Dan Dunn

How is it that people haven't yet figured out that a message titled "BREAKING" is guaranteed to be clickbait garbage?

I mean, the writers still do it, so people must click it, right? Is it like the Nigerian prince spam, you only need a few suckers to make it worth the effort?

Congress Requires ICE to Publish Detention Statistics. The Numbers Don’t Add Up. Researchers tracking detention data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement spotted errors in the agency’s most recent report.

So ICE is misreporting their detention numbers. Ordinarily, I'd attribute something like this to error, not malice. But when we're talking about masked thugs grabbing people off the street, I'm betting on malice. What are they hiding? www.notus.org/immigration/...

The Fourth Of July, Rethought Can Any Nation So Conceived Long Endure?

I found a way to express Happy Fourth of July.

Thank you @kenwhite.bsky.social

www.popehat.com/p/the-fourth... The Fourth Of July, Rethought

The MAHA Report Cites Studies That Don’t Exist The Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” report misinterprets some studies and cites others that don’t exist, according to the listed authors.

"When NOTUS reached out to her this week, she was surprised . . . 'The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with,' Keyes told NOTUS via email."

I bet MAHA was written (and hallucinated) by AI - anyone want the other side of that?

www.notus.org/health-scien...

Happy May 23!

I'm looking forward to today's pictures!

President Declines Gift of Holiday Apple Pie WASHINGTON, Oct 27 - AP - President and Mrs. Coolidge have declined an offer from the Girls' Club of Vermont University of a large apple pie for the White House Thanksgiving dinner. Although no reason was given for declining the pie, apparently it was refused because acceptance might have been taken as an endorsement by the president of the proposed apple week to be held about that time. This might be regarded as a precent for endorsement of similar movements in other parts of the country. The telegram tendering the pie said it was designed to be a part of the apple week program. --The Fresno Bee, 27 Oct 1925

President Declines Gift (1925)

151. The Supreme Court's (Alien Enemies Act) Patience is Wearing Thin A very quick breakdown of Friday afternoon's quietly significant ruling slapping down the lower courts in the Northern District of Texas Alien Enemies Act litigation—and what it means going forward.

open.substack.com/pub/stevevla...

I feel late to this party but his writing is excellent. Pair it with “Serious Trouble” podcast and I feel well informed.

My seats are aisle of section 41!

lol. Sometimes it’s me!

Fenway Park workers will vote whether to strike in June Concession workers are fighting over pay and use of automated machines after their contract ended last year.

Keeping a close eye on this one. I'm sympathetic on the pay concerns, and a lot less on the anti-automation arguments. www.wgbh.org/news/local/2...

"Masked security forces captured an opposition leader in the coastal province of New Jersey as regime officials continue their months-long crack-down against pro-democracy elements in the embattled United States. The arrest comes as the regime issued calls for summary detentions without trial."

All this “first American” excitement is baffling to me. Wake me up when the headline is “first woman.”

Isn’t it cute how the spambots reply in alphabetical order?

Epilogue: writing this up, I figured out the investment play. It's probably too late, but you should buy a warehouse in Vancouver and charge a good price to store Chinese goods for a few months. . .

In short, this isn't a faucet you can just turn off and on. You have to fix a lot of the pipes as you go.

We're headed for a painful summer, and it only gets deeper and more painful the longer this trade war continues.

And I haven't even mentioned trucking.

Trucking is a low-margin operation that easily whipsawed by changes in demand. They are going to be crushed by the loss of volume from ports, and then overwhelmed when it finally comes back.

The supply chain is made up of a million moving parts, and they don't just stop and start gracefully.

A sampling: We're going to run out of shipping containers - we don't have a 4-week supply sitting around. Trained factory workers are furloughed, and only some of them will come back.

Chemicals? Car parts? Tools? Pharmaceuticals? I don't know enough about supply and local alternatives to have any sense. But it's easy to imagine them cropping up.

What happens next? Even if the tariffs are rescinded today, we will feel the 4-week gap in goods, but that's not all.

Plastic containers might bite hard, I don't know. But various food, drink, and household products might get scarce.

There's a very few weeks left before Christmas toys are impacted. You'd be amazed how many of your gifts are already on a boat in June.

In the next couple of weeks the boats will stop coming. We'll be consuming what's already in warehouses, and when it's done, it's done.

What will we notice first? Hard to say. They might be out of our size when we go shopping for clothes or shoes, and we'll be annoyed but keep wearing the old ones.

The ships that were already on the water are coming into port now. The containers are often stuck in port, racking up fees, while the purchaser sweats the tariff.

For now, the stores are full. They have the goods that already arrived, whatever is in their warehouses.

But the fuse is very short.

The burning fuse here is cross-Pacific shipping. When the tariffs went into effect, all of the buyers in the US cancelled or delayed their orders with immediate effect. Containers stayed on the dock, or were held at the factory. The ships didn't fill up. In most cases, the ships didn't even sail.

I'll join the chorus: The US is about to experience a frustrating, inflationary, and sometimes painful period of "supply chain shock."

In English: we're about to run out of a lot of stuff, and many shelves are going to be empty.

And, of course, this is 100% self-inflicted impact of tariffs. <more>

So. . . what's going to be the first item we run out of, that we usually import from China?

Why do you always post everything twice? It's annoying.

Happy Canadian Election Day to all who celebrate.

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

Morning Boston! - Sunrise from Bunker Hill!

I've track the downtown office market with great interest. I think it's the ground truth for the remote/hybrid/in-office reality - not the usual speculation. Sales are an extremely laggy indicator, unfortunately. But still - you can't get any more clear that office space demand is lower.