The entire American economy is being held hostage to the whims of a guy who doesn’t understand how the economy works

This is the lesson of 2025

This morning, the Trump Administration’s Department of War gave me an ultimatum: call up your troops, or we will. It is absolutely outrageous and un-American to demand a Governor send military troops within our own borders and against our will.

I am ready for a change in baseball operations leadership. Between the roster construction problems and lack of player development, shouldn’t ownership consider that changing the manager is only a half measure? Clean the top of the house!

Look at that value, baby!!!

Twins’ attendance sinks to 25-year low and bigger dropoff is likely coming next season Target Field attendance plummeted after the Twins' trade deadline fire sale, as a frustrated fan base tuned out and closed their wallets.

Last time the Twins' attendance was this low, they were playing in the Metrodome, managed by Tom Kelly, and the Pohlads agreed to take $250 million from MLB to contract the team.

And if the Twins think this is low attendance, just wait for next season: www.nytimes.com/athletic/664...

We can and should produce a good deal of our energy from rooftop solar panels and solar canopies over parking lots—but there aren’t enough of them to produce everything we need, and it’s considerably cheaper to use cleared land. Like, for example, some of the fields where we currently grow corn, the most widespread crop in America. And here—as someone who lives in a corn-growing county—is where I want to make an argument that may seem at first blush unlikely: Converting some of these fields to solar panels makes enormous ecological sense.

That’s because one way to look at a field of corn (or any other crop) is that it’s already an array of solar panels. A plant is a way to convert sunshine into energy through photosynthesis, which is an enormous miracle—the chlorophyll in the leaves absorbs energy from the red and blue parts of the spectrum, which energizes electrons, moving them to a higher energy state. A miracle—but not a very efficient one. Somewhere between 1 and 3 percent of the sunlight falling on a leaf actually becomes energy. The photovoltaic panel works considerably better: As we’ve seen, the average panel is about 20 percent efficient, and we’re on a course that might someday soon get us to 40 percent efficient. Which means that, say, if you want to use corn to power a car, it takes a lot of it. About 40 percent of America’s corn crop is turned to ethanol—in Iowa, on the richest topsoil in the world, that number is over 60 percent. If you spent a day driving past Midwestern corn fields, mostly you’d be seeing gasoline plants. But, again, inefficient ones: A few years ago, 200 scientists at 31 colleges and universities across Iowa signed a statement noting that a “one-acre solar farm produces as much energy as 100 acres of ethanol.” Or, to do the math in reverse, an acre of corn will produce enough ethanol every year to drive a Ford F-150 pickup about 25,000 miles. But cover that same acre in solar panels and you will produce enough juice to drive the electric version of the same truck—the F-150 Lightning—about 750,000 miles. Or to do the math one more way, you could supply all the energy the US currently uses by covering 30

One truth is, we actually don’t need very much land to provide the energy we need. At the moment, according to Stanford’s Mark Jacobson, fossil fuel infrastructure takes up about 1.3 percent of America’s land area—this includes active and abandoned oil and gas wells and coal mines (since, unlike the sun, these play out, you need new ones every year) and deforested strips for pipelines, power plants, and tank farms. By his calculation, converting entirely to clean energy would use less of the landscape. It depends on how you count it, of course—when Jacobson looks at the acreage of a wind farm, for instance, he includes just the pads for mounting the turbines and the paved roads between them, since everything else can still be farmed. His numbers, across 145 countries: “The total new land area for footprint required . . . is about 0.17 percent” of their territory. By contrast, at the moment the US devotes about 41 percent of its land—both pasture and cropland—to feeding cows. We devote two million acres to golf courses and three million to airports.

doubt it convinces anyone but i like the pro-solar framing that it's better at converting energy than corn. fuck corn, we're kicking corn's ass now

Support for vaccinating kids against infectious diseases dropped from 81% in 1991 to 51% last year


We are getting dumber as a society

Byron Buxton x Courtney Williams !

“Having a guy” for a task is the number one most important thing you can do as you get older. We need to cultivate your guys, and the greatest honor is to be someone else’s “guy.”

Require transparency down to the contract level from all providers. Maybe to the point of general ledger entries. Segregate formularies from PBMs. End steering. This allows everyone to dig in and see what care would actually cost and determine a path, that everyone can discuss

That was one of the most batshit press conferences of Trump's public life. He brandished a photo of Putin and promised to deploy the US military to occupy Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. A sane country would be moving toward impeachment and removal right now.

Morneau and Provus look like they’re wearing matching jammies for the late plane ride home. Amazing!!

This is why we subscribe!!

The fact we have secret police whisking people off the streets doesn’t get enough attention. It ain’t normal and we’re further down the road to authoritarianism than you think.

The richest 10% of households will get more in cash from the tax bill than all SNAP households that have fewer than 8 people in them get in food vouchers.

Or, this bill gives more cash to rich households than it gives in food vouchers to poor ones with 7 people in it.

4/

Today’s a good day to figure out who’s trying to build their brand on the bodies of dead people, and block them. All my love to everyone honestly grieving. All we have is each other.

I can’t remember the last time Donte made an adequate pass. He has 4 official turnovers but at least two of Julius’ are due his terrible decisions.

Conclave Selects First Chicago-Style Pope

Conclave Selects First Chicago-Style Pope

First stop from the airport? Kramarczuk’s, of course.

Every financial advisor’s email today: “Stay the course. Your plan was built with stress testing.”
Me: “Did it include the most powerful man in the world being an idiotic economic illiterate enabled by fools?

graphic of markets being down during Trump 2.0

is this good?

Sharing an excerpt of facebook screenshot of Amanda Gailey: As someone who uses Signal every day, I need to explain how totally committed to being an absolute dumbass multiple people had to be in order for this security leak to happen. Okay, so in Signal if you want to talk to multiple people you have to create a group and give it a name, for example "JD Vance Humps His Couch." You then add people from your contacts to the group. If you are a competent user of Signal, you can then restrict the permissions so that only designated admins can add people. If you are an absolute dipshit whose only job qualification is pwning the libs on Twitter, you would create a group about war plans and not know about or activate this functionality. If you are in a group and are allowed to add members, either because you are an admin or because the admin was raised on lead paint milkshakes, you then must do the following to add someone: Click on "JD Vance Humps His Couch" Scroll down to "Add Members." Select one or more people from your phone's contact list. Click "Update" Confirm that yes, you want to add that member. This is impossible to do accidentally. Then, once you have gone through the multi-step process of adding a member, an announcement appears on the screen for literally everyone in the group to see: "JD Vance Has Added Chairry to the Group." This sentence is a line in a single-stream text thread and if anyone is reading their messages they cannot miss it. (If they are not reading their messages, one might wonder why they have been included on the chat to begin with.) At this point, anyone can say in the chat or privately, Hey JD, why are you adding the bedroom-eyed plush chair from Pee-Wee's Playhouse to our chat about your upholstery problem? Yet nobody in the war bro chat said a thing about the new member added to the group.

This is art. 🤗

The terrible CR Budget bill — written by right-wing House Republicans with no input from anybody but themselves — was passed tonight with the support of 10 Democrats.
 
An absolute failure of Democratic leadership. NOBODY in the Senate should have voted for this dangerous bill.

I'm honestly running out of words I can use on the air to describe what's happening in and to this economy

The institutional Democratic Party is guided by an almost pathological level of conflict avoidance in almost every direction. “What can we do to make the least number of people mad?” is just a bankrupt way to operate.

Hope to see many local Blueskyers at the glove shop!
Mark your calendars. Baseball season is right around the corner!

Every single Democratic Senator voted for Marco Rubio as Sec of State!

It’s on the FanDuel North alternate. Sony trust the listings, just go to the channel!

Privatization is fucking scam. It doesn’t lower costs. It’s not efficient. And most importantly, it doesn’t improve access or care, which is how it’s sold to us in the first place.