Should Iowa farmers — year after year in perpetuity, on every acre they can right up to the water’s edge — grow corn to be made into ethanol? Career water scientist Chris Jones (@theswinerepublic.bsky.social) believes this is….unwise. newrepublic.com/article/2064...

Some children in Dilley were so distraught they cut themselves or talked about suicide, parents told ProPublica. They said kids lost their appetites after finding worms and mold on their food, had trouble sleeping, and were constantly sick.

Was talking to an uber driver and a mechanic who both had brushes with uninsured disability and injury in different ways. One did not know to claim from our public disability insurance, via California SDI. It would have really helped him out.

Been a while since I took muni downtown at relaxed working hours (arriving by ten). It got so full I had to take off my backpack with standing room! Before the pandemic, I’d routinely would have to skip trains out for being too full. Slowly but surely…recovery. A bit like and yet unlike the GFC.

The Black unemployment rate fell to 7.2% from 7.5%, which continues to exceed all other groups. Black workers are still struggling in this economy. See my recent piece on this: www.cbpp.org/blog/the-eco... (3/6)

Sometimes very hard not to feel like the rest of the country has abandoned Minnesota. We STILL have ICE everywhere. Our schools, businesses, and economy are in profound crisis. But without Bovino here throwing tear gas, much of the country seems to not care at all what’s being done to us.

It sure is. reader.foreignaffairs.com/2025/01/21/e...

Things that are fake: “Bullshit jobs” per Graeber 10-20% AI driven unemployment per AI company officers (a marketing gimmick to get around talking up their product directly, everyone sees through that)

Seems a lot of these feds seem to think people ought to be carrying identification papers on them at all times. Why would I do that? I’m often walking or on a bicycle, I pay for things with my watch. I haven’t been carrying identification routinely for years.

State of play in negotiations to fund the Department of Homeland Security, by Politico via @clarajeffery.bsky.social. If you require judicial warrants, your secret police won’t be secret anymore. Plus, the 4th Amendment is woke. Such is the Trump Republican position.

None of my relatives are in Italy, but two of them have gotten COVID within the past week. It’s still around.

The U.S. conducted more extrajudicial killings in the Eastern Pacific today We’re tracking the civilian toll @theintercept.com theintercept.com/2025/11/17/t...

I was rather alarmed how integrated Fanduel was into PGA, with ads as a proud sponsor of the Super Bowl, plus an ad featuring Joe Montana I think. There was a brief infobox showing how the lead player was way over performing their initial betting odds, based on fanduel data.

Pretty clear to me that all the good incentives that come from being able to make a billion dollars are wiped out in a few years as billionaires become people who mainly want to keep their billion dollars.

Thinking over this again, sometimes it really is that simple. “Sometimes, you lose.” And what it says about the situation we’re in does not recommend a utopian prescription to get out of it.

ICE blamed this guy’s eight skull fractures on a brick wall. They actually beat him with the same metal rod they used to smash car windows. “There was never a wall.”

They're Abrego-Garcia-ing a child -- punishing him because his very existence is inconvenient to them. It's gutter bigotry and petulant sadism all the way down.

A lot of hypothesis end up backfiring, I posted a couple of mine recently. But I’ll propose a new one to get embarrassed by later: LLMs have productive use in textual forms, and it’ll be an elegant weapon for the literate… even as broadband video eats away at popular engagement with text.

“Never blame the voters” is as much an axiom in electoral politics as “the customer is always right” is in business. But these are marketing principles, not statements of ontological truth. Anyone who has ever worked in business can tell you customers are wrong all the time. They can do foolish,

Another monkey-paw outcome of the decade: I long thought it might be better if people did their betting on the stock market, putting aside options or the bookie: the latter carry high fees.

One junction here is this cross-subsidization greatly impacts the geography of the data center industry: they are clustered around municipal power. I had to exclude a site that was on PG&E power even though I would like to have pursued business with them.

This thread by @joshtpm.bsky.social is as good an analysis of Jeff Bezos’ thinking as I’ve seen. Marshall is one of the rare people who knows firsthand both the news & business side of journalism. Bezos bought The Washington Post knowing neither, and is decimating his paper having learned little.

We gotta come up with a better system than “everything rests on whether these twelve billionnaires are nice”

A friend convinced me to downgrade my polled endorsement of municipalizing San Francisco’s electrical grid. It’s no secret that other municipal power (SVP, SMUD) is much cheaper by avoiding cross subsidization imposed on, and by, PG&E. He thinks the damage is too great.

yep. Obama FP was mid to awful but that was the best part and they never forgave him

This is what one afternoon drop looks like for one (1) Minneapolis mutual aid distributor (read: random mom who wants to help families at her kids’ schools)

this is a wicked man who knows he is being wicked and does it anyway

The current exposure for the California FAIR plan (California’s insurer of last resort) sits at $724 billion. Its liability almost doubled in two years and is now more than double the state’s annual budget. In its most recent financial reporting it had about $1.5 billion on hand.

"Popularism" doesn't work because issue polling doesn't work and there's really not more to discuss beyond that.

I would enjoy hearing from an expert on 18 USC 242 about what can be done to these people.

lmao omg this is the guy who This American Life interviewed on Dec. 19! He lives in the immediate vicinity of ICE's Portland facility, and a clowncar of the worst far-right podcasters who congregate there singled him out, and then he unwittingly leaned into the "leader of Antifa" thing as a joke

“Keep on stacking" We regret to inform you that silver is a meme stock now www.ft.com/content/8c69...

The two Border Patrol agents who killed Alex Pretti were from Texas. I was curious where the other agents in Minneapolis were from, so I looked it up. Turns out, it's a secret. www.pbump.net/o/where-are-...

New — I spoke to eight people who were present at the ICE protest on Saturday in Portland, Oregon when federal agents deployed tear gas and rubber bullets into a crowd of families, children, elderly and disabled people, and their pets. These are their stories:

I keep seeing this resurfacing on my feed but what I wanna know is how this doesn’t get them straight up booted off of campus, why it hasn’t happened sooner, & who is allowing them to stay? Because if I were those other students who aren’t complete freaks, I’d feel wildly unsafe at that location.

Apropos nothing, over twenty years ago, I was discussing a bug in an assignment of mine with the professor. I say something like “that’s just semantics” and he retorts: “every bit is sacred.” Clearly, I have never forgotten.

Gelman is an entertaining writer as well as a statistician. A “core sample” of a part of American society, indeed.

I had some early enthusiasm for twitter to find some way other than advertisement and thus surveillance to make their living. It ended up being some monkey-paw level backfiring.

Millerism means Minneapolis times 100 for a decade. It would tend the United States apart. It is something close to Milosevic’s line.

"It may take time to prove you're right, but you have to stick to it." - Fred Korematsu Jailed for refusing to abide by FDR's Exec Order 9066, he took his case against internment all the way to the Supreme Court - and lost. Remember him on Korematsu Day, January 30th. 1/

He would be the first to say he’s but one of the crowd, nevertheless: I admire this man.

Gold may be the oldest meme stock, but the one thing that makes it different then other meme stocks is that central banks buy it, and are significant drivers of the price.

A film people interested in the failure of Reconstruction or incompleteness in de-Nazification looks like is this film set in Imperial Japan, 1945. I watched it on a flight not knowing anything about it. m.imdb.com/title/tt3154...

Emanuel Mönch, a leading economist and former head of research at Germany’s federal bank, the Bundesbank, called for the gold to be brought home, saying it was too “risky” for it to be kept in the US under the current administration.

"I'm coming to Boston and I'm bringing hell with me." --Homan in February "Do I expect violence to escalate? Absolutely." -- Tom Homan in March "I actually thought about getting up and throwing that man a beating right there in the middle of the room" -- Homan in July, referring to a D congressman

The chief federal judge in Minnesota excoriated ICE on Wednesday, saying it had violated nearly 100 court orders stemming from its aggressive crackdown in the state and had disobeyed more judicial directives in January alone than “some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.”

Someone should play the video of Fátima Lucas Henrique’s screams as she was kidnapped by federal agents on the way to her early morning nursing shift to Sen Susan Collins wherever she shows her face. This is happening to Mainers on her watch. www.bostonglobe.com/2026/01/28/s...

California is 28% foreign born, and enjoyed one of its safest years. There’s no social order stalking the streets can meaningfully improve. calmatters.org/justice/2026...

BTW, if Senate Dems want technical reforms, here's one: amend 8 USC 1357 so DHS agents do not have power to arrest without a judicial warrant unless they are GS-1811, grade of GS-13 or higher. Real criminal investigations would be unaffected, but CBP & ICE goon squads would be severely limited.

Here is the child’s drawing.