Weird how some drug dealers get pardons while others are subjected to extrajudicial murder just on suspicion of it.

i think about this every time i look at the latest Overdrive or Hoopla or Kanopy invoice. unless prices or demand stabilize, our budget and thus our library will soon be describable as “lessee of digital content with a legacy dead-tree side concern.” 📚

Non-protesting dad just trying to hustle his kids, as young as 6mo, out of the neighborhood. ICE threw a flash-bang INTO HIS car, all 6 kids in the hospital now. If anyone wondered how things turn against occupying armies there's a case study playing out in front of you.

It's been a while since we did Books I've Read to a 4yo That Are Not Meant For 4yos. The rundown of the last 3 months: The Borrowers, Lost Evangeline, and The Mouse and the Motorcycle (arbitrary scores: C- / A / B). I decided to do a "theme" cluster as we prepare for, potentially, a series

this is such a fun thread

The armed people that are all fiercely loyal to him and are organized under a department that reports to the presidency directly, allowing him to treat them as his personal police: the department of homeland security. The analog to what DHS can become is the Tsarist Okhrana or the Italian OVRS

you should never watch things at resolutions higher than they were originally meant for, even when available, because best case its so distracting you cant suspend disbelief bc it starts looking like a mid 2000s daytime soap (idk why, it just does) and worst case this stuff happens

i hate to be all like “decline of culture” but, god damn, kids’ TV (outside apple TV+) has sloppified worse than any other genre. And don’t reply “what about bluey?” bc that’s not a show for kids, thats a show for parents produced so that kids don’t mind watching it and i will not debate that point.

I mean this with the utmost solemnity and sincerity, go fuck yourself with a spiked bat you toad-kissing ass-licker. Protecting ACA *was* the fight, keeping RFK out of HHS *was* the fight, preventing deportations *was* the fight. Winning elections is for passing policy, not for chasing a high score.

Great and important reporting here. But the administration has been pretty clear about how these judges need to rule in order to keep their jobs. So I think we’re well beyond perception of fairness.

look, i get that it seems ridiculous to spend $30 for two-dozen colored pencils for a 4 year old but, hear me out here, you have to sharpen them like 1/10th as much, they last forever, and you never have to worry about sharpening only to break the lead or find out the lead is already broken inside

US citizen shot from behind as he warned ICE agents children would be coming to get bus, lawyers say

OpenAI employees are very excited about how well their new AI tool can create fake videos of people doing crimes and have definitely thought through all the implications of this

the 4 year old is very very into kpop demon hunters. well, at least she thinks so, because obviously we did not let her watch it and she just knows a couple of songs from it. anyways, she is convinced its about three groups of friends, the demons, the hunters, and the kpops.

Cumulative excess mortality following a tropical storm in the continental US. Young & Hsiang find that mortality rises after a tropical cyclone for ~172 months, including children not even conceived yet. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

new AI slop alert: sewing patterns. etsy et al are now flooded with AI patterns and AI generated images of the garment. the patterns are absolute garbage but they are hard to spot unless you are paying attention. look for reviews from people who have actually sewn the pattern

take a break from reading about the latest crimes the Trump family did, and read this instead. you’ll still be just as mad about our burgeoning kleptocracy, but at least you will know more about our home planet and the star at the center of our orbit. www.quantamagazine.org/why-is-venus...

Car company: our entry level cars are now like Ferraris!! Community: can we get a speed bump on our street to help slow down drivers City: No, it will upset drivers. That’s the entirety of the safe streets discussion.

can we get a gofundme started for the analyst who loses their job after having the balls to ask about this on the earnings call?

Today, in this endless list of posts of things to read to a young kid when you are trying to teach them how to think while reading literature, we take a step-back from the more complex and lengthier novels and take-on the Catwings series by Ursula k Le Guin. www.ursulakleguin.com/catwings

A revolutionary seizure of the means of persuasion…

if you’ve ever wondered why environmental economics is a worthwhile subject to learn more about, this is the perfect little example to illustrate it youtu.be/9KXOO3gK5wo?...

One of my dear friends is raising money for an immigration attorney so he can either stay in the US, or be able to start over elsewhere. If you donate I will post something good on a topic of your choice as long as i have expertise (depth and breadth subject to donation amount) gofund.me/263317f6

I don't know what to call the late-millennial / sometimes early-gen-Z style of video that is just a looking-at-the-camera lecture characterized by a very casual detached-cool affect that comes across as a caricature (in an unintentional "cool prof" way) but this nails it youtu.be/tFlHxHvniJk?...

does anyone know of any good studies with statistics on ischemia rate by age or age-group other than the recent CDC one from MMWR 73 20? the 65+ age group is way too broad to be useful to me in that one. doesn’t have to be an american study, just recentish www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes...

wait, holdup… the reason people are talking about dildos is because crypto bros are going out and buying dildos and wnba tickets and going to games only to throw the dildos into the court??? why is everything so dumb?? i imagine i will feel equal levels of regret if i learn why this is happening?

@christinatoms.bsky.social hey so i was looking at the recent rainfall over hong kong and noticed they are seeing events that are over 400mm in a 12h period and multiple periods similar to that in a few days and i started wondering about a couple of things you may know

income and employment tax withheld used to be a great resource the 10 months out of the year that withholding from IRA distributions doesn’t add a lot of noise, but cashflow data is subject to volatility from skew in compensation, and in fact stock-based compensation has made it very noisy lately

New: A donor to Mayor Adams has pleaded guilty to playing part in a sprawling insurance fraud scheme that a separate civil lawsuit claims also involved a company co-founded by Frank Carone, Adams' reelection campaign boss and longtime political confidant. www.nydailynews.com/2025/07/30/n...

You know who else set up a youth organisation to teach children about his ideology

if anyone knows of an academic monograph or dissertation that is available digitally, through ILL, or for purchase that is focused on fired bricks (like for buildings) of the US, specifically the chicago & new york metropolitan areas, please do let me know. it must exist and i really want to read it

picked up The Cats of Silver Crescent at the library bc the 3 things i was looking for were out. It seemed like a nice book. a young girl, cats that talk, a kooky great aunt! Well I’ve been spending half the time explaining new words and now I had to explain how shelters euthanize animals! oooooof.

Honestly think this move is being vastly undercovered and will have severe long-term repercussions for the US. Any law enforcement agency, once funded to this degree, becomes impossible to dislodge or downsize due to protestations of "making people unsafe"

There’s something funny about the NYT working overtime to manufacture dirt on Mamdani, when it completely slept on Santos

one of those instances where clothing is elevated to an absolute art form youtu.be/qViabYYeJV4?...

Update on age-inappropriate chapter books to read to a (barely) 4 year old: went deeper with the same author and read The Magician’s Elephant. a few weeks ago. themes and complexity of language better for 8+ imho but we made it through with a lot (and i mean A LOT) of pauses to explain new concepts

a large diversified portfolio of private funds of private credit CDO equity is the perfect investment for your 401k. the underlying credits are super stable, the CDO provides sensible leverage, and the long time horizon means illiquidity is irrelevant.

after weeks of listening to the wicked soundtrack with the toddler we finally started the movie and idk what i was expecting, bc in hindsight it makes perfect sense, but it absolutely sent me for a loop that visually it looks like a musical prequel to lord of the rings

minor technical note: the effect of the 5 week tariff fiasco should be that Q2 imports will be a lot lower than Q1 and then Q3 imports will be really high. that will nudge GDP up (from lower NX) in Q2 but down in Q3. its also probably going to mess with seasonal adjustment factors on a forward basis

excluding covid layoffs, the number of dollars collected for social security tax withheld is growing at its slowest level since 2018 on both an aggregate and per-payroll basis.

even *if* elections are fair in 26/28, dems were to sweep midterms, win the senate by 28, take-back the white house, a transition is fair and uncontested *and* dems have initiative and numbers to take-down MAGA policy, DHS is staffed top-to-bottom with heavily armed ppl loyal to trump and only trump

Summer is coming (lowbar squat)

fwiw i dont have hard evidence but i think once retail sales are out we will see that april has had a fair amount of pull-forward purchases and a bit of hoarding as people are afraid of “supply chain issues” being a thing again. that and accelerated sales from inventory liquidation by some retailers

i think people not plugged-in to financial media or trade-pubs have not yet realized that starting next week the imports start declining precipitously and, with them, also port-worker shifts, truck loads, rail cars, cargo unloads at distribution centers all the way to eventually stocking shelves

if you’ve ever said to yourself, “i am really in the mood for a song that gives me vibes that are a crossover of mid 00s Garbage and AFI” then i have great news for you

why is there so many fucking orphans in children’s books? were there really that many orphans in europe 50-100 years ago or is it a lazy device used to dispense with parents so that kids can just do whatever without parents and their supervision getting in the way of the story?

those low-rate mortgages are dying off.

@conorsen.bsky.social conorbait

@conorsen.bsky.social conorbait