The Senate is losing its distinctiveness. People like Bernie, Jon Tester, Elizabeth Warren, Murkowski, Manchin - they fit their states perfectly. But new arrivals like McCormick and Ashley Moody are essentially just “generic Republican number 5.”

This is bad

Per Politico, the United States Secretary of the Treasury allegedly threatened to punch another official in the face on Wednesday. We're being governed by manchildren.

Here's a fun graph of the US population by region since 1900. You can really see the decline of the Northeast and Midwest and rise of the West and the South.

Here's a map of the housing shortage by state, in absolute terms. Democrats just aren't building enough in their states. Especially CA.

Per a new Financial Times article from today: vast parts of the US aren't looking great economically. Many states, including large ones like IL, WA, NJ, GA, and VA, could be in recession. However, the "big 4" (NY, TX, FL, CA) are holding on.

Per the FT, manufacturing is in the worst economic position of any sector of the economy atm. The US has lost 78,000 manufacturing jobs so far in 2025. Those tariffs sure are working great.

Minnesota feels like someone picked up an East Coast state and just dropped it in the middle of the upper Midwest. Similarly, Colorado feels like a West Coast state dropped in the Rockies.

Georgia's flag is not okay tbh. Literally the first official flag of the Confederacy with the state seal in the middle of the stars.

Here's a map of the housing shortage by state. You'll see the South and Midwest generally do better, while the West and Northeast are struggling. And California is... well, it's California.

Americans aren't choosing to move to, or stay in, blue states. Only 5 states both voted for Kamala Harris and attract more Americans than they lose. Four of them, DE, NH, VT, and ME, are very small states. 21 Trump-voting states have positive domestic migration. Democrats must build housing.

Since 2000, average rent has increased by 139.4% compared to 112.3% for median full-time wages, meaning the growth in rents has outpaced wage growth by roughly 24.1%

Nightmare. Five alarm fire. Trump just fired Lisa Cook, a member of the Fed Board of Governors. Trump can only remove her "for cause," i.e. gross negligence or malfeasance. So he charged her with mortgage fraud. Remember this man is guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

It feels wrong to me that Wisconsin is more populated than Minnesota. The Twin Cities are so much bigger than anything in WI. All the mid-size towns and deceptively populous rural areas in WI throw me off.

MAGA seems to think that wages will magically go up if you deport people. But immigration generally slightly raises wages of native workers, or has little impact. And by deporting people, you shrink the entire economy. One less worker, one less consumer, one less taxpayer.

The only two people, at present, I'd be willing to say I think have a >10% shot at the Dem nomination in 2028 are AOC and Newsom.

If conservatives wanted to preserve Cracker Barrel in amber, might I suggest they should have prevented its past three years of quarterly growth from looking like this? Perhaps by eating there?

Each colour is roughly 1/3rd of the US population.

The AI is not going to be shut off. Stop deluding yourselves, engage with the world as it is.

Democrats haven’t won a statewide election in Texas since 1994. Republicans haven’t won a statewide election in New York since 2002. These are the longest same-party streaks in any state for each side. It’ll be interesting to see which one breaks first.

Is your state building housing? Here’s how many housing units were permitted per 1,000 residents in 2024. You’ll notice that many red states are booming, but only four blue states - Washington, Maine, Colorado, and Delaware - are above the nationwide median.

The number of young men who report having had sex with another man has more than doubled since 1990. Who knows if more men are actually having sex with men, or if they're just more willing to be forthright on a survey, or both, but either way, it's something.

Do you remember the famed "rising male virginity" headline from WaPo in 2018? It's gone now

Thanks Trump. I always secretly yearned for you to stab the US economy in the back for no reason.

South Carolina is sneakily heavily gerrymandered. It's very easy to draw a compact 4R-3D map, which also reflects the state's partisan makeup very well. But it's 6R-1D in reality, and the GOP has to let that seat exist because of the VRA.

Sometimes looking at possible maps in states where Dems gave up redistricting power is painful.

In the US, coal is having whatever the opposite of a moment is. In its flop era.

911 didn't reach coverage of 50% of Americans until 1987 lol. It covered 26% in 1979. It wasn't nationally mandated until 1999. So many facets of what I consider modernity are still so new.

There are only 12 countries on Earth that have a population of 25 million or more and a GDP per capita (at PPP) of >$50,000. Getting rich is hard. Aside from Western Europe and its offshoots, the only others to make the list are Japan, South Korea, Poland, and KSA (who cheated)

Are gay/bi/MSM men less likely to serve in the US military? This survey of 2.3M American men found no statistical difference between the groups. They serve at equal rates. Data is from 2002-2013, a higher proportion of men identify as gay/bi now (about 6.5%, an ~50% increase)

You can make a 20D-18R Texas using 2024 data even though Democrats lost the state by 14pts. You can also make a 32R-6D map using the same data. Gerrymandering is stupid powerful.

Thatcher came to power and the British immediately started to lose faith in God

Here's a popular narrative more or less debunked by new evidence: does lead explain the huge surge in crime in the 80s and 90s? No, not mostly. It's certainly part of it, but the effects are relatively modest.

The solution is clear: to save the birthrate, we must stop men from going to school

If you try to create a liberal or neutral LLM, it becomes a wine mom resist lib. If you try to create a conservative bot, it starts calling itself MechaHitler. Much to be gleaned here.

- Elon aligns AI to his liking - Instantly starts calling itself "MechaHitler”

Well, the bill may result in 17M losing health insurance, explode borrowing costs, increase the deficit, hurt student borrowers, make energy more expensive, and cut SNAP for millions, but at least it grows the economy right? No. It has a negative effect on GDP!

Wow, Zohran *actually* supercharged youth turnout. Didn't think this was possible tbh.

If you just stop after Season 6 and pretend the series ends on the bold cliffhanger of Daenerys finally sailing to Westeros with her army and dragons as winter looms, Game of Thrones remains one of the best shows ever made tbh

“An Iranian woman who has lived in the United States for 47 years, has no criminal record, and is married to a US citizen was detained by ICE as she gardened outside her New Orleans home.” They're deporting suburban grandmas who make jambalaya and dinosaur chicken nuggets now.

Will be in Seattle July 27-Aug 3. Any ideas on things to do, any oomfs wanna meet up?

What actually reduced crime in America? Does anyone have any idea? 2025 is set to be the least violent year in America's entire modern history. Incarceration rates are falling too, so it's not like we're just locking more people up.

ngl, pretty big loss for authors in one of the first major ai fair use decisions.

Medicaid covers 36% of all US children and Republicans are booting 8 million people off of it.

grindr tempting me on this hot summer day:

bimagrumab

I actually do pretty strongly object to some federal land use. 56% of BLM land and 40% of Forest Service land is used for grazing cattle and other livestock. This is the worst of both worlds: ecologically devastating *and* very low economic productivity.

One of Elon's rockets exploded tonight. Enormous fire. Huge setback for him.

Realistically if God created the world and he put smallpox, malaria, and the worm that eats children from the inside out in it he's a right dick.