shtirlets.bsky.social

The best part of the Odyssey is when Agamemnon turns to the camera and says, "Trade wars are good and easy to win."

time to reup this classic

Seems like a pretty big problem that violations from speeding and red light cameras, which are very strong predictors of a driver killing or seriously injuring somebody in the future, cannot, according to NYS law, be used by insurers to determine insurance rates www.nysenate.gov/legislation/...

There is a problem in the Vision Zero community of repeating a disproven and tired line of discounting traffic enforcement. Turning off traffic enforcement created a disaster. Road design didn't get worse yet crash deaths skyrocketed. NYCDOT found 2 cell phone violations / year = 40X KSI crash risk!

You can find that paper, a micro-simulation analysis of the SSI Restoration Act of 2024 here: CC: @rooseveltinstitute.org rooseveltinstitute.org/publications...

This is a genuinely shocking contrast. www.latimes.com/california/s...

I'm actually astonished at how clean this graph looks as a diagnostic for our housing ills. Note how close it is to 1 at the start. Houses per single adult or married couple.

i think people look at homelessness as a relatively new phenomenon and reason backwards to think that in the Before Times, poor people must've all been able to afford houses/their own apartments etc. Most of the housing types the poor used were actually just outlawed (boarding houses, SROs etc)

New CBO paper: every $1 of federal R&D returns ~$3–$4 of GDP in present value over 30 years www.nber.org/papers/w35472

...to adjust for cost-of-living increases. It's not perfect, and it won't perfectly reflect your own household's experience. But the intention behind all this data is to make life fairer and more stable than it was for our grandparents. www.bls.gov/opub/hom/cpi...

Omar is a friend of mine who’s currently the VP of Microsoft Word. He’s been an early adopter as long as I’ve known him and he’s shared how his family now uses OpenClaw. This is what Siri should be by now and we need an iPhone moment to get this in everyone’s hands.

Well let's separate intent from impact. Fees are intended to be revenue generators. That they're wildly misused & misconstrued as mechanisms of punishment doesn't change that. And it doesn't change the enormous, crushing impact they have on people who are struggling. Fees are failed policy. Period.

Nope. You've nailed it. Inflicting immense economic harm - because once you owe debt, that's a cycle of consequences - in return for...yup...a 2.3% collection rate. Fees are intended to generate revenue. They fail at it. You spend more than you collect to try to collect the very little that you do.

You're asking about fines. Fines are intended to be monetary punishments. There's a big convo there re: proportionality, ability to pay, community service alternatives... These are fees. Fees are nothing more than revenue generation tools. Regressive taxes levied on people who cannot afford them.

Where do parents find the time to parent? Less sleep, work and screens. Amazing chart feat. in @alphaville.ft.com Further Reading. homeeconomics.substack.com/p/where-do-p...

NEW: In Iowa, when someone's charges are *dismissed,* they still had to pay court fees. So prosecutors pressured ppl into pleading guilty: 'plead guilty, you'll have no fees. (If you win, you'll owe $$.)' Iowa's Supreme Court struck that down in January... but prosecutors want to bring it all back:

The median housing unit in California is twenty years older than in texas. 10% of California's housing stock was built before WWII compared to 3% in Texas. Likewise, only 18% is built after 2000, compared to 39% in Texas. CA housing is really old!

I'm willing to give all the credit for this to the Dog Rates guy.

If you are curious to learn more, I highly recommend the first half of this video from one of BLS's senior statisticians, walking through the how and why of payroll survey revisions: www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZaX...

2. Annual revisions: the payroll survey is a sample, based on a census of firms that gets updated much more slowly (too slowly to be useful to policymakers). Once a year, they benchmark the survey to the census so the two don't drift too far apart.

Matt is correct that there is a monthly and an annual revision process: 1. Monthly revisions: many firms turn in their data late - because they are busy or have monthly payrolls that haven't been processed by the deadline. There's also more information on seasonal patterns.

Here are mostly revisions going back to 1979. www.bls.gov/web/empsit/c...

Quick summary from a non-former BLS Commissioner. It's two different processes: 1.) Monthly revisions are about payroll data that is submitted after the deadline. 2.) Annual revisions are about new firms (ie, ones that were not in the initial payroll data to begin with)

we need to talk about that Ring Super Bowl ad

A line from Kant that’s been ricocheting around my head a lot for the past year: “Whoever wills the end wills also the necessary means.” We’re going to get a lot of doe-eyed protestations from folks who “just wanted immigration laws enforced” & couldn’t be bothered to contempate what that entailed.

America is learning the hard way that "we make a lot of money together, you benefit from trade with us" does not actually equal "we own you and you must be subservient," and that countries will forgo some money to preserve sovereignty. Today's corrupt, self-interested US leaders don't get that.

Is unemployment caused by bad planning by firms, or a shortfall in aggregate demand? Today, everyone agrees it is the latter, but our unemployment insurance system is based on the assumption that it's the former. Madness!

Full paper here: www.niskanencenter.org/creating-a-m...

This kind of smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism is illegal to build in most American cities.

I've told this story on ContrabandCamp but it's worth sharing for BHM because it's one of the greatest stories ever. A thread.

Rest in peace to a legend. Catherine O'Hara, 1954-2026

A lot voted for the idea of "go door to door to get illegals out of the country" but had no capacity to imagine what that would entail in practice. It's the same level of thinking behind MAGA's "press insurrection act button and win."

New at The Watch: I dug into archival witness accounts of the British siege of Boston prior to the American Revolution. They are remarkably similar to what we're seeing in Minneapolis. open.substack.com/pub/radleyba...

@professormusgrave.bsky.social is back! musgrave.substack.com/p/the-old-wo...

This piece by Matt Bruenig is essential reading for AI skeptics on the left. You may or may not agree with the arguments, but very much worth taking seriously. mattbruenig.com/2026/01/19/s...

This is my politics.

Jesus. www.startribune.com/ice-raids-mi...

Worth every second

Holy hell, what an obituary

You may have heard that "social security is going to go bankrupt." Many younger people assume social security will not be there for them when they retire. In my latest paper I correct the record. SS is not going bankrupt but we'll need to revisit it soon 🧵 rooseveltinstitute.org/publications...

New Substack post: The wage compression that persisted. arindube.substack.com/p/the-wage-c...

Some countries that have prosecuted or threatened to prosecute central bankers for the purpose of political intimidation or punishment for monetary policy decisions: Argentina, Russia, Turkey, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.

Video message from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell: www.youtube.com/watch?v=KckG... www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/s...

So a CBS Evening News reporter actually did a pretty solid breakdown of the ICE murder video, talking to a former agent who details all the ways Ross messed up. And yet: It didn’t air on the actual show tonight. CBS did post it to YouTube—and it has nearly 800k views already youtu.be/6ywLEESFDu0?...

So much of what people say they yearn for is things you get from a high-trust society; trusting neighbors and strangers not to harm you, trusting the govt and business not to be crooked, etc. But worldwide there’s no good correlation between that and how religious/traditional a country is.

So much of the issues related to transit governance is downstream from the fact that both the boards of these agencies and many of advocates in this space believe that transit is a welfare program that acts as “transportation of last resort” as opposed to a viable, affordable alternative to cars.

My pet peeve about using GDP as a measure of national economic power. I suggest an adjustment that may get closer to reality. www.piie.com/blogs/realti...