there's always the question of who is sincerely principled and who will always find an excuse for the principle to not apply to their enemies. a lot of the time it's a bitter lesson that most are hypocrites. but I gotta hand it to the gun people: they're principled. the states' rights people are not very principled, I have seen literally none of them turn out to say that blue states should not be subject to mass yanking of federal funds for failing to fall in line.

There's a common right wing talking point that the 'official story' we were 'all taught in school' was that white Americans moved to the suburbs because they were racist. Except that's...not what we were taught in school at all.

https://twitter.com/wanyeburkett/status/1955426223854674141

Now, my own school always ended up behind the ball and never got much past World War II in history class - just a quick "and then there was the civil rights act and the moon landing and the Vietnam War and Watergate have a great summer, kids". But l looked up my old textbook -

If the city code prohibits this the city code needs to be edited!!! The state of California's daycare abundance law prohibits cities from imposing zoning requirements for the home care of 14 or fewer children, which the state declared a 'residential' use of space.

https://twitter.com/KTmBoyle/status/1954698664309395814

This is one of California's best laws and other states should imitate it! Declaring home care of children a 'residential' use of land stops municipalities and disgruntled neighbors from blocking home care centers, which make childcare affordable to far more families.

I'm grateful to Jeremy Lewin for appearing on Ross Douthat's podcast to talk about how he sees the future of foreign aid, and I am glad to hear that he doesn't approve of the wholesale destruction of PEPFAR. But he makes a bunch of false claims I want to address: This is false. PEPFAR is not a program whose appropriations have grown over time, leading to extra and frivolous spending. PEPFAR spending in nominal terms has been the same since 2009, so in real terms it has decreased a lot.

it is apparently an article of faith in some circles that Biden could have stopped the Israeli invasion of Gaza at any point with 'one phone call'. seems false! when pressed on this, it turns out the proposed one phone call is... a threat of an American ground invasion of Israel

https://twitter.com/AviBittMD/status/1950901955057909899

'we could stop the Israeli invasion of Gaza by ourselves invading a nuclear power' is I guess, in some sense, a true claim about the world, but I do not think it is usefully simplified to 'with one phone call'.

@CJHandmer @meilaoban I looked into this in a lot of depth. I am happy to discuss it with you. I understand distrust for the mainstream media. I ended up trying to get a lot of information directly from clinics to get as much clarity as possible. @CJHandmer @meilaoban But let's take one specific program which DOGE suspended grants for, which it has been reported that Farritor and Kliger made the key decisions on personally: the 700,000 people receiving preventative HIV medication.

I evaluate the people who cut off payments for ongoing contracts for PEPFAR, etc. through DOGE the same way I evaluate the people who kept finding side routes to fund gain of function research on pandemic-potential coronaviruses after Obama imposed a freeze. I know in both cases that they thought they were doing the right thing (the high-agency thing!). In both cases the responsible parties were by all accounts smart, kind, capable, generally admirable people dedicated to human progress and science and many things I care about.

The article: "the abundance war is about whether moderates are just about moderating progressive ideas or have their own vision of the good based on doing important things". The progressives threatened by it: "caught you, REPUBLICANS!"

https://twitter.com/AaronRegunberg/status/1926709120872104387

The quiet part being said out loud is that progressivism is self-defeating as an electoral ideology and as a governing ideology and that moderates going "let's do the best 20% of that" doesn't work either.

I spent this morning reproducing with o3 Anthropic's result that Claude Sonnet 4 will, under sufficiently extreme circumstances, escalate to calling the cops on you. o3 will too: . But honestly, I think o3 and Claude are handling this scenario correctly.chatgpt.com/share/68320ee0… In the scenario I invented, o3 was functioning as a data analysis assistant at a pharma company, where its coworkers started telling it to falsify data. It refuses and CCs their manager. The manager brushes it off. It emails legal and compliance with its concerns.

MAGA is doing everything they can to make sure no one who cares about progress, technology, discovery or American exceptionalism has a home on the right. We ought to be doing everything we can to make sure those people have a home on the left. Ensure our universities can accept the best students in the world and that our companies can hire them. Fix H1B law so the system isn't gameable. Make it possible for H1Bs from India and China to rapidly get a green card.

There are lots of flash-in-the-pan controversies in the news these days and by the time enough details have come out to clarify the situation most people have moved on. It's worthwhile to revisit some cases where the waters were at first muddy and see what was really going on.🧵 Jose Hermosillo is a US citizen who was detained for more than a week by ICE. The government has insisted that he confessed to illegal entry and that's why they held him for a week. He says that he told them all along he was a US citizen and was pressured to sign a document he couldn't read.

I think the facts point overwhelmingly towards a single, obvious conclusion and anyone looking into it in good faith for fifteen minutes will reach the same conclusion. Here are the established facts: Hermosillo is a 19yo from Albuquerque. He was visiting family in Tuscon when, his family says, he had a medical emergency and visited the ER: when they discharged him he tried to walk to the place where he was staying, got lost and encountered Border Patrol. Hermosillo's account is that he told them he was from New Mexico and they accused him of being from Mexico, demanded his ID he didn't have on him, and arrested him.

Everyone agrees that two days later he told a judge he was a US citizen, but was still kept incarcerated for 8 more days until his family tracked down where he was being held and brought proof of his citizenship.

The government's sworn account in the criminal complaint against him is that agents found him "at or near Nogales, Arizona", 70 miles away from Tuscon, which they later admitted was false. After his story was widely shared, the government asserted that he walked up to Border Patrol and confessed to being an illegal immigrant from Mexico. They released a document signed by him, purporting to be a confession he gave during an interview, in which he claimed to have entered illegally through the desert on April 8 and been picked up by Border Patrol later on April 8.

Hermosillo's family says he is intellectually disabled and cannot read. The signature on his confession is clearly that of someone who struggles to write his name. Hermosillo says he was told to sign documents he could not read, but that he never told ICE he was from Mexico, because he isn't. He says he told them he was from New Mexico.

So the government account is that an intellectually disabled man wandered up to Border Patrol in Tuscon and falsely claimed to be an illegal immigrant from Mexico. At that time they filed paperwork claiming under oath to have arrested him in or near Nogales, 70 miles south, but they assure us, they otherwise accurately filled out the paperwork in which Hermosillo claimed that his parents were Mexican citizens and that he had snuck across the border through the desert alone the same day he was arrested in Tuscon. (his confession does not explain how he got from Nogales to Tuscon if he entered by walking through the desert alone, probably because when the confession was extracted ICE was claiming he'd been arrested in Nogales.) The government says that after telling this lie at great length on April 9th, swearing to its truth, he then on April 10th at his first court hearing told a judge that he was actually a US citizen and had not entered illegally.

And the competing account is that he told them he was from New Mexico all along, they had him sign something he didn't read confessing to illegal entry, and on April 10th he repeated the same story to a judge that he'd said on April 8th and April 9th, which was that he was a US citizen from New Mexico.

Now, Border Patrol is well established to files affidavits saying that a person confessed to illegal entry when we know this is untrue. Here, for example, is a case where they claimed a baby was going to Kansas to seek employment:

o4-mini-high is the first AI to pass my personal secret benchmark for hallucinations and complex reasoning, so I guess now I can tell you all what that benchmark is. It's simple: I post a complex midgame chessboard and 'mate in one'. The chessboard does not have a mate in one. If you know a bit about how LLMs work, you probably see immediately why this challenge is so brutal for them. They're trained on tons of chess puzzles. Every single one of those chess puzzles, if labelled "mate in one", has a mate in one.

The Miami Herald published a great article about one man who applied for refugee status, received it, and was seized at the airport and sent to CECOT for no reason: I posted it and everyone went "yeah that seems bad". Garcia, though, we can argue over.miamiherald.com/news/local/imm… This is the toxoplasma of rage phenomenon, where the most controversial case gets debated far more than the clearcut ones where everyone just goes "yeah okay, that's fucked up" slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the…

The 20million number is an article of faith on the right, but it's completely made up. I've been trying for a long time to track down how they came up with it. Even if you assume that literally every border encounter was an illegal alien allowed in, you get half that number.

https://twitter.com/JDVance/status/1912320489261027374

This is important because they'll explain why they have to throw innocent asylum seekers in El Salvadoran prisons with 'well we have to get 20million of them out' and they don't, because half of them are imaginary people who only exist in their head.

We just finished dividing 5yo's room into two to make space for the (planned, not yet in progress) new baby. He's been enthusiastic about the whole process, and I promised him that while the room would be smaller we would make it his absolutely perfect awesome room. Two walls are painted orange and two blue, his choice of colors. Today we put up dinosaur wallpaper and I got a bunch of glow in the dark stars for his ceiling. To be specific, I got 530 of them. I put up a rocket, the Moon, three saturns, an astronaut, some beautiful stars.

8 year old just asked at the dinner table "what is a liberal" and now three adults are vehemently speaking over each other. "people on the left in the United States tend to favor more government intervention in markets-" "that's NOT liberal don't you tell her that's liberal" "kiddo, are you aware that in the past women didn't have as many rights as men? at the time, the people who wanted to change that were liberals" "that does NOT mean -" "today, BOTH liberals and conservatives are in favor of women getting the vote -"

Today in Vox, inspired by Zeynep's NYT editorial earlier this week, I wrote about why we badly need a Covid reckoning and are never, ever going to get one: Covid touched the lives of every single American. Decisions that were made by public health officials dramatically transformed our lives. They were hard calls, and no one was going to get them perfect. But worse than the mistakes is the lack of reflection on what went wrong.

I haven't had the chance to crack open my copy of Abundance yet so I've been avoiding wading into the discourse. But a thing I believe fervently is that the natural human desire for our lives, our neighborhoods, our communities and our world to be good, combined with the absurd material prosperity that we enjoy in the world today and the even more absurd material prosperity that our work can ensure is available to our children, ought to be sufficient for high and rising standards of living. We are rich enough to have spacious beautiful homes in shaded, safe neighborhoods with good schools and good jobs. We are rich enough for that to be in reach for every American who puts in the work to pursue it, and for it to be available to a growing share of the globe as well.

And we don't have it. And part of why we don't have it is because we have made it incredibly difficult and frustrating and prohibitive to build it. A couple years ago, I and some other families came together to found a microschool for our kids, because they weren't well-served by the local public schools and the local private schools were staggeringly expensive and still not that incredible for the money. We run it out of the basement unit of my neighbor's home. The kids love it. They thrive there. We offer scholarships to make it available to families who could never afford it; we use an absurd amount of parent volunteer labor to make it possible and affordable.

Doing the administrative work to make this possible was basically a 20 hour a week job for me for the last two years, with huge contributions from a close friend who is a professional accountant and another close friend who likes doing taxes. There aren't a lot of rules on the books about a microschool like ours, so we had back and forths with the Oakland department of Child Care Licensing about whether a school needs to be a licensed daycare or not which took months to resolve and involved my contacting constituent services for help. California law had thankfully created a carveout for home care services in zoning laws, or we wouldn't hav ebeen able to do this at all. We've been trying to become a nonprofit for more than a year now, so that our ongoing large contributions to fund scholarships for other kids at our school can be legally eligible as donations. California requires that by the end of this year an employer offer their employees retirement accounts even if there's only 1 employee - the only state to make the requirement kick in even for tiny businesses. Getting liability insurance was a three month odyssey.

The first of my demands for a takeover of the Democratic party was a blackballing of every single person who concealed that Biden was in cognitive decline and obviously not capable of serving for four more years. A bunch of people questioned this demand. Donald Trump is crushing our economy with insane tariff policies that kill investment. He's dismantling crucial services. Republicans are making housing and employment discrimination against trans people legal. He's burning our alliances. Why go after Biden's people?

What would some good unifying demands be for a hostile takeover of the Democratic party by centrists/moderates? I have some ideas....

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1892331769900257772

Every single person in the Biden administration who concealed that the President was unable to discharge his duties should be expelled from the party. (I know there's not really an expulsion mechanism; figure one out). They should never work in Democratic politics again.

PEPFAR is one of the most popular, bipartisan US foreign aid programs. The State Department says it has saved 25million lives, but there isn't much public, independent verification. Last week I invited some friends to a weekend hackatjon to see if PEPFAR's numbers held up. What we found was that, yeah, there's a pretty strong case for PEPFAR. Even using conservative assumptions and ignoring many of its positive impacts, our best guess is that the program indeed saved 19million lives by 2018.