Favorites: Tariff Twists and Booker’s Big Filibuster
From special election gains to nuclear regulation tweaks, and a Ghibli-style LOTR: never a dull moment!
Probably not a surprise that these are the highest average tariffs (cached) of any country. Jason Furman says that the article he wrote a few days ago arguing that this was all a terrible idea got one thing wrong (cached): the new tariffs are 15x what he had expected. Folks initially scratched their heads at the rates per country, lower tariffs on Iran than Israel (cached). Eventually folks figured it out, and it's dumb (cached), and has nothing to do with other countries effective tariff rates. Pro Trump people don't seem to understand (cached) what's going on. They tried to make it look fancy by using Greek (cached) symbols though. Some have tried to argue that this is 'just like Reagan', but obviously it's not (cached), as you can clearly tell from the graph above. Rand Paul and Tim Walz are taking interviews on Fox (cached) together to say this is bad. Fundamentally, the US is imposing something on itself that countries have fought wars (cached) to avoid. Every 100 years (cached) the US has raised tariffs because that's how long the horribleness of the outcomes takes to pass out of living memory. On the other hand it could be worse, in the 13th century countries were stupid enough to put taxes on exports (cached)
S&P Futures are down 3% as of this writing...
As Snow Crash teaches us, the US should be specializing in what it’s best at, and it’s not growing bananas or making pants.
So many famous photos! In the post, it's set to the 2023 edition of "We Didn't Start the Fire"
Longer Reads
• Thread of web apps created by Gemini 2.5 (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– A short thread of image generation prompts that were once difficult for AI image generators but that they now perform well at. Most notable to me was the geometric shapes one, I remember reading about it, and it's amazing to see it so clearly handled perfectly. (src)(cached)
– Yglesias argues that if Democrats want to win elections, the tent should be big enough to include someone like Lisa Murkowski. (src)(cached)
– The proposal for a company to 'buy' TikTok seems to be to let the algorithm remain in Bytedance's hands, which seems to obviously violate the law. (src)(cached)
– ABC 7: "Only Four Permits Issued 75 Days After California Wildfires Burned 6,000+ Homes in Pacific Palisades" (src)(cached)
– A demo of remaking the LOTR trailer with Studio Ghibli animation. Poster says it cost about $250 to generate the video from the still ChatGPT generated frames. Honestly, it's still got some problems with character inconsistency, but it's quite impressive. (src)(cached)
– Democrats are doing very very well in special elections since November. Here's an article with more details. Nate Silver explains (cached) that the Republicans aren't wrong to decide Stefanik shouldn't leave her position in a Republican house district that she won by 20 points, because they could easily lose the special election to replace her. (src)(cached)
– Discussion of why a lot of American animation is quite ugly. To some extent all we can say is that kids in the early 2000s just liked it that way. (src)(cached)
– A short thread of changes to nuclear regulations to make it possible to improve economics while maintaining adequate safety. TL;DR: Match radiation limits to limits for coal/oil power plants, streamline environmental review, simplify licensing of reactor designs. (src)(cached)
– Using AI image generation as a sort of DM for a game, played image-by-image. (src)(cached)
– Cory Booker set a new record for longest speaking filibuster. Reportedly he was relatively coherent the entire time, and unlike Strom Thurmond, he didn't resort to reading from the encyclopedia. Yglesias asks if Booker used his vegan superpowers (cached) to do it. Who can say! (src)(cached)
– 1% of Russian casualties are caused by Tanks, 75% are caused by drones. (src)(cached)
– During the tariff announcement, Trump went on a tangent about groceries, he seems to think they're some ancient idea? He also seems to think that Fentanyl smugglers pay tariffs (cached). (src)(cached)
Can’t post a screenshot but what Araghibli is doing to that Nazghibli with the torch seems like a war crime.