I've got an op-ed in several papers across the Inland Empire today electrifying Metrolink service between Los Angeles and San Bernardino. It would make everyone's life a lot better and we are dumb not to do it.

Something tricky here is normally the speculative froth coming out of markets would be healthy, but in our situation it's financial asset-based wealth and loose financial market conditions that have been supporting the whole economy in the face of weak hiring and sluggish housing.

Have you wondered why exactly it is that single-family zoning leads to racial segregation? I wrote this little article to figure it out. I use an agent based model to show it is a combination of race-based wealth inequality, homophily, & clustering of housing types in zoning maps.

I tried my hand at a video explainer of the talking filibuster. open.substack.com/pub/mattglas...

All agents of state violence should be: Uniformed. Identified. Accountable.

New and open access, in @psrm.bsky.social: What happens when we make politicians draw distributions? Nic Dias, @jacklucas.bsky.social and I explore whether the large errors politicians make about public opinion are artificially inflated by how researchers ask them to estimate it /1 cup.org/4kltoyE

Yes, eventually someone’s going to hook one of these 🤖s up to the wrong machine and get us all killed, but, for now, this is art.

Notifications from the future

Terence Tao gets it: "AI is teaching us...our idea of what intelligence is is not really accurate" "we were looking for some elusive intelligent way of of thinking and we don't see it in the tools that actually solve our goals...maybe it's actually because intelligence is not what we think it is"

relevant (genuine, because budget execution is not my area) Q I've been mulling: how likely is it that DHS has actually segregated the OBBBA $ from the discretionary $ such that they can accurately claim facts consistent with the rider not applying (if, indeed, that's the correct legal argument)?

To expand, at some point it would need to go get more skills, say, or build better chips, or get better power supply, or create whole new software primitives, things which aren't just in their current capability set. Think OpenAI today vs OpenAI 3 years ago. That's the gap.

If we could say, "claude, make opus 6 better at coding, make no mistakes" and have it do that, how many iterations of that could we get before it will need human intervention? is it opus 7? 8? 10? We could imagine it extending forever, sure, but that's unlikely

Open Position: Knight Postdoctoral Fellow at Wharton School: Expertise in the quantitative study of the information ecosystem, especially news, media, and advertising. infodem.upenn.edu/wharton-post...

just amazing work by my colleagues at @wsj.com - a frame by frame analysis of the shooting incredible that some continue to rationalize this www.wsj.com/us-news/vide...

Interesting to watch online conservatives look for an offramp without handing it to the libs and they appear to be landing on the Second Amendment.

The scam PAC Democrat grifter operations have to end. ActBlue needs to do some minimal vetting of these entities raising funds under their name.

I voted to impeach Trump for abusing his power to undermine the 2020 election. A healthy democracy depends on leaders respecting voters. Trump and his allies have repeatedly tried to rig the system. Utah voters passed Prop 4 to restore trust in our democracy. Don’t sign this petition.

Imagine writing this IRB application.

Let's assume that the skeptics were right and that Trump's threats toward Greenland were never serious. Allies are still noticing that Congress was willing to let the executive threaten a NATO ally. "Aren't you guys going to do anything about this?" remains the underlying trust problem.

Who here nostalgic for Reader?

This is exactly how we will find out.

I'd guess this is less about the very small chance of a shooting war breaking out and more about a permanent downgrade in US/EU security/trade relations, and the resulting instability. Which is very bad since that's less likely to bounce back when Trump (very likely) chickens out.

The Insurrection Act in no way whatsoever suspends, closes, or bypasses the courts. It is not a suspension of habeas corpus. It is not martial law. It does not authorize rule by decree. It allows using troops for law enforcement but that's it. It's not an instant dictatorship switch.

This is one of the bravest things I have seen.

It’s cold comfort right now but, if past is prologue, spectacles of violence committed by the state against sympathetic civilians—especially when captured on camera—were the beginning of the end for Bull Connor and Jim Crow, too.

Submission deadline for our Machine+Behavior conference (May 18-19) is approaching. Abstract submission: February 8 Notification: February 23 Hope to see you in Berlin this Spring. machinebehavior.science

By analyzing $4 trillion of shipments between January 2024 and November 2025, researchers found that foreign exporters absorbed only about 4% of the burden of last year’s U.S. tariff increases by lowering their prices, while American consumers and importers absorbed 96%. www.wsj.com/economy/trad...

The deadline is here! Last call for applications to the Chicago School in Experimental Economics in Japan. This free summer school will take place June 22–26, 2026 at the University of Osaka. Apply here: voices.uchicago.edu/jlist/the-ch... Questions? Contact [email protected]

Theory: hockey fans develop a better sense of expected value and are less results-oriented, because of the nature of the game. blog.mattglassman.net/process-vs-o...

P(A, B) Wholesome. Embodied. Possesses intelligence. Truly knows true things. P(B|A) P(A) Idiot word guesser. Does not possess intelligence. Can never do anything useful. Also eats water for some reason.

Continuing to have AI build a weird game demo a day. Here is: "Make a game where you have to prevent the apocalypse, but the interface is just Jira tickets" Pretty fun/funny branching storyline, all text is AI created with minor feedback from me. Play: gentle-bienenstitch-01e24b.netlify.app

There are a few people now who've sold their dignity to Trump, only to get passed up for the job they wanted, but few have the entire bond market immediately tell them just how much they suck.

This is a great explainer to lawyers (or otherwise curious people) on what quantum computing is and is not. Via my colleague @aumasson.jp, a prolific cryptographer and advisor to some of the largest banks in the world.

Skin color, race, or ethnicity can be visible. How can immigration status be visible? Fools.

BRONCOS

There are a few people now who've sold their dignity to Trump, only to get passed up for the job they wanted, but few have the entire bond market immediately tell them just how much they suck.

In the real world, power depends on trust. A US attack on a NATO ally would decimate American power. The Kremlin knows this. Does Congress? www.reuters.com/world/senior...

From a markets standpoint the “tariffs in two weeks if not XYZ” is annoying because there’s an 80% chance he’ll back down but you can’t totally be sure so you have to pay attention.

Since the $200 billion GSE announcement 10-year yields are up 6bps -- ultimately without some game-changing announcement that would cost real money, we're just not going to move the needle much on housing affordability in the short-run.

Come work at Stanford! I'm hiring a post-doc who will work with me on projects about prosecutors and trial courts in the US. Feel free to contact me with any questions, or apply here: hoover.smapply.us/prog/postdoc...

Application deadline 31 January. Join us; it will be great fun!

It’s been awhile since I took micro, but my recollection is that the models give pretty clear predictions about what happens to consumer surplus under perfect price discrimination.

We recently tested ~ a dozen public statements from a diverse set of Democratic elected officials on the murder of Renee Good and this was the top testing one

Disappointed to not see discussion in this article of why it's so hard for private citizens to sue federal agents for damages for constitutional violations - that's one of the key issues here! www.nytimes.com/live/2026/01...

if one chooses to use an llm one must validate what it puts out, as one is responsible for what ships and not the model

Plus if your local police force oversteps you know who to take it out on politically. With this there’s basically no accountability unless the public outcry is loud and national.

Want to get the data out of a PDF figure? As in, the actual data – not a rough trace-along-the-lines version? I made an app you might like: adamkucharski.github.io/pdf2plot/ It all started a few years ago... 🧵

Honestly, besides maybe gold, this seems like a pretty muted reaction

Video message from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell: www.youtube.com/watch?v=KckG... www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/s...