I mean, sure, "IKEA this is comfortable" is a dated Friends quote BUT when you use their 2.2 foam density couches...

genuinely crazy to me how unitary executive advocates read the vesting clause as granting a huge scope of essentially royal "inherent" powers. one would think that if the framers intended to give the president royal authority, they would have just said so.

Consumer prices rose 3.3% year on year, with prices for imported goods rising by *tackled by an FCC employee*

This is not true. Blackstone owns 0.06% of the single family homes in America. There is no market where they own more than 1% of the homes.

Nobody has a monopoly on housing. 2/3 of American households own their homes and rental housing is a VERY diversified and competitive industry.

This dude was so woke, he served in WWI, went head-to-head with Stalin at Potsdam, dropped atomic bombs to end WWII, created NATO, & saved West Berlin from communism.

Today we learned that in June the US economy lost jobs for the first time since 2020. We haven’t seen this kind of net job loss since - well, since the last time Trump was in charge.

CNN put together a clip of RKF Jr denying today he linked antidepressants and mass shootings, followed by a clip of RFK Jr last week linking antidepressants and mass shootings

Twitter is run by a far-right Ketamine addict who has helped spread vaccine misinformation that will lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Here's another piece on how BlueSky's lack of intellectual diversity is destroying liberalism.

The man predicted the future and he told you exactly how it was going to happen, too

When you throw a dead fly in the trash you’re laying it to rest amongst a great fortune like a pharaoh

Every American should read this ACLU lawsuit about what is happening in Los Angeles and California. It is the stuff of dystopian nightmares. This is not immigration enforcement. It is positively stuffed with videos and articles documenting racial profiling on a scale unseen since Jim Crow.

Reporter: Yesterday you said you weren't sure who ordered the munitions halted to Ukraine—have you since been able to figure that out?

Trump: I have not thought about it.

Reporter: What does it say that such a big decision could be made inside your government without you knowing?

Infographic titled “One Court, Two Standards” compares how the Supreme Court used emergency powers to rule on lower-court injunctions against the Biden and Trump administrations. Two panels show: • Biden Administration: Lower courts blocked policies in 21 cases. All 21 cases are represented by red squares, indicating that 0% of injunctions/TROs were lifted by SCOTUS. • Trump Administration: Lower courts blocked policies in 86 cases. 66 green squares and 20 red squares show that 77% of injunctions/TROs were lifted by SCOTUS. Key takeaway box below reads: “Using its ‘shadow docket,’ the Supreme Court granted emergency relief to lift 77% of lower-court injunctions against the Trump administration. It lifted 0% of those against the Biden administration.” Sources and notes below include: CourtListener data through July 7, 2025; analysis by Adam Bonica.

The Supreme Court’s “shadow docket” has cast very different shadows depending on which party holds the White House.

When lower courts blocked Trump admin policies, SCOTUS intervened on an emergency basis to lift those orders in 77% of cases.

For the Biden administration, that number was 0%.

Exxon Mobil is the largest private oil company in the world and it produces less than 4% of the world’s oil.

It is quite hard for me to remember that most of the world’s oil is drilled, not by companies, but by countries.

Last thought on absence of music expressly criticizing social media platforms: the closest thing to this is probably Bo Burnham's stuff on "Inside?"

I love his work, but, like, c'mon. He's not Rage Against the Machine and the songs aren't quite as on-point on the harms as, say, Mosh, B.O.B., etc.

As an addendum, some AI summaries/music forums point to Tom MacDonald and the like as critical of social media - but he takes these platforms as a tool of some vague, bad, "they."

Criticism of a vague, undefined group using a platform is not really criticism of the platform itself.

Very frustrating that there seem to be few made-for-mass-consumption protest songs explicitly criticizing social media platforms beyond "wow I stare at my phone a lot" or "my phone always listens to me."

It feels like contemporary music is not meeting the moment?

Apropos of nothing I feel like one of the most important things to help your kids develop is an ability to self-regulate.

I am so glad "why tariff banana" thought is reaching members of Congress. It's the most obvious example of how insane this administration's trade policy has been—officials like Lutnick can't give a good justification for it because there simply isn't one

From Paul Krugman: "Trump repeatedly promised to bring grocery prices down on Day One of his presidency. As soon as the election was over, however, he declared that 'it’s hard to bring things down once they’re up.' He didn’t quite say 'Nyah, nyah, fooled you!' but he might as well have."

From Paul Krugman: "Did public employment surge under Biden? No:"

From Paul Krugman: "Government purchases are a smaller share of GDP now than they were under Reagan, mainly because we spend less on defense. Government transfers, mainly for retirement and health care, are up, but they aren’t part of GDP."

From Matt Yglesias: "[T]he government paid out around $1.5 trillion in Social Security benefits in 2024, and the [Inspector General] estimates an improper payment rate of about 0.84 percent."

From PBS: "Sen. Al Cutrona (R-Canfield[, Ohio]) is proposing the state establish a personal income tax deduction for gym and other personal training costs that total $1,500 or less annually, in Senate Bill 89." [Statehouse News Bureau]

From Bloomberg: "Once upon a time, the conservative position on economics was easy to describe: It was in favor of free markets . . . Now a large part of the conservative movement [is against] free markets. This shift may well be bigger and last longer than the presidency of Donald Trump."

From Bloomberg: "Among the head-scratchers, Robert says, were Lutnick’s assertions that tariffs don’t cause prices to rise and that there can’t be inflation if the budget is balanced."

From Bloomberg:

Racial Wealth Gaps Persist in Middle-Class US Families

From Matt Yglesias: "Th[e] question of what the government should be doing is a legitimate question for debate. But one really does need to debate it! We keep hearing right-wingers broadly categorize any spending they [don’t] happen to agree with as 'waste' or 'fraud.'"

From Bloomberg: "This is most dramatic in the mid-cap segment, where companies tend to be most directly exposed to their domestic economy rather than to global growth. The turnaround in favor of the German MDAX index, and against the S&P 400 mid-cap index in the US, has been breathtaking."