Striking a Bidenesque pose of immobilization and helplessness

"I believe in nothing, I have no principles or values whatsoever, I will say anything to get power and then not do anything with it. hey where's everyone going"

New for the Vibecession Debate. Working paper argues that using microdata to get household-specific inflation rates (rather than aggregating first like CPI), you find -lotta variation in household inflation -greater avg inflation during price upturns -lower real wages for lower income people

This is an interesting one for economists - if a company spends vastly more money on producing a service which it is extremely unlikely that anyone (ie, any advertiser) wants to pay for, purely because it feels the need to preserve a monopoly position, doesn't that suggest a low productivity impact?

This Day in Labor History: May 19, 1920. The Matewan Massacre took place in the small town of Matewan, West Virginia. Let's talk about this key moment of the West Virginia Mine Wars, made famous by the great John Sayles film!

“I am suffering from boobooitis”

oh man

Scott Bessent is a stuttering, sweaty mess this morning. Things must be going well.

I wrote a post about this recently. It is a central fact about industrial capitalism that real resources are allocated on the basis of hopes and dreams, rather than as a rational response to prices in existing markets. jwmason.org/slackwire/mo...

I think a lot of debates about “markets” vs “planning” in the abstract would benefit from thinking a bit more about how investment decisions are made in the economies in which we currently live. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

I don’t think California gets enough credit for how gross its politics are

It turns out the LNG export capacity has been in the works for a long time. From EIA:

Pretty cool, 65,000 retirees in Connecticut will now have the choice of taking traditional Medicare restored, after a forced mandate into private-sector Medicare Advantage plans was rolled back. prospect.org/2026/05/13/r...

sat down with a legend

We’re in a bull market for pitchfork inducing quotes.

I’m not interested in ranking presidents but in addition to Vietnam LBJ launched the War on Crime.

This Day in Labor History: May 9, 1949. Mob thugs assassinated International Ladies Garment Workers Union organizer William Lurye in a blatant effort to keep New York garment trade shops union-free. Let's talk about how mobs took over unions because the cops didn't care if they killed organizers!

This psychotic break is taking forever.

funny to think we still have “conscience whigs” everything changes and everything stays the same

Obama’s ambassador to Israel, a Clinton NSC member, says war with Iran makes us weak against China — love the scope of foreign policy opinion in the power structure

John Dewey, 90th birthday, 1949

“Alpha, a fast-growing private-school chain that employs “guides” instead of teachers and serves children as young as four, claims that [helps] “kids to “crush academics in just 2 hours” per day, according to its website.” www.newyorker.com/culture/prog...

“open the schools,” so we can sell software products and cloud computing to one of the only domains of social life not entirely saturated with it already

WSJ reporting Ken Griffin and Stephen Freidheim’s firms as influencing the Spirit decision

AGAINST MONEY arrives this month from @jwmason.bsky.social, @arjunjayadev.bsky.social, and @uchicagopress.bsky.social lithub.com/ten-great-no...

happy may day! every right you have as a worker was written in blood ❤️

thinking about the role of the church in the Alabama auto industry today

happy may day to all except howard schultz

So they waited until West Texas Intermediate was up above $110/barrel to announce it would be illegal for states to redistrict with the goal of affirmative action.

US Oil salivating on UAE OPEX exit. David McNally reminds them of 2015 & 2020 "Au contraire, @WSJ: A fractured or absent OPEC+ is a disaster for the US oil industry and foreign policy. No OPEC =Wild Price Volatility=Gut punch for high-cost US shale oil, the first victim when oversupply appears"

If you want to understand History of Oil read this superb essay by @gbrew24.bsky.social 1) Somebody always does price-setting, both Govts & Big Oil 2) Geopolitics is entangled w Market & neither firms nor govts can set prices for long 3) Big Oil vs wildcatters www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/pri...

The reason Peter Thiel destroyed Gawker--the real reason, not them reporting on the available info that he was gay, which they could pass off to dummies as cruel--was how viciously Valleywag reported on his hedge funds performing badly off his picks and guidance.

The union data space is a mess but so is everything and honestly this is one of the most exciting messes to fix rn. Closest you can come to doing military logistics for the good guys. We also know we have trouble hiring from within for this skillset, so do-gooders running from tech/finance welcome

Imagine if you did a Big Boy Crime and the media said you got radicalized by Malcolm Gladwell

“The Pentagon plans for [firing missiles], regardless of the shifting geopolitical tides and political winds in Washington.”

Mamdani’s over here trying to push his approval rating over 100%

CMS calls emergency meeting as leave requests mount for May 1 NC educator protest. School board will meet Friday to decide whether to cancel May 1 classes after 1,875 of the district's 9,000 teachers requested leave. (Via @rebeccanoel.bsky.social) www.newsobserver.com/news/local/e... #ncpol #nced

Corpus Christi, Texas, appears to be on track to become the first modern American city to run out of water

Oil analyst Amrita sen explains here the disconnect between not only refined products + crude, but also crude spot & futures - impt to understand bcs even in best scenario, various refinery issues will persist quite a while giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

hmm

Story here: www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

Our latest @us.theguardian.com: New evidence shows Amazon allegedly colluding with other firms to raise prices. Here’s a pet treat manufacturer allegedly celebrating coordinated price hikes between Amazon and Chewy, per CA AG: [The prices] “that went up on Amazon immediately went up on Chewy :)”

Once again "the death of the West" meant "the death of my secret bank account."

Warren Buffett in 2014

A difficult concept to navigate properly is that *testing* is itself a major problem in education (most exemplified by the No Child Left Behind testing regimes. This can mean that the very tests revealing declines in learning are themselves part of what is causing the decline.

Feels like a Greg Cartwright deep dive kind of day.

Talk about burying the lede www.wsj.com/tech/ai/chat...

RIP Robert Skidelsky - an amazing and important scholar. His biographies get a lot of well deserved attention, but my favorite is the shorter Keynes: Return of the Master. It’s a fantastic, accessible introduction to Keynes that came at a really critical time.