Roberts Courts legacy is to make it harder for ordinary people to engage in the most basic form of participation (voting), for that participation to matter (letting gerrymandering stand), while removing any constraints from billionaire influence on politics
The ICE detention center purchases appear to be money laundering:
Nasdaq is changing its rules to "entice" the SpaceX IPO to its exchange, which will fast-track the stock's inclusion in index funds... this effectively dumps Elon Musk's unprofitable garbage on vulnerable passive investors, and ensures new retirement accounts have to buy in.
The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer is out, and it is one of the most fascinating document of every year (imo).
Edelman is a PR company shaping narrative for companies like Exxon & Shell (greenwashing), and uses this doc to push their clients' narratives as 'leaders'.
www.edelman.com/trust/2026/t...
Terrible idea. How clueless can you be?
After a decade of missteps, Corpus Christi careens toward water catastrophe
www.texastribune.org/2026/03/08/t...
Very interesting from @polphilpod.bsky.social.
"It's not as if fascism ever went away...Fascists have fought to undermine conservatism from within...Fascists took elite conservatives' measure nicely...The future will belong either to liberals or fascists."
www.liberalcurrents.com/it-wasnt-fas...
Rising health insurance costs are putting pressure on wages. Research shows wage growth could be higher if employer health insurance costs were not rising so quickly.
libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2026/03/are-...
Graph of award probability of R35 and R01 from NIH factbook as a function of review rank percentile. As is apparent, 2025 is a significant departure, with lower award probabilities at all scores <40 and significant departures from norm, where even being in the top 10% is no longer a nearly certain indicator of success. Data source: https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/report/302
The data is in: the NIH goalposts have shifted.
What were once almost certain fundable scores have become coin flips and what used to be likely grants have become aspirational, leading to fewer awards.
Another manifestation of how HHS policies have led to fewer awards and less science.
"At a time when civilization is hurtling toward irreversible climate breakdown, to overlook the climate consequences of three of the deadliest militaries on earth going to war would be journalistic malpractice."
newrepublic.com/article/2073...
Given the obvious portents for Republicans, seems that this election is going to be riddled with fake Democrats and the billionaires that fund them.
Coward
Exactly right: “We’re long past the point at which there are neutral legal principles that can be deployed to persuasively reconcile all of the Court’s behavior … It makes the Court at least look like what so many regularly accuse it of being: a font of partisan political power, and not much more.”
What I mean by that is that crime reduction is best understood as a positive externality from an intervention with a different primary objective. For instance, the child poverty tax credit has a proximate goal of helping poor children have a better life, right now. But a positive externality of the child poverty tax credit is that it removes some key barriers to a child’s future and creates new opportunities. And those have downstream positive effects on the child’s likelihood of committing a crime or being victimized. By contrast, few of the items on my list that are directly intended to reduce crime have effects of the same magnitude. Yes, installing hard barriers to prevent people from entering a public transit system without paying will reduce crime, but the scale is very small. The potential scale of the effect of the earned income tax credit on crime is much greater, perhaps an order of magnitude greater There are many policies that have positive externalities that extend well beyond their proximate goal. That list includes everything on Smith’s list: health care, behavioral interventions, housing, transit, and urbanism. And all of those policies and interventions affect crime. The problems that Smith describes, expensive health care, insufficient housing, inequality and poverty, bad transit, and poor urban planning, are the problems that are central to the lives of people who are at greatest risk of being victimized by disorder. And these are the kinds of problems that lead to disorder. And they are all preventable. Crime is a multi-final outcome—crime results from myriad causes. Addressing those causes has potentially big effects on crime. Limiting our choice set to interventions that affect only crime puts a very low ceiling on the potential outcome.
On crime policy:
I want to highlight an incredibly important point by @johnkroman.bsky.social
It is possible that "tough on crime" approaches have an impact on crime, but they will have NOWHERE NEAR THE IMPACT that more thoughtful interventions could have
johnkroman.substack.com/p/crime-diso...
As I explain via the latest “One First,” the only theme that unites the Supreme Court’s (unrelated) grants of emergency relief Monday night in the California transgender student and New York redistricting cases is what might be called “selective judicial impatience.”
And that’s *not* a good thing:
1. This morning, Texas AG Ken Paxton just released a chilling new declaration:
Mental health therapists, counselors, and psychologists must cease affirming trans youth - using their name and pronouns - or potentially face child abuse charges and loss of licensure.
Its a horrifying escalation.
As the US doubles down on glyphosate, a widely cited study asserting its safety has been retracted after it was discovered the paper was ghostwritten by Monsanto employees. This incident, and ghostwriting in general, harms scientific integrity, writes Naomi Oreskes.
whether war, vaccines, or critical infrastructure there is contingent of the right that seems to believe that their security from the worst things that happen is some kind of metaphysical principle rather than the result of specific historical processes that could've gone otherwise and still could
I would say one of the main right-wing projects of the past twenty years has been gaming every web 2.0 platform into thinking the right-wing is much bigger and more influential than it actually is. And the people who have been most taken in by this effort has been the right wing
I'm a cognitive scientist with an interest in epistemic vigilance, and this essay that's been going around gave me pause.
I don't think it's straightforward to apply the concept of epistemic vigilance to interactions with LLMs, as this essay does.
🧵/
sbgeoaiphd.github.io/rotating_the...
Literally just watched this in a DS9 episode
I constantly hear people banging on about how bad almond milk is for the environment, but somehow I never hear anyone mention how dairy milk is many times worse for the environment across every possible metric
Polling results from PPIC of the CA GOV race
In California, the top two vote getters regardless of party advance to the general. Hilton and Blanco are Republicans. We are in mortal danger of a Rep-Rep runoff unless some Dems drop out to consolidate the Dem vote. Villaraigosa, Becerra, Thurmond and Yee must leave the race immediately.
Screenshot of a job ad with highlighted text that reads Once fully trained, at least 4 denial letters per hour and/or at least 6-7 approval letters per hour Remote specialists manage time and productivity without in-office oversight and combines technical expertise, compliance knowledge, and strong communication skills in a virtual setting.
United States Healthcare in a post.
(Job ad)
An official letter from the Kansas Division of Vehicles dated February 23, 2026, with a redacted recipient address. The letter notifies the recipient that due to the enactment of Senate Bill 244, all Kansas driver's licenses and IDs must reflect the holder's sex at birth. It states that the recipient's current credential will become invalid immediately upon the law's publication on February 26, 2026, with no grace period. The recipient is directed to surrender their current ID to receive a new one matching their sex assigned at birth. The document concludes with instructions on how to appeal the notice if received in error, along with contact information for the department.
Kansas is sending letters to trans people telling them that their licenses will be revoked as of tomorrow and that they risk arrest for driving on a suspended license.
This is pure cruelty.
www.erininthemorning.com/p/kansas-sen...
A lethal form of bird flu, which has already killed tens of thousands of elephant seals in the Southern Hemisphere, is now spreading in a colony of elephant seals in California.
w/ @emilyanthes.bsky.social
Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/s...
“.. America’s own citizens are leaving in record numbers, replanting themselves and their families in lands they find more affordable and safe.”
@wsj.com #ByeAmerica
www.wsj.com/us-news/amer...
They beat a blind refugee who speaks no English for failing to obey police commands he could not understand. Then instead of apologizing, they charged him with possession of a “weapon”—HIS WALKING STICK. Then they dumped him miles from home without notifying anyone, after which he was found dead.
More details about the US registered vessel fired on by Cuban Border Guard Troops
