Sam Levey

Also they're just sick. They're killing people and whether you think it's justified or not (obviously it's not) that should mean something. Instead they're running around laughing like an axe murderer in some terrible horror movie. Completely broken people

Americans relearning in real time that uncertainty is a necessary sibling of discretionary authority.

In my Foundations of HCI class, we’re in the midst of our social computing section, thinking about how to address online toxicities. Had the students play Masnick’s “Trust & Safety Tycoon” game in class yesterday. Their reactions: moderation is HARD... www.techdirt.com/2023/10/17/t...

Staggering

Headwind vs tailwind?

people's political affiliations are frequently not an expression of underlying ideology but an attempt to define their own identity and a reflection of their perceived (and desired) role in the social ecosystem, which in turn means they're a direct reflection of how they perceive that ecosystem

HOW VOTERS PICK A CANDIDATE:

-they observe the social environment (largely through media)
-they decide what role they want to play in that environment (respected? savvy? oppositional?)
-they pick the candidate they think fulfills that role
-they reverse-engineer an explanation for their pick

"normies do not care about this thing and so it is no use raising a stink" is imho just an excuse for not doing politics, which is the job of making normies care about something

The only check-and-balance that actually matters

The destruction of the East Wing is a reminder that America has violated the only check-and-balance that actually ends up mattering: www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/the-only-c...

This is very nice symbolically, but economically I don’t think it actually does anything, it’s not real leverage. The Treasury would have to sell more bonds to cover the lost revenue, but the states would be depositing the funds in banks, who would be buying the bonds. (Or else the Fed could.)

All of us are individually powerless. We can only form an effective opposition collectively. And when things need to happen on the scale we need them to happen, you’re simply not going to agree with every tactic every group deploys, never mind have a veto on them.

Fragility Is Getting Scary The opposite of risk management.

This, from @hamiltonnolan.bsky.social , highlights a consistent aspect of the second Trump Administration that should scare us all -- across a variety of areas (economy, health, climate, etc.), Trump is weakening our protections against the greatest risks. open.substack.com/pub/howthing...

The problem is that neither inventive design nor enforcement can cover every conceivable scenario, and so peoples’ hearts matter too. The heart makes you do the pro-social thing even if no one is looking.

"[A]ll universities have to do now is do nothing—no accepting the compact, no counter-offers, nothing—and the government will be left with no more power to coerce and control the First Amendment-protected activities of major American universities than it has today."

“Terrible things are happening outside. Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart. Men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.”

Diary of Anne Frank
January 13, 1943

On a productive day I can write about 400 lines of Manim code... which will be like 1.5 minutes of video😅

I still hate LaTeX with the passion of a thousand suns and believe strongly that it deserves to die a painful death..... but, in the AI era, it is a lot more manageable.

Working on an empirical paper sure is forcing me to dig deep into the NIPA manual....

The lesson of history is that tyrants cannot be appeased.

Appeasement only feeds their insatiable hunger for power.

Tyrants prey on people who feel unsafe and vulnerable.

But without mass submission, a tyrant is powerless.

Oh wow anti-trust, wealth taxation...you are telling me these can be tools to promote democratic stability and there were a whole boatload of centrist economists who couldn't think beyond deadweight loss and consumer welfare?

Yes we actually do need a Project 2029 for liberals

Figure showing that 30% of manufacturers report passing on all the tariffs, about 25% report passing on none of the tariffs, and the rest report passing on some of the tariffs.

As a rough heuristic, it seems like, so far, about half the cost of tariffs have been passed on to consumers, and about half have been absorbed by lower profit margins for import-using American firms. libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2025/06/are-...

Like the old quote goes, anyone who would give up their liberty in exchange for security will live happily ever after, both free and safe

"Donald Trump is a monster and we desperately want to work with him" is a batshit position to take, it makes you sound like an insincere and feckless empty suit

One thing I think is cool is [some] economists saying "we shouldn't do anything that seems helpful until we have studied it empirically" but also "we should continue to use these foundational, somewhat radical postulates about how firms function in markets w/o subjecting them to empirical scrutiny"

I’m really sick of the courts finding this administration broke the law in some unprecedented way, but they get to keep doing illegal things for a few months as a little treat. They’re defaulting to rewarding lawbreaking.

I think we are in a quantum superposition between democracy and competitive authoritarianism. The 2026 midterms will collapse the wave function: we'll look into the box and see whether the cat is dead or alive.

Washington, DC under military occupation in last August 2025, with banners proclaiming the absolute power of the primus inter pares

This is a real photograph of Washington, DC this week, where the United States president has ordered military occupation in peacetime, and ordered the display of colossal portraits of himself.

www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

"The political culture of our youths, of tame and tamed discourse, of liberalism as a gentlemanly referee, no longer exists. It was a flower of a different climate."

Liberalism is not neutral & must speak to - and FROM - its values. It is impossible to divorce from race & gender

Such a good essay