pushkar samarkand
4.2K posts
This kind of dumb property tax slopulism will be less and less politically effective as the baby boomers exit the voting population.
Nancy Mace@NancyMace
Our seniors should not pay property taxes.
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@AlexTurlais @dilanesper It’s fair to say CA/north american costs make project infeasible but doesn’t make sense to blame geography
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i keep telling high speed rail advocates the actual cost of the project is hundreds of billions of dollars. if you actually know the basics of how HSR works and the Tehachapi mountains this was always obvious.
The original ballot measure set it at 19.9 billion. They lied.
Judge Glock@judgeglock
California high-speed rail cost now up to $231 billion. That means the average worker in the state will pay out over $12,000 to fund a single project that almost no one will ride. CA rail will be studied for generations, a truly once-in-a-lifetime level of government failure.
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@scottastevenson @villi Long (4+ days?) stays with multiple people - works out pretty well. Im not sure how the pricing (w cleaning fees) works for anyone else.
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@villi Fair, it is probably optimal for multiple people
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The golden years of AirBNB were a temporary arbitrage on depreciation.
There was a universe of beautiful well-maintained properties and hosts that had not been worn down by short term guests.
And the AirBNB hosts didn’t properly estimate the cost of depreciation to maintain that standard, so costs were irrationally low
That era fundamentally cant return, it was a temporary arbitrage opportunity
There was once a supply of fairly pristine unused space and now there’s not
If a space does manage to hit the 2014 standard, it must charge a lot more to fight depreciation
And at that point a hotel is generally better
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@pseudointe27245 @mattyglesias I believe he is alluding to gun deaths disproportionately affecting younger people rather than heat deaths, so many more life years would be lost in the US vs Europe.
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@mattyglesias Your argument doesn't make any sense. It would make sense if heat deaths in Europe were proportionally 30% higher due to Europe having 30% larger population than the United States. But that's not what the figures show. Heat death exceeds US deaths by heat by 21x.
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This is a fun fact, but the EU-27 also has ~120 million more total people than the United States and we are surely losing a lot more life-years
Werner Zagrebbi🇦🇿@zagrebbi
As summer comes into view, always remember that more Europeans regularly die in heat waves than Americans die in guns violence.
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@SiobhanV74297 @jbarro Re recruiting. For soccer yes but is that always true for the major sports - baseball, football, basketball? Travel sports are almost mandatory for making teams in large schools, which is nutty
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@jbarro Both can be true. You won’t make your school team in a lot of schools if you don’t play on a competitive travel team. But colleges recruit from the travel teams, not the high school teams,
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I have never heard any parent speak positively about this travel-team private-league sports stuff. So why do they have their kids participate in it? (The answer is rarely "my kid is headed for D1") Don't schools have teams anymore? theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/05/…
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@StatisticUrban Yes he's corrupted,but Hillary in a smaller scale was no different.Clinton Global so called non-profit went bankrupt one month after she lost.All those donations from Saudis & other wealthy Middle Eastern countries, stopped.She was selling so many promises to them and more,lol.
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Corruption on a genuinely breathtaking scale.
Financial Times@FT
Trump and sons to be ‘forever’ exempt from tax audits ft.trib.al/ca4OS8P
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@regularhuman0 @grahamformaine @LinkofSunshine He wont get a chance if they don’t bring it to a vote.
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@grahamformaine @LinkofSunshine Dems will need at least 52 seats to block a nominee. Bc Fetterman will 100% vote to confirm
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If Donald Trump tries to confirm a Supreme Court justice in his final two years, Senate Democrats must follow The McConnell Rule™
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@boooyorkcity @mattyglesias Funny ~= has a good sense of humor ~= laughs at my dumb jokes
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Scientific studies on how to make yourself more marriageable mostly do not exist. The central problem of how to find love in this world has proven strangely uninteresting to social scientists.
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It’s actually crazy we don’t have RCTs of programs designed to help young men/women find love.
Finding recruits would be easy. Follow up time wouldn’t be that long. Numerous cheap candidate interventions are available but untested.
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@porksouvla20069 @spencerpratt If crime goes down and schools get better etc without an increase in housing, then housing prices will go up
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@spencerpratt Low-crime and no-illegal-immigrants unlocks a ton of existing housing for regular people. And most of those buildings look immeasurably better than YIMBYslop
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What the YIMBY folks may not yet understand is that I’m their pathway to actually getting 100K new housing units. Imagine what we can do with 55 blocks on Skid Row, once it’s clean and useable for the first time…
YIMBYLAND@YIMBYLAND
I massively underestimated Pratt. He’s gonna run away with this thing.
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Claude, welcome to neoliberalism
Arram@arram
Asked Claude: 'There's a meme called the "fix everything easily switch". What policies do you think are the best candidates for being a real fix everything switch in the US? Give me your top ten, your confidence, your reasoning, and why a given policy has not been implemented.'
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@Natural_Fallacy @asymmetricinfo @razibkhan Yes. And you need discipline to actually do the homework when it is easy to cheat; having a good (non-photographic) memory wont help if you dont study.
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@asymmetricinfo @razibkhan I don’t really see how this substantially diminishes the value of conscientiousness.
To write cogent essays that are backed by evidence, you need to do considerable preparatory work (reading and writing). That does require some degree of conscientiousness.
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This is going to reward a different kind of student. Returns to conscientiousness 📉, returns to memory and raw cognitive ability 📈. One unintended side effect will likely be to improve male performance relative to female, since men tend to be lower on conscientiousness.
Dana Goldstein@DanaGoldstein
With student A.I. use/abuse now ubiquitous, professors and teachers are killing off take-home essays and papers. Students are writing inside the classroom, often by hand. It's part of the big rethink happening on tech and learning. My new report here: nytimes.com/2026/04/30/us/…
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@ImNotOwned Undoubtedly someone who has thought deeply about the reasons for Dem losses in 2024:
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@NMachiavalli @dilanesper @mattyglesias Also, the foundation of LA’s success was built decades ago in pro-growth eras with better leaders. Fundamentally its sclerotic governance now would have stunted the city if in place before 70s.
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@dilanesper @mattyglesias I live here and come on LA's economic success is clearly because it has the greatest weather (and geography) on planet Earth. It's succeeded in spite of terrible political mismanagement.
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I know this is in jest, but I really wish people not from LA shouldn't tell people in LA how to live.
It's one of the worst urbanist tics. Let us have our own way of life and our own geography and if Matt thinks it is so terrible, he can just never visit here and we'll be happy.
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The ex fiancée of McMorrow’s husband, a Michigan co-chair of Trump’s 2016 campaign, is running for the U-M board of regents as well, on cracking down against protests and repressing leftists on campus.
Michigan GOP@MIGOP
MEET YOUR REPUBLICAN NOMINEE FOR THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN BOARD OF REGENTS Lena Epstein—a successful businesswoman, entrepreneur, and longtime active member of the Republican Party—will prioritize holding leftist professors and administrators accountable, protecting conservative speech on campus, ending diversity, equity and inclusion programs and calling for an end to "lawless riots" on campus. As a mom to a young daughter, Lena understands the importance of ensuring our academic institutions of higher learning are fiscally responsible and responsive to the people who fund them—the taxpayers.
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@rwlesq @keysmashbandit I didnt compare closely enough re content, but stylistically I preferred your original fwiw
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@keysmashbandit There's a reason why I didn't just cut and paste ChatGPT's response, but I think the final product is better having run it by ChatGPT and considered its input.
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Please, I'm begging you, try to critically examine the differences between these two pieces of writing.
ChatGPT editing did not improve this. Every single change only served to weaken your claims significantly. Everything is now hedged into oblivion: no longer have you outlined a "problem," now it's merely a "flaw." "It is true" now demoted to "it appears to be the case." "Is" gets a "usually" tacked on. A thesis statement at the end of the first paragraph gets run over by noisy, out-of-context example-whittling. All for fear of being misconstrued.
And at the end, the argument that gets spat out isn't even yours anymore! You argued that Graeber failed to create a true account of work because he did not understand Chesterton's Fence. ChatGPT is arguing is that it is possible some apparently bullshit jobs could be secretly load-bearing if you squint. These are two different statements. The second is weaker and less compelling. It says less. And it's fucking longer!
Don't do this anymore! Stop doing this! It's worse!!!
Chasing Ennui@rwlesq
@imsuchagem @pangramlabs @benglickenhaus Why not? Sometimes I'm just shitposting, but if I'm trying to make a point, I try to make it well.
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@cowllin I view the labs as similar in character to Dropbox and dissimilar in character to a small CPA firm with regards to questions like “Are you capable of competently securing a data store?”
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Cannot underline this enough: send your human-prepared return to an LLM for review prior to signing it. The closest thing to free money.
It isn't even necessarily on the complex or hard bits, either. The first thing it surfaced me was an IL credit for elementary school tuition.
Dave Guarino@allafarce
Pretty sure Claude just saved us an additional ~$1,000 in taxes. (I used Cowork to review the draft return our tax preparer prepared.) We really are in a new world when it comes to the informational costs of policy compliance.
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@jasonrgriffin @JosephPolitano @oren_cass Well, not sure what he knows but the markets tanked and he backtracked somewhat
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@JosephPolitano @oren_cass Not to mention, Trump is a pussy and didn’t do the big beautiful tariffs he claimed he would, because he knows the predictions were right!
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The problem with economists asking for a takesy-backsy on their predictions of tariff doom is that it implies they would have had favorable predictions about the tariffs had they known the full trajectory.
Who thinks that, if you had told economists a year ago what was going to happen with tariffs, they would have said "sounds reasonable, growth will probably tick up and inflation down, manufacturing demand and productivity will rise and sentiment will improve"? Did I miss all of the economists who have been saying since June that now the tariff level looks OK?
The reality is they missed even on the basic mechanisms: the dollar didn't appreciate; the retaliation didn't occur; the administration successfully leveraged tariffs into favorable deals and commitments. Of course the models spit out the wrong answer.
Yes, it's embarrassing for a field when confident predictions fail. But it's way more embarrassing when the reaction of practitioners to the failure is to deny a problem exists.
Erica York@ericadyork
The administration made specific claims about the effects of its tariff policy. We should evaluate those. Instead Oren points to economists’ estimates about peak April tariffs and says those outcomes didn’t occur. Of course they didn't, because tariffs changed substantially.
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@BoredXanthippe @thecureforblur It’s possible but v difficult bc attractive young doctors tend to find other attractive doctors/ professionals easily, especially in residency. Hence the 50k matchmaking. Might work with 20m and a doctor that doesn’t feel like working much.
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A self-made, successful 46yo man with >$5M net worth can get an attractive 38yo doctor/successful professional or he can get a hot 28yo model/actress/bartender who hasn’t been able to make real money and has no reasonable path to do so.
However, he’s almost certainly not getting a hot 28yo doctor. 🤷🏼♀️
Blaine Anderson@datingbyblaine
Why is matchmaking expensive? To illustrate, here’s how I’ll lose money on a client’s $49,000 package. Client is 46, 6’2, exited tech founder. He’s looking for a woman 27-33, very specific criteria around match personality, appearance, and profession. Without diving into specifics, she: • Isn’t easily searchable online... • Isn’t likely to reply when we find her… • Isn’t likely to be single… • Often has a deal-breaker trait we can’t screen for without a phone call… • Isn’t necessarily interested in my client… I was expecting this to be a difficult search, so I quoted $49,000. I wasn’t expecting ~100 hours of labor to find each match, not including communication with the client! To date I’ve spent $45,000 on salaries for the women staffed on his search, plus $2,750 on styling and photos, and we still owe the client 2 matches... Before considering overhead (let alone opportunity cost) this will be a huge L financially. Things balance out though. Most engagements are profitable. Some engagements are quite profitable. For example, a new client in NYC paid $30,000 and paused after his first match, because he’s 99% sure we found his wife. That's still a new relationship, and engagements last 9 months (6 months of active matching + up to 3 months of pause), so we could be on the hook for more work in coming months. But you get the point 🙏
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