justice and peace - it only furthers the violence, pain, and loss - and such hatred must be firmly rejected by all.

They're terminating OPT. Today the nominee to head USCIS stated directly: he will end Optional Practical Training, the single largest channel for high-skill immigrants to work in the US. 6 weeks ago I warned about this & summarized the research on impacts of this drastic action—> @piie.com

Major update to the @hamiltonproject.org outlay tracker. You can now do cumulative charts with the line items in the Monthly Treasury Statement + monthly data through April are now live. www.hamiltonproject.org/data/trackin... #EconSky #DOGE

Exciting! Pushing an update to QuantumKeep.io Soon. My quantum randomness enhanced encryption web app. The first pull request to this open source project! This app allows you to safely encrypt and decrypt files using AES-256 that’s enhanced with quantum randomness from zero point energy.

From trade tracker www.brookings.edu/articles/tra... Advanced release Census data shows approx 50% yoy increase in U.S. consumer goods imports in March.

suntory boss coffee save me. save me suntory boss coffee

please American automakers I stg, LOOK at Tokyo city streets! A truck the size of a humvee is NOT going to fit.

Very informative chart from Washington Post

Idk who the @amtrak.com conductor was for Vermonter 57 arriving into Union St, DC just now, but bravo that was a perfect arrival announcement.

that’s it for TikTok shop possibly…

Hamilton Project trade tracker now shows February data. www.brookings.edu/articles/tra... Imports stayed very high as firms front run possible tariffs (when? which goods? how much? who knows?). If some warehouses are bulging w/ stuff, seems likely that some importers will be left high & dry, yes?

crazy that in a few years, humans will have the capability to generate the hottest point in the known universe. like there’s not much that’s hotter out there - 10x hotter than the sun’s core. #iter

Have you found yourself asking in recent times, what the heck is happening with trade? Our newest data interactive is here to help: www.hamiltonproject.org/data/trackin...

I learned a new term today: rollup. When an outside investor consecutively acquires many of the small firms in a local market and consolidates them. When this occurs with anesthesia practices, prices increase by 18%. I'm paraphrasing an NBER summary of this paper: www.nber.org/papers/w33217

who else hyped for a major update to Import/Export Price Index from the U.S. BLS -> www.bls.gov/mxp/notices/... TLDR; they will be supplementing their survey data with administrative data from U.S. Census to improve data coverage.

Hutchins Center Fiscal Impact Measure finds local, state, federal fiscal policy boosted US GDP growth by 0.4 pct points in Q1. www.brookings.edu/articles/hut... @brookings.edu

how do I see this

New note: “Where Debanking Didn't Happen”

Hi Bluesky! We’re The Hamilton Project. We produce research and proposals on some of our nation’s most pressing economic policy challenges, from economic security and growth to climate and health care. #EconSky @brookings.edu

How do you find a stolen piece of art? On Thursday 5pm CET/11am EST we explore the world of thieves, forgers and fraudsters with @sauterne.bsky.social, CEO of The Association for Research into Crimes against Art in the first Stage Talk of 2025. Join us: discord.gg/r88a4zcX?eve...

folks what are the “best” pre-trained LLM models for extreme multi-label text classification? currently just using Llama3.2:3B with few shot prompts, but idk if there’s another way. #genai #llm

America's first bird flu death has been reported in Louisiana. The state's Department of Health says the person was over 65 and reportedly had underlying medical conditions. cnn.it/3Pqi3i3

Python programming thing I learned today -> if you do: # Remove a folder tree shutil.rmtree(file_path) # Recreate the folder with the same name os.makedirs(file_path) It might have the same name, but you can’t “recreate” the directory - so it can kick up errors if you’re running a program.

cannot stress enough how much this room needs a chandelier

This Haaretz piece of IDF soldiers’ confessions of human rights violations absolutely wrecked me www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024...

check out my new blog post on retrieval augmented generation to automate SWOT analysis for country macroeconomic environments! medium.com/@rikimatsumo...

From Japan’s Family Income & Expenditure Survey (FIES) - largest increases in housing, durables, energy, and food - expenditure on clothing hasn’t recovered since 2020 - culture/recreation almost back up to 2019 levels

They are talking about Among Us

I am Elphaba-pilled

“Today marks a watershed moment in Syria’s history—a nation that has endured nearly 14 years of relentless suffering and unspeakable loss,” Geir Pedersen, U.N. special envoy for #Syria

ok i listened to a lot of Laufey this year. #AppleWrapped

How much of macro is just arguing over accounting identities?

Overall interesting event at Brookings on AI + Climate. Arguably, it was 80%: 1) mitigating the impact of AI driven energy consumption, and; 2) AI for mitigating climate risks (better seed varieties) Sparse on solving climate change or hitting emissions goals, overall bearish on that.

Found an old children’s song from the 1918 Spanish Flu: “I had a little bird And it’s name was Enza I opened the window And in-flew-Enza.”

A problem I’ve come across with one-shot learning for LLM prompt engineering is that sometimes it has too much effect on the output and it starts to affect the accuracy. I’m doing SWOT analysis and it keep using the examples instead of the correct context.

Experimenting with the parameters for similarity score thresholds for RAG! I asked a general Llama3 to evaluate and grade its own output. As the K top matches and similarity score increases, quality of the output drops precipitously!