Favorites: Birthright Citizenship, Border Panic, and Bridgewater
July 2, 2026 — Advanced-degree pay bumps reward useless credentials, the median Supreme Court vote drifts right by arithmetic, Caplan sours on the online-argument utopia.
Very cool paper from Bridgewater, they seem to have managed to get incredible results from fine tuning a weaker open weight model to do financial analyst tasks, outperforming all frontier models. And of course it's much cheaper too. (src)(cached)
If you're wondering what the exact figure is approximately a quarter of union soldiers were immigrants. This really shouldn't have been a close decision, it would have been insane (cached) to abandon a century old settled constitutional doctrine. You can sorta tell the opposing justices haven't thought this through because the four dissenting justices all had conflicting, incompatible (cached) explanations about why birthright citizenship wasn't real. Opposition to immigration is so central to the modern Republican party that now all major right-wing speakers have to go out and debase themselves (cached) by acting like birthright citizenship is a new concept being imposed upon (cached) the United States by an activist court. Crowder is personally only a US citizen because of (cached) birthright citizenship, Ted Cruz is out here arguing against (cached) his own past position. Some rightists want to make overturning this central to the party, like Roe v. Wade was, seems bad given how overwhelmingly popular (cached) birthright citizenship is. (src)(cached)
If you're wondering, yes Australia is part of the Asian Football Confederation. (src)(cached)
Fable’s back, but anthropic says it will no longer be included with subscriptions after July 7th, they sure know how to generate a feeling of urgency. Kelsey Piper points out (cached) the thinking trace in this post “Better think of something witty to say!”. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– NYTimes covered an advance in synthetic biology, scientists built cells from scratch that can feed, grow, and reproduce. That's all cool, but they're extremely primitive, and they degrade quickly, they stop working after 5–10 generations, and if I'm reading it correctly, the scientists have to inject a special chemical into the environment to make them reproduce. (src)(cached)
– James Pethokoukis, who is relatively conservative, discusses checking out the 250th anniversary celebration on the National Mall. He argues you shouldn't write off criticisms of it for being biased, the whole thing really is extremely poorly executed. (src)(cached)
– Starting pay for teachers is pretty rough (as one teacher discovered recently in a viral video), it only goes up with seniority, or by getting degrees that almost certainly don't affect outcomes. It would probably be better if pay wasn't so directly tied to tenure. (src)(cached)
– There was a Financial Times article this week arguing against the concept of Degrowth. If you (like me) don't have a subscription, this pull quote gets to the point: "Economic growth isn’t everything for everyone, but it turns out it’s pretty close. It has delivered remarkable progress on exactly the benchmarks that its critics prioritise — recently even on environmental impact. The problem facing rich and poor alike today is that we don’t have enough of it, not that we’ve had too much" (src)(cached)
– As an aside regarding the Birthright Citizenship item today, Josh Barro has to explain to conservatives that the reason it's recently been Republican appointees who are swing Supreme Court justices is because the majority of justices were appointed by Republicans. Therefore the median justice is always a Republican, and that's the swing justice. It's not that Republican justices are somehow more ideologically flexible. (src)(cached)
– Bryan Caplan: "When I was in high school, I dreamed of a world where people wanted to spend all day arguing about philosophy, politics, and economics. Now we're here, and I was wrong. Wrong!" (src)(cached)
– Governor Polis of Colorado is famously good on housing, and he does some stuff to try to signal moderation, but pardoning someone who tried to overturn an election was definitely bad. Moderation on policy is fine, but you don’t “meet in the middle” on whether we should have rule of law. Firing staff who opposed that pardon is straight up deranged. (src)(cached)
– Looks like Mike Johnson only had enough sway to get about a quarter of Republican house members to endorse a letter supporting the Jones Act. Maybe it’s finally going away soon…. (src)(cached)