Andrew Selbst

Re the Hatch Act, they literally staged the 2020 Republican convention from the White House. Like physically there, at the White House. When anyone said "Isn't that the biggest Hatch Act violation in history?" they said "Go to hell, we do whatever we want."

The Supreme Court Just Signaled Something Deeply Disturbing About the Next Term A court fundamentally hostile to the rights of voters places the court increasingly at odds with democracy itself.

My New One at @slate.com on the Supreme Court Potentially Killing the Remaining Pillar of the Voting Rights Act: “The Supreme Court Just Signaled Something Deeply Disturbing About the Next Term” slate.com/news-and-pol...

I think the comparison is more abstract. A meaningful tech advancement that will alter society in ways yet unknown, but not in the ways the hype of the bubble would suggest. I think you’d have to be more optimistic about the usefulness of LLMs than I am to reach for the commons analogy at all.

Your baseline optimism is too high! I was agreeing with lasting impact, not with a useful and cheap commons.

Yeah agree. Was hedging a bit with the above skeet. But given that what happens after the bubble burst will be determined by current political, social, and economic realities and **waves all around at everything**…yeah

Your point about data centers needing to be used in some way is especially good.

The Grimy Residue of the AI Bubble What kind of residue will the AI bubble's popping leave behind? By Alex Photo credit: Marc Sendra Martorell Q2 earnings are in. According to Pitchbook data,...

I wrote a blog post on this, and I don't think it will be.

buttondown.com/maiht3k/arch...

Also @davidthewid.bsky.social and @histoftech.bsky.social wrote on this

ash.harvard.edu/resources/wa...

The point about infrastructure is important, but I think it more important to note that the infrastructure will shape the trajectory of future tech, business, politics, in ways that will be hard to predict and likely impossible to undo. I don’t know if that’s a positive.

This is absolutely what I expect as well.

Very fun read.

This should be true in theory, yet people cited two-year old inflation issues that had since subsided as a reason the vote against Biden. So inflation “knowledge” is similarly susceptible to emotional manipulation, though perhaps to a lesser degree.

Heads up: the Bureau of Labor Statistics also calculates the Consumer Price Index.

BREAKING: We're suing ICE for unlawfully targeting and arresting people who show up to court for their immigration hearings.

Except nonwhite people can own land now so not sure they’ll be happy with that.

Woooah, gonna let big butts shine down!

This thread (and the multiple quotes) remind me of something: it is a lot harder to build something than it is to break it down.

There is no “Democratic Stephen Miller” because turning off a hundred switches takes one person, but turning on one hundred programs is going to take thousands.

He eliminated so much fraud waste and abuse tho

💯

This is part of it. But also, the substantive goals of both liberals and progressives require rules (re: e.g. fairness). Even if we replace the useless folks in the party, we won’t have a Stephen Miller, bc aside from a few necessary prosecutions, many of the left’s goals can’t be achieved that way.

DOJ is investigating.

As several of us have pointed out by now, they don’t care about antisemitism at all. The only Jews that matter and who they will defend are the right wing ones who agree with their maximalist Zionist stance.

Maybe one of the reasons they want to kill it.

Next year, he’s gonna roll out data that says the economy is great. We’re gonna say yeah but he’s cooking the books. NYT will respond that economic sentiment was bad under Biden too, where the numbers were good & we’ll all say he *wasnt* cooking the books. And now economic truth is forever partisan.

Elsewhere, I’ve seen folks talk about the deals as paradoxical because they ban DEI for most but require it for Jewish students. I think that’s likely a misread. In practice, they require protections for Zionism & repression of anti-Zionism. Many Jews will be harmed by this, as we saw last year.

will they do that? almost certainly not. but they could if they cared about the country at all.

While I haven’t looked, my guess is that one was necessary given geographic realities, but a second was justified as needed to satisfy the VRA.

Exclusive | Ex-Trump prosecutor Jack Smith under investigation by Office of Special Counsel after claims of playing politics: ‘No one is above the law’ “Jack Smith’s actions were clearly driven to hurt President Trump’s election, and Smith should be held fully accountable,” said Senate Intelligence Committee chair Sen Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) in …

A reminder that Dems went out of their way to NOT politicize their prosecutions of Trump. Garland dragged his feet. Biden kept his distance. And then they appointed a special counsel to look independent.

All a waste of time. You can never appease the GOP. So why do Dems keep trying? ARGHGGHG.

Which would, of course, be upheld because it’s politically motivated, not racially motivated. This Supreme Court needs to be torn down brick by brick.

We have had stable, professional, vouchsafed information about the physical & economic world for so long that we entirely take it for granted. It's going to be truly wild to operate in a world where quite literally no one knows for sure what is happening, where there is no fact of the matter.

Sorry, that’s not how lawyers talk about our esteemed justices and I should be setting an example as an educator of young lawyers. I obviously meant to say “I respectfully disagree with the Roberts Court’s approach to voting and race.”

Fuck that guy.

WTAF is this? Fucking John Roberts with his lifelong obsession with destroying what little progress we’ve made toward voting equality is fucking disgrace to humanity let alone our profession.

if i were a pro-trump financial type i might view the destruction of reliable government data with the kind of anger and apprehension that might lead me to reevaluate my politics, but then if i’m a financial guy throwing my weight behind strongman rule, i’m already too stupid to breathe