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https://twitter.com/UrbanCourtyard/status/2042785638240366769

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Jun 2

The unspoken cause of the 2008 financial crisis: lowered lending standards to poor urban neighborhoods in exchange for regulatory approval of mergers and then passing those loans off to the GSEs

I’m taking this from a really, really good 2014 book about the politics of banking crises, “Fragile by Design,” by Charles Calomiris and Stephen Haber 🧵

They’re both academic economists who appear to be right-leaning. Calomiris has done a stint with the Manhattan Institute and Haber a long tenure with the Hoover Institute. If they’re liberal, they’re of the neoliberal deregulatory type

So what do they argue happened? There’s no one single cause for such an immense blowup; a few different pieces had to come together; two important ones came in the early 90s with the Riegle-Neal Act of 1994 and the GSE Act of 1992

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May 23

https://twitter.com/peter_nimitz/status/2058033187410817091

An ex gf of mine is a BigLaw employment litigator which means handling HR lawsuits for big corps

She’s a libtard but she’d joke that the job was slowly turning her Republican because most of her cases were from farcically bad employees trying to bilk the company for a settlement

https://twitter.com/peter_nimitz/status/2058033187410817091

Some stories from her:

One woman took FMLA leave (family/medical) for a few months and the company realized she was terrible because her department picked up the slack no problem and found some mistakes she’d made

They let her go when she got back, so she sued on the grounds that they were retaliating against her for taking FMLA leave

Another guy was in a sales role and he’d been in the bottom quartile of performers for years despite having a favorable sales territory

They finally let him go, he lawyered up, and said he was having PTSD issues from the military

He was let go in like 2021 /

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Apr 11

The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch

Got around to reading this cult classic from 1979. There’s parts I think can be ignored or dismissed but at its peaks it’s a remarkable book and changed the way I view narcissism and our society

🧵

Let’s start by talking about narcissism. I’ll give you my preconceptions, which I think are in line with the average person

From Greek myth, Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection in a pool. Narcissism is extreme self-love: egotism, selfishness, vanity

This can be classified as “grandiose narcissism.” We think of people like Donald Trump, Kanye West, and Paris Hilton

Lasch presents narcissism as something subtler and more widespread. Let me give you some quotes from Lasch

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Apr 3

Fujimori’s Coup and the Breakdown of Democracy in Latin America by Charles Kenney

This is going to be a very long book thread about Alberto Fujimori’s 1992 autogolpe in Peru.

Autogolpe means self-coup in Spanish, an occurrence common enough in Latin America that they have a neologism for it. It’s when a regime that’s already in power ends democracy to consolidate its own power

Fujimori, while president, dissolved the legislature with the military’s backing and became a de facto dictator

Most of this thread is going to be about the history preceding the coup. It’s a typical Latam shitshow

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Feb 19

Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism by Jonathan Rieder

This is a 1985 ethnography about racial conflict in eastern Brooklyn in the 70s. It’s a true story of white flight. Rieder embedded in the community for two years to learn their stories

🧵

An amuse bouche:

“Canarsians spoke about crime with more unanimity than they achieved on any other subject, and they spoke often and forcefully. Most had a favorite story of horror. A trucker remembered defecating in his pants a few years earlier when five black youths cornered him in an elevator and placed a knifeblade against his throat. ‘They got two hundred dollars and a gold watch. They told me, Listen you white motherfucker, you ain't calling the law.’”

“‘The police came and we caught one of them. The judge gave them a fucking two-year probation.’ The experience left an indelible imprint. He still relived the humiliation of soiling himself.”

Some background:

Canarsie is a neighborhood on the edge of Brooklyn in the east, abutting Jamaica Bay

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Oct 17, 2025

A few items from Unsettled by Steven Koonin, a sober review of the state of climate science

Koonin has impressive pedigree: a Caltech physics professor, private sector work for British Petroleum, Department of Energy under Obama

He’s been a major player for decades

Koonin does not dismiss climate change. He starts the book by explaining that carbon dioxide impedes natural radiation from the earth, thus trapping a certain amount of extra heat

The question is, how much of a difference does it make and what should we do about it

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