Erik Peinert

3/15 China focuses on "physical and industrial AI" rather than large language models. Xiaomi's fully automated dark factories can produce one smartphone per second. BYD surpassed Tesla in EV production using AI-driven manufacturing.

We should flip that messaging on its head.

“Roy cares about us. Republicans only care about they/themselves.”

*insert reel of headlines about cuts to Medicaid, etc.*

But this IS me saying that Buttigieg's position on this is incoherent—that if you're going to take the position, as a prominent public figure, that liberals and lefties need to be open to hard conversations on this, you FIRST NEED TO ACKNOWLEDGE AND REJECT YOUR OPPONENT'S GOALS.

A comparativist weighs in: it's not just this bad, it's even worse.

"Color" might not even mean some measure of skin tone. It might also mean one of many primitive theories of race 1/

Also the *not rigged* job numbers in 2012 were not good? The job market was still pretty bad

As end-of-empire scenarios go it is so much more dignified to get your capital city sacked by the Visigoths than to have a bunch of illiterate rich people in their 70s doing it through a series of incomprehensible tantrums because their brains were defeated by their phones.

The thing about this: it’s targeted at mRNA tech.

It’s just an extremely 2025 thing. In the 20th century, the idea that the U.S. would willingly slash funding for a domestically developed tech acclaimed worldwide would be unthinkable.

Just a wild departure from the mindset of the American Century.

Well, I’m gonna insist that you listen to this.

Definition of terms:

“these people” = Latino migrants

“Inner city people” = Black people

“We tried to get them [inner city people] to do it” = slavery & sharecropping

Orders of magnitude worse than I’d thought

The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine How a single consulting firm extracted $282 million from a network of spam PACs while delivering just $11 million to actual campaigns.

The annoying spam texts destroying the Democratic brand:

$678M raised through those spam tactics

$282M to one consulting firm: Mothership Strategies.

$11M to actual campaigns (1.6%)

The party isn’t just treating donors like marks—it’s being fleeced itself yet continues to back Mothership.

are all the wannabe dictators on some kind of signal group chat or something

Wow. A group of top scholars at Harvard just sent a letter to its president, Alan Garber, warning against surrendering to Trump.

Signatories include Steven Levitsky, Dani Rodrik, Ryan Enos, Theda Skocpol, and Steven Walt.

Someone forwarded it to me. Read it here:

“One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” - Omar El Akkad

A word.

YouTube video by Angela Collier vibe physics

I watched this (youtu.be/TMoz3gSXBcY?...) on the abuse of LLMs & 'vibe physics' by @acollierastro.bsky.social - well worth a watch! - and I was struck by how the back 15 minutes (the 'thought train') also summed up neatly what it has been like to be a public-facing historian, even before LLMs.1/

and the things trump has done — mainly the administrative agenda for Project 2025 —  are things he denied he had anything to do with!

years of live-streamed genocide, & media refusing to call it a genocide. now footage of starving people in Gaza — horrifying resemblance to Holocaust photos — gunned down trying to get food, yet media *still* refuses to call it genocide. a moral depravity/failure that'll be a museum exhibit one day

When we crawl out of our current moment, the demand for properly-credentialed administrators who publicly defied fascist coercion is going to WAAAAY exceed the supply. You'll be able to write your own ticket.

And in the meantime you'll sleep the righteous sleep of someone who didn't bend the knee.

It’s not just the cowardice, and rapid abandonment of principles, that gets me. It’s the short-sightedness too.

Does anyone think this regime will last forever? Because the stain of aiding it will. And while standing up now isn’t costless, there’s a good chance it pays off big in the future.

I think a lot about how much a student protest movement nationwide could have done to save some of these colleges and universities, or at least to slow their capitulation, if administrators hadn't already put in overtime to expel the politically active kids and get them arrested.

Many people in power are not offering an honest assessment of where we are politically in this country because that assessment would call on them to do things they simply refuse to do. That's where we are right now.

Opinion | I Watched It Happen in Hungary. Now It’s Happening Here.

Former US ambassador to Hungary: "After years watching Hungary suffocate under the weight of its democratic collapse, I came to understand that the real danger of a strongman isn’t his tactics; it’s how others, especially those with power, justify their acquiescence." (h/t @bnovak.bsky.social)

Opinion | Columbia’s Administrators Are Fooling Themselves

A timely and trenchant piece by Suresh Naidu. When future generations sift through the wreckage of our era, they’ll find it strewn with the institutional and personal failures of leaders both great and small.

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/o...

Pete Aguilar (CA-33) Dan Goldman (NY-10) Lucy McBath (GA-06) Terri Sewell (AL-07) Yassamin Ansari (AZ-03) Jimmy Gomez (CA-34) Sarah McBride (DE-AL) Mikie Sherrill (NJ-11) Jake Auchincloss (MA-04) Vicente Gonzalez (TX-34) April McClain Delaney (MD-06) Lateefah Simon (CA-12) Ami Bera (CA-06) Maggie Goodlander (NH-02) Kristen McDonald Rivet (MI-08) Eric Sorensen (IL-17) Brendan Boyle (PA-02) Josh Gottheimer (NJ-05) Robert Menendez (NJ-08) Darren Soto (FL-09) Nikki Budzinski (IL-13) Adam Gray (CA-13) David Min (CA-47) Greg Stanton (AZ-04) Janelle Bynum (OR-05) Josh Harder (CA-09) Jared Moskowitz (FL-23) Haley Stevens (MI-11) Salud Carbajal (CA-24) Steven Horsford (NV-04) Seth Moulton (MA-06) Marilyn Strickland (WA-10) Herb Conaway (NJ-03) Chrissy Houlahan (PA-06) Kevin Mullin (CA-15) Suhas Subramanyam (VA-10) Lou Correa (CA-46) Jonathan Jackson (IL-01) Jimmy Panetta (CA-19) Tom Suozzi (NY-03) Jim Costa (CA-21) Julie Johnson (TX-32) Chris Pappas (NH-01) Shri Thanedar (MI-13) Angie Craig (MN-02) Ro Khanna (CA-17) Nancy Pelosi (CA-11) Mike Thompson (CA-04) Henry Cuellar (TX-28) Raj Krishnamoorthi (IL-08) Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (WA-03) Ritchie Torres (NY-15) Don Davis (NC-01) Greg Landsman (OH-01) Nelli Pou (NJ-09) Derek Tran (CA-45) Suzan DelBene (WA-01) George Latimer (NY-16) Josh Riley (NY-19) Gabe Vasquez (NM-02) Cleo Fields (LA-06) Susie Lee (NV-03) Raul Ruiz (CA-25) Marc Veasey (TX-33) Shomari Figures (AL-02) Mike Levin (CA-49) Pat Ryan (NY-18) Eugene Vindman (VA-07) Lois Frankel (FL-22) Ted Lieu (CA-36) Brad Schneider (IL-10) George Whitesides (CA-27) Laura Gillen (NY-04) Zoe Lofgren (CA-18) Hillary Scholten (MI-03) Jared Golden (ME-02) John Mannion (NY-22) Kim Schrier (WA-08)

The House voted 294 to 134 to pass the crypto industry's CLARITY Act, which creates a regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies without any meaningful consumer or investor protections. Basically, it's a pro-fraud, pro-corruption bill.

78 Democrats voted yes.

We're in the middle of a green energy revolution -- India is 50% renewable, half of China's new cars are EVs, Iceland is 100% renewable, France is 80% nuclear, etc -- and the Trump administration is basically trying to restart the whale oil industry

I'm stunned. ICE attorneys not identifying themselves in COURT?

Justice Department Drops Case Against Plastic Surgeon Over Fake Covid-19 Cards

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/13/u...

What's at stake here is genuinely deeper than the particular issue of COVID vaccination mandates. Effective policymaking and governance, or for that matter social coexistence, can't survive the rule "you may commit professional fraud if you feel like it."

Shared hostility to the events of 2020 *in support of the man who was president in 2020*.

Has that ever happened before? Usually, general anger about circumstances blames the president. I can’t think of another case of scrambling to blame anyone else while working to put that leader back in charge.

A screenshot of a message attributed to Marc Andreessen appears in a chat format with a gray background and white text bubbles. The first bubble states that he was born in 1971 in Iowa, raised in Wisconsin, and that his generation was told to endure discrimination as repayment for past American bigotry, even though the discrimination was now directed at them. The second bubble claims the last eight years, especially the summer of 2020, ended that complacency. The third bubble says “my people” are now furious and unwilling to tolerate it. The fourth bubble accuses universities of being central to a “counterattack,” alleging they both discriminate against “us” and spread the opposing worldview. The final bubble claims: “They declared war on 70% of the country and now they’re going to pay the price.”

Only in America could a white man with a current net worth of $2 billion see himself as part of a victimized group. 🤦‍♂️

I’m so fascinated by how these people form opinions like this in the absence of basic facts. All you have to to is google ‘white college enrollment’ to realize it’s laughably false but they don’t bother!

What a ‘Spiral of Silence’ Can Do to a Democracy Protests show people they are not alone in caring about an issue.

“The fact that organized protest can break the spiral of silence, and correct our impressions of what other Americans think, is one of the most immediate and important values of protesting in the first place. Scientists have [shown] protests update our impressions of what other citizens believe.”