i wonder if people have done any polling across the multiracial "tattooed" demographic.

is there no 8th Amendment, cruel-and-unusual-punishment challenge to CECOT?

jfc.

bring back Nightline, “America Held Hostage”, where is Ted Koppel when we need him?

yes, but they scolded me for not wearing a mask, and made me endure frequent nasal swabs because i refused the vaccine.

one day you wake up and realize that you — yes, you, my friend — are in fact the titan Sisyphus, except each morning you have to write up and gorgeously graph detailed analyses of US tariffs, and each afternoon Donald Trump speaks.

have we considered a tariff on imprisonment, enslavement, and torture? can't have hard working american torturers competing with sadists making third world wages.

i wonder if instead of oscillating between "risk-on" (stocks up, Treasury prices down) and "risk-off" (stocks down, Treasury prices up), we're going have shifts between "normalization" (stocks up, Treasury prices up, dollar up) and "de-dollarization" (stocks down, Treasury prices down, dollar down).

just an echo of the original!

there are better ways to do industrial policy than tariffs, but if you were using tariffs to do industrial policy they would be sectoral, and certainly wouldn’t be incoherently targeting bilateral trade deficits.

Word of the day — “soteriology”, a doctrine or theology of salvation from @quinnae.com via @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com

if they had any sense they’d call the whole thing off and declare the weaker dollar a great victory.

every time i swipe the credit card, whatever bullshit i am blowing the money on, i am increasing my capital account surplus.

it’s been a long time, but i guess i’ll have to watch some 60 Minutes segments.

“Pushing family benefits would thus have the added benefit of revealing how full of shit [right-wing pronatalists] really are.” @mattbruenig.bsky.social mattbruenig.com/2025/04/13/t...

it’s an excellence one should pursue for its own sake.

the same forces that pushed Obama to say “if you like your health insurance you can keep it” pushes an effective housing politics to concede “if you like your neighbirhood, you can keep it” in neither case is the constraint necessarily virtuous. perhaps it can be overcome. but it’s the same problem

although the laundering itself remains illegal, providing extremely difficult to penetrate *money laundering services* has been effectively legalized, as long as the infrastructure is “digital assets”. see @jpkoning.bsky.social www.moneyness.ca/2025/04/if-i...

it’ll take a lot of “build[ing] back better” is for sure. one way or another, in a good direction or catastrophically, i expect permanent changes in the structure of the American state. Trump either consolidates or is repudiated. If (please God) repudiated, “never again” reforms will be needed.

the thing i struggle with most in this essay is the audience to which it is purported to write. 1. where we are now 2. ??? 3. “The next Democratic president” whatever is next is unlikely to be status quo government—the misequilibrium of post-2008 America—plus an ordinary transition of power.