It’s 2050 and a teen girl is torrenting a .tar.gz file of all the consciousnesses of all the tech bros who uploaded themselves into the cloud in a bid for immortality and modding them into The Sims 4

I feel like there's an analog to pareiodolia but for political sensemaking. Sometimes there's no real unifying narrative to learn from. Just a bunch of random shit that happened. "Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why." -- Kurt Vonnegut en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareido...

A very frustrating thing about Klein’s podcast is that is constantly discusses perceptions of the Democratic Party without addressing media ownership or attention. Mediation gets bare passing mentions, as it does at the end here when Coates recommends Chris Hayes’s book Siren’s Call.

I'm surprised that folks still assume there's a strong connection between what left/progressive political actors *do* and what they're perceived to have done by the public. How does the asymmetric narrative power of right-wing media not come up in this conversation? www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uaeo...

It often gets lost in these conversations that there are major structural differences between funders of groups like TPUSA and, say, climate philanthropy. Most notably, TPUSA funders have a profit motive, and see this as a source of long term revenue stability, like coca-cola's ad budget.

Hearing other Americans while traveling abroad:

Walking across town (in Chiapas, Mexico) while listening to this episode, I happened to pass by the local BYD dealership. "Tired of spending your money on gasoline? Better test drive a BYD." There are a couple of interesting dynamics I haven't heard come up in this conversation yet. #EnergySky 🧵

City of #Boulder has concluded its mega #parking reform. Parking minimums are now gone. So all those patches of 200 square feet that home-builders have been required to install at a cost of $30,000+ per space can now be used for other things like vegetable gardens, bike parking, and housing.

Nice, Retaliatory, Forgiving, & Clear.

It's weird and frustrating how The Left is blamed for abandoning "kitchen table" issues in favor of climate action in the IRA, when those parts were either stripped out by corpos preemptively as the Green New Deal morphed into the IRA, or in the final negotiations with Manchin in 2022.

I am annoyed that I assume they are just lying and making shit up about the labor standards violations, because they obviously do not give a shit about labor standards. www.cbp.gov/newsroom/nat...

Capitulating is bad for shareholders, so is it securities fraud? But what if the retaliation against you for not capitulating is also bad for shareholders? Everything is securities fraud.

Reading Biografías del Poder, a history of Mexico through short biographies, and have gotten to Maximilian. Last time I heard about him was AP world history and he really didn't make any sense. Turns out he still doesn't make any sense. Such a weird delusional European monarchist interlude.

It's almost like the US has inspired a lot of other countries to make a point about how the law applies to presidents and ex-presidents. www.france24.com/en/live-news...

Well, well, what’s signed, is signed; and what’s to be, will be; and then again, perhaps it won’t be, after all.

One of my favorite days from my planetary science for non-STEM majors class is when we mention Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin! Other than her research, my favorite facts: - Her childhood music teacher was Gustav Holst, composer of The Planets suite - She advised two notable Franks: Drake and Kameny

Killing machines. But electric!

Good video essay from @unlearnecon.bsky.social riffing on Ricardo’s Dream, about politics & power relations that exist alongside “free” trade and profoundly shape commerce. And the recent, mysterious “rediscovery” 🙄 of this fact by previously dominant states. www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsOY...

Roman style discount rates.

Mr. Targaryen goes to the UN.

Reading Wired in college during the lead up to the dot com bubble, I did not imagine it would become one of the premier political journalism outlets in the US.

Holycrap, is it literally a transcript?

Could Disney even make Andor now?

There is *no* state in which it is more common than not to have a Bachelor's degree. Also what the heck is up with Colorado?

There's a cost-reduction hump to get over for sure but I'll be pretty surprised if we don't replace a ton of our industrial thermo-/pyro-chemistry with electrochemistry by the end of my life.

Too late, Batman. Once this Tylenol floods the city's water supply, my wiki won't run out of editors ever again

A classic in the genre: www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/t...

I think there's something interesting in the combination of these two charts. The US is just barely a net exporter of fossil fuels, and also a relatively high cost oil producer. What happens to the politics of oil in the US if global demand & prices drop, but domestic demand doesn't? #EnergySky

Lol, is someone paying Jim Cramer for retail order flow?

Even more generally I find it confusing that so many people are so deeply invested in other people's genders at all. Like, not even people they know. It just seems kind of creepy.

Plenty of people in Brazil still remember the (U.S. supported) military dictatorship of 1964-1985. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militar...

Some applied memeology from @hankgreen.bsky.social. What do ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, methlyene blue, and fenbendazole all have in common? Nothing pharamcological. www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC9g...

I would have thought the AI kool-aid was limited to Southern Company's demand forecasts. #EnergySky

Really interesting discussion about the dynamics of the natural gas market, in the light of a potential new 50 bcf pipeline from Russia to China. It sure seems like Russia is gonna end up wholly subservient to China economically. #EnergySky www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/the-power-of...

$200B is a lot of money, but today it's relative to a gross world product of ~$110T, vs. (adjusted for inflation) something like $15T in 1950. So, it's only ~10% as large as the Marshall Plan in comparison to the overall global economy.

Gracias a @ember-energy.org puedo practicar mi español técnico un poquito. #EnergiaRenovable #Mexico #EnergySky 🇲🇽 ember-energy.org/es/analisis/...

I don't know how we are still reflexively using a hypocrisy framing in US politics. They're asserting the *power* to apply different rules to different people and political positions with impunity. There's no pretense of fairness or symmetry. I think that's different from hypocrisy.

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.” -- Phillip K. Dick www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/m...

I'm watching "I'm Still Here" and it's interesting to think that in almost the same place and time "City of God" was happening. But to different people. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_S... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of...

Huh. I guess one way to keep undercapitalized, state-sponsored insurers of last resort solvent in the face of rising climate driven claims is just to... not pay? www.propublica.org/article/citi...

And then even when you DO have permission to change the regulatory regime... ctmirror.org/2025/09/19/m...

I wrote this right after the 9/19/2017 earthquake that shook CDMX. Everything I said still stands. wp.me/p30bS-4DH

I’m a Primary Care Doctor. My Patients Are Scared to Show Up Due to ICE. truthout.org/articles/im-... (I wrote a thing in @truthout.org about what it's like to be a primary care doctor when ICE is attacking my patients. )

One thing it seems like China and Russia have understood well, that the US especially has failed to grasp, is how important it is to keep your plutocrats on a short leash.

Dude is working overtime to catapult BRICS to the center of the global economy.

A nice synthesis of some of the China + developing world energy data that's been swirling around lately. #EnergySky "1200 GW in [annual] PV manufacturing capacity not crazy. It is, give or take, right-sized." adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-...

Some 🔥🍿 for utility political economy nerds from @open-circuit.bsky.social. Jigar pushes back hard on the idea that better educating regulators will result in better policy, and the hope that distribution system costs will remain quietly apolitical. #EnergySky www.latitudemedia.com/news/open-ci...

The fading of vaccine preventable childhood diseases from our collective memory feels kind of like the way the strength of evil and magic in general fades in Middle Earth over the ages. I had chicken pox. My dad had yellow fever. My grandparents might have seen smallpox. But now they're all gone.

Someone On Here mentioned this already and I don't remember who but I had to go search for myself and yeah, you *can* get continuing legal education credits for studying how to sue employers for "reverse discrimination." www.lawline.com/course/rever...

[Jackpot intensifies]