I think is the death knell for Schumer's leadership. His caucus has abandoned him on what has become a core D moral issue. I don't think it's sustainable to have someone in that position who supports unconditional military support for Israel.

“The researchers found that 40% of workers had encountered workslop within a month, and then spent an average of 3.4 hours a month dealing with it – which the study estimates adds up to $8.1m in lost productivity for a 10,000-person organization.” www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

"Income effects matter more than people think, price effects matter less than people think" is the underlying theme of a lot of good economics research.

a fun thing about social media is watching gifted wordsmiths come up with new and vivid ways to vaguely suggest unactionable violent ideation while thousands of people all wish for the same man to die

Claims and ideas which happen to favour the ruling class don't dominate public life by accident. They're paid for by oligarchs and corporations then promoted by media outlets other oligarchs and corporations own. Once they've been drummed into our ears enough, they're internalised as "common sense".

LOGGING ON

🤭

people treat recommendations like such a chore. i know it’s extra work, and we are all exhausted, so damn exhausted. but it’s also someone saying, “i trust you with my career.” i don’t know, man, maybe we honor that trust by writing letters ourselves?

“So it was, on that misty morning, that Brenda set off for the capital. She knew not what she would find there, only that the time had come to move on - away from small-minded rural attitudes and people who called her ‘Oreo’ and ‘the wide panda’ - to seek a more fulfilling life.”

Early reviews say: not half bad! Still looking for eyes on my novel draft if anyone is curious.

Aside from some potential snow-flurries next week I think we can finally say spring has sprung in the valley

...and – CLEARLY THE MOST IMPORTANT! – it’s 248 years to the day since Parson Woodforde’s hogs got shitfaced

using a computer is much easier than using a smart phone

While Hampshire’s case is in some ways unique, it is amazing to think that in a single lifetime - about 70 years - the US founded the greatest public and liberal arts college system in the world and then destroyed it, to build prisons, give tax cuts to the rich, and own the libs

Once again: despite what you might read in The Argument, most opposition to new housing development comes from the right. Not from the left.

On substack, I put up a slightly improved version of my post on how a recent @matt-levine.bsky.social column on a hypothetical algae-energy company is a perfect illustration of the Keynesian vision of investment and of a central argument of Against Money. jwmason.substack.com/p/on-algae-a...

But... he did? He ran a more progressive general election campaign than his primary campaign. Responding to the times: George Floyd and COVID hadn't happened when he started running.

"So what do my miraculous sunglasses tell me? Many things. They inform me, in the voice of Princess Anna from “Frozen,” that my dog is a golden retriever mix (he is not) and that a tree I am looking at is probably an oak (it is not)." www.nytimes.com/2026/04/14/m...

"When will Democrats finally campaign on economic issues, appeal to swing voters and reject social justice issues!?"

And here I've been saying that he worships Moloch instead, apologies Mr. President!

Happy Ruination Day to all who celebrate

Pottery cup fragment from Roman Peterborough (Durobrivae) depicting a magnificent hare. Now part of the collections at Peterborough Museum & Art Gallery. 📸 My own. #RomanBritain #Peterborough

today is quintidi 25 Germinal in the year of the Republic CCXXXIV, celebrating the pigeon

Same goes for every "genius" academic or scholar.

Just when I thought I’d have to go without free identity monitoring services, lucky me, another data breach! They’re skipping the class action suit and going straight to free monitoring.

Feels like your society is not in a great path if it feels like the only reliable and well-paying career route left is “running scams”

Why they think that is because reality is socially constructed and they are pickled in an evil social order, and partly because they are lazy thinkers who are morally compromised, and finally because they’re bad! Just plain bad.

The world (work, life, globe) has a lot of problems that everyone agrees are bad. These problems have a lot of causes. What the proponents of turbocharging GenAI suppose is that the answer to all of these problems is exponentially increasing their causes.

And taxing the rich in this city is going to be the fight of our lives and many more people are going to join the fight.

gotta get your beat sweeteners in before it happens

Here have some flowers (they’re on the way out but looking wild and magnificent anyway)

The point of the university as a concept is that it's been here for a thousand years and meant to be here another thousand. Turning education over to producing what the market needed five years ago is never going to work well.

Should be a fun day in the great arbitrage machine. Sending thoughts and prayers to the team assigned to use AI to generate a statement that will sufficiently juice the stonks for lord Jesus resurrected as a failson.

Two data points from a recent drive thru rural Virginia. 1. Many lawn signs saying "No new data centers," "Vote no on data centers," etc. 2. The classic rock channel promoted itself as "Every song chosen by a real human - no AI."

Drop some BATHTUBS

The inevitable wailing of “How could anyone have known” when GenAI flops will be deafening.

“Oh no we were going to do something about Trump but Mitch McConnell slowed down the senate, who coulda known?” Oh you weren’t gonna do shit. We know it. Stop pretending.

Who is the “we” here? Because you’re making it sound an awful lot like people are the party, candidates, campaign managers, media, business and finance leaders, etc who all worked very hard to make sure Democrats didn’t win that big, because it might upset things.

Reposting on the anniversary of the Fort Pillow massacre as a reminder that remembering horrific pasts can bring us together into new communities today: www.smithsonianmag.com/history/at-f...

If Democrats don’t act like this in 2028, they need to go too. (They need to go.)

Relevance:

So many of us are now textual Case Pollards, physically averse to pre-digested, mass extruded machine verbiage just as William Gibson's Pattern Recognition protagonist was made physically sick by fashion and brands.

All GenAI can do is add new epicycles to the orbits, it can’t invent gravity.

The relief was because they felt they had found the magic to dispel the brutal truth that software engineering and most skilled work is more art and craft than a perfect science, and can’t be rationalized or roboticized away. They resent the skills and intuition inherent in their workers.