Hank

A Slice of History: Searching for the First Pizza in Indianapolis Searching for the when and where of the first pizza sold in Indianapolis.

Since there is a pizza festival downtown on the Circle today, I’m reposting this Indy pizza history from a few weeks ago. www.class900indy.com/post/a-slice...

The most interesting report of the week (IMHO) 🧵

This is the Reichstag fire America deserves

Objective truth concocted from the frothy broth of 2 billion minds spewed over thousands of years then distilled and milled and quilled out as a grey mush? Moronically, AI is overtly ahistorical, weighting text written 150 years ago equal to words written yesterday.

Economist Amartya Sen won a Nobel in part for asking: Why did India avoid the mass famines that killed tens of millions in China? His answer: a free press. Journalists could expose suffering and shame governments into action. Silence and avoidance, by contrast, can be deadly.

Some relevant economic information and my thoughts on it. Firing the commissioner of the BLS is more important news than some might think. #bls #quantitativeresearch #stockmarket #quant #trading TikTok video by Sharp Research

A quantitative finance guy explains why firing the head of BLS is so dangerous to anyone who relies on economic modeling—which directly is everybody www.tiktok.com/t/ZT6UadjQF/

Goatse tart

Baking a Strawberry Tart for my kids bake sale #smokefleet

"And if you thought this was unimportant to you, remember BLS calculates the CPI used for Social Security COLAs, as well as the headline CPI used to calculate TIPS yields. Oh, also the inflation adjustments to the marginal tax rate thresholds…"

#econsky

econbrowser.com/archives/202...

Mellon Foundation The Mellon Foundation makes grants to actively unlock the power in the arts and humanities that helps connect us all.

“American Academy of Arts&Sciences reports 96.3% of humanities grads age 23-32 fully employed. Earnings in humanitiess comparable to social/life sciences, job satisfaction levels too. A serious mismatch bw actual employment for hum grads +general perception."
www.mellon.org/voices/human...

also, this is very Soviet, except that Stalin then arrested and executed the statisticians

I am not as optimistic as @jasonfurman.bsky.social. Yes there are controls today but the intention of the firing is clear and the administration will not stop until it can make the data noisy enough that becomes subject to interpretation. I do not see enough resistance to stop this.

First time I’d heard James Talarico (D-Tex) speak…

"I reached the conclusion something would go wrong in Germany very early. I reached in 1931 the conclusion that Hitler would get into power, not because the forces of the Nazi revolution were so strong but rather because I thought that there would be no resistance whatsoever."

Physicist Leo Szilard

the bottom of the whale-boat is like critical ice, which will bear up a considerable distributed weight, but not very much of a concentrated one

Faculty Support of George Mason’s President Draws Federal Investigation

Faculty who wrote to defend their president and object to a DOJ investigation of their university...are now being investigated by the DOJ.
The most banal defense of free speech and academic freedom will trigger the full wrath of the US government now.
www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/u...

"In one of my good moments I turned it down"... OK, so tell us about your bad moments, Mr. Trump

Sidestepping devaluations of Turkish lira, etc

The Quality of CPI Data Continues to Deteriorate - Apollo Academy To calculate CPI inflation, BLS teams collect approximately 90,000 price quotes every month covering 200 different item categories, and there...

Yeesh, a third of data in the CPI is estimated, not actually collected. This is of course entirely Trump's fault.

I don't know if that's the Trump admin fiddling with data, the BLS not having adequate resources to collect data thanks to DOGE cuts, or both.

But it ain't good.

Cross-breeding with Britbois

You should be gretfull!

Epic small dick loser energy

The San Antonio Flood of 1921 Held Lessons We Refuse to Learn There is nothing unknown about what triggered the brutal Hill Country flood of 2025 and so many others dating back to the nineteenth century.

People did not die solely because of forgetfulness but because amnesia allowed succeeding generations to erase the past and their responsibilities to the future. When they could have enacted post-flood, life-saving interventions, they chose not to act on their progeny’s behalf.

The 100 Best Podcasts of All Time From pop culture and history to sports and more, these are the best podcasts ever made.

I despise lists: cheap magazine & newspaper clickbait. In the case of podcasts, it's offensive because it's mass-media reductionism brought to a popular medium of countless thousands of distinct voices.
The 100 Best Podcasts of All Time
time.com/collections/...

A heartbreaking economic indicator: More people are giving up their pets | CNN Business In recent months, animal rescues and shelters across the country are reporting sharp increases in animals being surrendered, with several of those organizations telling CNN that financial hardship was...

In recent months, animal rescues and shelters across the country are reporting sharp increases in animals being surrendered, with several of those organizations telling CNN that financial hardship was at the root of those owners’ decisions.

Trump, surrounded by sycophants and enablers, is a compulsive fraudster

Adding to the creepy atmosphere, 1991 pageant cattle call footage seems to be from Plaza Hotel, which Trump owned at the time

Trump: It looks like it’s about $3.1 billion

Powell: I’m not aware of that.

Trump: It just came out

Powell: You just added in a third building

Trump: It’s a building that’s being built

Powell: It was built five years ago.

A Slice of History: Searching for the First Pizza in Indianapolis Searching for the when and where of the first pizza sold in Indianapolis.

Venturing into some food history of Indianapolis, with a post exploring where the first pizza was sold in the city.
www.class900indy.com/post/a-slice...

the hardest thing in the trading business is not to hit home runs it is to avoid obliteration and every so often a new cohort enters the market, thinks they have the former mastered, is unafraid of the latter, and will inevitably learn that lesson the hard way

like maybe now