Ryan Van Meter

@scottcoleman55 On mute.

The Apple TV broadcast really is impeccable from a technical perspective

I'm not entirely sure how to react when the Falcons make good draft decisions.

@whignewtons @pjaicomo We are experts at the game, rank novices at what to do with the winnings.

What’s funny about all this gerrymandering talk is that we’re fighting over which party controls a legislative branch that doesn’t actually legislate anymore.

Ramesh's final chemotherapy treatment is tomorrow. In your charity, please pray for @RameshPonnuru this week--that his health will be completely restored. He is deeply loved, as our friends and family have demonstrated so well over these last eight months. ❤️🙏

These are so frustrating to receive. A building owner sent me this video of a 2BR Upper West Side apartment he just got back, but after he empties it out it will stay vacant going forward. The tenant lived here since 1985 and the current legal rent is $940.01 Because of the 2019 HSTPA law, a building owner is expected to fully renovate this unit to current building code (that’s a good thing), but also expected to lose money in perpetuity at the same time. This 2BD would need well over $100,000 to clean out the debris, comply with lead laws, upgrade major systems, remove the Sheetrock + much more just to make this into an apartment a tenant would actually want to live in with dignity. But the law says the $940 rent would still end up below the estimated $1300/mo it costs to operate the apt which covers insurance, property taxes, labor, fuel, and capital expenditures for the building. So if the new rent falls below the operating cost, the owner would still lose money every month and never see $1 back from the $100k+ renovation. Why would the state expect anyone to lose money like this? What bank would ever provide a loan with no path to repayment? Why do we acknowledge the cost to build housing but ignore what it takes to preserve older housing? Why do we accept this policy when thousands of New Yorkers are searching for housing in the midst of the worst supply crunch we’ve ever seen? So frustrating.

Love the candor here.

The Hawks finished the regular season with a 46-36 record. At the All-Star break, Atlanta held a 26-30 record. Per Elias Sports, the 2025-26 Hawks are just the third team in NBA history to be 4+ games under .500 at the break and finish the season 10+ games over .500.

US fertility reached 1.57 last year, the lowest ever recorded, and the WSJ explanation is "uncertainty about finances, relationship stability, and the political climate" my great grandma had eleven children during the second world war, in a country being bombed, in a house with no running water, on rations. poor people have always had kids. the poorest people on earth right now still have kids and the financial excuse is a story we tell ourselves because it makes us feel good and the real one is unbearable the real mechanism is that we got rich enough to redefine children as an expense instead of the point. somewhere in the last fifty years the cultural goal inverted and a child stopped being what life is for and became a line item competing with the lifestyle. once you frame it that way the math never works, because the math isnt supposed to work. that's the point we are living in the richest moment in human history and we decided to use the surplus to buy ourselves out of the future. the most prosperous civilization that has ever existed is committing demographic suicide at the altar of personal optimization and comfort, and the official line is that we cant afford it the birthrate is a lagging indicator of a civilization that forgot why it was alive

I concluded my Henry Family lecture at the University of Miami last Thursday by saying: “Two things are important right now in life: deep learning and fertility. Everything else is noise.” We are only starting to glimpse what these two forces will do to global life over the next fifty years. And they interact: deep learning will reshape demographics, and demographic collapse will reshape automation. Nearly all my posts on X (except some parochial commentary on Spanish economic policy) revolve around these two facts. So does most of my current research. Even work that does not seem directly connected turns out to be, once you look carefully. My papers on geoeconomics and international macro are about figuring out some of the consequences of deep learning and fertility. For example, my work on China focuses on its abysmal demographic future and how the U.S. is positioning itself (rightly or wrongly) to address it. And my work on political polarization and the welfare state is about the consequences of decades of low fertility in Western Europe. When people talk about political change in Western Europe, they are talking about low fertility, whether they know it or not. It is not clear that modern representative democracy can survive sustained fertility rates of 1.3. I do not say that with glee. The reason I decided to spend my life on academic work in economics is that I realized, when I was much younger, that daily events are irrelevant. The things that concern the media and 99 percent of commentary on X are largely irrelevant. One political party does better or worse in the next electoral cycle because of internal fights or a good campaign. At a fundamental level, none of it matters: the political outcome 25 years from now will not depend on those accidents. As Alexander Gerschenkron said, Clio is not a tidy housewife. The rise of any political movement is always full of advances and retreats. Social change waxes and wanes. But at the end of the day, as my favorite historian Fernand Braudel put it: “The events of history are merely surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs.” or in the much better original: “Les événements de l’histoire ne sont que des agitations de surface, des crêtes d’écume que les marées de l’histoire portent sur leur dos puissant.” The tides of history today are deep learning and fertility.

I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. Take a moment and listen to this 81 second response from Victor Glover after being asked if he had any thoughts leading up to Easter. I don’t quite think it can be overstated how perfect this crew is for the job.

Drake Baldwin has scored a run in each of the Braves’ first seven games this season That ties 1957 Henry Aaron and 1900 Jimmy Collins for the most consecutive team games with a run scored to start a season by a Braves player since at least 1900

The Atlanta Hawks have spent a total of 614 days in the play-in range of the NBA standings since 2020-21 That's ~25% more days than the #2 team, the Golden State Warriors, which just surpassed the Chicago Bulls

Went down the rabbit hole on this. A firefly spends up to two years underground as a larva, hunting slugs in the dirt. Then it crawls out, grows wings, and gets maybe three weeks as the glowing thing you remember from childhood. Three weeks to find a mate and reproduce. Then it's dead. So when the tweet says "some scientist" warned we're the last generation to see them, that's real. A Belgian firefly researcher named Raphaël De Cock said it, and the clip blew up on TikTok. But I dug into the actual science, and the picture is weirder than the headline. We know of about 2,200 firefly species worldwide. Scientists have studied fewer than 150 of them. That's less than 7%. Of the ones they looked at, about 14% are at risk of extinction. And here's the part that got me: we know so little about more than half the species we've found that scientists can't even tell if they're dying off. If those mystery species are disappearing at the same rate, 1 in 3 North American fireflies could be in trouble. We might be losing species nobody's even properly named yet. A major 2024 study by Penn State, the University of Kentucky, and Bucknell examined 24,000 citizen surveys across the eastern U.S. The number one thing killing fireflies turned out to be weather and climate shifts. Their larvae need wet soil to survive those two years underground. Too dry, they die. Too flooded, they drown. The second biggest killer: artificial light. Night skies are getting about 10% brighter every year. A quarter of Earth's land is now lit up at night. And fireflies talk to each other with light. Their whole mating system runs on flashing patterns in the dark. Flood that with streetlights and porch lights, and the signal disappears. This isn't abstract. In Hong Kong, one firefly species lived along 1.8 kilometers of a single hiking trail. Street lamps went up in 2018 and 2019. The population is gone. Critically Endangered now. In Delaware, the Bethany Beach firefly exists in a few tiny salt marshes, and coastal construction is eating them up. But your common backyard lightning bug, the one called Photinus pyralis, is fine. Ben Pfeiffer, who runs Firefly Conservation and Research, said it straight: "We won't be the last generation to see fireflies." What's actually vanishing is the variety. The weird ones. The specialists. They get replaced by the one tough generalist that can survive anywhere. One last thing that stuck with me. A firefly turns chemical energy into light at about 41% efficiency, with almost zero heat lost. Our best LEDs just recently hit about 40%. We spent decades of engineering to match what a beetle worked out 100 million years ago. And we're blinding them with the lights we built to copy them.

@steakshapiro @jontweetssports Seabear or The National

If you were going to eat one meal in Athens, Georgia what would it be?

The next time someone says "but but.. international law" Please show them this video of these China Maritime Militia vessels swarming Filipino fishermen inside the Philippines’ own Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). The goal is to physically occupy space, block access, and intimidate local fishermen or resupply missions. In 2025, daily averages reached record highs of over 240 militia vessels across the South China Sea. The CCP doesn’t respect international law, tribunals, or sovereign waters. And it means nothing if no one is there to police it, and no credible deterrence exists.

@Blankogolf @BrentRollinsPhD @RadiNabulsi They still beat 5 tournament teams, by my quick count. They can do it. They just aren’t reliable.

@ryanjvanmeter @BrentRollinsPhD @RadiNabulsi Maybe the talent isn’t as good as you think.

Gonzaga was at least good. This Saint Louis team isn’t. Georgia’s way more athletic and can get to the rim whenever they want. They are just choosing to chuck 3’s, make it easy for Billikens and playing minimal defense.

@BIODAWGSPORTBOI This isn’t about foul calls. This is about selfish play, poor shot selection, and scatterbrained defense. Total collapse. Just like Texas, just like Florida, just like Ole Miss.

Georgia splits right now are 2-13, 0-6, 5-9. This is really bad. They’re not generating good looks at all. Don’t know how Ross doesn’t get a foul call there.

@YIMBYLAND And rooftop naval installations

This is awesome... but if I may, I'd like to suggest adding one more (highly whimsical) ADU typology: The Rooftop Dwelling Unit