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The last time debt hit these levels, America had just helped win a World War. What's our excuse today? Runaway spending. Bloated budgets. A uniparty that refuses to say no. I've said no. I'll keep saying no. But I need Americans to demand better from their representatives. wsj.com/economy/u-s-de…

@sheminary @TheCartoonLoon … Is that stare about the take, or just about engaging in b*tt*n discourse?

I'm not blaming you if I die. I'm blaming you if the children die. I made an informed choice The children did not.

@sheminary @TheCartoonLoon ‘Importance inflation’ is a key marker of AI generated thought and text. Apropos nothing, of course.

@TheCartoonLoon People are certainly not taking this whole topic too seriously. No siree. Not at all.

I feel like you are taking the purple button too seriously.

@sheminary Why do you hate peace and light?

And whether a closed-off community focussing on "building the Divine Just State which will be ruled by a divinely appointed king" sounds a bit culty, or not. religionmediacentre.org.uk/news/factsheet…

Police have raided that Islamic cult in Crewe that had robot guards, and an intense 'personal army training programme' on the grounds of modern slavery and sexual assault. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

@sheminary @godblesstoto @Rekt57v I mean…

@SaintTzu @godblesstoto @Rekt57v Sounds like the Chelsea > Arsenal transfer strategy. BOOM BOOM

Multiple rapes happening in the streets every day now. When is something going to be done?

@sheminary @godblesstoto @Rekt57v Pink Floyd, a career of getting better by shedding members.

@godblesstoto @SaintTzu @Rekt57v As a Floyd fan too, Christ I know what you mean.

@nickgillespie @reason I’d just like him to know his concurrence in the tariff decision was goddamn heroic.

I'm interviewing Neil Gorsuch later today for @reason. What should I ask him?

@sheminary @Rekt57v @godblesstoto Also, perhaps the police could have paused their cordon-ing briefly to intervene? Seems like they were in the neighborhood…

@sheminary @Rekt57v @godblesstoto My son, in the midst of his Bohemian Rhapsody phase, makes a rude gesture in your general direction.

The Fourth Amendment isn't optional. If the government wants to read your messages, search your data, or spy on you, they need a warrant. Period. My Fourth Amendment Restoration and Protection Act ends warrantless surveillance of Americans.

from a cool new paper by @pawtrammell and @ChadJonesEcon philiptrammell.com/static/utility…

if only most econ papers had this good of a first paragraph

Marx thought calculus was fake because he thought he had disproven derivatives.

Would you believe 57 Republicans and 211 Democrats recently voted in favor of this Orwellian automobile kill-switch? Here’s the roll call for the vote I forced to defund the mandate: clerk.house.gov/evs/2026/roll0…

@d4doome Can’t completely disagree, but de Camp is nearly always a good time.

Unless it's actually written by Robert E. Howard, don't bother. The inferior pastiches by other writers will give you a totally false impression. Most of them are rubbish and the tone is different.

@CesarFerraro11 @OrangeJigger @helenlewis @waitbutwhy I can see this. Humans are likely to want leaders who pushed the blue button, or convinced everyone they did.

@SaintTzu @OrangeJigger @helenlewis @waitbutwhy should press the blue button, and perhaps lying that you pressed the blue button, with the idea that this could lead to a net gain of people pressing the blue button so that everyone survives.

Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?

@OrangeJigger @helenlewis @waitbutwhy Yeah, is the question attempting to select for the desire to signal altruism or for the ability to think through the game theory?

@helenlewis @waitbutwhy If we all press red we all survive, no?

A Canticle For Leibowitz is a classic early (1959) post-apocalypse novel where an order of monks preserved the last remnants of learning (the memorabilia) after a nuclear exchange turned the remains of society into book and scientist burners. I first read it in the 80s as a mass market paperback that I somehow lost along the way. Other paperbacks from that time are yellow with age and getting brittle, but still readable. I read it again in the late 2000s on a first edition Kindle. I eventually migrated to iPads for Kindle reading, but every couple years I would come across an old Kindle in a drawer, charge it up, and check out what I had been reading on it. They eventually stopped working entirely. I’m just finishing reading a new Folio Society edition, printed on heavy, acid-free archival quality paper. If it doesn’t get soaked or burned, it could still be in good shape for centuries. The ephemeral nature of digital storage does give me some pause. We can still read Sumerian tablets full of administrative trivia from four thousand years ago, but there are no known copies of some important software products from just fifty years ago. I am a proud supporter of the Internet Archive!