Ariel Ron

Was having a convo with @bachynski.bsky.social & we decided that it's of upmost importance to start gathering the oral histories of those who lived through the time before polio vaccines, measles vaccines, etc. They can provide important perspectives and they will not be with us for too much longer

lol I guess I have to imagine something very terrible and cringe?

When people say AI can't think or understand, I guess they mean this. I asked ChatGPT to convert an old article chart into a vector image file. It's visually similar(ish), but it misses the chart's point and so fails to reproduce it in a way that's even remotely correct or useful.

"Feed the People!: Why Industrial Food Is Good and How to Make It Even Better," by @jandutkiewicz.bsky.social & @gnrosenberg.bsky.social, is now available!

There’s a larger point here, I know, but it’s hard not to laugh at this as terminal business brain

Quite enjoying the WSJ hit piece on Noem

Impossible to divine the true meaning of recommendation letters through the writer's relentless enthusiasm and goodwill--no doubt genuine--toward the applicant.

This is PRECISELY why @gruberte.bsky.social and I say it's so important to be loud abt the consequences of fossil decline. These risks sound outlandish to many right up until they become reality. Who gets blamed then will depend a lot on whether govt has already warned and tried to take action.

narratives don't require facts at all

I don’t subscribe to the Atlantic & so can’t offer a gift link, but back in 2018 when more polite voices than Miller floated this (a UChicago law prof & a M$ economist) in Politico, @arielron.bsky.social and I co-wrote a rebuttal, explaining that reinventing slavery/servitude would be bad, actually.

University subscription. My real flex is that I’m not teaching this semester

Dallas people are out here with rakes trying to shovel snow. Two inches of accumulation shut down the entire place nearly completely for four days.

💯

getting back to the OP about public power, what are the prospects of a public fund or authority taking a stake among a consortium of private funds in project finance to give the public a voice in development from stage 1?

Thank you for your service!

I guess I'm unclear on how selling power really works. If there are off take agreements with, eg, data centers, the utility's job is transmission for a set fee? If a fund owns a share of the project, what choices does it have in who it sells power to? What advantage is there to owning the asset?

How does this work? Do equity owners have options other than the one local utility?

It would be very funny if the Trump administration's plan to win the midterms with tax refunds were humbled by bureaucratic ineptitude they created themselves

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

From William G. Thomas, The Iron Way. For the life of me I still can't figure out what word clouds are good for. Does anyone have a reliable interpretive approach to these things?

How Eli Whitney Single-handedly Started the Civil War . . . and Why That’s Not True The real Whitney story is less grand than the legend, but more interesting and, ultimately, more edifying.

buff.ly/YxkoU9v
h/t @arielron.bsky.social

Atop the Forces of Production Announcing the launch of the Forces of Production macro data newsletter

okay so fun news, I am launching a macro newsletter from Common Wealth about the supply side data and the US economy called Forces of Production

Charts for bsky forthcoming at: @forcesofproduction.com
Launch essay below:

www.forcesofproduction.com/p/atop-the-f...

here for critical time-sensitive updates from the National Hay Association

Thanks to @talkingpointsmemo.com for the terrific suite of articles on what Jan. 6 really was. Here's the report Greg Downs and I wrote for the J6 committee, in which we cast that day's events -- and the response to them -- as part of a very long struggle over democracy in the United States

dailynous.com/2026/01/06/t...

yes exactly

Bret Devereaux Read all of the posts by Bret Devereaux on A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

I’ve written a six-page appendix to explain the sources and methods behind these charts. Lots of details! Figuring this stuff out has given me a deep appreciation for the title of @bretdevereaux.bsky.social’s blog: acoup.blog/author/aimed...

writing a chapter that’s either a significant contribution to Civil War military history or an exercise in utterly pedantic antiquarianism. Really not sure which. Both? It took ages to put together these numbers showing the logistical burden of equine forage in physical vs cost quantities.

Like bald men with wind in their hair