An interesting possibility I had not considered, re: the apparent insider trading around the Iran war and other Trump admin actions.

I generally try to motivate the undergrads about the things I cover in my decision making class (e.g. 'you WILL encounter the Sunk Cost fallacy in your life and recognizing it could save your butt'), but when it comes to counterfactuals I put this up:

An interesting possibility I had not considered, re: the apparent insider trading around the Iran war and other Trump admin actions.

tl;dr: NIH is running at about 60% of pre-Trump levels and NSF is running at about 20% of pre-Trump levels of funding-outlays (some directorates far below even that). Utterly catastrophic. An unforced disaster for U.S. society, and the world

New high for May gasoline futures:

Oil just ticked up on this:

My general take on this is: Last week jawboning informed the market that he *wants* to 🌮. However, the market (correctly) does not believe that additional jawboning means he's any closer to a deal.

and the best part is: the advice and guidance provided in this webinar is widely applicable to other grant and fellowship applications graduate students apply to. join us next week #polisky

A lot of people in my feed keep retweeting this story from 3 hours ago, but oil is up ~1pp and the S&P is already back to being slightly negative. Doesn’t seem like the jawboning was really that successful this time.

Oil’s up.

1 week ago, he got the oil futures to drop ~10%. This seems pretty small.

Still interesting to me how little this jawboning has moved the markets since Friday, especially compared to how well it worked on Monday last week.

The community note.

"Iran is now earning nearly twice as much from oil sales each day as it did before American and Israeli bombs started falling on February 28th. It may be pummelled on the battlefield, but the regime is winning the energy war." www.economist.com/finance-and-...

Large protests are common knowledge machines 🧠🔄🧠

Oh damn - the feature phone era finally ends in Japan! You will be remembered, fallen soldiers

If I were a vast imperial power I would simply not become so hubristic about my military might that I become embroiled in a prolonged asymmetrical war with a weaker power who's fundamental willingness to stick it out means that they can bear not losing for longer than I can afford to not win.

Large protests are common knowledge machines 🧠🔄🧠

#NoKings in Chicago.

“The fact that organized protest can break the spiral of silence, and correct our impressions of what other Americans think, is one of the most immediate and important values of protesting in the first place. Scientists have [shown] protests update our impressions of what other citizens believe.”

@christiangrose.bsky.social didn’t deserve the public attacks he got for doing his job out here in CA. Here’s his take: www.politico.com/newsletters/...

Unforgivable for HyperCard to be this low

While the situation is grim at NIH, it's closer to catastrophic at NSF. They're just not able to move any money out the door. It appears OMB has them on lockdown. www.science.org/content/arti....

I guess this explains some of it. Traders seem to believe he can still salvage this in a week or two.

New working paper: Rethinking Misinformation Interventions. The field has spent years searching for the one intervention that will solve misinformation. This search is the wrong approach — and our disappointment says more about our expectations than our tools. (1/5) osf.io/preprints/so...

Brent crude prices (white) are high, but at $110/bbl they're still well below 2022 highs. But Brent crude Dated-to-Frontline timespreads (blue)—diff between spot Brent crude/futures, a measure of market tightness—are at all-time highs, almost DOUBLE 2022 highs. All-time tight.

Only 23% of government workers believe they “can report a suspected violation of a law, rule, or regulation without experiencing retaliation.” That's way down form the share the prior year (72%) who said they could report suspected illegal activity without fear www.thebulwark.com/p/two-more-g...

TBC this is mostly me expressing my own ignorance, but I don’t understand why oil futures are still much lower than 2022. Yes, Trump _wants_ to 🌮 in some sense, but can he fix this in time?

Unforgivable for HyperCard to be this low

I really do like this as an example of markets learning

I really do like this as an example of markets learning

This is really bad. The federal government has basically stopped investing in basic research.

Man, inflation is out of control. I remember when extending the deadline on Iran strikes bought a whole 10 percent drop in oil futures. www.wsj.com/livecoverage...

i think the worst part of the anti-ai posts on here esp for coding agents is that THEY ARE EXTREMELY FUN TO USE AND YOU ARE SKIPPING FUN FOR MOSTLY BAD PRETENTIOUS AESTHETIC REASONS

New theory: pretraining on trillions of tokens causes models to vastly overestimate how much text I want to read

Great opportunity for politcal economists career.mpifg.de/jobposting/3...

GREAT gig. Lots of Brussels folks aren’t on Bsky, let them know!

From a market price action standpoint, you have two sides both of whom are known for being liars who are incentivized to lie to move markets in their direction.

This is something I’d be interested to hear from experts on. Has the market priced in most of the disruptions that will persist after the war ends? Or, another way to put it, how quickly does Trump need to TACO for the futures to make sense? cc @roryjohnston.bsky.social

Ironically, I think the transparency of Trump’s lie might be helping to sell the market on how badly he wants to 🌮.

Beautiful paper, read, set in your classes, think about, cite, extend, etc.

Trump admin violating domestic law, international law, and now the law of total variance

I think you can absolutely do qualitative research and still be a scientist, but if you actively block *any* replication policy then you’re not. You’re anti-science. bsky.app/profile/jere...

To clearly communicate the war’s purpose, the admin would need to clearly understand it themselves

This past winter I visited boulder beach and sunrise with a goal to capture otter cliffs in a different way then I normally do. This is what I came away with. #photo #landscapephotography #seascapephotography #acadia #maine #photography #sunrise

So many ways in which ICE in airports could backfire. TSA has a union, but Trump has 2x tried to bust it. (It’s still in court). 7 months of training vs Imagine working for free next to paid ICE agents More TSA agents will call in sick. chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/...

Independents perceive themselves as slightly right of center

This is bonkers

Well this doesn’t sound like deescalation