Chris Lay

Chris Lay

@chrislay.bsky.social

Villen, lefty, runner, engineer, in that order. Formerly @christopherlay on the former birdsite. Formerly chrislay on Zuckbook. Also @chrislay at extinct pachyderm dot online. Some ville, Mass

2K followers872 following2.6K posts

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An idea: UBI+JG. The SOEs staffed by the JG produce the basket of goods and services necessary to dignified material existence and participation in society, priced so that the whole basket costs the UBI. The UBI is fully taxed away by progressive income tax by the time you get to 1.5x median income.

Chris Lay reposted

The destruction of protected wildlife sanctuaries in Texas for border wall construction continues long after the slogan was forgotten. Here's what will be lost: 'Green Jay (Cyanocorax luxuosus) on a Collared Peccary (Pecari tajacu)' (📷: Steve Hillebrand, USFWS)

Texas Tribune@texastribune.org

A section of border wall that the federal government planned to build along a South Texas wildlife refuge could end up cutting through the refuge instead. The proposed change attempts to resolve a legal dispute in which government contractors are accused of trespassing on property near the refuge.

Chris Lay reposted

flaminghydra.comFriends like these / Return tripNEW ENGLAND WEEK opens with Miles Klee and Rax King and your host, Luke O’Neil
Luke O'Neil@lukeoneil47.bsky.social

I'm very excited to present New England Week at @flaminghydra.com. Our first entries come from @milesklee.bsky.social on what New England "means" and a new writer who is trying her best so be nice @raxkingisdead.bsky.social on Shirley Jackson in Vermont. flaminghydra.com/issue-676/

Chris Lay reposted

Ethics aside, this take could use some contact with reality. Biden's expanded CTC didn't motivate recipients to vote to maintain it. Trump offered $5000 checks and it hurt him in the polls. The empirical claim that welfare creates single issue voters just doesn't hold up.

Chris Lay reposted

Corollary: The reason we should want to boost housing supply is not that it will lower housing costs, but because it will allow more people to live in dense urban areas.

Dan Davies@dsquareddigest.bsky.social

a) there is no such thing as "housing", locations are poor substitutes for one another b) people sort themselves into locations so that the 33% ratio is preserved therefore, constructing new housing has very low elasticity in terms of the effect on measured "affordability"

Chris Lay reposted

the biggest presidential scandal in history but the political media largely acts as if it's not happening. hasan piker has received more mainstream political media coverage over the last 6 months than trump's connections with epstein has

Prem Thakker ツ@premthakker.bsky.social

NEW: "Donald Trump was an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of young women during the mid-to-late 1990s," per new House Judiciary Dem report. Report has new allegation that Trump raped a 24-year-old and then promised the victim a visa & NYU admission, demanding she stay quiet.

Chris Lay reposted

a kinda interesting thing that The Files have shown is “the limits of corporate media’s control of information.” like, this stuff has been frozen out of the discourse of DC and political elites, and the national legislature and news coverage, but it’s still widely known and cared about.

mtsw@mtsw.bsky.social

the biggest presidential scandal in history but the political media largely acts as if it's not happening. hasan piker has received more mainstream political media coverage over the last 6 months than trump's connections with epstein has

Chris Lay reposted

Replying to @somershade.bsky.social

I logged in a bit late, just in time to hear @jtforward2.bsky.social asking whether it might be better to simply enforce the vacant property ordinance that we have on the books rather than hiring consultants and talking to neighboring communities about how to maybe make a new law. 3/?

Chris Lay reposted

There is a very important point here, which is that housing (like money, labor and perhaps energy) is such a critical input to so many other (re)production processes that a partial equilibrium analysis that approaches it as just another commodity is going to get a lot of big things wrong.

Matt Darling@besttrousers.bsky.social

The reason "percent of income spent on housing" is slightly lower in 2024 than 2010 isn't because housing is more affordable today. It's because in 2010 there were a bunch of households that had two earners in 2007 trying to stay in their house with one earner in 2010.

Chris Lay reposted

one thing the people targeting Arday did very successfully was bait the left into a discussion of whether Arday plagiarized (he did) rather than a discussion of the value of DEI.

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Chris Lay reposted

... I'll allow it

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com

JD Vance: "Gas prices are too high ... they skyrocket every time some tinpot dictator decides to throw a tantrum"

Chris Lay reposted

It's good for people who work at tech companies to realize that benign premises are often masks for contracts they're uncomfortable with, and also Boston Dynamics *origin* is as a defense contractor building robot mules for the military.

Chris Lay reposted

Replying to @snowden.st

as I was saying…

Dave Karpf@davekarpf.bsky.social

Roose does a very nice job signaling in the second paragraph what sort of book this will be. He decided to write it the night after partying with ketamine-snorting effective accelerationists. He isn’t e/acc himself, but he hangs with that crowd and accepts their premises as newsworthy,

Chris Lay reposted

hunter s thompson sure did ruin a lot of male writers huh

Dave Karpf@davekarpf.bsky.social

Roose does a very nice job signaling in the second paragraph what sort of book this will be. He decided to write it the night after partying with ketamine-snorting effective accelerationists. He isn’t e/acc himself, but he hangs with that crowd and accepts their premises as newsworthy,

Chris Lay reposted

There's nuance here about "how do we use platforms owned by the fascists". You *have to understand the political purpose of the platforms* in order to use them to subvert authoritarians. For the most part, Americans simply do not. Centrists (including DNC consultants) do not. Major media does not.

Kim Sherrell@web.kim

Key lessons from Brazil Amplify our people. Ignore the opposition. Use the tools owned by fascists to defeat the fascists? Meet the people where they are. May need to reconsider my staunch position of boycotting Meta for the reason. Thoughts?

Chris Lay reposted

The vibes-based "I know it when I see it" system of umpires determining if a swing was successfully checked or not is actually fine — a time-tested and effective solution to an annoying problem — and anyone trying to write a new rule to make it "objective" is a sicko who should not be trusted.

Chris Lay reposted

It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown is a great movie for kids because it shows multiple children getting bullied and grapples with the horrors of WWI

Chris Lay reposted

There is an international, well-connected network of fascists promoting far-right candidates in elections (and coups) across the world. The guy who owns the site Yglesias posted this on is one of their leaders. Be careful of people advocating for their opponents to disarm!

Dan Mauler 🎃@meelar.bsky.social

I just think Matt's wrong about this. We're at a point in our technological development where a ton of problems spill over national borders--if Flavio Bolsonaro burns down the Amazon, that will flood houses in Miami.

Chris Lay reposted

Replying to @anildash.com

If you want to know how complete the right-wing capture of the public narrative is: people were shocked a dozen years ago at birtherism being pointed at Obama. Yesterday, Trumpists said AES was not an American *even though he has a birth certificate* — and none of those outlets even made it news.

Chris Lay reposted

Not just pundit class — "legitimate" journalists CANNOT STOP centering fascists and racists as the only possible source of narratives.

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Re LRS, this is also the dynamic in the US going back to at least the 90s: When the GOP is in power they fit the state and make enemies abroad, and then they run against the incompetent government that they made and promise to protect us from the foreign enemies that they pissed off.

Chris Lay reposted

Thread ⬇️

Bruno Dies@brunodias.dev

I don't know that there is a template or a "secret sauce" or a clear-cut lesson to take from this. But if there is one it's the idea of treating social media as the hostile territory that it is, of actually acting like you are a participant in propaganda warfare and not like a consumer.

Chris Lay reposted

there's no question that there's still a lot of froth in "AI," but having watched Tesla plow through multiple crises with vastly worse business fundamentals than what Anthropic is disclosing I'm not sure I'd get too hung up on a transformative bubble pop scenario