Jake

One of the first signs of larger coverage losses to come. CBO estimated that enhanced ACA subsidy expiration would mean 2M fewer people insured in 2026 & 3.8M fewer by 2035. Together with HR1’s cuts, more than 14M additional people are expected to be uninsured by 2034.

NEW: We've spent 10 months tracking the outcomes in tens of thousands of lawsuits brought by ICE detainees amid an unprecedented detention push. It's not a cose call: judges have ruled more than 10,000 times against ICE, a 9-1 ratio. See the database: politico.com/news/2026/05/1…

When you strip out food, energy and trade, US producer prices surged the most in April in five years on a year over year basis.

For 45 years, Berkeley built virtually no new housing. By the mid-2010s, it was the most expensive college town in America. Shortly thereafter, YIMBYs took over and kicked off a building boom. Today, nominal rents are below 2018 rates—remarkable progress on affordability.

@DannyBKelly @Danny_Heifetz @craighorlbeck dirtbags

New newsletter: THIS IS HOW WE CURE PANCREATIC CANCER There are 3 broad reasons why pancreatic cancer is so hard to treat: 1. It often starts w a gene mutation that doctors thought was “undruggable” 2. It is largely “invisible” to the immune system by evading, and even turning down, T cell response 3. It’s asymptomatic until it’s too late—and radiologists can’t even see it on scans until it’s lethal We’re making progress along all three categories. Today’s post explains how—and how AI-assisted radiology could make a huge difference open.substack.com/pub/derekthomp…

Interesting factoid about that $235 million apartment? NYC values it at less than $10 million for property tax purposes. cnn.com/2026/05/07/bus…

Texas just passed California in utility-scale solar. And it's not close in wind or energy storage.

@MikeIsaac @DKThomp loved super pumped btw

@JakeKauz @DKThomp movie theaters rule

The future of leisure is fitness, running clubs are replacing night clubs for young people, alcohol consumption is falling, and oral GLP1s are going to melt literally billions of pounds of visceral and subcutaneous fat in the next decade in America. The future is gonna be fit as hell (and a little bit boring)

@MikeIsaac @DKThomp I think millennials are the perfect blend. No tech as kids, still like to hang out, better dad parenting, also into fitness, love going to movie theaters (this last one may be just me)

@DKThomp shoutout to alcoholism

Banner day of headlines for the FDA

Are we great yet? F.D.A. Blocked Publication of Research Finding Covid and Shingles Vaccines Were Safe nytimes.com/2026/05/05/us/…

We have a year’s worth of economic data since Liberation Day, when President Trump announced much higher tariffs on most imported goods and countries, and the data are definitive; the tariffs have done significant damage to the economy. Since that day, job growth has come to a standstill, with only the non-traded healthcare industry adding meaningfully to payrolls. Also, since that day, inflation has accelerated, with the consumer expenditure deflator increasing at a 3% year-over-year pace, up from 2.5% before the tariffs and well above the Federal Reserve’s target of 2%. And the trend lines don’t look good, especially as the economic fallout from the Iran War hits with full force. The higher energy and other commodity prices caused by the war threaten to do even more economic damage than the tariffs, further undermining growth and pushing inflation higher. The U.S. economy is resilient, but just how resilient is set to be tested.

Sky-high aluminum tariffs + a war that knocks out Middle Eastern aluminum supplies + pissing off one of the world's largest aluminum suppliers (and your nextdoor neighbor) = inarguably one of the biggest industrial own-goals in recent memory

The president’s second son pitches his bitcoin company as a money-printing machine. It’s actually an arbitrage vehicle that preys on MAGA-minded investors. forbes.com/sites/danalexa… 📸: Daniel Ceng/Anadolu via Getty Images

Cool breakdown of who’s winning (and losing) in prediction markets Since early 2025: • 100K+ Polymarket accounts lost at least $1,000, nearly 2x the number that made that much • Profits are heavily concentrated among a small group • Everyone else, in aggregate, is down $131 M

In Mere Christianity, CS Lewis has an awesome opening riff about how most people know the difference between right and wrong, but they justify acting immorally by appealing to "special exception." They know they shouldn't hit a friend, but what if that friend was being so mean? They know they shouldn't steal a seat a bus, but what if that person got up and created a moment's confusion and then the seat was up for grabs? Etc. When I read this section, I thought a lot about contemporary politics and the way that people justify their politics, not by appealing to higher principles, but rather by appealing to "special exception" to argue that their admitted indecency is justifiable in context. A lot of MAGA vice is justified by special exception. Trump's defenders rarely defend his crookedness directly. They don't say "it's wonderful to use trade policy to enrich the Oval Office, it's really awesome." They say: Well, look, it doesn't really matter, because the left is so dangerous, Biden maybe did something similar 3 years ago, Democrats would do the same in power, and so forth. I heard something similar in that NYT conversation everybody's talking about. You even see it in the headline: ‘The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?’ Why, hello, special exception. When you start arguing that stealing food and French paintings is justifiable in the context of political protest in an age of prevailing distrust, you're similarly not arguing *for* any kind of a universal principle. Nobody actually wants 300 million people stealing fruit from the grocery store. Nobody actually wants every Louvre visitor trying to rip a Manet off the walls. These virtues don't scale. (Because they're not virtuous!) Sap that I am, I want us to get to a place where politics is about fighting for what is right and decent, not about justifying what sort of indecent behavior might be somewhat understandable or technically justifiable given the other side's vice or the prevailing levels of indecency. The point is to build the kind of goodness that scales. nytimes.com/2026/04/22/opi…

With the US now on the verge of achieving pure idiocracy and a brand new form of government that can only be described in terms of coconuts and bananas, I’ve decided to expand my guide to what is arguably the most cartoonishly stupid administration known to modern man. 🧵

Yea we joke about the double standard in the media, but this is legitimately insane.

Tariff War, Post-SCOTUS Update "None of the promised benefits occurred over the year when tariffs were in effect. The data shows the exact opposite happened." buff.ly/VXB0504 by @Ritholtz