The man who gifted Musk his infamous chainsaw is now begging the US for a bailout…

Since immigration’s effect on job growth is in the news: @taraelizwatson.bsky.social & @stanveuger.bsky.social and I explain how breakevens are affected by current immigration policy. There’s lots of uncertainty but my preferred estimates from the paper are in this table. www.aei.org/wp-content/u...

I’ve seen so many people spreading the misinformation that PBS is shut down or is shutting down. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been shut down and PBS has been defunded. HOWEVER!!! PBS still exists. It is more important now than ever that you donate to PBS if you can.

Great background on what power Trump has over DC: www.stevevladeck.com/p/172-federa...

1. This week, the FBI released its comprehensive crime report for 2024, which revealed that both VIOLENT CRIME and PROPERTY CRIME reached their LOWEST LEVELS SINCE THE 1960s This a massive story. But you might not have heard about it, even if you follow the news closely. Here's why.

Folks often assume that sheer number of wildfires in West must be linked to intentional arson--despite abundant evidence to contrary. But this partly stems from profound underestimation re: just how easy it can be to spark a fire under right conditions... www.nytimes.com/2025...

3/ Final point - it’s interesting that the labor market has been very undynamic along one dimension (low hiring, low firing) and very dynamic along another (employment delta due to business creation/destruction)

As US population growth slows, we need to reset expectations for economic data. Payrolls, GDP, expenditures, and income will all grow more slowly now that the immigration surge has ended. That changes how we interpret ... everything. My first piece for @piie.com www.piie.com/publications...

A niche complaint but in histories, it always seems more effective me to have the unit of account not be an inflation-adjust currency but rather relative to an avg daily or monthly wage given how much real incomes have risen over time.

Increasingly convinced the main damage cell phones have done to creativity isn't decreased attention spans or what not but the elimination of productive boredom. Inspiration comes from the mind filling the void inside. Hard to make art when you're constantly silencing the silence with "content."

NEW: There’s been a lot of discussion lately about rising graduate unemployment. I dug a little closer and a striking story emerged: Unemployment is climbing among young graduate *men*, but college-educated young women are generally doing okay. www.ft.com/content/a9ea...

1. We interrupt this programming for some LEGITIMATELY GOOD NEWS Violent crime in Baltimore has PLUMMETED to historic lows How did the city do it? Baltimore adopted a comprehensive set of "woke" policies, treating violence as a public health issue

Some of the best advice I’ve ever read was to “do things for which you will later experience nostalgia.” Checked that box for sure on Sunday.

people argue that rooftop solar policy discourse can get in the way of the real land use issues with mass solar energy production, but in fact it's all the same problem with how nothing can get built in America

NEPA and CEQA were enacted with the best of intentions, but the reality of their implementation in 2025 is an unsustainable status quo of car-dependent exurbs flung into the path of unstoppable megafires. The idea that change is always bad is an idea which the environmental movement must abandon.

Wondeful piece on the importance of day to day existence vs productivity & work in defining one’s life. Work is a part of life but unless you’re a very unique person in a very unique role, it shouldn’t be all your life open.substack.com/pub/theparis...

Industries that rely more on unauthorized immigrants are adding jobs at a slower rate than the rest of the private sector. Gap opened up shortly after border encounters dropped last year.

What's a "good" jobs-report number? The breakeven job level needed to keep employment steady is just 50k, vs 160k a year ago. The immigration surge is over, and peak boomers are aging into retirement. Our rules of thumb about slack, overheating, etc, must adjust.

For all the talk about “hard truths” etc that propagate our discourse we really don’t discuss how coddling conspiracy theorists has made things worse for everyone.

Pretty wild for May 18th

It's hard to overemphasise just how right @jaredb-econ.bsky.social is with this argument. He's as right as a right whale which has the right to right itself to your right. (Not right-wing, that's a different thing.)

• In broad strokes, the lower China tariffs announced today have 2 main effects, assuming they stay in place: 1. They reduce the economic damage of 2025 tariffs by 40% (judged by price & GDP); 2. They raise $300bn *more* over 10Y, showing how suboptimal 145% was. 2/13

a thing I’ve noticed in my time in research: many people really want to believe that Data™ is some sort of magical object that contains objective truth but the thing is, just like everything else, data is _produced_ via processes and mechanisms that profoundly affect the shape of the data

The Fed's dilemma: Navigate a recession or manage a period of stagflation. The result: “This is not going to be a cycle where the Fed pre-emptively cuts because there’s a forecast of a slowdown. They’re going to actually need to see it in the tangible data." www.wsj.com/economy/cent...

Thread on “hard data” vs “soft data”: 1/ Current conventional wisdom: the split between resilient “hard data” (e.g. government-published series on employment & activity) and weak “soft data” (sentiment surveys). IMHO this CW is mostly wrong.

Bruce Springsteen: The Rising Johnny Cash: American IV or V U2: All that You Can’t Leave Behind

It is my always and forever take that most people, perhaps especially finance, would be best served by a dual major pairing history/philosophy/poli sci with physics/math/CS/stats

An interesting read on life in America lacks My experience was been somewhat different after 2y in the UK. DC allowed for and utilized public spaces wonderfully, Dallas not so much. In many small outdoorsy towns there’s a greater use of public space that carries over from recreation into town too

Third time we’ve had tickets to see Sturgill Simpson. First time we’ve been able to (Covid beat the man up). Well worth the 5y wait

Vaccines have granted families in wealthy countries the luxury of forgetting what measles, polio, rubella, and other preventable diseases are like. We're looking at how many millions of lives vaccines have saved. Read the full story: https://go.nature.com/4jqOqKn

Had the troubling thought that if the Matrix was right that 1999 was the peak of humanity (joke going around), then that means Woodstock 1999 was the peak music festival

Not exactly spilling the beans on this one, but New Zealand is very pretty

We really a mass movement around Logging Off and Touching Grass or we're not going to make it.

This is pure anecdata but the way my own friends talk about things before/after getting hooked on to short form video has been a real experience. I am lucky in that many of them self confess to how they know it’s frying their brain in a way that they don’t fully grasp.

We should use caution when making month-to-month comparisons going forward too. Months ago, Census had to commit to population growth numbers for 2025 -- and those numbers likely include more immigration than we are on track for. Link: www.hamiltonproject.org/publication/...

See opportunities & choices through ‘regret minimization’ more than comp/fun/travel maximization will serve you better. More robust and helps keep one removed from rat race and hedonic treadmills IMO Work life balance is probably better seen as moments of detachment than an hours ratio etc

Some JOLTS-ish CPS data for December: 1/ Courtesy of @amandamichaud.bsky.social & Ellieroth, prime working age layoffs have been flat recently, but quits continue to slide.

low-key one of the most insidious dumb guy beliefs of the last few decades to gain widespread purchase has been this notion that demonstrating pro-social behavior in the hope that others would notice and mirror it, one of the fucking building blocks of any kind of society, is somehow ‘fake’.

Every entertainment zone and heavily pedestrianized area should have retractable metal bollards at minimum. Europe figured this out eons ago and, as with roundabouts, America has long resisted these infrastructure interventions for illogical reasons. Hopefully things start to change.

It's the "process over results" attitude that I'm just sick and tired of. So many programs are created with immense goodwill and money to be put into good things. But when the time comes to build, *we just can't*, because paperwork and process is like crack cocaine to Democrats.