Supreme Court justices should have term limits. There is no reason that every appointment should be a high stakes game of chicken with the country's future on the line.

You know what I noticed? People on the right are pushing for Congressional term limits, and people on the left are pushing for Supreme Court term limits. Can we unite the country around the idea that people who aren't worried about voters and will hold on to their seat until they die should leave?

One measure of Supreme Court hypocrisy is going to be the upcoming battle over whether Trump’s tariffs are legal. 1/7

First thought: Ugh. Second thought: This will probably be a huge success in LA. Third thought: Ugh.

Just to be clear, the last four administrations averaged between about 1 and 3 state dinners per year. He's spending $200M on a hosting venue for something that happens maybe once every six months. That's like me building a separate house to host my kids' birthdays. www.threads.com/@brittainfor...

Just a reminder that Trump's big deals all end with the situation the same as it was before he took office. He escalates, then they escalate, and then they agree to whatever it looked like before he escalated.

And then, every once in a while, something like this pops up to remind us that our society is redeemable. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/15/h...

When people say they want OpenAI to be the new Google, I don't think they mean that they want OpenAI to adopt Google's branding strategy. #buzzchatduohangoutsmeetmessengertalkvoicemessagesallo #lamdabardduetgeminiadvancednanoproultraaipremium

Dumbest thing I've seen today, or everyone's seen today? Even if we needed it, it would cost an enormous amount of money to turn it back into a working prison, and it would rob the SF area of a major source of tourism revenue. If we actually need new prisons, pick a place where land is cheap.

Why is the NYT raising subscription prices by a third? That's absurdly enormous. I haven't seen any press coverage of it. @nytimes.com

Tesla's stock price in blue, BYD's in red. Turns out that, even if your products are ten years ahead of everyone else's, it's a bad idea to let your CEO spend all of his time on politics and social media, both alienating half your potential market, and letting your product offerings get stale.

Occupying Gaza would be a great way to militarize a generation against the United States and destroy any chance of anyone seeing us as an honest broker in the region. WhyTF would we want yet another semi-permanent military involvement in the Middle East, when we just got out of the last one?

So it *was* self-interest all along! We're *very* disappointed in you, Elon!

Trump has said he likes William McKinley. McKinley pushed American imperial power, annexing Guam, Puerto Rico, The Philippines. In the Philippines, at least 200K people - and as many as 1M - died during our conquest. Thousands were killed in concentration camps. Gaza, Greenland, Panama, Canada.

Time to start aggressively misgendering Federal officials. "A cup of tea with your staggering bigotry, Ms Vance?"

My first and definitely last time working with the Los Angeles Times. Editing out the most urgent point of an OpEd in the minutes before sending to press while then also assigning a title and image that suggest an argument entirely opposite to the author’s clear intent is pretty shitty.

Maybe we could start small? Could the US guarantee that no one will ever have to go bankrupt to pay for life-saving medical care?

"[T]he management I was dealing with didn’t understand the difference between having an opinion and having an informed, factually sourced opinion". I think that's a pretty good summary of the state of American public discourse.

Today I learned that #MelvilleMonday is a thing. I'm posting all of Moby Dick, alphabetized by sentence, at @aisforahab.bsky.social; my favorite of the day's sentences so far is "A clam for supper?", but there are definitely some other choice selections in there.

The lesson is that people are really angry that everything is unaffordable and there's no such thing as job stability anymore. It's not just eggs, it's healthcare and education and housing. It's not just tech layoffs, it's 30 years of globalization at all costs.

Here's a theory: Trump likes tariffs because he can put them in place without asking anyone, which makes him feel as if he looks decisive. They used to have to go through Congress. Go back to that, and Trump would stop talking about tariffs.

One of the things I found in breaking up Moby Dick into individual sentences was a new delight in Melville's prose. Looking at sentences out of context was like wandering around an art gallery. Like this one, quite a few are what we would probably call Lovecraftian today.

Trump has introduced an immediate halt to all work on PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, set up by George W Bush). This includes the HIV treatment provided to 20 million people through PEPFAR, people who will die without treatment. And many more will acquire HIV as a result.

Inspired by a recent episode of On with @karaswisher.bsky.social , in which Dwight Garner said he would like to read a version of Moby Dick where the sentences were alphabetized, I wrote a bot to post Moby Dick, but alphabetized, to Bluesky. @aisforahab.bsky.social

Trump is one of two recent Presidents to start his term with his approval underwater. The other one? Also Donald Trump. Presidential day-one approval/disapproval, per Gallup (the last one is Reuters): Bill Clinton: 58% George W Bush: 57% Barack Obama: 67% Trump 1: 45% Joe Biden: 57% Trump 2: 47%

Or maybe everyone will be secretly relieved that TikTok is gone because they know that an infinite feed of mildly entertaining but highly addictive mini-videos is bad for them and wish they could just stop using it.

Left out of this discussion is the fact that Meta has been working for years to make their platforms useless for information. Does anyone use these platforms for news or civic engagement anymore? FB has engagement bait and older relatives, Insta has celebrity influencers, and Threads has memes.

I was pretty dismayed to see people delighting the murder of the United Healthcare CEO. I have a lot of empathy for people going through healthcare nightmares, but we have a system where CEOs of publicly traded companies are fired if they don’t maximize revenue, and replaced by ones who will. 1/5

Looking back in the NYT archive, I see one article from 2020 that mentions Trump's pardon of Jared Kushner's father, and 20 articles (so far) about Biden's pardon of Hunter Biden. 1/2

Lots of discussion about software engineering productivity. There is no silver bullet metric that applies to every engineer that tells you if they are productive.

Dear Apple: If I'm on my laptop, I'm probably trying to focus on something. Push notifications to tell me that you have randomly decided to set a bunch of my photos to music are deeply, deeply unwelcome. Change your defaults. PS, I am not a crackpot.