Favorites: Clinton Cuts, CATL Credit, Cooling Culture Wars
August 13, 2025 — Moderation nudges vote share, the first trans House rep tells coalition trolls to pipe down, and YIMBY critics keep inventing strawmen
The lesson is that when you talk about increases and decreases in employment for specific job titles, you need to be very careful that you're not just looking at a cultural shift in which word is used to describe the job. The source is a Washington Post article. Although as the graph points out, the underlying source is the BLS, so that’s one more thing to worry about.
Another highlight from the summary is that after years of focusing on this question, after getting a university degree specifically to pursue this question, he's realized that "The world is better understood as misaligned incentives rather than coordinated oppression". Check out the full article, or at least this topline summary.
Obviously they use different rice varieties. I was wondering whether the different leaf colors correlate with different tastes/textures/cook time/mill setups, and indeed they do. Best I can tell, some get carefully harvested section by section, but you can also just use it for animal feed instead. I also found some limited evidence that it's sometimes sold to consumers mixed as novelty "art rice".
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Guy nominated to be head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics is just absolutely incompetent. Here’s an example (cached) of his terrible economic commentary. Oh, and the Trump admin is saying their fix for not liking the BLS monthly jobs data is that they're going to stop releasing monthly jobs data (cached). (src)(cached)
– Clinton era spending bill represented peak performance, lowered the deficit while helping the poor. Trump’s OBBB did basically the opposite. (src)(cached)
– China’s massive battery manufacturing company CATL isn’t nearly as subsidized as you might think, 800 million per year for a company with 52 billion in revenue. But there's actually another factor that supports CATL (and other Chinese industries) the government is guaranteeing they get low interest bank loans (cached). (src)(cached)
– The far right in France is getting a free boost because the French left is campaigning against air conditioning. I’d like to encourage liberals everywhere to remember that you can’t fight fascism if you lose elections. Opposing material prosperity loses elections. (src)(cached)
– Stupidest idea I’ve heard from an authoritative source in a while: UK government is recommending deleting old emails as a good way to save water. (src)(cached)
– India achieved their goal of 50% of installed electrical capacity being renewable 5 years early. That’s 28% of their electrical generation (cached)! In April, China installed more solar power than Australia - a global leader in solar - has in all its history. In one month (cached). (src)(cached)
– EVs have now replaced about 10% of road fuel consumption globally. EV Sales are up 27% year over year globally (cached) (although basically flat in North America) (src)(cached)
– The first trans House representative has come into office and now can turn around and point out that the online shitposters in her own coalition are responsible for the negative public perception of Democrats, and is imploring them to shut up. (src)(cached)
– A thread about the weirdness you find when trying to parse PDFs. (src)(cached)
– Have you heard this old joke before? "Q: Is it true there’s freedom of speech in the USSR just like in the USA? A: Yes. In the USA you can stand in front of the White House and yell 'Down with Ronald Reagan!' and you won’t be punished. Equally, you can stand in Red Square in Moscow and yell 'Down with Ronald Reagan!' and you won’t be punished." Well, some British activists just did the exact joke: they were upset that Vance said the UK didn't have free speech, and this group is trying to prove they do by mocking Vance. If I was going to mock Vance for something, it's that he's gone on like one vacation per month since he came into office. Seems like a lot! (src)(cached)
– Short thread, you probably don’t need to be worrying about bees dying off. (src)(cached)
– Tucker Carlson says he was attacked by a demon, Alex Jones says the Star of David is secretly a satanic symbol, other conservative commentators nod along and attack “usury” as well. “American conservatives are basically medieval peasants with iPhones” (src)(cached)
– DHS Secretary’s claims of record crime in Boston, NYC, Chicago and LA is simply false. (src)(cached)
– Here's a whole article that argues that when Democrats moderate on policy, it has only a modest impact on vote share. But the author agrees that it helps rather than hurts. If you want to win elections, you should be trying to do things that gain you votes! Advertising also has only a modest effect, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it! (src)(cached)
– Sketchy rumors indicate Trump Is considering Yellen as fed chair, Jeremiah Johnson jokes that she should “shamelessly go full MAGA for the next year and say literally anything Trump wants to get appointed, because the alternative is like the Papa John's guy gets appointed and pegs the interest rate to the cost of a medium 2-topping pizza” (src)(cached)
– I have no idea what is going on with perplexity and chrome, but Gruber points out that it’s funny that they leaked it to both WSJ and Bloomberg and told both it was an “exclusive” story (src)
– In response to a nonsense statement that boiled down to "the worst thing about YIMBYs is their belief that zoning changes solve everything" Yglesias quips: "The best thing about the YIMBY movement is that 90% of the criticisms involve making stuff up." (src)(cached)
– Gary Marcus takes a victory lap for having predicted that GPT-5 would be disappointing. No surprise he was able to forecast this, as Tim Lee points out, Marcus has called 9 out of the last 5 disappointing AI releases. (src)(cached)