Professor "No way its already August"

If AI and Crypto are so awesome, why are they using the force of the Trump admin to make people buy them?

And....for what? What would a nuclear reactor do on the moon? We stopped going there because there is nothing there.

Patriots: "Its services will be free to those looking to push back on Trump’s use of executive power... Zelinsky told CNN in a phone call that their group stand[s] out because of the number of people who have come out of retirement to work for the firm."

Two things

1) This means there is also less money and labor in the United States so we lose

2) There will be less economic stability in our neighbors which means we lose

people keep acting like they dont know what trump will do if the economy starts tanking but we do know because he will handle it the same way he handled covid. back then, he saw the numbers as the problem, not covid itself. he will see the bad economic numbers as the problem, not the economy itself.

Tech and finance are still playing around with all the free money from Covid while the rest of the economy begins to struggle.

this is not how i would refute a claim from quorum-breakers that they had to leave the state to thwart my attempt to institute single-party rule

Designing Conjoint Experiments in Qualtrics — Sierra Davis Thomander conjoint experiment, Qualtrics, Qualtrics survey, candidate choice experiment, survey template, Javascript, HTML, experimental design, market research, product design, public policy research, Sierra D...

Want to make a conjoint experiment in Qualtrics? I'm sharing a template + how-to I made while Survey Lab manager this past semester. I hope it is helpful! sierradavisthomander.com/blogposts/de...

Remarkable how badly prestige media is failing the moment

Headline from Harvard Crimson: "Harvard President Garber Tells Faculty He Is Not Considering a $500 Million Deal With Trump."

Text of story: Harvard prez Garber says report of a deal "was apparently leaked to the press by White House officials." NYT ran with it as a story.

Important details from this story:

1) Yet another news-break by student journalists (this time @theharvardcrimson.bsky.social) www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

2) Harvard saying "see you in court," not "let's make a deal."

3) Per Garber, WH/MAGA leaked news of a "deal." NYT then ran with it.

Yup, I was elected back in May.

There are well-meaning consulting groups that want to help me, but there are several of them and they all demand my time and attention.

I have a full time job and kids. Navigating the consulting market is not something I have the bandwidth to handle if I want to build an actual party.

I have a PhD and my entire expertise is how parties build internal infrastructure and let me tell you, this is crazy hard and expensive -- Democrats will continue to lose if the national party passes the costs of development to people who don't have my background.

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.

If Dems decide to dump a bunch of incumbents in next year's primaries, perhaps this crap will be on the chopping block too
data4democracy.substack.com/p/the-mother...

Does the national party provide any of this??

Not really. We have ActBlue which provides the national party data that can be access by these spam groups and VoteBuilder which is a clunky terrible tool that doesn't do much.

That's it. Everything else is on the county party to invent itself.

What county parties need

1) Web domains, email/text capacity, and storage provided for it

2) Clean and regular access to registration data

3) Tech infrastructure to enroll members, fundraise, and organize all this information

4) Resources to recruit and train candidates.

How the Democratic Party sees the antipathy towards Trump AND itself and doesn't have a reckoning with how toxic its brand is is baffling.

As a county chair all I see is cannibalization by consulting groups and its clearly hamstringing the party.

They also revised down job numbers in 2024 to make Biden look good AND revised down job numbers in 2025 to make Trump look bad.

If you work in/adjacent to Democratic politics, or even if you are an occasional Democratic donor, this new @adambonica.bsky.social piece is the most important thing you can read today.

The Democratic Party cannot build power if it allows scam pacs to thrive

open.substack.com/pub/data4dem...

Not the most important point, but wild that their entire argument is "Democrats conspired and cheated to lose elections to Trump"

Not an "echo" of an authoritarian playbook. It is something autocrats routinely do.

Hey Karens

Trump will have presided over ending the two longest job growth streaks

Post from "The Rundown" July 18 at 5:30 PM · DuckDuckGo has introduced a new feature allowing users to filter out AI-generated images from search results, addressing growing concerns over synthetic content overwhelming authentic visuals online. The filter can be activated through a dropdown in the Images tab, search settings, or by using a dedicated AI-free domain: noai.duckduckgo.com. The system relies on curated blocklists, including uBlockOrigin’s Huge AI Blocklist, to detect and suppress AI-generated imagery. While not perfect, it significantly reduces synthetic content visibility. This move sets DuckDuckGo apart from competitors like Google and Bing by giving users direct control over their exposure to AI-generated material. Source: TechCrunch

DuckDuckGo has added a feature to filter out AI images from search results.

Businesses really should have passed the costs into consumers immediately as to make tariffs as unpopular as the could be immediately.

Lots of people started to believe it wasnt so bad and let Trump keep going with his madness.

Without question the thing Trump benefits from more than anything else is being able to do stuff that would've triggered Watergate-level media outrage and turn it into a nothing burger you barely hear about

Percentages, how do they work?

True Crime podcasts are cooking people's brains.

Why are elites (at my alma mater) surrendering?