Mike Wolfinbarger

The president obsessed with trade literally has no idea what our most globally competitive export industry is.

the USA built a system of higher education so good that smart/rich people from across the world came here, spending billions to learn here, subsidizing education for Americans while spending money to live in our cities and towns. our government arbitrarily decided we should stop doing that

How it started. How it's going.

Weakest 3 months of job growth since 2020.

‘1984’ is upon us

COVID is the deadliest virus ever when they talk about the "lab leak" theory to gin up outrage, but just a mild little cold when they talk about masking and public health measures to gin up outrage.

Reminder that the US has a signed and ratified trade deal with Korea that an international treaty & part of US law, & <everything> here is wildly illegal & we should stop sanewashing & normalizing of it & simply enforce the damn law even for this One Special Boy.

Cuts to Data Collection May Erode Reliability of Economic Statistics

MAGA people showing up in my replies and asking “iF taRIffS Are bad theN wHY iS INfLatION GoiNG dOwn?”

Well the Bureau of Labor Statistics has reduced or stopped collection of data on consumer prices in several areas.

So the numbers are cooked. That’s why.

What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? I’m going to give a sideways answer to this, which is that the venture capital business model needs to be understood as requiring hype. You can go back to the Netscape IPO, and that was the proof point that made venture capital the financial lifeblood of the tech industry. Venture capital looks at valuations and growth, not necessarily at profit or revenue. So you don’t actually have to invest in technology that works, or that even makes a profit, you simply have to have a narrative that is compelling enough to float those valuations. So you see this repetitive and exhausting hype cycle as a feature in this industry. A couple of years ago, you would have been asking me about the metaverse, then last year, you would have asked me about Web3 and crypto, and for each of these inflection points there’s an Andreessen Horowitz manifesto. It’s not simply that one piece of technology is overhyped, it’s that hype is a necessary ingredient of the current business ecosystem of the tech industry. We should examine how often the financial incentive for hype is rewarded without any real social returns, without any meaningful progress in technology, without these tools and services and worlds ever actually manifesting. That’s key to understanding the growing chasm between the narrative of techno-optimists and the reality of our tech-encumbered world.

Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...

"For the last time, I didn't know anything about Jeffrey Epstein's pedophilia ring, we were just best friends for over a decade and then finally had a falling out when he stole this seventeen-year-old blonde girl from me. I trust that settles it."

I am no constitutional scholar, but I can't help but feel that "the President gets to dictate what every university can teach and what every television station should broadcast" is closer to what the founding fathers were worried about when it comes to free speech than trigger warnings on syllabi.

I said this a couple of days ago, I think, but I’ve never seen any good way to circumvent process for hard problems, problems that require real intellectual effort. Just like writing is thinking, doing is thinking. You need to get lost and to think your way out, ChatGPT can’t help you there.

Our legislative branch of government, our Article 1 branch, has been ground to a halt because the President of the United States may be in the files of a pedophile sex trafficking ring.

The entire reason we have a congress is so that one man can not unilaterally tax all of us.

i did some inflation-adjusted back of the envelope against the manhattan project last year. we are so far above manhattan project levels of spending on ai, on government buy-in alone, to make it look like a joke

Like watching someone dunk Prometheus's flame in a lake.

Exactly: THe stories on what didn't get done bc Noem required her personal signature (in additional to call centers, the rescue teams) aren't stating clearly that one reason Noem is doing this is bc she's $1B over budget bc she has blown it all on kidnapping grannies.

what if the Big Walk slogan was "The Surrealistic Multiplayer Adventure That Will Become Your World". has anyone done that

FEMA Didn’t Answer Thousands of Calls From Flood Survivors, Documents Show

the times is reporting that fema let call center operator contracts expire on july 5, the day after the texas flood, and calls answered went from 99.7% that day to 36% the next to 16% the next www.nytimes.com/2025/07/11/c...

This is another flier that’s gone up at the State Department on this crazy day:

My opinion has always been that you will get short-term gains in typing speed & code generation, but you’re trading it for significant long-term slowdowns and errors when you:

1) Don’t actually know how the code works because you didn’t write it
2) Realize it never had any forward thinking design

this is interesting and balanced research and it confirms my priors so i'm sharing it (h/t @jenvalentino.bsky.social)

but also it makes sense — LLMs speed up the typing part, which often feels like the bulk of the job, but is actually dwarfed by the thinking part. and these things don't think good

We think we isolated this to a bug in the code for county-based watches. We have a potential fix on the way. In the meantime, turning off the watches feed should avoid a reoccurrence.

Imagine being part of a floundering political establishment at historic lows in favorability, seeing this guy's absolutely infectuous energy, and deciding to try to stop it through an array of embarrassing media appearances and editorial blunders.

i can’t believe we handed over control of everything to people who are this fucking stupid

I appreciate everyone offering nuanced, informed, empathetic commentary on the TX flooding disasters right now because I can't.

My comment? If you think prayer is the last mile in protecting lives, you don't respect the intelligence we were ostensibly given to navigate what happens on this planet.

Be sure you follow @wxmanms1.bsky.social and his substack

Smart people would be like oh wow look at this massive disaster that popped up fast. We should probably devote more funding to science.

insofar as the problem was that the locals didn't listen to the NWS, Elon killed those kids. That's the guy who knew which local to call and the guy whose call the local knew to pick up.

I wonder if they even knew he was gone