jen

i think mamdani should do other things that the mayor of stardew valley does since the scavenger hunt went so well. i think he should start sneaking onto your property and picking up your mail at 4am. i think the people of new york should have to sneak vegetables into his fridge

Well worth looking at the pictures and postings on Zohran Mamdani's #ZcavengerHunt in New York. These are the things that make cities into communities. Great for the city, and a welcome antidote to our national sociopath's dystopian vision of urban life and, really, all social and civilized life.

In my MSc dissertation on climate finance, I show that very high-level financial actors consider the integration of climate data to be a necessary condition for informed decision-making. This means that JP Morgan and other banks are, in effect, making the informed decision to short the Earth.

NYC voters elected Adams in the first place. (We could have had Garcia, people! What's wrong with you!)

Also, the city seems to have suffered a rightward shift last year along with the rest of the nation, so you know... disappointments all around.

Who knows how much this will matter but this is one the most comical failures of researching your brief I’ve ever seen.

Graph of federal employees over time showing a flatline trend since the late 1960s

When the dismantlists talk about "trimming the fat" or "bloated" whatever relating to the federal government, remind them that there have been about the same number of federal employees since the 1960s.
Meanwhile US population has increased by ~70% and GDP has increased 29-fold.

democrats won’t admit it, but my family’s economic outlook has gotten a LOT better since Trump took office. but what do i know? i don’t have a fancy economics degree, i’m just a regular guy who runs an airplane scrapyard

it was a really beautiful afternoon

made this snow guy on sunday

I saw RHAP live last month, it was really grand!

gays leaving twitter for bluesky reminds me of that scene from LoTR where the elves are exiting middle earth

hate to say it but all of ~this~ has substantially shaken my faith in the fundamental goodness/decency/capacity for wisdom of the average person, and has me really rethinking whether it's worth trying to help them at all. I hope it's a passing phase on my part...

would rather protect my mental health and build a space for actual humans who are decent people

I mean if they are arguing with literal bots I don't understand the point

Here’s one of my main takeaways: the point of governing is to make people’s lives better, but the point of politics - especially campaigns - is to give people a story about who to blame for things sucking. It’s a real mistake to confuse one for the other, as I have often done!

I'm so glad people are finally moving over, I've had my account for a bit but it was so dead until... until.

ahh I'm gonna see it tonight! excited. :)

yeah, there is a subreddit and everything lol

they are a whole thing www.target.com/s/decorative...

do you collect their birds

already tired of the whiny threads from young men about how society forced them to become monsters because they put woke in the video games or whatever. back in my day you applied some guyliner, wrote some emo lyrics in a journal, and handled it

Ladies and gentlemen... the weekend. (also: you are important and are not alone 🧡)

i really didn’t notice how abnormally negative twitter had become until i was presented with an alternative

omg it's z*ch 2.0

bluesky feels like a happier, quieter version of 2012 tw*tter without any bots or spam, and i kinda love it ??

oh no

two good cats, very cuddly

look at my cats

There's a big and basic asymmetry here.

Rs don't have to answer for obnoxious things Trump himself does. He doesn't mean it. I'd take some mean tweets and $2 gas right now! etc

Ds have to answer for the craziest thing said by a rando on Twitter or cable TV and featured on Fox News.

your own iPhone. The dominant social media platform form for news, Twitter, was purchased and turned into a right-wing mobilization engine for an emotionally unstable federal contractor. Meta, under Mark Zuckerberg, has driven its monopolistic social media platforms as far away from hard news as possible, to the point of explicit hostility. I am genuinely unsure if Google cares whether we live in a democracy or not as long as the feds let them keep spamming Al slop about glue pizza to keep OpenAI away from its Search monopoly. TikTok is a casino whose amazing success at circulating mindless content may come at the expense of "sleep, and eating, and moving around the room, and looking at someone in the eyes" according to one of its own executives. These are

one of its own executives. These are gigantic companies with far larger consumer audiences than any traditional media company that was covering the election, and some of these platforms are taking on the characteristics of becoming publishers themselves in terms of shaping content decisions and producing content of their own via AI. There are too many billionaires and CEOs in charge of too few information chokepoints, which are powered by too much surveillance over too many users who have too few viable alternatives. Given that America is apparently going to be perfectly happy to elect strongman federal executives from here on out, pursuing decentralization and good-old-fashioned competition in the Brandeisian vein, rather than a corporatist monopolization and fusion with potentially fashy federal regulators, seems to be the democratically healthier path forward.

The information economy is rotten from top to bottom. Lessons from Trump’s election about media policy:

mattdpearce.substack.com/p/lessons-on...