Eric Nelson

#SC01 news: VoteVets is airing a $300,000 digital ad buy boosting Democrat Nancy Lacore in South Carolina’s 1st District. Lacore is a retired Navy vice admiral running to succeed outgoing GOP Rep. Nancy Mace. youtube.com/watch?v=ViH5Kk…

@GarrisonLovely Do you include this view of peak value for all employees? Amodei/Clark saying mainly true just for lowest-level staff; but for next levels up if they can manage agentic, their value will go up. Amodei/Clark smoking us?

The value of their labor is around its peak: AI employees are frantically trying to render themselves obsolete (on the path to doing the same to rest of us). If they succeed, their leverage goes away first, then ours. Check out my book Obsolete on how we can stop this (see bio).

Important new development. AI company employees have an enormous amount of power — far more than they realize. Absent legislation, AI co worker power is one of the key levers to shaping what the industry does and doesn't do.

Big tech largely staved off unionization efforts using generous pay and benefits. But as leadership is increasingly out of step with what the rank and file want, organizing is starting to look more important.

The headline should be the DCCC is appropriately doing its assigned job, picking candidates with the best chance of winning. They have all the data. Nancy Pelosi would have never tolerated factions just looking out for themselves, over coming supporting who's most likely to win. Why isn't @davidsirota and @LeverNews gathering around the most likely winners?

🚨NEW: @HakeemJeffries and the @DCCC are intervening in Democratic primaries to try to prevent competitive nominating contests & use big donor money to handpick winners before Democratic voters have their say.

We just finished a focus group of Trump voters in Louisiana and nearly the whole group preferred Rubio to JD Vance. I’ve been watching this phenomenon build for a while. We’ll discuss more on the next focus group pod. theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/…

(1) Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapon. (2) Iran wasn’t close to getting a nuclear weapon. (3) The war could very well convince Iran that a nuclear weapon is its best bet. (4) You can’t bomb a country’s nuclear ambitions away. (5) The admin’s case rests on red herrings.

Uhhhhhh holy shit guys

From @TheAthletic: The Pulitzer for audio reporting went to the staff of “Pablo Torre Finds Out” for an investigation into how the Los Angeles Clippers seemingly evaded the NBA’s salary cap by funneling money to a star player. Watch the series on YouTube: nyti.ms/4uwljLp

The staff of “Pablo Torre Finds Out” won the Pulitzer Prize for Audio Reporting on Monday for its deeply reported investigation into how the Los Angeles Clippers seemingly circumvented the NBA’s salary cap, with the Pulitzer board calling the podcast “pioneering and entertaining." “Anyone who wins a Pulitzer should be proud, but it’s especially nice to see someone leave a reliable, well-paying job at ESPN, take a risk on something new, and have it pay off like this,” writes senior media writer Tom Jones. Read this story and more in today’s special Pulitzer edition of The Poynter Report: poynter.org/commentary/202…

New: While White House denies reports that a safety study of mifepristone is being delayed until after the midterms, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary expressed indifference in an interview with WSJ, saying “I don’t think about the abortion pill” or its safety restrictions.

"Casual traders are bleeding cash while a small number of sophisticated pros...eat their lunch, according to a Journal analysis" On Polymarket, the Journal found, 67% of profits go to just 0.1% of accounts" wsj.com/finance/invest… via @WSJ

"The new poll finds 34 percent of voters saying they trust Republicans to handle the economy, 33 percent saying they trust Democrats and the rest saying they trust neither or both equally. In 2022, Republicans had a double-digit advantage on the economy." washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/…

Although I am in Maryland, my X following of C-Span brought up your interview on C-Span this morning about the Ohio elections. Wow! You're good. I recommend to anyone across the US who wants to have pragmatic knowledge of the complex Ohio elections to watch you, in this clip, and to follow you.

Happy primary election day - I started a little earlier than usual today c-span.org/program/washin…

Tomorrow is primary day in Indiana and Ohio! In Indiana, President Trump endorsed primary challengers against 7 GOP state senators who opposed redistricting the state's congressional map last year. Groups like TPUSA, Club for Growth & others have worked to boost challengers.

Serious question: if this was any other industry … would the incumbent with a 10x CapEx disadvantage be taken seriously by street?

@ddale8 @dccc @TheDemocrats @votevets @ACLU

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made a false claim in his testimony to the House on Wednesday. Then he repeated it in his testimony to the Senate on Thursday. Hegseth said Wednesday: “In 2024, troops were depl… – that was Joe Biden by the way, Joe Biden –  were deployed to polling locations in 15 states." He continued, "2024 – Joe Biden – troops deployed to polling locations in 15 states. Explain that one to me.” Here’s the explanation: Hegseth’s claim isn't true. Not only were all National Guard activations for the 2024 election done by individual states rather than Biden, all 11 states that responded to my inquiries said *no troops* there were sent to polling places. Rather, they said, Guard personnel were in other locations helping with election cybersecurity, doing other behind-the-scenes support work, or not actually activated for the election after all. Fact check with on-record quotes: cnn.com/2026/05/04/pol…

This NYT piece gets something quite importantly wrong, btw — the UK has no rules on predeployment evals or safety standards, and everything I’ve heard is that we’re a long way off from having them.

Books will be written on how Trump I and II screwed up America. Just to mention my favorites: -Eliminating the White House office of Pandemic Preparedness in 2019, so the US was completely unprepared for COVID in 2020. -In Afghanistan, surrendering to the Taliban and intentionally leaving a hot potato for the Biden admin. -Last year crippling all areas of NIH/NSF science and all US universities. -Pulling out of the Iran JCPOA agreement, that was a better 5-countries signed deal with Iran than what Trump will be able to get to now.

On Trump's first day back in office, he eliminated a Biden-era mandate for AI firms to share security test results w/ govt, calling it unduly burdensome. Now, after Mythos, the WH is considering much more onerous AI regulation. Remarkable about-face. nytimes.com/2026/05/04/tec…

@staunovo @SecScottBessent Remember, 3 weeks after Trump's tariff program was announced, Bessent said that 90 deals were already in the queue at the term-sheet stage, and thousands of manufacturing jobs would come to the US; but then these deals never appeared. Why should anyone believe this guy?

Aware gas prices affecting Americans but expecting prices to come down quickly when conflict ends - @SecScottBessent

Necessary to understand AI stories are: -Why is the company doing it? Which other companies are doing the same? -Why does it make sense to them? Is online/digital better? -What is the deeper story? -What are the society/ethics/privacy/legal points of view? Then ChatGPT or Claude can summarize these perspectives employing my political centrist, facts-based biases, so that I can get some real knowledge, then see if I want to tweet anything my pro-ethical-business centrist point of view.

As I used to work in biomedical research with one foot in academia and one foot in big Pharma/Wall Street, I am used to knowing the big picture on stories, taking the objective due diligence point of view. So, for AI stories on topics of my interest that are hot news like Anthropic/DOD, I have started chat agents to track and provide assessments of some weekly news about AI and the chatbots collect other info on the industry/society/ethics impacts to provide me with multiple points of view. Which are really needed. ChatGPT or Claude can quickly scrape together the info, as long as one is willing to scan the AI outputs, which now are my homegrown newsletters.

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