Will

A head-and-shoulders shot of a 30-something white man with hair medium on top and short on the sides and swept back, presumably with a gel assist. He wears a white dress shirt and a dark tie with an ensemble of a dark sweater vest and dark suit jacket or sportcoat. The overall effect is traditional, somewhere between a preppy '80s movie villain and a character in American Psycho.

A fifty-something man stands in front of a colorful tech-talk background. His hair is styled to make him resemble a hairless crested dog, with a greasy-looking topknot and close-shaven sides, and he has a short beard. He wears a gray heathered sweater vest over a tight olive T-shirt and charcoal technical-fabric slacks, a violently clashing assemblage of neutrals. His skin is tight and glistening a la Peter Thiel. A pinkish-toned blob of microphone floats on an almost invisible wire by his mouth.

Googled the Princeton-legacy Princeton professor who wrote that bad piece about generative AI in the New Yorker to try to figure out what his deal is and this 2001/2025 before-and-after makes for a real capsule history of the 21st century so far

no no no, see, you don't understand, every law needs a special secret exemption for right-wing demagogues because they all constantly commit crimes, the only way to keep them in power is to make them above the law, and they must stay in power because reasons

The thing about conservatives is: they are evil and violent and they should be put down like rabid dogs

Elon Musk has been a walking SEC violation for a decade and no one cared. The entire Trump era could have been avoided if the US took white collar crime anywhere near as seriously as it does low level drug crime.

$100 invested in the S&P 500 on Oct 27, 2022, when the Twitter acquisition closed, is worth $142 today. $100 kept in Vichy Twitter just paid off at $73. Almost exactly a 50% loss vs an index fund for his co-investors but Musk gets ever wealthier! Funny how that works out!

Bill Gates: Within 10 years, AI will replace many doctors and teachers—humans won't be needed ‘for most things' Over the next decade, advances in artificial intelligence will mean that humans will no longer be needed "for most things" in the world, says Bill Gates.

i think these people are in the grip of a genuine delusion www.nbcchicago.com/news/busines...

I think the John Roberts “managed democracy that’s functionally a dictatorship but the proles don’t know” wing of the GOP and the “SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE” wing of the GOP have a relationship something like this:

one of the most irritating rhetorical twitches of our age is the tendency to market takes that are *very* comfortably within the elite mainstream and present them as daring heterodox truths people don't want you to know. eg., Matt Yglesias and like 60% of his highest profile detractors do this

This guy wrote this

mrs. gennaro I am sorry to have to tell you this but your husband was killed in a work accident. they made dinosaurs real for fun and he got eaten by one while sitting on the toilet. he wasn’t using it he died abandoning children

For all the South gets shit about the failures of reconstruction, the North doesn’t get called out enough on its lack of resolve. They won’t even defend their own backyards. Rural life has been so throughly Confederatized that you’re more likely to see a Confederate flag in rural NY than Atlanta.

One columnist, a professional pundit, is living in a paranoid delusion. The other, a sociologist, is living in America.

arguments over who would get blamed for a shutdown are insane. the median voter has no idea this is happening. the median voter knows one fact about politics and it’s that Donald Trump is the President

Deporting someone for protesting and speaking out feels very unamerican. Traditionally they're murdered by the FBI.

I feel like TVs current enough to have like HDMI ports and good resolution, but old enough to not be filled with malicious bloatware are low background radiation steel at this point.

Chartbook 359 West Wing for deplorables: America's liberal elites, history and the Trump shock. The long read in the FT this weekend under the title “Trump and the end of American soft power” is by one of the true doyens of US foreign policy thinking, Joseph Nye.

If Trump 2.0 takes the politics of the imaginary to a new level, is this a rupture with the supposedly more grounded Biden administration? Or, is this simply a new season of West Wing, this time “West Wing for deplorables”?
adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-...

It's cool how fentanyl has just become this boogeyman to justify every and any boneheaded thing the government wants to do. Canada is smuggling in fentanyl. Mexico is too. Your kids can get fentanyl from the internet. Look out theres a fentanyl standing behind you.

Did he suggest we send them cheesy movies they could watch with their robot pals and make snarky, hilarious comments to pass the time?

Dems chase the last few remaining persuadable Boomers and Xers with historically illiterate Reaganite slop while the upcoming generation cleaves to the right. It's all so tiresome.

one thing I've become very convinced of is the need for the civil service to do waaayyyy more propaganda. like you should know about how NOAA makes the weather app on your phone work. you should know that Uncle Sam runs GPS. you should know how impressive the US census data collection effort is, etc

old Soviet joke for our times:

Guy stops by the newsstand every day, scans the front page, doesn’t buy the paper. One day the vendor asks what he’s up to.

Guy says: “looking for an obituary.”

Vendor says “those are towards the back of the paper, comrade.”

Guy says: “not the one I’m looking for.”

This was the end goal of crypto aligning behind Trump - the crypto economy has very few actual dollars in it and relies on finding new people to hold the bag to get their dollars. The US government is the ultimate bag holder and they’re going to use your tax dollars to bail out crypto owners.

All the worst people are winning

David Sacks on twitter: Paying people to dig holes and fill them back up increases GDP, as it is currently measured, even though that activity has no value. Similarly, hiring an extreme number of regulators to vex entrepreneurs nominally increases GDP in the short term, even though it reduces output in the long term. The flaw of Keynesianism is to see all government spending as “stimulus” even when it’s value destroying.

this is libertarianism in a nutshell. never let actual economic indicators get in the way of your weird philosophy.

Trump take economy

Every time a Marvel movie loses money an angel gets their wings

Nate Silver has to believe that Nate Silver and people like Nate Silver are geniuses who deserve everything they got because otherwise he’s just one of a couple hundred guys who did some interesting stuff with baseball statistics and then claimed he was a data genius so could cover all fields.

I think the older Dems are genuinely good at managing a raucous caucus and moving hill creatures around to where they need to be. Very good, in Pelosi’s case. But that’s just not the game anymore, that’s not what the moment calls for. And what replacements they have groomed aren’t ready either.