Jonathan Shafter

@mattyglesias Normal people want to engage in politics to improve lives - not make it their lives

No, the abundance crowd believes (accurately) that the community meeting process empowers a wildly unrepresentative group of people to exert disproportionate influence over the political system.

I don't mean to beat up on this one specific company but the only end-game of mass AI generated follow up letters is I either lose all respect for the sender or I never see it because my own AI reads, filters, and maybe replies with my own AI slop in return.

@MarkLevineNYC Some of this is the macro environment and some is AI. But some is that NYC - much as I love it - is simply not a welcoming environment for business investment right now versus easy alternatives and that chill extends to hiring.

The hiring slow down in NYC is hitting one group especially hard: Young people looking for entry-level jobs. This is the other half of the affordability crisis. Addressing this worrisome trend should be a top priority for our city. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

@gavinpurcell Richard Garriott

trying to figure something out who would you consider the true geniuses in the history of video games? the likely mt. rushmore: miyamoto obviously carmack (from a technical standpoint) will wright kojima maybes: sid meier gabe newell warren spector hidetaka miyazaki

@whatisny Give this man a key to the city

HERO! A man jumped into a still frozen pond to rescue one of the Central Park coyotes which had fallen through the ice this afternoon #whatisnewyork

@ccbaker2023 Outdoor dining was the best new thing in NY in many years and we killed it for no apparent reason

It’s days like today when it becomes clear how massively the Eric Adams administration + Adrienne Adams city council messed up by decimating NYC’s outdoor dining and open streets programs. Where are we supposed to sit outside and eat and drink on this beautiful evening?

@ShabazzStuart @PeteFranzese We can have great civic things again but the curse of bloat and waste has to be fixed for that to happen c

@PeteFranzese Or just figure out how to build things in a cost effective manner like we used to.

Another great "regional metro" concept for the New York City via the Effective Transit Alliance. Unlocking regional transportation will make the area infinitely more livable and affordable.

@PhilSustainable Progressives do better when they focus on what they can actually build and deliver for the people vs. seeming like taxing people they don't like is the primary goal with public benefits a possible and incidental side effect.

For decades, NYC has run one of the largest, most unacknowledged welfare programs in its history, for suburban car owners. By giving away 3 million street parking spaces of expensive public real estate for free, it’s a multi-billion dollar annual wealth transfer

@raycast Tremendous Raycast fan. Will build custom apps for field use on this expedition in July. explorers.org/calendar-of-ev…

First Look at Glaze youtu.be/FGbmmgH97ms

@SamanthaLaDuc Markets are vulnerable now but also be fully aware that hedge fund managers talk their book

When you get Lloyd Blankfein of $GS warning "I smell a crash coming" and now Point72 David Rosen saying private credit is a fraudulent bubble... all within 24 hrs of each other... I dunno. Wall Street seems ... nervous.

@geeta_minocha Because substance matters and this sloppily written bill is obviously about monopolistic guild protectionism paid for by lobbyist dollars vs. AI safety

I think this bill is a bit clumsy but I’m shocked by the immense pushback against the mere idea of AI brakes

@MarkusDjm121 @TransAlt Your solution is what - we just shoot them instead?

@TransAlt And your solutions is more govt control and another revenue source for the state.

Nobody has the right to put millions of other people in danger. Yet that’s exactly what these drivers are doing on a near-daily basis — the top 10 super speeders in New York were caught by school zone speed cameras an average of 179 times each, at least once every other day.

@jennyrozelle Everyone dies but few people are trying to enforce permanent intergenerational primogeniture over their landed estates like it’s Downton Abbey or the other weird edge cases which constitute bar exam t&e questions

Just remembered the new Bar Exam ("NextGen") is dropping Wills, Trusts, and Estates. It is both concerning and terrifying that such a critical area is getting less focus. I don’t know if anyone’s noticed, but… everyone dies.

@SwannMarcus89 My daughter in fifth grade was put in a social studies class "Neoliberalism in 80s media." It was super-weird to start and 1000x weirder given her appropriate lack of any prerequisite political, economic, or cultural knowledge.

Nobody can explain to me what neoliberalism even is. Neoliberalism seems to encompass the policies of both Ronald Reagan and Sweden, so I'm not sure how it's either a) a valuable term for an actually existing ideology or b) something that can be said to have "fallen apart"

@dirtcheapbanks SNL now CapIQ made this frictionless. Did the product get that much worse?

Nobody mentions this. Every U.S. bank files a call report every quarter. Balance sheet, loan mix, deposit costs, credit quality, the whole picture. Free. Public. Updated 4 times a year. The call report for a $400M asset community bank in rural Tennessee has been read by approximately nobody. One person filed it. Maybe his secretary proofread it. Spend 45 minutes with it and you’re the most informed outside investor on earth about that institution. Loan-to-deposit ratio. Construction exposure. Deposit betas. Creeping charge-offs. Do this for 30 banks and something interesting happens. You start seeing things that are genuinely invisible to professional capital allocators. Not because you’re smarter. Because they literally cannot do this work. There’s no fee to justify it. No fund size that makes a $300M bank actionable. The economics don’t work for them. They work for you. The database is called FFIEC. It is hideous. It has no app. There is no AI wrapper making it frictionless. It has never been in a Substack. Which is exactly why it still has alpha in it. Most people optimizing their portfolio are doing so in the most crowded, over-analyzed, institutionally-saturated corners of the market. Meanwhile this thing exists. Boring, ugly, and absolutely loaded with signal for anyone willing to sit with it. The edge was never information. Information is everywhere. The edge is being the only person in the room who did the reading.

@John_Hempton @havivrettiggur @nntaleb Taleb wrote one pop-science book which could have been a long form tweet and has spend the subsequent decades as a weird bloviating narcissist with zero added output.

@havivrettiggur @nntaleb A. You are genuinely right. B. Taleb is smart but in his case antisemitism is an illness. C. I don't understand why he can't be more self analytical.

Yes. For all his wisdom, in the end, @nntaleb turns out to be a cheap, empty bigot who sees Jewish conspiracy behind everything he doesn’t like.

@valigo Get yourself an RPN calculator and just blow thy mind

I just had a revelation that LISP, in its superiority, does not need operator precedence. You always write everything in functional form, and there is no ambiguity what applies to what! Obvious in hindsight, but I got a real "whoa" moment after thinking through it explicitly!

@Jefffeldman The inevitable degen cycle of “don’t you dare regulate my honeypot” alternating with “govt these bastards stole my money DO SOMETHING”.

I looked at this bet on Thursday. I read the fine print and realized it excluded death. So I didn’t place it. Reading is important.

@RealEmirHan Steven Segal is a belligerent buffoonish whale

Steven Seagal says Tom Cruise was the wrong choice for The Last Samurai. “They have a 5-foot-2-inch guy, whether he was straight or gay, I don’t know. Doesn’t speak Japanese. I got phone calls saying, ‘That role was perfect for you. How did it happen?”

@dampedspring Made my night with this

I have the misfortune of being in the midst of passing a kidney stone. It is way less painful than reading #fintwit talk about Iran tho.