Rob Shearer

Yes, this is completely inappropriate.

But spare us “cushy” to describe any federal detention center.

If “an AI version of their son” meant an AI trained *only* on their son, that would be one (gross) thing. But that is NOT what this is: it’s an AI trained on everything everyone has ever written and then told to ape Joaquin Oliver’s prose style. The misrepresentation is a whole new level of ick.

Given this administration’s consistency in over-promising and under-delivering, do not be surprised if they drop a thermoelectric cell and declare victory.

Or, given that it is impossible not to sneer when umpire accuracy being reported in real time is now a core part of the game, just fix it. I cannot believe they eliminated pitch-sign culture before just putting a bug in the ump’s ear so that he can make the right call every time.

Imagine how everyone else feels about you sneering at the sneering.

So much of the public has just slavishly adopted the framing that companies are partisan.

A framing that comes *entirely* from MAGA arbitrarily declaring war on companies.

You misspelled “set up by people asking them to do a job that could have been automated a decade ago”.

It is completely insane that we have a sport in which everyone watching immediately knows the correct call in every case—no ambiguity—but we don’t let anyone actually playing the game know.

"Just before the election this woman came out with phenomenal numbers on Biden's economy and right after the election, they announced those numbers were wrong."

This is a lie! The pre-election job numbers were bad! BLS revisions were bad for Biden/Harris!
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/trump-shoo...

I think that mis-states it: people don’t “believe” this. That’s the whole point. It’s reinforcing a culture without belief—where there is no meaning. Even numbers—for actual prices real people pay—are just metaphors for feels, and anyone who hates on metaphors hates America.

I once almost had a conversation with someone who started by telling me that certain philosophical theories were natural—“natural philosophy”. And I just had to walk away.

I was super close to posting that people know how percentages work. But even well-educated people don’t seem to know what number theory or integers are. So.

Let us at least thank him for renaming it. Twitter was once niche, then cool, then ick in the way all social media is ick. There were Nazis on Twitter, but Twitter was not a Nazi bar. X is.

Also: we can totally reclaim the term “tweet”! It’s a reference to a dead service, not X!

It’s a bit of a bind that the party that wants to call Muslims animals isn’t equipped to say it’s wrong to impose extra burdens on women…

The lucida is a much more modern variant of the obscura, which was used as a drawing aid for millenia.

And yet Bonica chose not to do that, instead inventing a nonsensical “efficiency” measure that would make even good PACs look bad.

I guess there’s no profit in saying “what we all know”. Much better engagement to make up completely bogus stats.

This is true, but completely unsupported by the article, which expects PACs to act like pass-throughs. That’s like saying the Red Cross is inefficient because it spends so little on direct cash payments to disaster victims.

There is a word for people who argue “my lies align with a deeper truth”.

Liars.

This was such a transparent lie—both impossible to fund and politically infeasible to pin down—that no member of the media could ever have believed it. But they reported it anyway.

I guess I'm a lot less sanguine than you about accepting "I may be lying, but my lies align with a deeper truth" as meaningful discourse.

But again, you've not just shifted your ground but reversed it. Originally what was new was that artists were ashamed to admit using these tools, and now what is new is them arguing they shouldn't be ashamed?

If you just want to say "LLMs are bad" then say it instead of this ignorant rhetoric.

(Of course, "independent expenditures" isn't the only other relevant line item. There are defensible reasons for transferring funds to affiliated committees. And, on the other side, plenty of ways to self-deal on "independent expenditures". It's hard!)

But I think that's kind of my point: if a *fair* assessment of Mothership's efficiency is, say, below 20%, that's a powerful story! But looking only at the "contributions to other committees" line item is a methodology that doesn't tell that story (honestly) AT ALL.

(It also feels like someone who mostly wants to make the point that people should just donate to candidates directly. Probably a great message for anyone who hasn't hit contribution limits.)

I'm not at all making the argument that Mothership is efficient! Merely that this smells very much to me like bending over backwards to get jaw-dropping numbers...to the point where even a very efficient PAC would look terrible.

PROGRESSIVE TURNOUT PROJECT - committee overview - FEC.gov Explore current and historic federal campaign finance data on the new fec.gov. Look at totals and trends, and see how candidates and committees raise and spend money. When you find what you need, expo...

What makes you "believe" that? Again, he's fairly explicit in focusing *only* on contributions directly to candidates. Looking just at the filings for the biggest PAC, $2.6M of its $83.6M went to candidates. But It also spent $2.8M running rallies. Is the "efficiency" 3.1% or 6.4%?

But the post didn't include those line items. The newsletter is pretty explicit in listing only donations to candidates and committees in calculating "efficiency", and dismissing everything else as "operational expenses".

I agree you *could* do the math right. He intentionally doesn't.

Substack promotes a Nazi The company has long wanted to be seen as neutral infrastructure — this week, we saw why that’s a fantasy

I keep hearing about all the hustlebros and their grindset. And SO MANY of them were too lazy to get off of Substack when "they're using your content to promote Nazis" was the story of the day.

That was a long time ago. And now they are *really* using your content to promote Nazis.

I think maybe spending yesterday at a small local protest exhausted my ability to nod along to utterly asinine lefty rhetoric.
Being an artsy local kook with a bunch of crazy theories is fine(ish). But when you have a platform of thousands of online followers? FFS.