Mike Konczal

The entire incident is infuriating and terrifying. She’s a Latina woman who was working a service job. On her way home late at night, with her headphones in, she was detained for an hour by masked federal agents who wouldn’t give her their names.

Wow, wow, wow. This has always been legally possible but the law has virtually never been enforced — and now this is the SECOND case I've heard of in the last month (first involving a person with a green card) of a noncitizen being charged for failure to carry their papers.

And that's why we reprogram the Kobayashi Maru, we don't believe in the no-win scenario.

"They keep saying as loudly as possible, we're going to do more illegal partisan impoundments, and I think Democrats are seeing this and it just reinforces their sense they can't negotiate with these guys," Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, told me. "It's Darth Vader saying 'I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it any further'—again and again and again."

Truly can’t believe they took this quote
www.thebulwark.com/p/the-other-...

Last week California passed a big upzoning law, as well as laws pushing back on pharmacy PBMs and surveillance pricing.

The former is a YIMBY priority and the latter populist priorities. Often carried by the same legislators. The policy conflict between the two is overstated.

oh but it goes so poorly speed wise, R isn't optimized for this!

thank you brett kavanaugh!

Opinion | G.O.P. to Gen Z: Pay Double for Health Insurance or Go Without

New from @nataliefoster.bsky.social on how the pending health care premium spikes are going to really impact young people, already feeling intense economic stress with a weak labor market and sky high housing costs.
www.nytimes.com/2025/10/05/o...

!!! I was at a R conference and I do remember people talking about this now, they were saying it's a big deal. Fantastic, will dig in.

Looks interesting! But they are going to bury me in the Positron IDE, it was my upgrade from RStudio and now that it has quarto and Python build-it it's over for me. There or it's not happening.

I knew Stiglitz was the 🐐. Discontents made me want to study econ. I got to work with him while at RI, we even wrote a book together (!?!).

But to spend a night having your brain melted and rebuild to understand Dixit-Stiglitz monopolistic competition; the absolute🐐🐐🐐.

This ends investments. /9

I for-real love Fumio Hayashi's 1981 microfoundations of Tobin's Q. I love Q from my finance days, and do feel like I get it more now.

Plus it's an elaborate argument to do what you just wanted to do anyway (take the average), and what else is the human condition than that? /8

I didn't realize that having proper microfoundations for the Modigliani-Miller theorem was a missing part of my life, but it was?

I was fine with a vague milk and cream (or better, a bottle of ketchup) analogy from finance class and a lame arbitrage proof, but now it's on solid ground. 😎 /7

Me: Can you believe we're going deep on CES production functions? There was this big fight 11 years ago, I wrote about it online, over whether that sigma value could be greater than 1, after this French...

Classmates: Oh really? [Gen-Z stare saying “ok boomer-millennial”] /6

Brutal from Larry Summers. I got a deeper dive below.

Thanks! 😎🫡

For monthly data like BLS I'd always want to highlight the latest month clearly on the axis, and ggplot's base date breaks would be random, even showing like 2026 right now on the scale. That is one I enjoy using.

I wouldn't say it's nice as much as "CRAN finally accepted it" - but I'll be iterating on it and cleaning up the docs!

This is not ready to take on the big dogs of R macro. Your quantmod, your tidyquant.

Yet.

Oh no! It's jobs day and I need all 250 subindustries that are in the Current Employment Survey Diffusion Index.

We got you.

Folks we are live. Still very initial version, but the first thing I actually got around to pushing to CRAN.

pkgdown website coming eventually (I know I know).

White House withdraws Antoni’s nomination to lead BLS | CNN Politics The White House has sent paperwork to the Senate to withdraw the nomination of E.J. Antoni as head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, three sources told CNN.

Wow! This is a welcome surprise.

www.cnn.com/2025/09/30/p...

Los Angeles man demands answers after wife was detained at scheduled green card meeting A man is speaking out and asking for help after his wife was detained by federal agents at the end of a scheduled green card hearing in downtown Los Angeles in early September.

Horrifying— Barbara Gomes Marques went with her US citizen husband and lawyer on 9/16 to a green card appointment at USCIS office in downtown LA where she was tricked into walking down a hallway away from them, was snatched by ICE and never came back. She now faces imminent deportation in Louisiana.

Oh man I wish I remembered that while writing!

Think you might be being a bit uncharitable. It’s not like he has a history of back-filling the logic to an answer that’s already been arrived at.

Oh, wait…

Here's the genuine problem. There's a lot of bottom-up arguments Miran makes for r* = 0%, each a good deal outside of consensus but interesting.

But there's also another thing that could make someone argue r* = 0%, as show in the algebra below (all discussed in the piece).

Miran’s Case for Cuts: A Reminder of Why Independence is Essential Stephen Miran's recent speech highlights not just a debate over r*, but the deeper risks of allowing White House talking points to shape monetary policy.

New post, I finally wrote my thoughts on the Stephen Miran Federal Reserve speech.

I think it shows yet another reason for central bank independence. Without it, you can't tell what's a genuine outsider take and what's just carrying water for the Executive.
mikekonczal.substack.com/p/mirans-cas...

Colin Powell put his credibility on the line to say that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

An Australian skincare brand did a chant circle TikTok.

Oh I'm going, the question is which.

No spoilers. One Battle After Another: consensus on IMAX or 70mm for viewing?

Don't have the 70mm IMAX here, but the bounty of Silver Spring, Maryland, has each within a block of each other, AFI has the 70mm

Speechwriter, being told 2pm on a Friday:

"so we're going to need about 20 minutes on the warrior ethos. Make it inspiring, but also terrifying like the audience is going to get purged.

We want soaring language, but also watch the vocab because DefSec might have a few in him by that point."