Today is a good day to remember the Trumpers skipped the "deliver jobs and coveted goods" part of the authoritarian playbook and went straight to "we will loot the treasury and people will love getting the bill and an IOU" so a 16 year reign was always iffy.

Anyway, I'll see your "kitchen table issues" and raise you one "corruption is the ultimate kitchen table issue because people are sick and tired of scammers running everything with impunity."

Well, I guess we can chalk another one up to voting harder. It may not be sufficient on its own, but it sure seems like participating in that democratic practice is the minimum requirement for keeping the oligarchs from running roughshod.

Today I'm back on my bullshit that this is the era of bad vibes, and there is no amount of messaging and policy you can do to escape the swirling vortex of traditional media negativity and bad social incentives. We have to figure out how to break the doom loop.

Catching up on the Anthropic news, I can't help but think we really haven't grappled with how devastating spikey intelligence could be even if all the hype around AGI turns out to be meaningless blather and exploitation of fuzzy terminology.

If you simply take it as axiomatic that every statement this administration makes is a lie meant to stroke Dear Leader's ego, you will have a better understanding than all the very serious chin strokers in the media combined.

I know how to fix America: fund the white collar police and make insider trading punishable by life in supermax with no possibility of parole.

So I guess whether you think war for oil is bad or good doesn't really matter when in reality it's a really fuckin' stupid idea that gets you clobbered every single time.

To clarify the medical thing turned out ok but it did require me to drop everything to go provide support. We got really lucky this time.

Sorry for the long silence. I've been dealing with a parental medical situation followed by being slammed at work. I've concluded I have no fucking clue how to predict the actions of the chaos monkey in the White House and neither does anyone else lacking the insider info on the state of bribes.

Guy who thinks raping 13-17 year olds is still incredibly abhorrent because 1, rape is evil, period, and 2 teenagers are not in any way morally less deserving or better positioned to resist an exploitive power disparity.

Given the increasing frequency and cost of major disasters, I don't see why FEMA shouldn't be a separate cabinet level agency. Disaster response is literally a major part of President's day job now! It's a really poor fit to lump it in with law enforcement.

I expect them to double down on disappearing people to torture warehouses now. The next battle isn't going to look like the last battle. They're stupid but also really fucking evil and not totally insne.

Trust but verify on ICE leaving the Twin Cities. But it sure sounds like they're in full CYA mode now that public opinion is in total revolt. It can't be overstated how important it is to publicize the abuses widely. Minneapolis observers got results.

I think one big upshot of LLMs is a lot more bespoke software. Suddenly it becomes practical for even non-practitioners to make little one off utilities to solve a problem and so that's going to push digitization of processes much deeper down the value chain where before it didn't make sense.

Speaking of political malpractice, Collin County Democrats evidently did not bother to field a DA candidate this year. The POS misogynist who failed to indict Kris Harrison is running unopposed.

I will say again I don't care if Democrats literally say Abolish ICE as long as they communicate an understanding the whole thing is rotten root and branch and the entire idea of law enforcement dedicated solely to removing brown people is fatally flawed because of who it attracts to power.

So what's the insurance hike going to be for "car may be totaled by out of control ICE pursuit?" now that that is a measurable risk?

Talking about LLMs at really high levels of abstraction is not helpful. They're a tool that exhibits weird spikey intelligence. When you have a use case that fits well they enormously accelerate productivity (eg some kinds of coding).

A note on that awful Texas case: in Texas you need 9 out 12 votes on a grand jury to secure a true bill. So it only takes 4 MAGA psychopaths (pretty likely in fucking Prosper) to get a no bill. Also the Collin County DA is a piece of shit. Here's hoping 2026 is the year the county flips.

I don't think the Trumpers are monkeying with employment data tbc. I just think the models aren't working well for a variety of reasons, including falling response rates to their surveys, and this is a really difficult problem even with full staffing by the best and brightest let alone now.

Anyway, even if nothing nefarious is going on at BLS revisions have been pretty extreme lately so it might be wise to take the headline reports with a shaker of salt. We may be seeing indication of reacceleration. Or it may just be statistical noise that will go away with more complete data.

We over focus on the evil for good reason, but it's always important to remember the people in the government are also very stupid. Our government is a malevolent but epileptic monkey that does a lot of random flailing with no regard for who it hurts.

We need to revive the idea of solar energy being the ultimate tool for manly off grid living so right wingers stop committing ecocide to own the libs.

I think it's just as likely the MAGA guys are frontrunning the market as trying to do any even semi-legitimate spin so we'll see. Insider trading by government officials ought to be punishable with a lifetime ban from any government role and real prison time, with no statute of limitations.

I think we can be pretty confident Trump doesn't have enough consolidated control over the military and courts to pull off an autogolpe. It doesn't mean he won't try and doesn't mean he won't do incredible damage beyond what he's already done (in particular riling crazies into comitting violence).

I don't know what the exact appropriate messaging on ICE is, but we should appreciate that Republicans are doing national Prop 187 and not interrupt them.

I think it's important to remember viruses are not a eugenic filter and even survivors of a highly lethal disease like ebola almost universally experience devastating post acute sequelae. Whatever a cynical antivaxer might think they're doing they're wrong. Pathogens aren't doing us a favor.

Prediction is always dangerous, but the data right now is really pointing to the big narrative for 2026 being "how Trump lost his base" and that will be how anti-Dem punditry will paint it. Not a Democratic victory, which would require acknowledging they're good at politics, but a Republican loss.

In 2024 people got too worried about a stole election when the big risk was Democrats losing outright like almost every other incumbent party that year.

I think something the doomers are ignoring is the magnitude of flips needed to know the outcome. Democrats needed 23 in 2018. This year they only need at most *3* so the chances are overwhelming we will be able to project once the east coast comes in.

Untreated 2020 trauma is a big problem for commenters. I feel pretty confident that was a once in a lifetime thing caused by the perfect storm of COVID adaptations plus Trump's weird strength with rust belt low info voters plus his shameless disregard of democratic norms.

I've lived through more than 1 midterm. The state that counts excruciatingly slow is always California (due to accepting late mail ballots) and if we're looking at a true blowout Democrats will cross 218 before that becomes a factor. In 2018 we knew before sunup Wednesday Democrats won.

The joke most of my adult life was "libertarians are just Republicans who want to smoke pot" and the Trump years have sure as hell confirmed that.

But the big reason I lean Talarico is the job of a Senator is legislation and oversight, not posting. And Talarico's resume is a bit thicker on actually getting things enacted (granted even the horrible Texas state legislature is a bit more pragmatic than Congress)

I'm going to say there isn't enough data to be freaking out about Crockett winning primary, and Talarico has been running a conventional progressive campaign complete with the extremely annoying pleas for donations.

MAGA hates it when the wrong people adopt patriotic iconography and attach it to broader narratives about inclusion, unity, and joyful celebration so we should do more of that. Triggering the cons is in fact a useful heuristic because they have embraced vice so thoroughly under Trump.

There is such an obvious megabucks market for a home security company that explicitly says they'll religiously follow the 4th amendment and never turn over recordings without a judicial warrant or explicit owner permission and yet Silicon Valley just keeps doubling down on the panopticon dystopia.

Seems like my beloved Pacific Northbest has the mandate of heaven. I'm definitely taking that as a good omen for Woke 2.

All I'm saying is if we make Puerto Rico a state and bribe Hollywood to move there we can fix the dour vibes we find ourselves stuck with.

I think partisan gerrymandering is terrible but also you can't have an equilibrium where one side is creeping toward PRI style one party rule and the other high mindedly refuses to fight back. Politics ain't beanbag and tit for tat is the only way we can keep a reasonably competitive system.

Hot take: Republicans wouldn't be spinning so hard on "evil Obama was so unfair to Mittens" if they didn't know deep down supporting Trump is wrong. The strong need to deflect and rationalize is what we call a tell.

The problem with 2024 analysis has always been the problem of overreading a historically weak victory to fit a preconceived narrative. Even the Biden era backlash to immigration was mostly backlash to perceived border chaos and asylum abuse and not a strong desire to deport everyone.

We talk about the importance of civics education, which is true. But one of my bug bears is we don't cover reconstruction and its unraveling nearly well enough in history classes. And in particular how damned long it took to consolidate Jim Crow and suppress the Black vote.

My hot take is when people talk about the evils of neoliberal globalism they really mean the evils of GWBs mishandling of the China Shock, bank deregulation, and the subsequent mediocre 2000s economy that ended in catastrophe, and they haven't updated their priors since.

I'm not fretting about the midterms. The only force in history that has ever stopped thermostatic backlash is the overwhelming popularity of the president: FDR & JFK basically. Not even Saint Reagan could hold back the tide. No amount of marginal fiddling is going to make fetch happen.

Something we've kind of stopped talking about is the way healthcare ate a lot of the gains for workers and since Obamacare largely left ESI alone as part of the coalition management to get it enacted we haven't really addressed that issue at all.

How would you even voter intimidate in a vbm state anyway? What, you're going to shake down post offices and all the additional drop boxes as well as regular polling places too?

Really important than any DHS funding bill restrictions needs a rider that says "and the OBBBA money can't be used on this either" or they'll just use accounting gimmicks to get around it.

They're already having to gut real criminal law enforcement to divert bodies to rounding up abuelas. If they try to police polling places they'll have to stop rounding up abuelas and I think that might make even the racist Trumpers in ICE grumble.