The impact of the USAID shutdown on Africa, as seen from space and on the ground. M. Nicolini and I study the effects of the aid cuts by linking GODAD data on USAID projects to satellite-based measures of economic activity and IPC food insecurity indicators. 👉 papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... 1/11

a little bit of wonky data center news from me this morning: while other tech companies are pretty explicitly moving away from evaporative cooling, google is defending it in specific watersheds as a necessary part of building sustainable data centers

There's just a certain fin de siecle absurdity of someone whose only achievement in life is having opinions on the internet ending the career of someone who managed to get into Kyiv in 2022 in the middle of the initial Russian invasion to interview Zelensky.

A failed op-ed writer bankrolled by billionaires purging a universally liked and credible straight news journalist from 60 Minutes really has to be the height of the complete slide of American news media into a complete death spiral.

The longer this guy keeps talking, the less I like him. Not a *bad* guy, but with a strong case of lawyer brain + takes middling professional and political advice. I voted for Steyer with some hesitation.

The tricky thing is that many police departments are not under full effective civilian control, but one of the ways in which they exercise that undue autonomy is through selective shirking to punish pols they dislike, which is something that the ACAB/prison abolition people have no real answer for

From yesterday. I’ve been saying for a while that Trump’s people, having started Trump’s War in partnership with Israel, need to deal with Lebanon being part of it. Trump may not care about Lebanon, but the Iranians and Israelis do. I have no doubt Lebanese regret this. But it’s the reality.

…why are they even here? Israel is a ten hour flight away.

Here’s an interesting counter-factual to think about: in the absence of the Senate filibuster, civil rights legislation would have made it through Congress in the 1950s — in peacetime, under a Republican President, and with 20-odd years of strong economic growth and low inflation in its future.

People like aid to the poor and social security but hate welfare spending

One thing that reliably makes American opinion polls look good: Israeli opinion polls.

Another remark on billionaire tax: it’s five percent. Roughly the average real appreciation of a whole-market index fund in a year. I do not see pressing the pause button for a year as a particularly big deal in principle. The remaining problems are technical, not to be confused with “trivial.”

Save Jensen Huang, who said he was “perfectly fine” with the measure, these are the idle rich. Business is a hobby, or personal empire, and they engage with California as consumers, not as businesspeople that need strength in public institutions that cost time, manpower, and money. They can pay.

I was posting about it yesterday but it really is super frustrating how mainstream media has largely shifted attention away from ICE. The administration fake-out of "a change tone" really worked and since ICE isn't doing massive military-style occupations the coverage has petered out. 1/

24 years is a very long time to have accomplished as little in the Senate as John Cornyn did. He was always a loyal Republican soldier, a backbench Congressman with a nicer office and larger staff. Texas Republicans wanted financial scandal and moral depravity instead. By @sahilkapur.bsky.social

For comparison, unemployment reached 10% in 2010. It would stay crested there for about a year.

elon musk had his brain melted by right wing twitter slop and illegally shut it down. six figure body count plus a new strain of ebola is ravaging africa as we speak. the discourse is about whether they hired enough conservatives to justify not torpedoing the agency. illegally, i might add

BREAKING: Pope Leo XIV makes historic apology for Holy See's own role in legitimizing slavery and for failing to condemn it for centuries.

Prediction: companies that cut drastically “because AI” are making an excuse, and, eventually… very eventually given the incumbency of some… will be replaced by those that use AI to push the envelope on quality.

A sunny day in California

I am an iota older than Micah, that is, I found my feet in the private sector before the Great Recession… it may have made all the difference.

I haven’t thought that far ahead, but democrats that stay mum or, better yet, take point on opposing tax base destruction are on my good list.

Anthropic had managed to make a business that is shaping up pretty well. I like the product suite. No reason it can’t be as important as Microsoft Office in the 1990s. Which changed both everything … and nothing.

Sometimes, you lose. What a price everyone is going to pay though.

Interesting to see this year both centrist and left-liberal policy shops zero in on Public Housing Sweden’s (a trade group of cost-rent municipal housing firms) KomboHus program but draw some different conclusions. www.sverigesallmannytta.se/in-english/p...

It is genuinely disturbing how much of the current economy is based on having to pretend everything random rich guys say is true.

1. Number of stories about Trump buying and selling hundreds of millions of dollars in stocks in the first three months of 2026: CBS: 0 CNN: 0 Fox News: 0 NPR: 0 PBS: 0 Politico: 0 Semafor: 0 Business Insider: 0

Thread. The Ebola outbreak in Congo & Uganda: an overview by @ylepidemiologist.bsky.social. American public health agencies joined an international effort to suppress an earlier outbreak a dozen years ago. Those agencies have since been decimated, and Barack Obama is not the President now.

Shot in the dark here, but if you’re in the Bay Area, and find some of these words interesting: VPP, BGP, colocation, transceivers, 100% branch coverage, please send me a message. I’m looking to hire a software engineer that enjoys this work.

Japan is one of the most R&D intensive non-US countries, and RIKEN is its most prestigious (non-university) research institute. If you isekai’d it into the US, it only has the fourth biggest R&D budget in the state of North Carolina, which is like the twelfth biggest state bsky.app/profile/awma...

Some of the identified individuals the US killed in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific showed "no indication of involvement with drug trafficking." And even if they were traffickers, they'd be low level. Killing them would make virtually no impact on the cartels or drug trafficking into the US.

"The biggest donor in the midterm elections is not Elon Musk, or George Soros, or any of the other billionaires who are often thought to wield the fattest wallets in politics. It is a venture capital firm: Andreessen Horowitz."

We are ostensibly a free country and the degree to which we don’t know what is actually going on in a vast network of “camps” on our own soil in the year 2026 is….. something we are probably never going to come close to actually grappling with as a country

Weekend listen, 1: Economist @justinwolfers.bsky.social has begun a podcast series called Platypus Economics to translate complicated economic concepts into plain English. He starts this week with a brief primer on America’s $1.8 trillion federal budget deficit. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/p...

The paranoid style of the ultra wealthy.

Who will think of the plight of the “vilified” ultra wealthy now that their second-homes in NYC might be taxed at a slightly higher rate, as they already are in Montana? share.google/EeFfrPecjZrO...

Got a panicky text poll for a proposition in November to (pre-emptively) ban wealth tax and wealth tax on large retirement accounts (the Thiel Clause, best I can tell). Lot of leading the witness with moralism about the fairness of it all. Of course I @jdcmedlock.bsky.social’d the response.

Thread. Trump’s ballroom is, as @gregsargent.bsky.social says, an assertion of dictatorial power and an affront to the Republic. Compared to inflation or abortion, though, it doesn’t have a long polling history or speak to a specific constituency. Hence, it’s a “distraction” for some Democrats.

Europeans encountering the physical plant of our railroads always makes me chuckle. Yeah they absolutely suck, and you’ve got no idea how bad it can get. Thankfully it let the class 1 railroads to pay a bunch of money out to shareholders though ☠️

The end of this short @thestudyofwar.bsky.social thread, highlights a point Defense Sec. Hegseth also repeated this morning. The Trumpers are defending their made-up position that the 60-day WPA period for military operations before Congress must be consulted is paused if a ceasefire is declared.

🇰🇷 Samsung has joined the $1tn club -- only the second Asian company to do so, after TSMC This is all driven by the AI boom Oddly enough, the stock has quadrupled in a year and yet trades at 5.3x forward earnings. It was at 14.4x in October, according to Bloomberg

For what it's worth.— www.unpopularfront.news/p/how-social...

hundreds of billions of dollars in illegal tariffs? a year of procedural debate Republicans want to redraw maps before midterms? Alito is shotgunning Red Bulls at 3AM and asking Grok to draft up the paperwork

becerra policies are like - normie dem thing - housing policy cooked up by consultants which will have a negligible impact - financially ruinous idea which would bankrupt the state to protect republican climate deniers from their own choices

This “destroy the tax base” thing might be the dumbest meme of consequence in the Democratic Party right now.

I’d dread this. eBay has done well, a stable company with an amazing long tail of parts. Hard to imagine a meme stock takeover doing anything good.

And don’t forget … still here.

Democrats need to accept that they're entering a new era of procedural Total War. This includes a big escalation in redistricting, but it's not limited to that. If Republicans don't like it, tough shit: They made this world, and they are the ones inflicting it on us. newrepublic.com/article/2098...