I try to control my expressions of being aghast at the Trump administration, but I am utterly aghast that someone like Laura Loomer is able to come anywhere near within the influence of the White House.
He's a fifth-percentile worst person in the world, but in mostly kind of normal ways? Untrustworthy, disloyal, unhelpful, unfriendly, discourteous, cruel, disobedient, malcontent, lavish, cowardly, sloppy, irreverent--in my worst moments, I've been all of these things to some degree.
Loomer is a whole other kettle of wax. Ball of fish. Whatever.
In what way? Do you think there's not going to be at least some push for another Trump term. I don't know how far it will go, but I cannot imagine Trump and his disciples not at least giving it some shot.
Honestly what is the point of consolidating so much power to yourself if you're just going to give it away in a couple years?
Admin II has pretty much vindicated the most cringe resist libs— if you had measured expectations calibrated to Admin I going in, you now have egg on your face.
Well, I’m pleased to announce that all y’all will be seeing less of me, as I start a new job tomorrow! About damn time and I’m ready for this new chapter.
Well, I had quit pharmacy during Covid bc of the hiring frenzy in tech and thought I’d try my hand at that. Went for a masters in CS and got it, but a little too slowly and also realized I didn’t have much of a talent for it. Like I can code, but not as well as someone half my age. But I’ve applied for healthcare IT jobs since graduation, thinking that’s where I would bring my best strengths, but without any interviews. The market fell out on the entry levels. So I’ve gone back to pharmacy. I feel lucky because a lot of people are losing their jobs right now that Rite Aid went out of business!
From the Politico article: "Spear did not return calls or texts but looped in a senior HHS leader who called Playbook. The senior HHS official did not deny that Kennedy is weighing a presidential bid."
Anyone want to take bets on whether the "senior HHS official" is actually RFK, Jr. himself?
Sorry, but I did want clarification because, while I don't think Trump will be permitted to (unconstitutionally) run for a third term, I could more easily picture Trump picking RFK, Jr. for VP than I can picture Vance picking him.
Oh it's happening (if he's alive in 2028)... It's more a question as to whether or not the Bari Weisses of the world are going to rationalize it. I could see that aspect going either way.
After Matt triggered a grab bag of comments around cultural issues today with just that one quote from that union guy, a hypothesis formed in my mind as to test how well cultural issues will play with the public:
Is this a position that would be sustainable to regularly air on a broadcast network?
Unfortunately, this is an analogy that's quickly becoming antiquated with the rise of streaming. And sometimes broadcast TV sanded off the edges of what should be perfectly acceptable discourse too far. But in order to have traditional mass media be popular enough to be sustainable completely on ad revenue, it had to target a very, very wide audience in order to get people to watch. Or, a big tent, as one might. But this just came to my mind within the hour, so I'm welcome to some other thoughts.
The pre-internet media cartel was in many ways responsible for suppressing the electorate’s worst impulses and making sure that elites didn’t go too far in expressive cosmopolitan values.
There's something under-considered about regular television in general--almost no one I know socially (almost uniformly the type of upper middle class progressive we all know and love and are) has cable, but obviously a ton of people watch TV.
I've had cable over the past decade or so through living in a condo and occasionally will watch a particular football game or something. Even at peak Great Awokening, South Park and Family Guy (which of both made some pretty not-woke jokes about trans people, among others) were just......on regular television, in the middle of the day. Then on the other hand, you'd see a bunch of, like, PrEP commercials.
I think even stripping out cable, no one in my social circles are watching The Rookie or NCIS or whatever.
But they're definitely being watched. Doing a Wikipedia search, a show called Watson, starring Morris Chestnut(!) is pulling like 6.5 million viewers an episode.
Elite Progs and libs should be watching network to connect with the common man.
I think the man on the street just loves this stuff. Sincerely, off the top of my head, I can name like: Blue Bloods, Chicago Fire and PD, The Rookie, Fire Country, a show literally called 9-1-1.
Slop didn't originate from AI, hard working Americans collaborated for hours to give us these shows.
Yes. We have cable almost exclusively to watch sports. It is the best way to see the most sports, but there are still games only on streaming services, and we aren't going to deal with the complication and expense of that.
Streaming-only, on the wrong day, against the wrong teams, in Europe, on the Moon...
Saturday afternoon and evening is when college football is, and your team mostly plays the same teams your grandpappy's team played, and the game is on your local broadcast, anESPN, or your Fox Sports Regional. This was so easy. How did you cock it up so badly?
Easily the most uninteresting group of "rivalries" in the NFL, and it's not even close. The only thing close to compelling is actually pretty insulting, with the Titans committing stolen valor on the regular with trotting out the Oilers uniforms as their own.
I think it's gonna be pretty good this year, only the Colts are bad bad.
Sorta feels like all the teams are on the upswing - if Colts can grab Nussmeier or Klubnik (assuming Manning stays but crazy if he comes out) in 26, every team in that div is pretty interesting.
A pretty fervent and detailed pushback against the "conscientiousness is cratering among the young" take that was all the rage in disturbing people last week, including among several people on my main and trusted Twitter list.
This was really good. "Relative change in strength" is a BS way to present the data in my opinion and another issue not even touched on is that this is self-reported.
Maybe the younger generation notices their neuroticism (anxiety) more because it's more commonly discussed in society nowadays, similar to how the number of gay men went up over time?
I'm not certain this is the case but it's worth exploring
Self-reported in the sense that all Big 5 personality tests are self reported though, yeah? I think that if there's a consistent change across people reporting behavior that is less conscientious (example behaviors might be "I am thorough and pay attention to detail" or "I am organized and like to keep things tidy") that's probably still a problem
Even if people's actual behavior isn't changing it shows that people's self perception is being skewed, which would also be bad (if not nearly as bad).
The most conscientious people hold themselves to the highest standards and young people are probably more inclined to see how far short of the mark they fall and thus because of their relatively higher conscientiousness they tend to give themselves low marks on conscientiousness, which is solid evidence for how much their conscientiousness has increased over time.
The self-report aspect is addressed a bit in his interview with Derek Thompson. I believe it was about how non self-report correlated factors also increased over that time. Not sure how strong the argument is, though.
And it was being pushed by John Burn-Murdoch, the supposed "data journalist" at the FT. As I think I've said a few times now, his job is to basically make things up and have charts go viral. I find it alarming how many people on Twitter just retweet whatever he made up that week.
"But in an exchange on X, the article author John Burn-Murdoch acknowledged engaging in a lot of data manipulation to get those graphs from the raw form into the form published in the FT. He even acknowledges that engaging in different types of data manipulation could make the graphs look widely variable in outcome..... He stated he sought to provide a version that was less dramatic, but I’m skeptical of that given all his claims of "troubling decline", "sustained erosion" "collapsing conscientiousness" and “freefall.” Not to mention that, of course, the graphs he published appear to show a far more dramatic decline in conscientiousness than the raw data.
I accessed the UAS data myself. Using their interactive portal, it’s clear that the decline in conscientiousness is far more modest than Mr. Burn-Murdoch purported"
So I don't know if I would call this "detailed," and it seems like he's more interested in pushing back in any way he can than in getting at the truth.
I agree with him that it doesn't appear to be a large decrease in conscientiousness, and I agree that "cratering" as a description is unsupportable.
However, the computations he gives are not convincing, and I think actually rather misleading. He says that the effect size is about .4. (That is not very big, but also per the article this trait is supposed to be primarily genetic and very stable. So if that is the case, then even a small change might be big news.) Then he goes on to do this ridiculous translation to r^2, which I think actively harms one's understanding of the strength of the effect. If you just plot two normal distributions with the same variance that differ in their mean by .4 of a standard deviation, you'll see that there is a lot of overlap between them, but that they are noticeably different. Going through this rigamarole of translating an effect size to a point-biserial correlation to get 4% of variance explained is obfuscatory (IMHO).
I agree with some other critiques of the FT claims, but I don't think this one is particularly strong.
Fascists always turn on their own and eat their own. The fact that a glorified social media influencer even has this much access to the white house and thinks that she is some legit member of this administration shows how much of a joke this country is becoming.
This is almost as cringe as Trump talking about giving himself an award at the Kennedy center. Next thing you know she'll be in the charge of the department of truth. The fact that we are even having a conversation about a potential Trump third term like it is a possibility future shows how much these MAGA people treat the constitution like toilet paper, and how far we've descended into just vibes and meme wars.
I just keep wondering whether the questioning attorney was playing dumb or if he was genuinely unfamiliar with use of the term "roast beef sandwich" as a euphemism for an NSFW expression relating to female anatomy.
I haven’t read the entire deposition, but the interviewing attorney did explicitly ask if she meant it as a sexual insult iirc. Loomer responded like a rather stupid child and said she would never insult someone with a euphemism.
I increasingly believe Slow Borers have nothing approaching consensus on what you want to bore slowly toward, except a narrow menu of land use reforms. You also mostly have a distaste for the grubbiness of politicking and its “inside baseball” aspects. As a person who loves backslapping and handshaking and the theatrics of politics far more than the median Slow Borer (who has nothing but disdain for those dolts who hold elected office), I find it very amusing how little agreement there is, for example, on just what you want the Democratic and Republican parties to be.
I'm kind of torn on whether it would be unwise versus absolutely necessary to put the members of this administration up against the wall for their nakedly unconstitutional behavior should the Democrats take office. On the one hand, it would potentially normalize tit-for-tat purges in a massive defection spiral making everything worse. On the other hand, this manner of naked lawlessnes and defection *cannot* be normalized. A (DoJ-mediated) Night of the Long Knives[1] followed by the same boring business-as-usual governing[2] of every non-Trump administration may actually be necessary here to get the worst of the worst (and preferably their quislings like Rubio) incapacitated in as many different ways as humanly possible.
[1] Well, months of the Long Knives, however long DoJ prosecution takes.
[2] As usual as it can be in view of AI disruption.
Obviously this comment is partially in jest, but I do think we have a habit of forgetting there is no "winning" the culture war (unless we're committed enough to incarcerate/exile/execute the losers). There's never going to be a sweeping realignment where all the Trumpers suddenly wake up, realize they've been fooled and vote for Democrats.
I would like to see the Republicans and the Democrats both defeated, but I realize there are practical limits to how many parties can lose an election at the same time.
I want the Democratic and Republican parties to be sane, rational, respectful of small-d democratic norms (like, if you lose an election you must concede gracefully, and if you violate that rule we’ll cast you out), and genuinely concerned with the well-being of Americans and doing the right thing as they understand it.
They will still disagree strongly on many things, because sometimes the right thing to do isn’t obvious and there are tradeoffs, like, one party would be the Chesterton’s Fence party and the other would be in favor of bold but potentially risky reform.
Oh, and both parties would commit to running honest candidates of decent character, not con artists and douchebags.
You can’t call for Democrats to be the “big tent party” and then complain that we’ve got nothing approaching consensus. Yeah, that’s what being a big tent party means! Probably the closest we have to a consensus here at SB is that many of us* agree with Matt Y’s Common Sense Democratic Manifesto.
Hey, as much like I want the "if we just run a socialist in a red state who only focuses on economics instead of cultural issues" to run and lose by 10 to show that no, people in red states are cultural reactionaries and don't want to ally with the Other, I also want Matt and everybody else here to get their well-funded pro-life pro-gun anti-transgender kids in sports of the gender they think they are, and the same on Trump on immigration but no masked ICE agents who basically acts ashamed to be a Democrat and spends their whole campaign talking how much they're not like a normal Democrat in Missouri & South Carolina just so that persona can lose by 10 to show again, people in red states want Republicans who aren't allied w/ the Other.
Democrats are stuck as the party of feminists, black people, immigrants, LGBT people, and college educated professionals, because people know that.
Deal w/ that fact politically instead of pretending its 1995 and I say that both of Matt and some of my fellow lefties.
I also bet a candidate that ran on Matt's Common Sense manifesto would have issues in even a decently red state in a primary, because again, people who care enough about the Democratic party to vote in primaries don't want to vote for a Democrat who seems to be against their values and doesn't like them.
What does it mean to deal with this fact "politically" if the party of black people, feminists, immigrants, lgbtqia+, and college educated professionals is the minority of voters?
What does it mean, further, if you have defections in the LGB and immigrant and black parts of that coalition?
Isn't that the spot we're in? I see myself as being on the left wing of the party on social and especially economic issues, and I'll be a straight ticket Democratic voter until I die. But I'm comfortable admitting my views are not particularly popular. Why's that so hard? Wouldn't you rather smuggle your agenda in through the winning party than chopping your coalition to pieces and getting left out in the cold?
Have charismatic candidates who will over some of the other people and also be thankful not every non-college educated person is as reactionary as political pundits claim at times.
But, I'd be fine w/ "smuggling" the agenda. Like, while there was more pushback from the evil Groups than people pretend now, basically everybody was fine w/ Obama's kayfabe on gay marriage in 2008 (even though I also think Obama's questionnaire about gay marriage in the 90s could've been that cycle's ACLU questionnaire on transgender prisoners if we had 2025 media in 2008).
But, Matt and other centrists have made it clear they don't want to "smuggle through" progressive agenda through - they want a much more centrist Democratic party and its up to people like Matt and other centrists to convince normie Democrats thats a good thing and so far, as Matt himself admitted on the Politix podcast and on Twitter a week or so back, the moderates are failing as the party voters are moving to the left.
Maybe there's a cause and effect question here. Do the Yglesias's of the world want a more moderate party because they think it's the most convenient way to secure political power? Afterall, this was more or less the "Groups" playbook right, no one ever thought they were voting on the particulars of trans sports policy or whatever. The intraparty fight is a safer arena to get what you want.
Or do they want a more moderate party because they hold moderate views?
I think Matt's probably the former though, obviously old people are conservative, and he's getting old, so there's some blending here. But he has written that he doesn't really care what agenda items get "moderated" or which groups get thrown under the bus, only that some do.
I wonder if the party's move to the left is from shedding a lot of "moderate" or social conservative black americans and a bunch of latin american immigrants, and just men.
On some level, I think it's not that important. Thermostatic reaction will dominate every other factor in upcoming elections.
"On some level, I think it's not that important. Thermostatic reaction will dominate every other factor in upcoming elections."
Right - I think the most likely result in 2028 is something like a Raphael Warnock/[Insert White Governor or Senator Here - Preferably a Woman] ticket that actually isn't that different from Kamala - less friendly to Israel, a bit more economically populist, but not really any less woke, fairly easily defeats J.D. Vance in part due to a drop in turnout in many of the counties in places like rural Wisconsin that Trump got a surge out of.
I'm probably one of the few people in America who think the Democratic Party is...fine. I think parts of the leadership are being dumb and it needs to be aggressive about post-Trump prosecutions and such, but as far as a center-left party thats competing to win national elections and having to balance the needs of all coalitional partners, it could be doing much worse, even if it can't win a Senate seat in Missouri.
I'm probably closest to Jesse Ewiak and probably to the left as I actually agree with Freddie DeBoer more times than not but I think its a fact that that the structure of the Democratic party has always been more relational and coalitional at a structural level than the Republican party. That means when the majority of the party is non-white, majority female and overall less wealthy(though things have been changing) the party needs to cater who are most likely to vote for it. No offense to the slow borers here but by some of the surveys of the readership here, which is more wealthy and more male that most democrats(though educational attainment is probably close) the average slow borer is a bit out of step with what the Democratic base wants from their politicians. The biggest difference between the Democrats and Republicans is that MAGA is the core constituency but Democrats are more split between the hard left and electability democrats as the echelon insights eight political tribes (https://echeloninsights.com/tribes/) noted. However, it still remains the fact that the hard left and hard right are the core of both parties. Democrats are always less organized and you need to motivate the disenchanted parts of the base to vote because when it comes to voting, the most engaged do still tend to vote but not at the same rate as the Republicans and the moderate faction does not have the same numbers to win if you can't turn out the "young and disillusioned" who are more turned off by the weakness of the party than the more extreme parts who have the energy. The fact of the matter of the Republicans are a narrower coalition but have always voted at higher rate even if they don't particularly like their candidate but Democrats don't and the "young and disillusioned" probably split off from the hard left and they need to be turned out because the more moderate and electability minded democrats will still show up even if its AOC but the left is unlikely to show up for Schumer. The same dynamic is not true of Republicans.
To be fair the Democratic party has never had a great unifying consensus while the GOP has for the most part voted in lockstep. Despite different demographic and ideological changes within the parties, the structural underpinnings remain. As Will Rogers once said “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.”
Look, I have made many comments, beautiful comments, the best comments — just the other day, a gentleman approached me, strong, right of central casting; he was probably a Marine or a firefighter, he was definitely not an illegal, and he shakes my hand (he had big strong hands) and says to me with tears in his eyes “Sir, will make you more comments like these comments you make, for our country?” And I think on that basis I am the most qualified, the best qualified, to judge comments and people who make them, and we are going to build a world-class comments section, and Mexico will pay for it, not Crooked Hillary, and our paywall will be a big beautiful paywall, very beautiful.
I think the general consensus would be that we’d prefer the more honest and policy focused people win elections, so I guess that really translates to us hating the voters for refusing to care much about either trait.
I found this on the Ezra Klein subreddit a paper showing a lot of people don’t believe adding housing makes the price go down. I feel like there’s an intuitiveness to this that I have to really fight to make myself unbelieve it. In part because there’s no place in America with cheap good housing and in part because of like the seen and the unseen. Yes I see the new luxury homes but I don’t see the filtering down of older stock and we don’t see population trends only the new construction somewhere.
It seems to me if there was a way to make thinking like an economist and skeptical of our zero sum intuitions the default setting it would be really good but may as well wish to fly.
I mean yes this kind of thought experiment and reading broadly were what got to me. But like I can't remember any time in my life where the price of housing has ever gone down. It feels genuinely hard to believe it would actually really in real life happen.
Oddly I was quite grown but I left the country in 2009-2014 to be a foreign English teacher and I didn't really experience any of the Great Recession first hand even if I was kind of a refugee from its effects.
No, they probably lived in an expensive coastal city and were renting at the time. The crash was concentrated in owner-occupied homes in sunbelt suburbs, and took time to percolate to rents and superstar cities - enough time that in many of these places it was completely obscured by the longer term increase.
I actually you overrate how much people understand it generally - it's just people not understanding supply 'n' demand about say, Playstation's don't massively effect politics.
I mean, our inability to see counterfactuals makes it hard to bear witness. I’ve lived in a place that’s built a metric fuckton of new housing while rents and prices have increased rapidly. And I’ve lived in a place with no housing shortage and fairly stagnant wages where rents and prices have doubled in 15 years for no real reason. It’s easy to come to the conclusion that it’s greed or monopoly when you don’t see the counterfactual
How do rents double when there's significant amounts of vacant housing available? Don't the owners of those vacant units try to undercut things? Or do they just lose money altruistically?
In Memphis, I wouldn’t be surprised if to some extent there are landlords that would rather let places stay empty than lower rent out of fear they’d get the criminal element or destructive people. But then I also know a guy that’s part of a slum lord private equity company (a classmate of mine’s husband that’s a piece of shit)
You tell me! I think that in Memphis it really does have to do with cartel-ish behavior. There are still dirt cheap places but they’re straight up dangerous, as in nothing in Seattle or Tacoma comparable.
I mean, your $9/hour job in 2012 probably makes $13 now, but rents have doubled. All of the wage increases are captured by rent. My old apartment ($375/month in 2011) is $1150/month now. I paid $125k for my first house in 2011, its current zestimate is $240k. There are no new good white collar jobs - FedEx has been laying off rather than hiring - and there’s been a continuous population exodus from the city.
I mean some increases in rent are justified by inflation due to increased maintenance costs, but not a doubling.
And then Seattle, JFC. It’s the Yimbiest city in the US. The cityscape has tremendously changed even since I’ve lived there. 5 over 1s and townhouses and ADUs oh my. Population and median income and rent and home prices have gone up by a ton in just 7 years. But looking at the changed cityscape it’s no wonder people are looking for someone to blame because the YIMBY promise of more affordable housing just hasn’t materialized *relative to baseline, not counterfactual*
In 2000, the median existing single-family home price in the West (which includes the Seattle MSA) was $177,800. The average price was $205,700.
By 2010, the median home price in Seattle had risen to $409,172.
In 2020, the median home price in Seattle reached $749,417, an 83.2% increase since 2010.
In 2024, Seattle's median home price was $831,457.
Whether those are accurate is anyone’s guess, but I can’t do a deep dive rn. They feel about right. Of course population and AMI and minimum wages increased a lot over that time too.
My point is that people don’t exist in a Schrodinger’s superposition with the counterfactual, they experience the change relative to baseline, nominally. I’m as YIMBY as Matt or the median slow borer. But I do get why people say it’s not enough. People are like my wage doubled, but I still can’t buy a house and still have a roommate, etc. And they’ve built so much in my neighborhood and now it sucks! (Really they’re nostalgic for an old Seattle that never really existed or was only cool bc they were 17, but whatever lol)
This actually gets at something that YIMBYs overlook which is there is a pretty significant preference for SFRs among most buyers for a variety of reasons... and Seattle can't build more SFRs since there's no space. Seattle building a lot of apartments has succeeded in keeping the rent in apartments a lot more reasonable than SF despite comparable salaries. But single family homes in close-in neighborhoods--you can't really make more of those with upzoning. So the price of those will go up as the population increases and salaries go up.
In Florida, sure. Not really in Seattle (where the tech boom prevailed over the housing crisis) or Memphis (where prices stagnated for a while but didn’t drop significantly). You could use 2005 as the baseline if you wanted
"The average sales price for homes in the combined Puget Sound metropolitan areas (including Seattle) declined by 14% to $361,800 in 2009. This represents a 21% decrease from the peak average sales price recorded in the 12 months leading up to February 2008,"
Really? I didn’t know that and hadn’t even visited at that point in my life, but had read it was pretty much unscathed from the crisis. That being said, the median sales price 361800×1.14 = 437778 (I know that’s not technically the way to calculate it, but I’m in an airport sans pen/paper and it’s close enough), and it’s more than double that now despite being as close to yimbytopia as anywhere else in the US besides maybe Houston
I know Austin showed some decline over the last couple years, but my instinct is that barring a massive increase in building the best you'll see is nominal stabilization and decline with respect to inflation, not actual retrenchment.
Yeah typically builders will not knowingly build themselves into like a 15% rent drop. What happened in Austin was there were a bunch of apartments already under construction as builders anticiapted a continuation of the 1-2% population growth that had been happening from 2005-2019.
But with high interest rates going up a lot of people decided not to move--Austin is only marginally more populous than it was in 2019--you end up with a bunch of supply coming online and a reduction in demand, and therefore a large rent drop.
"It doesn't make the price go down, it makes people move to where the prices are lower" seems to be an efficient explanation. (Efficient isn't the word I want, someone help me, it's on the tip of my tongue...)
Unless you're building in areas that won't be gentrified immediately because of their proximity to desirable locales, it's not going to actually drive effective cost down in a way that people notice. Richer people will simply take advantage to make a move that's in their price range. If you keep adding housing in expensive areas, they just notice that you have to move to an even worse place to find affordable housing. And people hate being forced to move.
It would help if you're house hunting in an area where a lot of new units are going up. Before the new units the realtor takes you to some real shitholes and sweet Jebus they are asking top dollar. Then the new units go up and suddenly the sellers of the dated poorly maintained units are forced to cut prices.
I’m reading (and from Zillow stalking this feels correct) that in Seattle townhouses and condos are about to decline in price due to a glut. I’m hoping so due to wanting to move my MIL up here into a condo soon
If anyone needs a reminder of how vile a person Loomer is, here she is complaining that a medal of honor recipient was recognized by the Department of the Army
I did not have "roundabouts are libertarian" on my bingo card today, but it's a pretty decent argument--they really are good at self regulating intersections. But what libertarians would absolutely hate is that in order to build more roundabouts in existing developed areas, it very much would require eminent domain to pull it off.
This may be right in some sense (and thanks for sharing!), but I think the libertarian framing here is kind of comically dumb. Multiple-party conflict of a common resource is like the central example of where you want coordination mechanisms and you can't trust unmediated individually-selfish behaviors to create a socially efficient optimum, which is why we have escalating mechanisms of exactly that kind of coordination (uncontrolled, yield, stop sign, traffic lights) when it comes to intersection control based on the likelihood of conflict and why norms of not running a red are incredibly important in preventing gridlock (and I'd like to see more iron-fisted enforcement of same to keep those norms strong.)
Basing an argument on the desirability of roundabouts on the grounds that they "ease traffic congestion in perhaps the most libertarian way possible: by empowering motorists to make their own decision at an intersection," with respect to *exactly the class of situation in which this a fucking terrible idea for incredibly basis Econ 101 reasons and we need cooperation rather than defection for anything to work* is extremely difficult to respect. (also, people still do have to let you in, you can't forgo cooperative obligations here.)
More substantively, seems maybe worse for pedestrian crossings in addition to taking a lot more space, although those are empirical questions (my feelings on roundabouts aren't especially strong and I'm probably more in favor of them than against by default.)
A+ excellent comment, and have an extra like for pointing out that, compared with intersections with either traffic lights or four-way stop signs, roundabouts absolutely suck ass for pedestrians to navigate, and they’re not so hot for cyclists either.
It can be a bit nervous for more novice cyclists, but biking in the middle of one is actually quite relatively safe, because the roundabout naturally forces traffic to slow down.
I only cycled around a few roundabouts, and each time I was terrified of being hit by a car entering or leaving the roundabout. Sure, traffic slows down, but nowhere near slow enough to protect me, the cyclist, from serious injury or death in case of a collision.
The one thing I will add is on pedestrian crossings: they are still pretty simple, they're placed in front of each leg of the roundabout, and they make pedestrians more visible, which is a good thing. No one should ever be allowed to enter the middle circle itself.
But I thought the whole point of roundabouts is that they keep traffic *moving*? No driver has to stop, they just slow down and yield in a graceful dance as drivers enter and leave the roundabout.
But if you add pedestrian crossings to the “legs” of the roundabout, then cars have to come to a dead stop, and depending on the timing of the stops (do they involve lights or are you just supposed to watch out for pedestrians and stop as needed?) that can bollix up everything else.
Not what you mentioned but also I think roundabouts yield more fender benders but fewer fatalities, which goes to one of my hobby horses that a lot of people are driving too expensive cars.
Indeed, although there's still a dependency on cars slowing down in a way that affords more discretion to drivers than a stop sign does and it's a substantially longer path since you have to do a circumferential traverse.
Substantially longer on a left turn, slightly longer going straight, but actually shorter turning right. And the other nice thing about roundabouts is that U-turns are automatically allowed and very practical.
Roundabouts are like libertarianism in that they’re only really workable in high trust environments, and American driving culture is, uh, very much not that.
I think traffic lights rely more on high trust. In roundabouts, things are set up so that everyone can make things work and muddle through, regardless of what anyone else does, but at a traffic light, you really have to trust that the people coming up to the red light are going to stop.
But from the article, it doesn't sound like anything has actually been built there or that any construction has even started on anything.
One of the stereotypes about the "tax-and-spend liberals" for a long time is that they burn through taxpayer money and don't produce anything and it's a reason many don't vote Democrat and I'm not sure how any of this contradicts that stereotype.
"“Renewable energy projects in the area have seen such a significant boom that Texarkana College now offers dedicated courses in solar panel installation,” Zikai Li, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago, writes in a paper that was published last month, “Unrequited Love: Estimating the Electoral Effect of a Place-Based Green Subsidy with a 2D Regression Discontinuity Design.”"
I wonder if firms actually making a legit* profit on solar installations actually value course completion other than as a signal that a person has a modest and inchoate desire to do the job.
It's going to be Direct TV installation jobs all over again. You're a independent contractor, provide your own vehicle, insurance, and tools, buy your materials from the firm, they sell you 'leads', and you quit on 6 weeks with less money than you started with.
It doesn't sound like they even got from announcements about planning to ribbon cutting, let alone hiring anyone.
And there's this:
"...During the four years from January 2021 to January 2025 — the years of Biden’s presidency — the unemployment rate in the Texarkana metropolitan area fell to 4.2 percent from 6.8 percent..."
No shit, Sherlock, that was the end of the pandemic. You want to attribute that to Biden, knock yourself out, but the citizens of Texarkana don't seem to be that foolish.
One thing that I noticed is that the order of the teams you select matter: the earlier selected teams were given more weight. When I selected the Broncos and then Red Sox, it put me in Meh, but when I reversed them, it put me in Pleasant. (And Pleasant I think is accurate for me, with 3 Super Bowls and 4 World Series to celebrate in my lifetime, that's likely way above average.)
92 - deep woe. Padres fan, ex-Chargers fan (there is no way to tell the site that I was a fan of the *San Diego* Chargers and disavowed them after they blackmailed and abandoned my hometown for the inner ring of hell). There is also the missing piece that I follow USA Mens National soccer and that is another dark pit.
As a Warriors and A's fan who doesn't have a particular NFL team I love, I earned a 30 (Pleasant), but it's certainly skewed by the Warrior fandom since your team moving away from your state is the ultimate misery.
Oakland's got to be up there in contending for teams that have seen major sports teams leave them. The Raiders (fuck 'em!) even moved away *twice*! I can't think of any other team that's done that.
It's tough to measure college teams when the grand majority of them have a snowball's chance in hell of winning it all. You'd have to factor in things like conference titles. And even that's dicey: Oregon won the Big Ten last season, but would be in no mood at all to talk about what happened in the playoffs.
(And yes, "Oregon won the Big Ten" is a sentence that would make no sense whatsoever even a few years ago.)
Fucking tragic that I didn't know off the top of my head that Oregon won the Big Ten, when I live in core ancestral Big Ten country and have been to Autzen a couple two tree times myself.
78: Bears, Cubs, Bulls, Blackhawks (in that order). If I switch Bulls and Blackhawks it goes down to 72. Seems accurate to me as a mostly miserable Chicago sports fan
The very first team I ever rooted for as a kid was the Bird/McHale/Parish era Celtics. I hardly ever follow the NBA as an adult so I can't seriously claim them now. But I just happened to decide when it was time to watch baseball "OK, this Boston team's cool, let's try following this other one.". The Rockies didn't exist yet, and it was a mild surprise that the allure of Ken Griffey Jr. didn't suck me into the Mariners.
I try to control my expressions of being aghast at the Trump administration, but I am utterly aghast that someone like Laura Loomer is able to come anywhere near within the influence of the White House.
I mean, have you seen the president?
He's a fifth-percentile worst person in the world, but in mostly kind of normal ways? Untrustworthy, disloyal, unhelpful, unfriendly, discourteous, cruel, disobedient, malcontent, lavish, cowardly, sloppy, irreverent--in my worst moments, I've been all of these things to some degree.
Loomer is a whole other kettle of wax. Ball of fish. Whatever.
Shout out to to the Scout Law. I wish I had more likes to give.
His vindictiveness and utter lack of shame bump him up a few awfulness points
I lost it at “third campaign” tbh
Yeah that’s the buried lede here
Wouldn’t it be the fourth?
In what way? Do you think there's not going to be at least some push for another Trump term. I don't know how far it will go, but I cannot imagine Trump and his disciples not at least giving it some shot.
Honestly what is the point of consolidating so much power to yourself if you're just going to give it away in a couple years?
The more she’s the face of it the better tbh. She looks like such a freak
Don't worry, I'm sure Republicans will need to moderate and no longer associate with Laura Loomer if they want to remain in power.
I wish this was true smh
Admin II has pretty much vindicated the most cringe resist libs— if you had measured expectations calibrated to Admin I going in, you now have egg on your face.
Well, I’m pleased to announce that all y’all will be seeing less of me, as I start a new job tomorrow! About damn time and I’m ready for this new chapter.
Remember to win a fight on the first day so they know not to mess with you.
Of course. Must establish dominance.🤪
Congratulation!
Thank you sir
Good luck and Godspeed.
I’ve been out of the workforce in my field for a fairly long while, so I’m a little bit anxious. But I’m ready and grateful.
Congrats! Can you drop a hint about what your general field is?
Well, I had quit pharmacy during Covid bc of the hiring frenzy in tech and thought I’d try my hand at that. Went for a masters in CS and got it, but a little too slowly and also realized I didn’t have much of a talent for it. Like I can code, but not as well as someone half my age. But I’ve applied for healthcare IT jobs since graduation, thinking that’s where I would bring my best strengths, but without any interviews. The market fell out on the entry levels. So I’ve gone back to pharmacy. I feel lucky because a lot of people are losing their jobs right now that Rite Aid went out of business!
Congratulations! And how dare you make us your second priority!
Oh I’m sure y’all will still see me, Slow Boring comments are my high brow social media addiction
From the Politico article: "Spear did not return calls or texts but looped in a senior HHS leader who called Playbook. The senior HHS official did not deny that Kennedy is weighing a presidential bid."
Anyone want to take bets on whether the "senior HHS official" is actually RFK, Jr. himself?
RFKjr thinking he would be a serious presidential candidate may be his craziest belief, and this is a strong statement!
I wouldn’t be totally surprised if he ends up with the VP slot
Running with Vance or are you imagining Trump replacing Vance with RFK, Jr. for another run?
I wish this were the one sane place on the internet where we could just ignore empty gumflapping about a hypothetical third run. Alas.
Sorry, but I did want clarification because, while I don't think Trump will be permitted to (unconstitutionally) run for a third term, I could more easily picture Trump picking RFK, Jr. for VP than I can picture Vance picking him.
I'll grant you that one.
My strong suspicion is that everyone else in the Cabinet, and Vance, hates the ever-living fuck out of RFKjr.
Who would stop Trump, the Supreme Court?
Oh it's happening (if he's alive in 2028)... It's more a question as to whether or not the Bari Weisses of the world are going to rationalize it. I could see that aspect going either way.
Reluctantly and with great sorrow, in order to prevent the catastrophic damage that would occur under President Wes Moore or Pete Buttigieg.
With Vance
Stunned. Exceptionally stunned.
I mean it isn't nearly as crazy as *Donald Trump* believing he could be elected president, and here we are...
RFK leaving HHS to run for president would honestly be a Christmas miracle. Let me know when I can donate.
“It’s MAGA id versus MAGA superego.”
MAGA has a superego?
The largest, most golden ego. Absolutely stupendous ego. No one had ever seen an ego so huge and big.
After Matt triggered a grab bag of comments around cultural issues today with just that one quote from that union guy, a hypothesis formed in my mind as to test how well cultural issues will play with the public:
Is this a position that would be sustainable to regularly air on a broadcast network?
Unfortunately, this is an analogy that's quickly becoming antiquated with the rise of streaming. And sometimes broadcast TV sanded off the edges of what should be perfectly acceptable discourse too far. But in order to have traditional mass media be popular enough to be sustainable completely on ad revenue, it had to target a very, very wide audience in order to get people to watch. Or, a big tent, as one might. But this just came to my mind within the hour, so I'm welcome to some other thoughts.
The pre-internet media cartel was in many ways responsible for suppressing the electorate’s worst impulses and making sure that elites didn’t go too far in expressive cosmopolitan values.
There's something under-considered about regular television in general--almost no one I know socially (almost uniformly the type of upper middle class progressive we all know and love and are) has cable, but obviously a ton of people watch TV.
I've had cable over the past decade or so through living in a condo and occasionally will watch a particular football game or something. Even at peak Great Awokening, South Park and Family Guy (which of both made some pretty not-woke jokes about trans people, among others) were just......on regular television, in the middle of the day. Then on the other hand, you'd see a bunch of, like, PrEP commercials.
Sports really seem like the main reason anyone under 45 would still pay for cable.
Live entertainment is really the only thing that can be sustained on a linear TV format in the long run.
Thus, why both UFC & WWE got multi-billion dollars recently.
That's probably mostly true, but there are a lot of other people in those households where the 54 year old pays for it.
I think even stripping out cable, no one in my social circles are watching The Rookie or NCIS or whatever.
But they're definitely being watched. Doing a Wikipedia search, a show called Watson, starring Morris Chestnut(!) is pulling like 6.5 million viewers an episode.
Elite Progs and libs should be watching network to connect with the common man.
Somewhat related: I would love to read a 10,000 word deep dive from the right writer on "first responder" culture.
I think the man on the street just loves this stuff. Sincerely, off the top of my head, I can name like: Blue Bloods, Chicago Fire and PD, The Rookie, Fire Country, a show literally called 9-1-1.
Slop didn't originate from AI, hard working Americans collaborated for hours to give us these shows.
And most sports are doing their level best to fuck themselves up, too!
Yes. We have cable almost exclusively to watch sports. It is the best way to see the most sports, but there are still games only on streaming services, and we aren't going to deal with the complication and expense of that.
Streaming-only, on the wrong day, against the wrong teams, in Europe, on the Moon...
Saturday afternoon and evening is when college football is, and your team mostly plays the same teams your grandpappy's team played, and the game is on your local broadcast, anESPN, or your Fox Sports Regional. This was so easy. How did you cock it up so badly?
I'm just waiting for all AFC South games to stream exclusively on Shudder.
Shudder is exactly how I feel when I think about the AFC South! Amirite folks!
Easily the most uninteresting group of "rivalries" in the NFL, and it's not even close. The only thing close to compelling is actually pretty insulting, with the Titans committing stolen valor on the regular with trotting out the Oilers uniforms as their own.
I think it's gonna be pretty good this year, only the Colts are bad bad.
Sorta feels like all the teams are on the upswing - if Colts can grab Nussmeier or Klubnik (assuming Manning stays but crazy if he comes out) in 26, every team in that div is pretty interesting.
will and grace caused fascism in america
A pretty fervent and detailed pushback against the "conscientiousness is cratering among the young" take that was all the rage in disturbing people last week, including among several people on my main and trusted Twitter list.
https://grimoiremanor.substack.com/p/no-conscientiousness-hasnt-collaped
This was really good. "Relative change in strength" is a BS way to present the data in my opinion and another issue not even touched on is that this is self-reported.
Maybe the younger generation notices their neuroticism (anxiety) more because it's more commonly discussed in society nowadays, similar to how the number of gay men went up over time?
I'm not certain this is the case but it's worth exploring
Self-reported in the sense that all Big 5 personality tests are self reported though, yeah? I think that if there's a consistent change across people reporting behavior that is less conscientious (example behaviors might be "I am thorough and pay attention to detail" or "I am organized and like to keep things tidy") that's probably still a problem
Even if people's actual behavior isn't changing it shows that people's self perception is being skewed, which would also be bad (if not nearly as bad).
Hmm, would it necessarily be bad if their self-perception was becoming more negative but also closer to dispassionately correct? I'm not sure.
The most conscientious people hold themselves to the highest standards and young people are probably more inclined to see how far short of the mark they fall and thus because of their relatively higher conscientiousness they tend to give themselves low marks on conscientiousness, which is solid evidence for how much their conscientiousness has increased over time.
"It's bad but not nearly as bad as claimed" is the whole gist of the rebuttal, so your critique lines up well with that
The self-report aspect is addressed a bit in his interview with Derek Thompson. I believe it was about how non self-report correlated factors also increased over that time. Not sure how strong the argument is, though.
And it was being pushed by John Burn-Murdoch, the supposed "data journalist" at the FT. As I think I've said a few times now, his job is to basically make things up and have charts go viral. I find it alarming how many people on Twitter just retweet whatever he made up that week.
"But in an exchange on X, the article author John Burn-Murdoch acknowledged engaging in a lot of data manipulation to get those graphs from the raw form into the form published in the FT. He even acknowledges that engaging in different types of data manipulation could make the graphs look widely variable in outcome..... He stated he sought to provide a version that was less dramatic, but I’m skeptical of that given all his claims of "troubling decline", "sustained erosion" "collapsing conscientiousness" and “freefall.” Not to mention that, of course, the graphs he published appear to show a far more dramatic decline in conscientiousness than the raw data.
I accessed the UAS data myself. Using their interactive portal, it’s clear that the decline in conscientiousness is far more modest than Mr. Burn-Murdoch purported"
It is a serious problem that media consumers strongly prefer interesting lies to careful truths
So I don't know if I would call this "detailed," and it seems like he's more interested in pushing back in any way he can than in getting at the truth.
I agree with him that it doesn't appear to be a large decrease in conscientiousness, and I agree that "cratering" as a description is unsupportable.
However, the computations he gives are not convincing, and I think actually rather misleading. He says that the effect size is about .4. (That is not very big, but also per the article this trait is supposed to be primarily genetic and very stable. So if that is the case, then even a small change might be big news.) Then he goes on to do this ridiculous translation to r^2, which I think actively harms one's understanding of the strength of the effect. If you just plot two normal distributions with the same variance that differ in their mean by .4 of a standard deviation, you'll see that there is a lot of overlap between them, but that they are noticeably different. Going through this rigamarole of translating an effect size to a point-biserial correlation to get 4% of variance explained is obfuscatory (IMHO).
I agree with some other critiques of the FT claims, but I don't think this one is particularly strong.
Fascists always turn on their own and eat their own. The fact that a glorified social media influencer even has this much access to the white house and thinks that she is some legit member of this administration shows how much of a joke this country is becoming.
This is almost as cringe as Trump talking about giving himself an award at the Kennedy center. Next thing you know she'll be in the charge of the department of truth. The fact that we are even having a conversation about a potential Trump third term like it is a possibility future shows how much these MAGA people treat the constitution like toilet paper, and how far we've descended into just vibes and meme wars.
But during this dispute, have we determined if there is Arby's in anyone's pants?
The Notorious Arby, Gee?
I'll see myself out
ba dum tiss
I just keep wondering whether the questioning attorney was playing dumb or if he was genuinely unfamiliar with use of the term "roast beef sandwich" as a euphemism for an NSFW expression relating to female anatomy.
I was unfamiliar with it until I read your comment…
You have my heartfelt condolences for you now being aware of that term!
Urban Dictionary is everyone's friend to stay guarded on all the slang out there.
I haven’t read the entire deposition, but the interviewing attorney did explicitly ask if she meant it as a sexual insult iirc. Loomer responded like a rather stupid child and said she would never insult someone with a euphemism.
I increasingly believe Slow Borers have nothing approaching consensus on what you want to bore slowly toward, except a narrow menu of land use reforms. You also mostly have a distaste for the grubbiness of politicking and its “inside baseball” aspects. As a person who loves backslapping and handshaking and the theatrics of politics far more than the median Slow Borer (who has nothing but disdain for those dolts who hold elected office), I find it very amusing how little agreement there is, for example, on just what you want the Democratic and Republican parties to be.
i think most slow borers agree that they would like the democrats to be victorious and the republicans to be defeated
I would settle for the Republicans being defeated and cast out of society.
I'm kind of torn on whether it would be unwise versus absolutely necessary to put the members of this administration up against the wall for their nakedly unconstitutional behavior should the Democrats take office. On the one hand, it would potentially normalize tit-for-tat purges in a massive defection spiral making everything worse. On the other hand, this manner of naked lawlessnes and defection *cannot* be normalized. A (DoJ-mediated) Night of the Long Knives[1] followed by the same boring business-as-usual governing[2] of every non-Trump administration may actually be necessary here to get the worst of the worst (and preferably their quislings like Rubio) incapacitated in as many different ways as humanly possible.
[1] Well, months of the Long Knives, however long DoJ prosecution takes.
[2] As usual as it can be in view of AI disruption.
After civil asset forfeiture, yes
Obviously this comment is partially in jest, but I do think we have a habit of forgetting there is no "winning" the culture war (unless we're committed enough to incarcerate/exile/execute the losers). There's never going to be a sweeping realignment where all the Trumpers suddenly wake up, realize they've been fooled and vote for Democrats.
I would like to see the Republicans and the Democrats both defeated, but I realize there are practical limits to how many parties can lose an election at the same time.
I want the Democratic and Republican parties to be sane, rational, respectful of small-d democratic norms (like, if you lose an election you must concede gracefully, and if you violate that rule we’ll cast you out), and genuinely concerned with the well-being of Americans and doing the right thing as they understand it.
They will still disagree strongly on many things, because sometimes the right thing to do isn’t obvious and there are tradeoffs, like, one party would be the Chesterton’s Fence party and the other would be in favor of bold but potentially risky reform.
Oh, and both parties would commit to running honest candidates of decent character, not con artists and douchebags.
I hope that answers your question!
SuperLike (TM)
On these grounds I'd absolutely vote for de-aged Romney for POTUS over, say, Bob Menendez. 100 times out of 100.
Romney does look better in retrospect every day of the Trump administration.
This makes me miss Joseph Cao.
Yea, but in the absence of that we’ve got to go full scorched earth partisan
You're understating land use reforms.
Land reform is famously small potatoes and has never been a big deal in the history of mankind, ever.
Small potatoes? You mean like the Irish famine? Caused by… land reform?! It’s all linked together!
You can’t call for Democrats to be the “big tent party” and then complain that we’ve got nothing approaching consensus. Yeah, that’s what being a big tent party means! Probably the closest we have to a consensus here at SB is that many of us* agree with Matt Y’s Common Sense Democratic Manifesto.
*certainly not all of us [waves at Jesse Ewiak]
Hey, as much like I want the "if we just run a socialist in a red state who only focuses on economics instead of cultural issues" to run and lose by 10 to show that no, people in red states are cultural reactionaries and don't want to ally with the Other, I also want Matt and everybody else here to get their well-funded pro-life pro-gun anti-transgender kids in sports of the gender they think they are, and the same on Trump on immigration but no masked ICE agents who basically acts ashamed to be a Democrat and spends their whole campaign talking how much they're not like a normal Democrat in Missouri & South Carolina just so that persona can lose by 10 to show again, people in red states want Republicans who aren't allied w/ the Other.
Democrats are stuck as the party of feminists, black people, immigrants, LGBT people, and college educated professionals, because people know that.
Deal w/ that fact politically instead of pretending its 1995 and I say that both of Matt and some of my fellow lefties.
I also bet a candidate that ran on Matt's Common Sense manifesto would have issues in even a decently red state in a primary, because again, people who care enough about the Democratic party to vote in primaries don't want to vote for a Democrat who seems to be against their values and doesn't like them.
What does it mean to deal with this fact "politically" if the party of black people, feminists, immigrants, lgbtqia+, and college educated professionals is the minority of voters?
What does it mean, further, if you have defections in the LGB and immigrant and black parts of that coalition?
Isn't that the spot we're in? I see myself as being on the left wing of the party on social and especially economic issues, and I'll be a straight ticket Democratic voter until I die. But I'm comfortable admitting my views are not particularly popular. Why's that so hard? Wouldn't you rather smuggle your agenda in through the winning party than chopping your coalition to pieces and getting left out in the cold?
Have charismatic candidates who will over some of the other people and also be thankful not every non-college educated person is as reactionary as political pundits claim at times.
But, I'd be fine w/ "smuggling" the agenda. Like, while there was more pushback from the evil Groups than people pretend now, basically everybody was fine w/ Obama's kayfabe on gay marriage in 2008 (even though I also think Obama's questionnaire about gay marriage in the 90s could've been that cycle's ACLU questionnaire on transgender prisoners if we had 2025 media in 2008).
But, Matt and other centrists have made it clear they don't want to "smuggle through" progressive agenda through - they want a much more centrist Democratic party and its up to people like Matt and other centrists to convince normie Democrats thats a good thing and so far, as Matt himself admitted on the Politix podcast and on Twitter a week or so back, the moderates are failing as the party voters are moving to the left.
Maybe there's a cause and effect question here. Do the Yglesias's of the world want a more moderate party because they think it's the most convenient way to secure political power? Afterall, this was more or less the "Groups" playbook right, no one ever thought they were voting on the particulars of trans sports policy or whatever. The intraparty fight is a safer arena to get what you want.
Or do they want a more moderate party because they hold moderate views?
I think Matt's probably the former though, obviously old people are conservative, and he's getting old, so there's some blending here. But he has written that he doesn't really care what agenda items get "moderated" or which groups get thrown under the bus, only that some do.
I wonder if the party's move to the left is from shedding a lot of "moderate" or social conservative black americans and a bunch of latin american immigrants, and just men.
On some level, I think it's not that important. Thermostatic reaction will dominate every other factor in upcoming elections.
"On some level, I think it's not that important. Thermostatic reaction will dominate every other factor in upcoming elections."
Right - I think the most likely result in 2028 is something like a Raphael Warnock/[Insert White Governor or Senator Here - Preferably a Woman] ticket that actually isn't that different from Kamala - less friendly to Israel, a bit more economically populist, but not really any less woke, fairly easily defeats J.D. Vance in part due to a drop in turnout in many of the counties in places like rural Wisconsin that Trump got a surge out of.
I'm probably one of the few people in America who think the Democratic Party is...fine. I think parts of the leadership are being dumb and it needs to be aggressive about post-Trump prosecutions and such, but as far as a center-left party thats competing to win national elections and having to balance the needs of all coalitional partners, it could be doing much worse, even if it can't win a Senate seat in Missouri.
I'm probably closest to Jesse Ewiak and probably to the left as I actually agree with Freddie DeBoer more times than not but I think its a fact that that the structure of the Democratic party has always been more relational and coalitional at a structural level than the Republican party. That means when the majority of the party is non-white, majority female and overall less wealthy(though things have been changing) the party needs to cater who are most likely to vote for it. No offense to the slow borers here but by some of the surveys of the readership here, which is more wealthy and more male that most democrats(though educational attainment is probably close) the average slow borer is a bit out of step with what the Democratic base wants from their politicians. The biggest difference between the Democrats and Republicans is that MAGA is the core constituency but Democrats are more split between the hard left and electability democrats as the echelon insights eight political tribes (https://echeloninsights.com/tribes/) noted. However, it still remains the fact that the hard left and hard right are the core of both parties. Democrats are always less organized and you need to motivate the disenchanted parts of the base to vote because when it comes to voting, the most engaged do still tend to vote but not at the same rate as the Republicans and the moderate faction does not have the same numbers to win if you can't turn out the "young and disillusioned" who are more turned off by the weakness of the party than the more extreme parts who have the energy. The fact of the matter of the Republicans are a narrower coalition but have always voted at higher rate even if they don't particularly like their candidate but Democrats don't and the "young and disillusioned" probably split off from the hard left and they need to be turned out because the more moderate and electability minded democrats will still show up even if its AOC but the left is unlikely to show up for Schumer. The same dynamic is not true of Republicans.
To be fair the Democratic party has never had a great unifying consensus while the GOP has for the most part voted in lockstep. Despite different demographic and ideological changes within the parties, the structural underpinnings remain. As Will Rogers once said “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.”
I feel like I missed something here . . . .
I think it’s hilarious how frequently people here think some asp train boy should be put in charge of something, too… but that’s not the median surely
This seems an...ungenerous interpretation of 'Slow Boring has a politically diverse readership and commentariat.'
Don’t get me wrong, I love our commentariat. ❤️
The best, most beautiful commentariat on the entire Substack, many people are saying!
Look, I have made many comments, beautiful comments, the best comments — just the other day, a gentleman approached me, strong, right of central casting; he was probably a Marine or a firefighter, he was definitely not an illegal, and he shakes my hand (he had big strong hands) and says to me with tears in his eyes “Sir, will make you more comments like these comments you make, for our country?” And I think on that basis I am the most qualified, the best qualified, to judge comments and people who make them, and we are going to build a world-class comments section, and Mexico will pay for it, not Crooked Hillary, and our paywall will be a big beautiful paywall, very beautiful.
👏👏👏
I think the general consensus would be that we’d prefer the more honest and policy focused people win elections, so I guess that really translates to us hating the voters for refusing to care much about either trait.
I'm indifferent as long as the fascists and communists fuck off. Whoever it takes to accomplish that is fine in my book.
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.20241428
I found this on the Ezra Klein subreddit a paper showing a lot of people don’t believe adding housing makes the price go down. I feel like there’s an intuitiveness to this that I have to really fight to make myself unbelieve it. In part because there’s no place in America with cheap good housing and in part because of like the seen and the unseen. Yes I see the new luxury homes but I don’t see the filtering down of older stock and we don’t see population trends only the new construction somewhere.
It seems to me if there was a way to make thinking like an economist and skeptical of our zero sum intuitions the default setting it would be really good but may as well wish to fly.
I find the easiest way to explain it is to ask people what they would do.
"What would you do if when you were looking for houses, your current house cost $250,000 more than it actually did?"
"I'd move to a smaller house or a less desirable town"
"Okay, and imagine that house...where would the person who actually lives in it instead of you go?"
And on down the line
I mean yes this kind of thought experiment and reading broadly were what got to me. But like I can't remember any time in my life where the price of housing has ever gone down. It feels genuinely hard to believe it would actually really in real life happen.
"I can't remember any time in my life where the price of housing has ever gone down. "
I assume you were a kid in 2008 when housing fell by 30-50% nationwide?
Oddly I was quite grown but I left the country in 2009-2014 to be a foreign English teacher and I didn't really experience any of the Great Recession first hand even if I was kind of a refugee from its effects.
No, they probably lived in an expensive coastal city and were renting at the time. The crash was concentrated in owner-occupied homes in sunbelt suburbs, and took time to percolate to rents and superstar cities - enough time that in many of these places it was completely obscured by the longer term increase.
"For example, the median home price in Southern California dropped from $415,000 in January 2008 to $278,000 by the end of 2008."
If that includes the inland empire, that’s the sunbelt. If you restricted that to LA county the results would be very different.
My experience was in Boston, but prices did not drop even a little. My rent increased from $500 to $800 from 2007-2011.
It's amazing that people will intuitively understand supply and demand for literally other good except this.
I actually you overrate how much people understand it generally - it's just people not understanding supply 'n' demand about say, Playstation's don't massively effect politics.
I mean, our inability to see counterfactuals makes it hard to bear witness. I’ve lived in a place that’s built a metric fuckton of new housing while rents and prices have increased rapidly. And I’ve lived in a place with no housing shortage and fairly stagnant wages where rents and prices have doubled in 15 years for no real reason. It’s easy to come to the conclusion that it’s greed or monopoly when you don’t see the counterfactual
How do rents double when there's significant amounts of vacant housing available? Don't the owners of those vacant units try to undercut things? Or do they just lose money altruistically?
In Memphis, I wouldn’t be surprised if to some extent there are landlords that would rather let places stay empty than lower rent out of fear they’d get the criminal element or destructive people. But then I also know a guy that’s part of a slum lord private equity company (a classmate of mine’s husband that’s a piece of shit)
You tell me! I think that in Memphis it really does have to do with cartel-ish behavior. There are still dirt cheap places but they’re straight up dangerous, as in nothing in Seattle or Tacoma comparable.
I mean, your $9/hour job in 2012 probably makes $13 now, but rents have doubled. All of the wage increases are captured by rent. My old apartment ($375/month in 2011) is $1150/month now. I paid $125k for my first house in 2011, its current zestimate is $240k. There are no new good white collar jobs - FedEx has been laying off rather than hiring - and there’s been a continuous population exodus from the city.
I mean some increases in rent are justified by inflation due to increased maintenance costs, but not a doubling.
And then Seattle, JFC. It’s the Yimbiest city in the US. The cityscape has tremendously changed even since I’ve lived there. 5 over 1s and townhouses and ADUs oh my. Population and median income and rent and home prices have gone up by a ton in just 7 years. But looking at the changed cityscape it’s no wonder people are looking for someone to blame because the YIMBY promise of more affordable housing just hasn’t materialized *relative to baseline, not counterfactual*
If Seattle built less you think prices would be lower?
Of course not. But that’s kind of my point.
per Google AI:
In 2000, the median existing single-family home price in the West (which includes the Seattle MSA) was $177,800. The average price was $205,700.
By 2010, the median home price in Seattle had risen to $409,172.
In 2020, the median home price in Seattle reached $749,417, an 83.2% increase since 2010.
In 2024, Seattle's median home price was $831,457.
Whether those are accurate is anyone’s guess, but I can’t do a deep dive rn. They feel about right. Of course population and AMI and minimum wages increased a lot over that time too.
My point is that people don’t exist in a Schrodinger’s superposition with the counterfactual, they experience the change relative to baseline, nominally. I’m as YIMBY as Matt or the median slow borer. But I do get why people say it’s not enough. People are like my wage doubled, but I still can’t buy a house and still have a roommate, etc. And they’ve built so much in my neighborhood and now it sucks! (Really they’re nostalgic for an old Seattle that never really existed or was only cool bc they were 17, but whatever lol)
This actually gets at something that YIMBYs overlook which is there is a pretty significant preference for SFRs among most buyers for a variety of reasons... and Seattle can't build more SFRs since there's no space. Seattle building a lot of apartments has succeeded in keeping the rent in apartments a lot more reasonable than SF despite comparable salaries. But single family homes in close-in neighborhoods--you can't really make more of those with upzoning. So the price of those will go up as the population increases and salaries go up.
"prices have doubled in 15 years for no real reason."
Prices collapse by 30-50% 17 years ago.
In Florida, sure. Not really in Seattle (where the tech boom prevailed over the housing crisis) or Memphis (where prices stagnated for a while but didn’t drop significantly). You could use 2005 as the baseline if you wanted
"The average sales price for homes in the combined Puget Sound metropolitan areas (including Seattle) declined by 14% to $361,800 in 2009. This represents a 21% decrease from the peak average sales price recorded in the 12 months leading up to February 2008,"
21% is a decent drop.
Really? I didn’t know that and hadn’t even visited at that point in my life, but had read it was pretty much unscathed from the crisis. That being said, the median sales price 361800×1.14 = 437778 (I know that’s not technically the way to calculate it, but I’m in an airport sans pen/paper and it’s close enough), and it’s more than double that now despite being as close to yimbytopia as anywhere else in the US besides maybe Houston
The counterpoint would be Austin where they built and prices and rents recently dropped by 15-20%.
I know Austin showed some decline over the last couple years, but my instinct is that barring a massive increase in building the best you'll see is nominal stabilization and decline with respect to inflation, not actual retrenchment.
Yeah typically builders will not knowingly build themselves into like a 15% rent drop. What happened in Austin was there were a bunch of apartments already under construction as builders anticiapted a continuation of the 1-2% population growth that had been happening from 2005-2019.
But with high interest rates going up a lot of people decided not to move--Austin is only marginally more populous than it was in 2019--you end up with a bunch of supply coming online and a reduction in demand, and therefore a large rent drop.
"It doesn't make the price go down, it makes people move to where the prices are lower" seems to be an efficient explanation. (Efficient isn't the word I want, someone help me, it's on the tip of my tongue...)
Unless you're building in areas that won't be gentrified immediately because of their proximity to desirable locales, it's not going to actually drive effective cost down in a way that people notice. Richer people will simply take advantage to make a move that's in their price range. If you keep adding housing in expensive areas, they just notice that you have to move to an even worse place to find affordable housing. And people hate being forced to move.
If the nearest word was "efficient", my first guess is that you're reaching for "parsimonious".
YES
It would help if you're house hunting in an area where a lot of new units are going up. Before the new units the realtor takes you to some real shitholes and sweet Jebus they are asking top dollar. Then the new units go up and suddenly the sellers of the dated poorly maintained units are forced to cut prices.
I’m reading (and from Zillow stalking this feels correct) that in Seattle townhouses and condos are about to decline in price due to a glut. I’m hoping so due to wanting to move my MIL up here into a condo soon
value of condos has declined way off 2022 peaks in seattle and possibly below 2019 levels. https://www.zillow.com/home-values/99615/seattle-wa-98181/
If anyone needs a reminder of how vile a person Loomer is, here she is complaining that a medal of honor recipient was recognized by the Department of the Army
https://x.com/LauraLoomer/status/1953983442603192747
Peak right wing anti-Americanism imo
https://reason.com/2025/08/14/swindon-united-kingdom/
I did not have "roundabouts are libertarian" on my bingo card today, but it's a pretty decent argument--they really are good at self regulating intersections. But what libertarians would absolutely hate is that in order to build more roundabouts in existing developed areas, it very much would require eminent domain to pull it off.
This may be right in some sense (and thanks for sharing!), but I think the libertarian framing here is kind of comically dumb. Multiple-party conflict of a common resource is like the central example of where you want coordination mechanisms and you can't trust unmediated individually-selfish behaviors to create a socially efficient optimum, which is why we have escalating mechanisms of exactly that kind of coordination (uncontrolled, yield, stop sign, traffic lights) when it comes to intersection control based on the likelihood of conflict and why norms of not running a red are incredibly important in preventing gridlock (and I'd like to see more iron-fisted enforcement of same to keep those norms strong.)
Basing an argument on the desirability of roundabouts on the grounds that they "ease traffic congestion in perhaps the most libertarian way possible: by empowering motorists to make their own decision at an intersection," with respect to *exactly the class of situation in which this a fucking terrible idea for incredibly basis Econ 101 reasons and we need cooperation rather than defection for anything to work* is extremely difficult to respect. (also, people still do have to let you in, you can't forgo cooperative obligations here.)
More substantively, seems maybe worse for pedestrian crossings in addition to taking a lot more space, although those are empirical questions (my feelings on roundabouts aren't especially strong and I'm probably more in favor of them than against by default.)
A+ excellent comment, and have an extra like for pointing out that, compared with intersections with either traffic lights or four-way stop signs, roundabouts absolutely suck ass for pedestrians to navigate, and they’re not so hot for cyclists either.
It can be a bit nervous for more novice cyclists, but biking in the middle of one is actually quite relatively safe, because the roundabout naturally forces traffic to slow down.
I only cycled around a few roundabouts, and each time I was terrified of being hit by a car entering or leaving the roundabout. Sure, traffic slows down, but nowhere near slow enough to protect me, the cyclist, from serious injury or death in case of a collision.
I think you're overthinking things here.
The one thing I will add is on pedestrian crossings: they are still pretty simple, they're placed in front of each leg of the roundabout, and they make pedestrians more visible, which is a good thing. No one should ever be allowed to enter the middle circle itself.
But I thought the whole point of roundabouts is that they keep traffic *moving*? No driver has to stop, they just slow down and yield in a graceful dance as drivers enter and leave the roundabout.
But if you add pedestrian crossings to the “legs” of the roundabout, then cars have to come to a dead stop, and depending on the timing of the stops (do they involve lights or are you just supposed to watch out for pedestrians and stop as needed?) that can bollix up everything else.
Not what you mentioned but also I think roundabouts yield more fender benders but fewer fatalities, which goes to one of my hobby horses that a lot of people are driving too expensive cars.
Even without pedestrians, sometimes cars do have to come to a complete stop if there's not room to enter the roundabout.
https://youtu.be/HyufxcEQPGc?si=GBWjiMH6IdBdH_kL
Nah just go for it
Are the pedestrian crossings controlled? Could they cause traffic to back up in the roundabout?
Yes, but cars don't enter the roundabout until there's room to enter anyway. And pedestrians cause cars to wait at traditional intersections too.
Indeed, although there's still a dependency on cars slowing down in a way that affords more discretion to drivers than a stop sign does and it's a substantially longer path since you have to do a circumferential traverse.
Substantially longer on a left turn, slightly longer going straight, but actually shorter turning right. And the other nice thing about roundabouts is that U-turns are automatically allowed and very practical.
Sorry, I meant a longer path *for pedestrians.* I don't think the additional path length for the cars is necessarily material.
Ah, got it. Then I would say slightly longer in both directions.
"No one should ever be allowed to enter the middle circle itself"
I go there all the time, unless you are talking about really large, multilane roundabouts?
John Stossel did a pro-roundabout bit. Would look for it right now but am busy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQ0pnCx76Nk
Thanks! I always liked watching John Stossel way back to when I was a kid when he was on 20/20.
His haters haven't watched him all that much
Roundabouts are like libertarianism in that they’re only really workable in high trust environments, and American driving culture is, uh, very much not that.
I think traffic lights rely more on high trust. In roundabouts, things are set up so that everyone can make things work and muddle through, regardless of what anyone else does, but at a traffic light, you really have to trust that the people coming up to the red light are going to stop.
Just imagining an Altima running through the yield sign and going airborne over the center median.
IIRC even in the US, roundabouts result in fewer traffic fatalities than four way intersections
There are roundabouts in Vietnam and the US is about 100x higher trust than Vietnam.
The word "goofus" was invented to describe Laura Loomer.
Which is impressive since it's decades older than that freakshow.
Well, she’s certainly not gallant
Don't Do What Debbie Don't Does
Deliveryism RIP: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/opinion/liberalism-texarkana-economy-democracy.html
[Turns Lisa C and sings] Cause we're livin' in a post-material world, and I'm a post-material girl
But from the article, it doesn't sound like anything has actually been built there or that any construction has even started on anything.
One of the stereotypes about the "tax-and-spend liberals" for a long time is that they burn through taxpayer money and don't produce anything and it's a reason many don't vote Democrat and I'm not sure how any of this contradicts that stereotype.
"“Renewable energy projects in the area have seen such a significant boom that Texarkana College now offers dedicated courses in solar panel installation,” Zikai Li, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago, writes in a paper that was published last month, “Unrequited Love: Estimating the Electoral Effect of a Place-Based Green Subsidy with a 2D Regression Discontinuity Design.”"
True Deliverism has never been tried!
So I guess Biden delivered 1-2 jobs in the area: one for the instructor for these solar panel installation courses and maybe a second for a TA.
I wonder if firms actually making a legit* profit on solar installations actually value course completion other than as a signal that a person has a modest and inchoate desire to do the job.
.
*Sans subsidies.
It's going to be Direct TV installation jobs all over again. You're a independent contractor, provide your own vehicle, insurance, and tools, buy your materials from the firm, they sell you 'leads', and you quit on 6 weeks with less money than you started with.
But with life experience!
It doesn't sound like they even got from announcements about planning to ribbon cutting, let alone hiring anyone.
And there's this:
"...During the four years from January 2021 to January 2025 — the years of Biden’s presidency — the unemployment rate in the Texarkana metropolitan area fell to 4.2 percent from 6.8 percent..."
No shit, Sherlock, that was the end of the pandemic. You want to attribute that to Biden, knock yourself out, but the citizens of Texarkana don't seem to be that foolish.
Why bother quoting an old politico article calling Susie Wiles the de facto chief of staff when she is now the actual chief of staff?
For my lighthearted contribution for the day, ESPN launched a Sports Misery Index bot: https://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/45344992/sports-misery-index
One thing that I noticed is that the order of the teams you select matter: the earlier selected teams were given more weight. When I selected the Broncos and then Red Sox, it put me in Meh, but when I reversed them, it put me in Pleasant. (And Pleasant I think is accurate for me, with 3 Super Bowls and 4 World Series to celebrate in my lifetime, that's likely way above average.)
What are your results, Slow Borers?
I put in only Boston teams and the bot spat at me and told me to go away.
Good bot, good bot, here's a scritch behind the ears for you.
92 - deep woe. Padres fan, ex-Chargers fan (there is no way to tell the site that I was a fan of the *San Diego* Chargers and disavowed them after they blackmailed and abandoned my hometown for the inner ring of hell). There is also the missing piece that I follow USA Mens National soccer and that is another dark pit.
Instant upvote for slamming the disgrace that Dean Spanos inflicted.
Enjoy your temporary stay atop the NL West.
As a Warriors and A's fan who doesn't have a particular NFL team I love, I earned a 30 (Pleasant), but it's certainly skewed by the Warrior fandom since your team moving away from your state is the ultimate misery.
Oakland's got to be up there in contending for teams that have seen major sports teams leave them. The Raiders (fuck 'em!) even moved away *twice*! I can't think of any other team that's done that.
94
ah you gotta name the teams with a number like that.
I will guess Jets and Mets.
I am of a very particular generation.
Orioles and Red Commanders.
Mmmm, that's got some long-term pain lol. The best value in football should push that number to a 93.
Guardians, Browns, and Utah Jazz. That's an 87.
Only pro teams? Boo, booooooooooooo
77.
It's tough to measure college teams when the grand majority of them have a snowball's chance in hell of winning it all. You'd have to factor in things like conference titles. And even that's dicey: Oregon won the Big Ten last season, but would be in no mood at all to talk about what happened in the playoffs.
(And yes, "Oregon won the Big Ten" is a sentence that would make no sense whatsoever even a few years ago.)
Fucking tragic that I didn't know off the top of my head that Oregon won the Big Ten, when I live in core ancestral Big Ten country and have been to Autzen a couple two tree times myself.
What things have become.
Clippers then Angels both for +15 years and got an 85.
78: Bears, Cubs, Bulls, Blackhawks (in that order). If I switch Bulls and Blackhawks it goes down to 72. Seems accurate to me as a mostly miserable Chicago sports fan
30 😎
Bay Area teams + LAFC
If you don't mind me asking, how did you end up with the Red Sox as your baseball team instead of the Rockies?
The very first team I ever rooted for as a kid was the Bird/McHale/Parish era Celtics. I hardly ever follow the NBA as an adult so I can't seriously claim them now. But I just happened to decide when it was time to watch baseball "OK, this Boston team's cool, let's try following this other one.". The Rockies didn't exist yet, and it was a mild surprise that the allure of Ken Griffey Jr. didn't suck me into the Mariners.