STOP ENJOYING BEAUTIFUL WEATHER. YOU ARE PLAYING INTO ITS HANDS

raining today, so looking forward to a nice afternoon of leaning on my windowsill, pondering

The shutdown is over. The data drought is not. What we know (and mostly don't) about when the data flow will resume, what we'll never get, and what the lasting damage could be: www.nytimes.com/2025/11/14/b... #EconSky

we talked about the effects of social media in one of my classes today and multiple classmates said they saw videos of people dying in the middle of normal pet or news or cooking content and in my head all I could think was "what the hell kind of social media apps are you using???"

And from Sunshine Hillygus at Duke: I love that this includes a *self-reported* measure of whether respondent was just trying to be funny with some responses. (I don't even know what "Trump Bee Movie" means here but I will certainly google)

From Matt Tyler at Rice on measuring support for beliefs in conspiracies: One idea is to look at whether respondents report consistent beliefs over multiple questions in the same survey, with different wording. (Also: bonus Olympics content!)

New edited volume just dropped! Quantitative History of China: State Capacity, Institutions, and Development edited by Chen Zhiwu, myself, and Ma Debin is now able as a free PDF/ePub download. 1/2 link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

every sunday, from pulpits in megachurches across america, white evangelicals cry out about some imaginary persecution of christianity. but i can’t stop thinking about the pile of rosaries collected by a janitor at a border crossing or the priest turned away at the gates of the detention camp.

unrelated but when I was last in Taipei I was chatting with someone on the street and I mentioned that my grandparents were from Yunlin. she was like "wow! they must be very rich then, because everyone in Yunlin owns land" and I was like "what the frick??? have you been there?????"

A map of population decline in Taiwan from 1980 to 2020 from an article by Di Hu in the International Journal of Geo-Information. Local populations sometimes peaked in the 1960s, particularly in eastern Taiwan, so that decline is already baked-in by 1980. Not surprised to see Yunlin here!

Do you teach #rstats? Do your students complain about how lame and old-fashioned dplyr is? Don't worry: I have the solution for you: github.com/hadley/genzp.... genzplyr is dplyr, but bussin fr fr no cap.

ok, there is basically nothing she could do that would redeem her in my eyes that I could post about in a public forum, so I'm not worried this will happen to me, but this is going to be a fascinating experiment in how many people will accept a face turn from literally anyone

Hey what the actual fuck???

something that I wish was interrogated further (aligned with @sharonk.bsky.social's notion of china and the US as bretheren nations) is the tension between the traditional venertion of agriculture and rurality in china, versus the (arguably historic inevitability) of industrial urbanisation

I would love to have an interview with the 15% of Trump supporters who voted in favor of the California gerrymandering bill to support Trump

This season of Lupin is a real letdown

Cool how even senior GOP politicians now openly admit that the Republicans have a “Hitler sucks” wing and also another one that is not that

really good book i've been reading

Continual US delays in fighter jet shipments probably gives the KMT more ammo to assert that the US doesn't actually care about Taiwan and would do little in the event of an invasion focustaiwan.tw/politics/202...

Cheng Li-wun declares she will put an end to "cross-strait self-destruction" at the first meeting of the KMT central committee that she attends as chair. Expect her to try some move to directly communicate with China and route around the Lai admin udn.com/news/story/1...

just saw Herbie Hancock at the Strathmore. played almost exclusively progressive jazz, went ~1 hour over time, much of the overage stemming from a nearly 40m lecture on evolution, compassion, & futurism done entirely via vocoder, and saved almost all the accessible fusion for post-lecture. the GOAT!

just generated a password too iconic to use

We have progressed from data collection to data analysis.

Parents be sure to check your kids’ candy before they eat any!! There might be good stuff in there.

NEW - Exposure to Confederate Monuments: The Political Effect of Non-Intervention - https://cup.org/42ZHRc0 "results highlight the potential negative consequences of maintaining controversial commemorations" - Ana Ruipérez Núñez #OpenAccess

They've reinvented the workhouse from first principles

When anti-Semites claim to be fighting anti-Semitism they trivialize a very real problem and thereby deliberately make it worse. Attacking universities was always about spreading anti-Semitism, not combatting it. forward.com/fast-forward...

Take this quiz to die instantly www.americansurveycenter.org/quiz/

the trick is that Marx did anticipate the coordination of capitalists to pursue their class interests. he just thought that the invention of the joint-stock company would eventually rationalize accumulation and moderate the "anarchy of production." in essence, this is what he thought would happen:

The Democratic Party attracts people who want to do governing stuff, while the Republican Party attracts people who want some kind of cathartic "win" over the Democrats. It creates a vicious cycle where virtually all substantive policy debate is intra-Democratic.

After a huge post-election flip in economic perceptions, I thought Democrats and Republicans might be lying to pollsters to send a partisan message — but I was wrong! New in the Journal of Experimental Political Science (open access): doi.org/10.1017/XPS....

In case this news was a bit too local to reach interested parties abroad, Senseito recently participated in a Charlie Kirk memorial on a Taiwanese campus where student protesters were jumped and then labelled “terrorists” by the organisers.

It’s my birthday today, and one of the things I got was this pack of Shanhaijing (‘Guideways Through mountains and seas’) trading cards. Would anyone want to watch me do a pack-ripping video of these? #culture

Trump to discuss Taiwan with Xi, some trepidation expected about what he may unpredictably do focustaiwan.tw/politics/202...

Democrats should hold a press conference and announce that if Mike Johnson has no interest in running the House they'd be happy to do it for him

This is obviously illegal. It is also very stupid. An unconstrained executive will quickly learn that the best way to pay for the government is to call together all of the billionaires and ask them who wants to demonstrate their patriotism the most

The US Administration has explicitly chosen to make it much harder to build a career in research in the United States. This policy of hollowing out our future innovation capacity will ultimately harm every Conservative and Liberal American.

1/6 "While booming exports supported economic output in the third quarter," according to PKU's Huang Yiping, "indicators ranging from inflation to private investment and unemployment all point to sluggish confidence." www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

in retrospect it would make sense that a lot of these guys don't know what's in the fourth amendment

So you'd like to run in Hong Kong's 2025 Legislative Council elections? Here's a primer: • 90 seats are available: - 20 belong to geographical constituencies/GC - 30 are functional constituencies/FC (representing different business sectors) - 40 are Election Committee constituencies/ECC

Just so we're clear about the scale of the problem: Half a million occurrences of `random_state=42` on github, and another almost 200k occurrences of `random.seed(42)`. (And that's just Python. There are also ~20k cases in R.) 1/2

Our latest newsletter in which we discussed four bills that passed last month: Food Safety Law amendments, Public Health Emergency Response Law, Law on Publicity and Education on the Rule of Law, and National Parks Law: newsletter.npcobserver.com/p/september-...

Fraud is legal

New version (0.6.0) of my #rstats package {democracyData} xmarquez.github.io/democracyData/ with @freedomhouse.bsky.social data to 2024, as well as several other sources, plus minor improvements all around

using the chinese internet is so interesting because every big website is like "no foreign accounts! do not use if you're a foreigner! unless you're making an account through a random link you found on reddit and the heavenly stems and earthly branches have aligned just right and"