Evan Horowitz

Playing with GPT-5 and my initial feeling is: powerful but slightly annoying.

- Asked for help converting a markdown syllabus to html and it added a bunch of new (summary) info

- Spent time tweaking to get it right and it started outputting partial versions

He's a big fan of proportional representation

sure whatever why stop at 100% at this point. Let's do 200%. 350%. 1,245%. 3 billion percent. Two kabillion percent. Seventeen Brazilian percent. One Google percent.

Pulp fiction. Stat.

cherry-picking is fine--just part of politics

but in this case they're grabbing rocks and painting them to look like cherries

-A historic capex boom can’t lift 1H real GDP growth ex-noise beyond the 1%’s
-A modest housing recession hasn’t dragged the overall economy into recession

Both are true/are related.

Line not go up, #mapoli

I think the universe of voters who are:

-anti-crypto
-anti-gambling
-anti-algo
-pro-vax
-pro-choice
-anti-gun

is less than 40% so it’s about thinking about what you can live with.

This crypto ratio stuff is like asserting that Matchbox 20 is properly worth exactly four Maroon 5's, even though the numbers have no substantive relationship to anything in the real word or to one another.

We need to take this seriously in Boston when considering how costly Wu’s move
to up #IDP requirements from 13% to 20% has been for #Boston. In a time when new construction is at record lows and prices are record highs every lost unit is a huge cost. #BosPoli #MAPoli #BuildMABuild

Doesn't seem like a sign of health at @cwbeacon.bsky.social

What an incredible sentence...

Fortunately for me, linkrot at the Globe and Fivethirtyeight roughly matches the decay rate of my memories

The slipperiness of the term "affordable" makes it impossible to talk clearly about #mapoli and #bospoli housing policy.

People want rent+housing costs to go down (affordable=not too expensive)

The city is pushing for more subsidized properties (affordable=rent not set by market)

Right on cue...
commonwealthbeacon.org/energy/heale...

Offshore wind is alive and well. Maybe we should just keep quiet about that.  - CommonWealth Beacon Is it possible that the predictions of the death of offshore wind power – one of our single best tools in the fight against climate change – were greatly exaggerated?

Tip for aspiring #mapoli advocates...If you pick the right counterfactual, you can make almost any argument.
commonwealthbeacon.org/opinion/offs...

If you had to choose...

Driverless cars meet union resistance as Legislature considers new rules A group of union members are urging state lawmakers to pump the brakes on several proposals to open the Bay State’s roads to driverless cars.

Candlemakers Union petitions #mapoli to block out the sun
www.bostonherald.com/2025/06/24/d...

Doesn't seem great...

BofA: "We think the outlook is bimodal. If the labor market holds up ... there will probably be enough tariff-driven inflation to prevent the Fed from cutting. But if something is going to break ... we think it will happen over the summer. In that case the Fed would probably cut by at least 75bp .."

This is hilariously funny. That single source... it's me.

Here I am again at the hearing where we encouraged the state to set a low budget expectation even though we know we'd collect more money
www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/1x71y...

Nope...the budgeted amount was deliberately conservative. The projection was always for $2+ billion in direct revenue. See our analysis during the ballot campaign:
cspa.tufts.edu/sites/g/file...

Also... the main claims aren't true (we didn't collect twice as much at projected) and it's all based on data from some unproven thing called wealth-x.

Bad journalism feeds misunderstanding

How is Trump hurting the Massachusetts economy? Let me count the ways. - The Boston Globe It doesn’t take a detective to figure out why the Massachusetts economy is fading faster than the rest of the country: Blame the unfriendly regime in Washington, D.C.

Things look pretty bleak here in #mapoli

www.bostonglobe.com/2025/06/16/o...

And yet...

How is Trump hurting the Massachusetts economy? Let me count the ways. - The Boston Globe It doesn’t take a detective to figure out why the Massachusetts economy is fading faster than the rest of the country: Blame the unfriendly regime in Washington, D.C.

Happy Monday #mapoli

www.bostonglobe.com/2025/06/16/o...

Totally fine...just randomize your friends and enemies

yeesh @benadida.com

The inventory tsunami is slowly but methodically spreading from Florida and Texas to the rest of the Sun Belt and western US and it’s coming for the Midwest and northeast:

Boston chose to offset its FY 2025 shortfall by increasing property tax rates.

Continuing this approach through 2029 will require tax rates for homeowners to rise 25 percent above their 2024 level.