Joey Politano🏳️‍🌈

Luminous by Silvia Park and Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman

Sovereign is he who decides the exception and all

there are no atheists in the foxholes, there are no germaphobes in the bedroom

sorry for your loss friend❤️

1) What

A text chain. It says “Going to REI because I realized I don’t have any gloves lol lmk if you need any winter gear” “wow we are all one here” “I’m literally on my way to Uniqlo to pick up gloves” “Advait is at Uniqlo getting gloves” “and a coat for Lia”

POV: A bunch of sunbelters have a flight to Canada tomorrow morning

Tweet by the State department that reads "Mass migration poses an existential threat to Western civilization and undermines the stability of key American allies. Today the State Department instructed U.S. embassies to report on the human rights implications and public safety impacts of mass migration."

I don't like that the State Department is Camp-of-the-Saints-posting

Trump Hates Canada for its Decency The president lacks basic decency, and loathes people who do

Paul Krugman was right about this one, modern Republicans are deranged about Canada because it suggests a alternative politics where people and institutions are by default nice and decent
open.substack.com/pub/paulkrug...

Another in kind donation to the Mark Carney campaign

omg finally a good federal agency

Mojang just doesn't want to do Fortnite-ification and I think a lot of the audience just implicitly expects that endless run of content

trvthnvke

Yes assimilation means it's totally impossible to have more than >15% of the population be foreign born which is why Singapore, Canada, Australia, Germany, Spain, the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, Switzerland, Iceland, Sweden, France, etc have all collapsed

The United States is not a nation like other nations, and it never has been. There is at present no American ethnicity to back up the state called the United States, and there was no such distinctive ethnicity even in 1776 when the United States was created. Many European countries, Germany, for example, were nations before they became states. Most of the European states were created out of a prior sense of a common ethnicity or language. Some of these European states, the Czech Republic, for example, are new, created in the twentieth century, and are certainly newer than the 249-year-old United States. Yet these European states, new as they may be, are undergirded by peoples who had a preexisting sense of their own distinctiveness, their own nationhood. In the United States the process was reversed. Americans created a state before they were a nation, and much of American history has been an effort to define the nature of that nationhood. America’s lack of a national identity and a common ethnicity may turn out to be an advantage in the twenty-first century, dominated as it is by mass migrations from the south to the north. It certainly enables the United States to be more capable of accepting and absorbing immigrants. The whole world is now in the United States. Of course, America has its own problems with immigrants, especially immigrants coming over the southern border, but its problems with immigration pale in comparison with the problems of immigration that the European nations are facing and will continue to face over the rest of the twenty-first century, especially as global warming drives people northward. But immigration must be handled carefully. Because assimilation is not easy, no nation should allow the percentage of foreign born to exceed about 15 percent of its population.

I do feel like right-wingers have gotten completely lost in the overton window of immigration when speakers at the American Enterprise Institute are waxing poetic about all the contributions immigrants have made to the US & then explicitly go on to call for a complete & total ban on new immigration

A map comparing North and South Dakota to North and South Manhattan, which have roughly the same populations

fav version of this

The Chip : How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and… Barely fifty years ago a computer was a gargantuan, vas…

The Chip by TR Reid!

www.goodreads.com/book/show/54...

also lol imagine being the employee on the “bring a boiling vat of oil” part of presentation duty and presumably not knowing what the heck they planned to do with it until the audience did lol

A picture of Columbo

how Teal felt doing the “I just happen to have a silicon transistor in my coat pocket” routine

“In May 1954,Teal and Adcocj attended a technical meeting in which speaker after speaker discussed the insuperable problems posed by silicon. Finally, Teal rose to speak. He had listened with interest, he said, to the bleak predictions about silicon’s utility. “Our company,” he noted calmly “has two types of silicon transistor in production….I just happen to have some here in my coat pocket.” Adcock then appeared, carrying a record player that employed a geranium transistor. As the record played, Teal dunked the transistor in a vat of boiling oil; the sound stopped. Next teal wired in one of the silicon transistors. He dumped it into the hot oil; the band played on. The meeting ended in pandemonium. Texas Instruments was on its way”

Crazy aura farming to go to a meeting about how your invention is impossible with a working version of your invention

"The value of land, they say it's the common heritage of mankind, of everybody you see, and especially me, I have a lot of land you know up in Scotland, but there are some people, some new people in this country who say we have to tax the land, so people build more housing, I know a lot about that"

now I really need a new joke to replace “Brazilian coffee tariff victim” in my bio

Joey Politano's review of America's Urban Future 4/5: Canadian cities are not exactly world leaders in quality urbanism—yet they are much denser, transit-accessible, equitable, and sustainable than their American counterparts. Why? America's Urban ...

Canadian cities aren't exactly world leaders in urbanism—yet they average much better than their American counterparts. Why?

Just finished "America's Urban Future" by Tomalty & Mallach, a dense but galvanizing breakdown of what makes the Canadian urban form special
www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

a graph of unemployment rates by race/ethnicity

The unemployment rate for Black Americans remained at 7.5% in September, the highest level since 2021 and a nearly 1.9% increase from the start of this year

a graph of year-on-year change in US tech employment

The US tech job market remains extremely weak—overall, employment only increased by 2k last month and is down 7k over the last year

That's not as bad as the worst of the 2024 tech-cession, but extremely bad compared to the 2022 boom or even pre-2020 norms

a graph of un and under employment

Look at broader measures of unemployment—including people who want a job but aren't in the labor force or who are working part-time but want a full-time job—and the labor market is nearly in the worst place since the pandemic.

a graph of the change in federal employment since January 2025

Federal government employment is down nearly 100k since the start of the year amidst DOGE cuts—that's more than 3% of the Fed workforce

Keep in mind that this undercounts the true extent of cuts because workers on deferred resignation are still counted as federal employees

a graph of year-on-year change in US blue collar employment

The US is losing blue-collar jobs for the first time since the pandemic—year-on-year job losses have hit 59k as manufacturing industries lose jobs at a rapid pace while growth in construction & transportation has nearly zeroed out

these are the september numbers, it's the october ones they won't be releasing

Payroll number is a pretty sizeable beat beat, but all the employment indicators are the continued deterioration you'd expect. Haven't had a chance to dig in enough for full thoughts but will get back to you soon