If we ever get back to proper rule of law constitutionalism, the presidential pardon power needs to be curbed if not abrogated. Require senate supermajority approval, at minimum.

There were no good choices (but I think this cave is mostly bad) but I do see a lot of people whipsawing between gotta let them touch the stove/gotta save them from touching the stove takes. People were going to suffer because of SNAP cuts, but now people are going to suffer because of ACA cuts

Deal seems pretty bad (though all options are very bad) but are we sure this even passes the house? Are we sure Trump supports it? We are underestimating the chances of further chaos and incompetence, IMO

Here’s video of federal agents doing a drive by pepper spraying that hit a father and his one-year old on Saturday when the Feds were hitting Little Village and Cicero

"Far from a peak, China's gasoline demand is estimated to have fallen 9% in October on the year to 12.5 million tons, with average daily use roughly flat with September..." China's oil demand is entering structural decline.

Wild guess here: the jabronis running DHS may have been hit by an enormous instance of wire fraud that everyone is embarrassed to admit

Saddest part is what’s likely to happen next: Spaniards are going to start to blame immigrants. If the Spanish left insists that demand for housing is the problem rather than the lack of supply, voters will soon realize that the Latin American immigrant boom is the demand just as much as tourists.

An extremely high marginal tax rate on production of a socially desirable thing that there's a broad shortage of, no matter how that tax is spent, seems like... extremely bad policy with a huge deadweight loss

“We're seeing a level of proliferation of bodies & body piles from space that's unlike anything I've ever seen…” Human rights investigator Nathaniel Raymond explains how more people could be killed within a week in Sudan, compared to the past two years in Gaza. 🔗 zeteo.com/p/sudans-dea...

The Stancil-adjacent arguments about the state of the economy are kind of funny: they were originally about how irrationally people voted in 2024, but now that Trump is *actually* delivering some real economic pain, that pain is being backdated to support the same 2024-era arguments

I am once again saying that we saw what wall to wall, panic coverage of a crisis looked like after the Biden debate and there’s no reason Trump isn’t getting that kind of coverage except for class solidarity.

Lots of garbage ideas here, but one thing that catches my eye is how it's possible to pass a ballot measure by simple majority that requires 2/3 supermajorities for future ballot measures

“gambling is the worst, most game integrity destroying crime you can commit against the game of baseball now please read this sports betting advertisement, they’re our biggest sponsor” truly one of the most predictable disasters of all time

COVID wasn't particularly notable in places with poor public health infrastructure and young populations. Its impact was higher in richer countries to a large extent because we keep vulnerable people alive and healthy for much longer

Police car chases are obviously incredibly dangerous to the public, but I also think the alternative incentive structure where you don't have to let a cop pull you over leads to very bad places too. Really wonder what the best way forward is here

Even the people dunking on Stancil by observing that houses are more expensive now & people wait longer to buy them are missing the bigger point, which is that the problem is not whether we have enough money, but whether we have enough desirable houses.

Exciting new technological frontiers in NIMBYism www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

This is 100% not someone who has been trained to use a gun. He's waving it around nervously. This is insane

I actually read this profile, and it's jarring to see Ahmari claim he's an interesting, complex, and thoughtful young man contrasted with a bunch of quotes that could easily have been randomly selected from the comments on a D-tier YouTube channel

it's true and they should say it but it's a real bad sign it's winding up in print

The GOP truly desires to catch the car

All the people in the replies bashing Harbor Freight simply don't understand Harbor Freight's place in the DIYer moral universe. How it works: you earn your right to purchase a DeWalt or Milwaukee only after wearing out or revealing the deficiencies of a Harbor Freight tool

30th century historians will disagree whether "Wilson" was a common family name or an appellation given to mayors of early 21st century Pacific Northwest mayors

USS Los Angeles (ZR-3) moored to USS Patoka (AO-9) off the coast of Panama during Fleet Problem XII, February 1931.

Some physicists should stay in their lane. A recent @thetyee.ca article turns science into sciencefiction, claiming SARS-CoV-2 acts like HIV, causes immune collapse, and fuels cancer. None of it holds up to evidence. I dissect the falsehoods here 👇 🔗marcveldhoen.substac... 1/3

I feel it's bad for my soul that me and my friends now regularly rejoice in witnessing the humiliating decay of an old and sick man. But you gotta take the pleasures you can

This class of argument gets so much pushback, but I think criticizing dumb and counterproductive activism might be one of the more useful things someone sympathetic to Palestinians might be able to do right now

Interesting to see @meganwachspress.bsky.social observe that the Sierra Club’s staff were clear-eyed about the need for clean energy development while the *members/small-dollar donor base* were more resistant to it.

whoops, bar had a leak, guess the only thing to do is fill it back up again fill that bar, folks, maybe we can hit $60K

oh so these people do pay attention to who politicians follow on social media, they just don’t care that the vice president follows a bunch of actual neo-nazis

MFers are about to elect Nigel Farage, want to hunt trans people for sport, and outside of London are some of the ruddiest and most xenophobic people alive. Give me a break

we talk too much about the male loneliness crisis and not enough about the male suckerfication crisis maxread.substack.com/p/prediction...

This is incredible. King County elections is now saying they have 45,000 ballots left to count. If Wilson gets exactly the same margin of those as she got today she'll take the lead by... 20 votes!

As I have said from the beginning, the number of federal troops needed in our city is zero, and today's court ruling vindicates Portland's position while reaffirming the rule of law that protects our community.

Not great that the world's richest man has real Ray Liotta in the last 1/3 of Goodfellas energy

The breathtaking power of the atom, harnessed to provide limitless and fast marine propulsion, used for whatever the fuck is going on here

Given that COVID-19 really looks like it's moderating towards being just another endemic respiratory virus, it makes one wonder how much healthier we'd be if we were regularly vaccinated for some of the hundreds of others circulating

::movie trailer voice:: They said he was retired, but Bill Kristol has one more regime to change...

An interesting tech thing to follow: solid-state transformers for grid applications. Remember how your brick-like SNES wall wart? Notice how your much more powerful and flexible phone charger is much smaller? The same change might come to transformers on power poles and in electrical substations

I understand that cheap and efficient solar panels are a consequences of a pretty sophisticated semiconductor supply chain that would be hard to bootstrap. But what about lithium-ion batteries? If we could send back 50k pages of research and technical specs to 1950 would it be usable?

birds trying to fight or fuck the mirror, forever

emotive butlerian jihad, more and more are saying it. the robot may not wear the skin of a man.

Man. When AI live video chat arrives, pretty soon... it's going to break some brains

I'm becoming interested in the general phenomenon of norm equilibria that are getting shattered, and whether/ when that results in a new worse equilibrium. Widespread pardons for Republicans convicted of corruption (see also Santos), the end of FCPA enforcement... www.wsmv.com/2025/11/06/p...

A fun question. In 5 years time, what looks better? The US’s enormous bet & capex on AI? Or China’s equally enormous bet and capex on renewables?

Gen z and younger doesn't get what cultural cachet the numbers 1999 and 2000 had in the 80s and 90s. It was on all sorts of things. Then the years actually happened and everyone stopped giving a shit

mr beast saudi arabian theme park

This is a thing lifted right from The Culture novels, a series Musk has purportedly read, doesn't understand past a surface level, and whose author would have absolutely hated him

I think this is a genuinely interesting line of questioning. It's impossible to say if they'd win or lose, but I think either way they would have done it with a significantly different coalition

It's very hard to read this, knowing the little bit about suicide that I do, and conclude that chatgpt was not a major causal factor