Great piece with useful visualizations from @nytimes.com on the risk posed to pedestrians by our swollen vehicles. But it was a major oversight not to mention the role played by Obama's CAFE standard revisions in incentivizing bigger vehicles.

Car manufacturers shouldn't be liable for their automated systems by default. But given Elon Musk's hyperbole about Full Self Driving, vision-only policy, and haphazard rollouts (timed to meet executive pay deadlines), Tesla should face serious liability under contributory negligence standards.

You can check the extent to which your creative output influences LLMs relative to others. I scored relatively high for someone who's not well-known, which I suspect is b/c I have published in crawlable outlets: journals, editorials, newsletters, podcasts, etc.

Doomers at Anthropic have peddled b.s. about LLM capabilities for years and finally caught the car.

Trump spoke at the Libertarian convention in 2024 in front a big banner with this exact same slogan.

There's something distinctly medieval about the US aggression against Iran. It's aimless wandering the countryside (or in this case, the skies) and hitting things without any clear objective. It's more like a prolonged raiding campaign. A chevauchée.

America spent a quarter millennium fearing the fate of Rome and still wound up with a populist demagogue demolishing republican symbols while building triumphal arches and a personal gilded palace and an arena to host spectacular blood sports in honor of his birthday.

exactly the right response

I appreciate Gary's cautions on AGI hyperbole, but his idea of FDA-style regulation of the AI industry is very bad. The FDA kills thousands of people every year through its extreme risk aversion which delays lifesaving innovation. This is a pathway to stagnation at the technological frontier.

Saline, bandaids, and gauze, your classic weapons of war.

Bootleggers & Baptists is soooo last century. Meet Loan Sharks & Tankies.

once again i am stuck in the boring position of saying "yeah this product's most demented pitchmen are selling you snake oil, and yet also the product is real and has useful applications

That an "FCC headache" is a realistic outcome of poking fun at Trump is a complete indictment of the lawlessness of the agency under Brendan Carr.

ICE agents pepper-sprayed Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey.

Counter-offer: a class action lawsuit by every other American requiring Jan 6ers to pay us $1.8 billion dollars.

Plot for a new Graham Greene novel.

"Cato’s brand of libertarianism works great in theory and on a spreadsheet." -In other words, it's grounded in the world's best moral theory, and its empirical conclusions are rigorously tested with data. But we don't like it because we want to blame foreigners for everything.

the president is raiding the treasury to put your tax dollars into this mans personal checking account as a reward for what hes doing in this picture

In 1952, Richard Nixon's career was nearly derailed by revelations that he had access to a slush fund of $18,000 -- less than a quarter million today." People used to give a shit about that kind of thing, you see.

You can see the uptick in uses of "Christian nationalism" in the 1930s/40s on Google ngram, then a decline in the 1950s, a steady rise in the 1980s, before an explosion in the 2010s.

That the search on TikTok is "who is will ferell" makes me feel old as shit. 😅

In 2017, Criselda Vasquez painted this portrait of her parents and titled it "The New American Gothic." Last month, her father, the man in this portrait, was abducted by ICE after being in the US for 30+ years. The family is now struggling with bills. A GoFundMe has been started: gofund.me/456d8a193

Counterpoint: Govt officials, particularly intelligence leaders, shouldn’t be doing “oppo hits” on members of Congress during legitimate oversight hearings.

My first tankie pile-on since I left Twitter! Makes me feel a bit nostalgic, lol.

This isn't correct. The decline of the humanities is a product of falling demand -- particularly the collapse in enrollment & majors -- and not technological substitution for labor. That said, it's true that AI, although it will help historians do better work, will not solve that crisis.

The edits CBS made here are severe, and depict a man who is much more petulant and incoherent than the broadcast would suggest. trib.al/xaPuJZc

There has never been anything approaching this scale or scope of corruption from a presidential family in US history. Hunter Biden, Billy Carter, and even Lady Bird Johnson (prior record holder) are small fry by comparison.

Some useful public speaking tips from Freud here.

The Pentagon wants to use hypersonic missiles in Iran b/c they think we're stupid: 1) we can already bomb targets at will, making their extra speed pointless 2) they cost 10x more than the expensive missiles we're currently using 3) we're demonstrating their capabilities to other potential foes.

I suppose it is fitting that the new passport portrays Trump defacing the Declaration of Independence, a protest against a king who also thought he stood above law and custom. They didn't quite think this one all the way through...

A broken Congress produces an overpowered presidency and Supreme Court. The ways in which Congress is broken are a consequence of the electoral system. None of these things improve in any viable long-term way without structural electoral reform. It's not a nice-to-have, it's the bedrock necessity.

Depending on who's correct about the future of A(G)I, this chart will be (in)famous a decade from now.

I wonder if Lina Khan or any of the antitrust hawks responsible for blocking the Spirit Airlines + JetBlue merger feel even an iota of chagrin for the unnecessary financial pain they've caused & idiotic follow-on policy they've enabled?

Jay Bhattacharya has ordered that a paper showing the effectiveness of COVID19 vaccines in preventing severe disease and hospitalization be suppressed and hidden. This man has been crying nonstop about political censorship for 6 years. But he’s the one who is actually doing it.

Abundance socialism.

If some, young grad school historian wants a paper idea, compare the micropayment network of Nick Fuentes to the very similar funding model of conservative broadcasters in the mid-20th century. ie, there's a box full of donor envelopes in the Carl McIntire archives.

People keep reading the retro-tech and physical media revival as a political project, either resistance to platform capitalism or a version of frictionmaxxing. I think what's mostly driving it is much simpler: we like how physical objects look and feel.

Many, many people will die unnecessary deaths over the next decade because the Trump administration put a vaccine skeptic in charge of approving new vaccines at the moment when we were developing cures for cancer with vaccines.

Maine leading with the anti-abundance agenda. In 2022, they blocked renewable Canadian hydropower & now they're blocking data centers. Hard to think of a state less well-equipped for either policy: the oldest average age + highest poverty rate in the region + lagging high-skill economy penetration.

If you need any more reminders that we're not the good guys in this war, the US interdicting vessels from neutral nations which pay a transit fee to Iran is the same conduct as that which led to the War of 1812 when Britain interdicted neutral US ships to block trade with France.

Liberalism creates spaces (in literal space!) where both an evangelical astronaut can share his faith AND hopecore feminism has a moment. Reject reaction, ditch hate, and enjoy this otherworldly moment of humankind reaching back out to the stars.

The time is ripe for the return of an anti-masonic style movement. All the preconditions are present like in the 1830s. We've got a literal cabal of elite traffickers manipulating politics to avoid accountability & a party system that's degraded into pre-modern dysfunction.

downwardly mobile gentrifiers want riding the subway to be Cool, urbanists want the least cool person you know to prefer riding the subway to owning a car

The reactionary right pushed a government takeover of New College in Florida. What hath Chris Rufo, Ron DeSantis, and their miserable band of culture warriors wrought? Budget nearly doubled, student outcomes plummeting, reputation in freefall. washingtonmonthly.com/2025/11/13/n...

And Partridge is a pastor, which makes his bigotry all the more vile. Unsurprisingly, he's part of the "empathy is a sin" crowd, who are heretics prostituting sound theology in service of their political idols.

Under Trump, the US has been as dangerous as Iran, Netanyahu's Israel, or any other malign state actor. We brazenly flout the laws of war, promote regime change in non-aligned states, launch conflicts at the executive's whim, assassinate foreign heads of state, and blatantly murder non-combatants.

Waymo helping cities track potholes is a clear public interest win. Then again, reflexive AI skeptics, neo-Brandesians, and anti-capitalists will likely just confirmation bias it away.

Trump says everything and means nothing.