Erik

‘The biggest powerhouse Democratic donor wrangler that nobody has ever heard of’ Charles Gaba has helped Democrats up and down the ballot raise more than $13 million.

Last fall @adamwren.bsky.social wrote a feature piece on my efforts just days before the election.

(The $13M in the subhead refers to the 2024 cycle specifically; $20M includes the 2020, 2022 & 2024 cycles. The domain has been updated from Blue24 to Blue26.org).

www.politico.com/live-updates...

Opposition to gerrymandering requires retaliatory Democratic gerrymanders - Lawyers, Guns & Money This is a strange framing of actions that are perfectly consistent: Eight years ago, Eric Holder, the attorney general in the Obama administration, embarked on a quest with a single, daunting goal: to...

Opposition to gerrymandering requires retaliatory Democratic gerrymanders www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/08/oppo...

Something every Democrat can and should do is calmly announce that when next in power they will fully fund, staff, and empower investigations into any and all abuses of power in these four years - and will not let the "look to the future" fetishists in the NYT Editorial Board talk them out of it.

Larry Summers: "This is way beyond anything Nixon ever did ... this is the stuff of democracies giving way to authoritarianism. Firing statisticians goes with threatening the heads of newspapers, launching assaults on universities, launching assaults on law firms. This is really scary stuff."

Maybe Summers read the new issue of my OUR LAND newsletter on "Donald Trump and the Deconstruction of America," which notes all the daily outrages from Trump distract from the grand master plan of MAGA to transform American society. The big-picture story of Trumpism isn't being told. Check it out.

Maga will not…

Baby Racer Stunts On Competitors By Standing Up And Walking | Defector The Minnesota Lynx absolutely obliterated the Las Vegas Aces on Saturday, 111-58—the 53-point victory breaking a 1998 record for the biggest road win in WNBA history. While Aces fans didn’t get much o...

Baby racer stunts on competitors by standing up and walking: defector.com/baby-racer-s...

News Analysis Trump’s Efforts to Control Information Echo an Authoritarian Playbook In firing the head of the agency that collects employment statistics, the president underscored his tendency to suppress facts he doesn’t like and promote his own version of reality.

This Peter Baker joint does catalog Trump's lies and censorship, but headline and text tie themselves in journo-cliched linguistic knots to avoid that direct judgment. He's not "underscoring a tendency." He's not an "echo" of an "authoritarian playbook." He is a dictator.

That and also his openly stated administration policy is they need to be ethnically cleansed and then potentially occupied, so

Trump’s mental decline is undeniable — so what now? hemselves, that there is a problem, just as Biden’s supporters did for him.    Donald Trump is showing all the signs of suffering from dementia. If this were a neighbor, a parent, or a family frien…

thehill.com/opinion/camp...

The Proud Republican History of Paranoia and Anti-Semitism About Government Statistics: From Nixon’s Jew Counting at the Labor Department to Trump Firing the BLS Commissioner

Trump's firing of the BLS commissioner continues a Republican tradition of paranoia about government data dating to Nixon's Jew counting at the Labor Department substack.com/home/post/p-...

YouTube video by LangChain What are Deep Agents?

Deep Agents

this is a great 10 min video that’s absolutely worth your time

Deep Agent = planning tool (TODO lists) + subagents + filesystem + long detailed system prompt

seems like a deconstruction of why Claude Code works so well

www.youtube.com/watch?v=433S...

What to make of POTUS's attempt to fire the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)?

Let's run down what knowledgable people are saying...

This week’s @thetimes.com column is about how we’re bad at investing

Decades of data shows that rather than investing for profit, UK savers are motivated by pessimism

This “when shit hits the fan, save all you can” approach is bad for our finances, and bad for the economy

1/5

This is incredibly smooth….
#WorldBollardAssociation 😎

Jefferson, the man who literally paid Napoleon for the right to claim ownership of a third of the contiguous USA, regardless of the wishes of its actual inhabitants.

Wollstonecraft, who would have spat in Matthew Syed's eye for daring to drag her into this racist crap.

Trump’s Efforts to Control Information Echo an Authoritarian Playbook

“Firing the top statistical official sends a clear signal to others across the government that you are expected to compromise scientific integrity to appease the president… This puts us in dangerous territory far from an accountable and reality-based government.” @peterbakernyt.bsky.social

Advertise your account with a gif

This will serve as my #100HorrorMoviesIn92Days (2025) thread on BlueSky.

From August 1st through October 31st, I will add all of the horror films that I watch for this challenge🧵.

Letterboxd List: boxd.it/LO7N4

Insta: MikeandSerialX (will be posting more there).

in case you missed it: Terence Tao calls for pre-registration of methodology for AI mathematical ability tests, and offers an excellent breakdown of why ability even on a single given task is not a binary variable

mathstodon.xyz/@tao/1148814...

NYTimes front page with subdued headline

Although depressingly not on the Sunday print edition (though still front page)…

Freedom is never free. It always comes at a price.

Ny times landing page headline “Trumps Efforts to Control Information Echo an Authoritarian Playbook”

So the Times is getting a little closer and at least putting it on the top of the online front page and not buried on B4…

It's less than 100 days until October 31, so now's a great time to sign up for my 100% free newsletter, 31 Days of Halloween. Every day of October I send an email with fun, cute, cozy and/or spooky seasonal stuff to get you into a Halloween mood 🎃 Sign up here: buttondown.com/31daysofhall...

Until Trump Fired Her, She Was an Economist With Bipartisan Support

Until Trump Fired Her, She Was an Economist With Bipartisan Support - The New York Times www.nytimes.com/2025/08/02/u...

The Economist Trump Targeted Over ‘Rigged’ Jobs Data McEntarfer led the Bureau of Labor Statistics through rocky times before the president dismissed her after an ugly jobs report.

Gift Link 🎁 🔗 www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

the POTUS47 campaign claimed to be campaigning for "free speech" but they are governong to shut down free speech.

Nobody talks about stove touching any more because we have the attention span of a fucking goldfish but at some point reality is going to catch up to Trump and all of us.

The initial estimate of job change for a month is based on the growth or loss of jobs at the businesses that have reported their data. Generally, BLS assumes that the employment situation at businesses that had reported is representative of the situation at those that had not yet reported. BLS continues to collect outstanding reports from the businesses in the sample as it prepares a second and then a third estimate for the month. With each subsequent estimate, more businesses have provided their information. In 2012, the average collection rate at the time of the third estimate for a month was 94.6 percent. (See chart 1.)

Why do the jobs numbers get revised?

our markets and policymakers want data NOW but employer data dribbles in over months

1st estimate is based on the 75% of employers who respond promptly

Updates occur as more data rolls in: 95% response rate by final revision 1/N

www.bls.gov/opub/btn/vol...

I so appreciate that Prof Dynarski explains this stuff on public platforms with the same clarity she showed in the classroom over 15 years ago.