peter theil’s head keeps getting longer. camp preacher physiognomy.

🫡🫡🫡👸 @estupido.fyi u know what this means.

possibly some good news from china: they launched an overnight lending facility kind of like ours, with a rate below the previous target. now they're buying fewer long term bonds. this is what you'd do if you planned higher inflation. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

tfw belgians take a second look at the case. takes me back mon ami

New NBER paper finds that the congestion zone in NYC sped up emergency responses by over a minute - about 5-6%. Great stuff! www.nber.org/papers/w35414

in the tungsten community, i bet they say “take the W“ a lot. can imagine a conference with a big poster that says ”W-inning.” sad the lithium ppl cant do take the L. www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/internationa...

im a fan of lost franchises. circle K has some good ones: Circle S.

Knee-high by the Fourth of July. ethanol started randomly growing in my backyard.

saw an old F150. small

happy fourth yall. a nation with many online reviews for most businesses. where you can be accepted in one generation by sharing conspiracies on nextdoor.

leaders often want war per se, out of an ordinary drive like greed. i think this was more widely acknowledged in the past. it makes it hard to predict what people will do from incentives. www.theatlantic.com/national-sec...

Celebrating #USA250 with a #CarIntoBuilding roll call! 🇺🇸 🎆 Alabama

"All of these newspaper stories were by “Elena Marchetti,” whose articles page on The Editorial suggests she roughly splits her time between decrying the death of American newspapers and writing about tensions in the South China Sea. (More about that below.)" -- www.niemanlab.org/2026/07/now-...

especially sad when evil corporate plots don’t even make money. fully pointless destruction.

i do this in my presentations whenever someone has more of a comment than a question

i hadnt realized mamdani was shia. i checked with gemini about other famous american shia. you dont see this type of hallucination in the wild much anymore. a classic.

readers of Critical Density knew about Chinese austerity when the mainstream media said China was doing stimulus. there is no "involution" or overinvestment. just fiscal and especially monetary austerity. sad. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

truck buying is often about personal brand. Many people buy trucks to say “i do things with my hands.” this one could signal that well bc you can mod it yourself. It also is a good “first car” bc it doesnt go fast. www.motortrend.com/reviews/firs...

dawg what happened to you? we were boys. remember anchorage bro? That anchorage spirit? i still crack up at those reels we made. Then shit changed mane. you abandoned the spirit of anchorage. www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/202...

“I’m on fixed, a lot of us, on fixed income and Social Security is not increasing,” Davis said. im interested in how persistent talking points are. Social Security payments rise every year. The lady has been on it for years and saw her checks rise. www.wsbtv.com/news/local/d...

Good coverage. instead of extended range ev, i would just call them series hybrids. ”Zero-to-60 performance is as quick as 3.5 seconds.” this will change the roads: tall trucks driving like sports cars. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/b...

great content here.

give up on the reflecting pool. it’s beyond us. National frog pond seems more doable. yes it would need work, but the reflecting pool is cutting against the grain of nature and our state capacity. frog pond would “reflect” who we are: a swamp people. Dont drain the swamp; fill the swamp.

we live in a renaissance of language learning apps. i like trying them to see how people are exploiting ai etc. elon.io (no idea about name) is a quiz tool that also has hundreds of excellent grammar explanations. they’re so prolific i wonder if ai wrote them, but theyre too good.

plane out of milan got too hot to take off. slowly melting on runway as they unload cargo. never leaving champaign again. maybe, as a vacation, i would go to urbana. but no farther.

in the future americans will roll around europe in little climate controlled balls

did not expect this. i suppose this hurts tourism because the thing to do in europe is walk around and look at stuff. Oh well

interesting how specifically iran and ukraine‘s strategies resemble. both use long range drones to hit hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons are flammable and have to be gathered in ships/pipelines/refineries/depots. they are also government revenue sources.

joan walker doing the keynote at the international transportation economics association (ITEA) conference at U Bergamo (italy). She said the setting was appropriate bc her talk would be preachy. This is a wonderful town and conference.

it’s against conventional wisdom, but academic papers are often less concerned with names than the “man in the arena.“ a paper might use toll, price, fee, charge, tax interchangeably. I think this is because natural thinking centers essences and intentions. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/15/w...

detective: you're a sick son of a bitch, you know it? that bird was your friend of 10, 12 years and you drop a big fuckin boulder on him. wile e. coyote: i swear to god man i didn't think it was gonna work. it never works. oh god. detective: nevada's a death penalty state.

"our 2025 Civic Hybrid earned a measly 41 mpg up against the official EPA number of 48 mpg. The Ford Maverick we currently own is getting 33 mpg instead of 37 mpg...Our 2025 Toyota 4Runner TRD Pro Hybrid did even worse with 18 mpg against an EPA rating of 23 mpg." www.edmunds.com/car-news/one...

the thing to think about is it's way easier to automate electric driving, so legacy automakers will have to switch to series hybrids (gas powers a generator). but series hybrids have fewer parts/mechanical systems than regular engines or parallel hybrids. so there will be a total shakeup.

I think our miscalculation was stupider than russia’s bc ukraine had already shown a small power can defend itself, and iran had extra advantages: the strait, uninvadable, apocalyptic ideology, defense base and stocks, old nationhood, totalitarian control, etc www.nytimes.com/2026/06/14/w...

“barely straight version of pete buttegieg.” much to consider here, esp in light of tucker saying buttigieg was secretly straight.

my cousin Lauren was in French Vanity Fair. she makes book plates, including for Lenny Kravitz and Macron. www.exlibris.paris/en-us?srslti...

defending data centers on bluesky. too bad this title was taken before stancil’s biography came out. if he is scots irish (plausible) i guess he can go in another edition.

i like the frontier flight from chicago to atlanta. two fun cities connected by a relaxed airline. theres a certain joi de vivre.

so banks foreclose if the space gets let at a lower rent. this is also a reason china has so many vacant homes. it’s a dumb arrangement for the bank to incentivize you to forgo money. in turn, i wonder what incentivizes the bank to do that. Could be a regulation, or a tradition.

this says the BUILD legislation wont move forward this time. Sad therealdeal.com/chicago/2026...

before going so far as to invade, you might expect the president take the much milder step of sanctions on the country supplying iran with drones and missiles. But doing so is taken as a “blow to Trump.” www.reuters.com/world/us/us-...

gonna go viral by posing as a generic european floored about stuff in georgia. at waffle house: "in europe it lacks such grand size waffles." "they sell the gun inside walmart!" "i am without mind when i visit bass pro shop!" people love that schlock.

using Fable for a proof. it is smarter than opus 4.8: it actually follows through. but the strategy is long and strange. i think it will be a while before these things are that useful for writing proofs, although they are helpful for seeing if some hunch is true quickly.

got this needle bottle to kill weeds with big roots (canada thistle and burdock). you cut near the ground, then inject a few drops of concentrated glyphosate into the stem. more work than spraying but minimizes herbicide. will also try with triclopyr for invasive wintercreeper. a.co/d/038vhP5k

“Reactors are built in batches of 6 to 10 reactors to take advantage of economies of scale.” www.eia.gov/todayinenerg...

highly recommend this simple type-in-the-blank language app Clozemaster. Most apps are gamified in the sense “making you feel good because you recognize useful phrases.” Making you type forces recall and practices declension. You also get better at using a phone keyboard which you need to text.

do europeans use or recognize the term “mild hybrid”? here it‘s rare. european brands and mazda sell MHEVs here, but dont advertise as such. Closest is “e-torque” trim on some ram trucks. (mild means a small 48 v battery for starting moving, electronics w/ engine off, etc)

~31% of illinois land is corn. ~25-30% of our corn is for ethanol. could say abiut 8% of our land is for ethanol. complicating that, ethanol uses the starch, but the same corn makes livestock feed. similarly you can grow crops/graze sheep under solar panels www.nass.usda.gov/Quick_Stats/...

ive always killed pokeweed, bc it has weed in the name and has “invasive“ vibes. But TIL it‘s native and good for soil (deep fat taproot/circulates minerals) and birds (berries). at UAB they are learning to extract rare earths with it. However it is poisonous www.uab.edu/reporter/res...

3600 beds on the way in campustown. the sweet sound of lower rents/higher quality for students, and higher property/sales tax revenues for the public employee heros of central illinois. www.wcia.com/news/champai...