Alan Cole

@benwfreeman1 🥰

Can confirm that if you are above age 35ish, you are a prediction market UNC But we love our prediction market uncs and welcome more!

Andrew Belnap and I recently did a survey of tax directors about the CAMT. It is really complicated and hard to comply with, yet few people actually pay anything. The worst of both worlds!

@MichaelRStrain @JerusalemDemsas In some cases, the disagreement is more or less open. For example, I see many more academics than business leaders touting the merits of worker-owned cooperatives. Startup founders are often attempt to IPO and give equity-holding early employees the opportunity to "exit."

@MichaelRStrain @JerusalemDemsas One clarification that might immediately explain our differences: I’m including revealed preferences of the elite/business, not just the stated preferences, and certainly not just the words of spokespeople specifically tasked with interacting with left-leaning systems or groups.

"roughly 90 percent of politically relevant social science articles leaned left 1960–2024" 1. The lack of viewpoint diversity affects the questions that are being asked. Conservatives who are scholars sometimes ask different questions than progressives who are scholars! 2. The lack of viewpoint diversity obviously affects the answers that are given to a given question. 3. There is no conspiracy: Human beings naturally give less scrutiny to answers that conform to their prior views. This natural human tendency reinforces (at least on the margin) the dominance of progressive views in peer-reviewed journals. 4. This is such an obvious and major problem that is of first-order relevance to the central mission of universities. It is astonishing to me that the dominant view of faculty at elite universities is that the absence of scholars with conservative views is either desirable or not a big deal.

@MichaelRStrain @JerusalemDemsas When academia's politics mirror what you'd find at Google or a yacht club or JP Morgan, it's "smart people agree with us." But when academia promotes ideas that look different from those places, it's "we're an important critique of power." Heads I win, tails you lose.

@MichaelRStrain I've tried to come up with something smart ever since @JerusalemDemsas wrote on this and maybe I have something. Defense of academic left-leaniningness is internally inconsistent about whether IRL power is correlated with correctness or instead a force to be counterbalanced.

@jfurf Yes for some reason!

@AlanMCole Have hired a couple Russian-immigrant appliance repair guys too. Is this a distinct Russian Guy niche here in America?

Commissioned a surly Russian mechanic to come tell me what I already knew in my heart: The over-engineered fridge developers sold my house with is too expensive and finicky to repair, and instead I should simply buy a new mass-manufactured one from LG. Classic Type of Guy.

@asymmetricinfo As a frequent "liberals' trusted conservative friend:" that moment, that issue, was the single biggest gap I've ever seen between the views they expressed publicly and the views they expressed privately. Never seen anything as dramatic before or since.

My experience reporting on this--in 2022, when there was a kind of omerta on suggesting you opposed it in most mainstream institutions--was that when I told people what I was writing about, in the most neutral terms possible, I got unprompted rants from extremely liberal women.

True it’s not a good lyric, but it’s often the case that beloved songs are mediocre on one or more elements and instead trading on other strengths. Money for Nothing, Africa, Iris, Sweet Child O Mine, these songs can *afford* to have mediocre lyrics.

@CartoonsHateHer This is like right in the middle of your strike zone because you're obsessive enough to verbalize, in a far more comical and exaggerated form, the little nagging feelings the rest of us also have.

I wrote about how I perform in public with my kids so won't judge me- and this article is free! Link in replies.

@RichardHanania 🫡

My take on Caesar Chavez is labor unions are evil and he should’ve already gone down in infamy for being a union organizer alone. richardhanania.com/p/labor-freedo…

This was the moment. July 4, 2004. They did a massive free concert for the holiday in Buffalo, their hometown. As the weather took a dramatic turn for the worse, they played on in a massive downpour against any common sense.

@dilanesper Hollywood will quickly cycle through its female stars as they age, but it will keep reusing the same male stars even after they are literally dead.

this is gonna be controversial

@cojobrien Well that's okay, it's not like history changes and evolves, and it certainly doesn't increase the rewards to specialized service-sector agglomerations relative to the rewards earned in the recent past.

This is supposed to be the “Future Land Use Map” but it coincidentally looks exactly the same as the “Current Land Use Map.”

@Holden114 Wives would rather do perfect toothpaste squeezing for months than save the same amount of money by having one (1) less pair of shoes.

You think husbands are stronger than wives, until it's time to squeeze the last bit of toothpaste out of the tube.

Veronica Hegens thought she’d made a sound financial decision in September 2023 by renting out her row house in Southwest D.C. Now the retired Army major is in danger of losing the property to foreclosure because of a tenant who hasn’t paid rent since October and who also has no immediate plans to leave. bit.ly/4bfbEC6

@jpklees Viking. Do not recommend at all.

@AlanMCole What brand did you have come with your place? Please don’t say Thermador

Joe Kent Never Should Have Had This Job - read @RLHeinrichs in @realDailyWire dailywire.com/news/joe-kent-…

@Polymarket !!!

We're excited to announce 'The Situation Room' by Polymarket is coming to Washington, D.C. The world's first bar dedicated to monitoring the situation. 🧵