In case anyone is still covering the IVF question, today's new Republican Study Committee budget specifically endorses the idea that embryos have the full legal rights of persons under the 14th Amendment. They're not going to say "we support Rep Mooney's bill to ban IVF" but that's a ban on IVF as well as a national ban on all abortions at any week with no exceptions.

Braindead rightists are enraged by my suggestion that people worried about the budget deficit should support the candidate who has proposals to reduce the budget deficit.

https://twitter.com/brien_lundin/status/1757236950577143905

To be clear, I’m not even asking anyone to vote for Joe Biden.

If your priority is corporate tax cuts and such then by all means vote for Trump!

But don’t run around pretending to be motivated by the national debt while you do that.

One notable thing about the 2024 primary is it’s easy to find polling evidence that Nikki Haley would be a stronger candidate than Trump, but GOP primary voters and most conservative influencers apparently don’t care. Conversely, in the 2020 primary there was a good deal of polling evidence that Joe Biden was a stronger nominee than Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and it seems like Dem elected officials — and ultimately voters — cared a lot about this.

The context for something absurd like “Woke Kindergarten” is that 10-20 years ago there was a lot of interest in trying to advance equality by improving basic schooling which generated stakeholder demand for reasons why pushing schools for measurable results was actually racist.

This is also related to the effort to get people to stop saying that diversity (or lack thereof) in the workplace is in part a downstream consequence of stuff that happens in school.

slowboring.com/p/why-progress…

Really interesting paper on the realities of household financial decision-making

nber.org/papers/w24161
A related one — while in theory high interest credit products could be serving a useful market niche, in practice the people using them don’t know what they’re talking about.

nber.org/papers/w18969

What happens to grocery prices if the government spends a bunch of money on deporting 14% of the agricultural workforce?

slowboring.com/p/trump-wont-m…
If you’re a native born American who specifically aspires to go pick fruit in the Central Valley or work in a slaughterhouse this program will raise your wages, but for anyone who works in a store or an office or construction site or factory it just means higher prices.

“Smarter people have more extreme views” holds pretty generally, which is why you see much more psychotic takes from Princeton students than from kids at normal colleges. Robert Nozick was a brilliant teacher but I remember him sketching out some elaborate scheme for replacing government safety regulation of canned food with a group of competing canned food certification firms.

Researchers, HUD, and the journalists who rely on their data use "homelessness" to mean the situation when a person does not have a home.

But people complaining about "homelessness" usually mean something like "people acting out on the street."

slowboring.com/p/americas-two… These are both real things that happened.

On any given night in America, there are lots of people sleeping in cars or shelters — often employed people — dealing with a bad situation and not bothering anyone.

slowboring.com/p/americas-two…

Take with something for everyone: Most of the criticism I read of what Israel is doing in Gaza seems unfair to me.

But what’s true is that what Israel has been doing in the West Bank (not just now but for the last 20+ years) undermines the legitimacy of everything else. The version of this policy that would have moral and political integrity would be a proper grand coalition that freezes out the far right parties, a “Nixon goes to China” moment on settlements, bringing the PA into regional talks with the Gulf states, etc etc etc

The signature flaw of far-left activist groups on everything from climate to Palestine to housing to policing is refusing to engage in any kind of specific way with how anything is supposed to happen beyond mystifications about political will. I take everyone at their word that when they say “Free Palestine from the river to the sea” they mean a secular democracy with equal rights for all and not “kill all the Jews.”

But how do you accomplish that? That’s not what Hamas is asking for or how they run Gaza.

A concept that we have lost sight of in the era of internet-induced bad tempers is that if you have a very unpopular political view that you nonetheless strongly feel is correct, you need to try to find ways to convince people who for whatever reason don’t share your view. Suppose you want Joe Biden to try harder to restrain Israel. You are climbing three hills:

— More people think Biden has done too little for Israel than too much
— Most Americans agree on the merits with Israel’s response
— Pre-attack, Americans’ sympathies were with Israel

I wonder how much the Manhattan Project and subsequent framing of nuclear reactors as a technology whose primary purpose was to manufacture fissile material for bombs wound up harming the long-term prospects for nuclear power. The world's first nuclear power station, Calder Hall, generated electricity as a co-benefit of manufacturing fissile material for the UK nuclear weapons program.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calder_Ha…

I think there's a less vibes-y way to reach the Zumbrun conclusion here that doesn't rely on Cass' slippery statistics — Baumol's law and opportunity costs.

https://twitter.com/PTBwrites/status/1672229280464396292

Precisely because wages and living standards are rising, the cost of paying other people to watch your kids — something we should construe broadly as including school, camp, the soccer team, etc. as well as child care — has gone up relative to average incomes.

I've been joking around about this, but the way you can tell the Supreme Court corruption scandal is genuinely scandalous and genuinely corrupt is by following the logic of their own jurisprudence on public corruption issues. The justices themselves have officially ruled that there is nothing wrong with a wealthy individual providing an ongoing stream of financial benefits to a public official who is in a position to make decisions that favor him as long as there's no explicit quid pro quo.

Doing a podcast debate about vaccine science with cranks is dumb … but the question of what we should actually do to increase vaccine uptake is worth talking about.

slowboring.com/p/a-vaccine-di… In 1953 you’d say that vaccination is good so we should work the consent-manufacturing industry and make sure that everyone agrees vaccination is good.

But this kind of information control strategy doesn’t work anymore and it’s not going to return.

https://t.co/HO3GdyQm30slowboring.com/p/a-vaccine-di…

Trump turned your kids trans by weakening Clean Water Act rules https://t.co/HEcdAl7Sfo

https://twitter.com/BenjaminGoggin/status/1670755204403277825

Back in 2002, we had a study showing atrazine “demasculinizes” frogs, disrupting their endocrine system and altering their sexual maturation and functioning.

Evidence grew stronger over time and this was seen as a lib point calling for stronger regulation.

A lot of conservative grievances are downstream from the fact that the country keeps getting less religiously observant, but this seems like it’s mostly just churches doing their jobs badly — religious people have more kids but the retention rate isn’t so high. Conversely, liberals are obsessed with “misinformation” driving rightwing politics but never talk about widely held false ideas like “good people will go to heaven when they die” because it’s considered impolite to discuss religion.

This grift @GavinNewsom is running with his constitutional amendment is really bad, it deserves to be widely — and publicly — condemned by Democratic Party elected officials and other stakeholders. When I talk to people about it, they almost universally agree that it's dumb and counterproductive.

But also just sort of roll their eyes and say well, it's good for Newsom's own profile and list-building so of course he does it and what are you gonna do.

I take the good news lately as a win for expectations > hydraulic theory of inflation reduction, but also trying not to be too confident about such things.

https://twitter.com/mtkonczal/status/1668624261190418434

Tried to explain these two views back in December 2021 when I was more confident.

Hydraulic view that to reduce inflation, the Fed actually has to make a bunch of people lose their jobs, so that their newly unemployed selves drag price growth down.

slowboring.com/p/monetary-mec…

I’ve been thinking about this Trump indictment, and Trump’s overall conduct and character as a person and I reached a conclusion some of you will find shocking: He seems like a bad person — selfish, reckless, unprincipled, vulgar, and corrupt. open.substack.com/pub/matthewygl… A lot of rank-and-file Republicans have convinced themselves that his low character is an asset — that backing him is a form of ruthlessness that “owns the libs.”

But he’s a con man and the right is his marks; he drags their causes down for his personal gain.

I would say the larger issue about RFK Jr and the "conspiracy theory" charge is that it's factually true that the military-industrial complex killed both his uncle and his father with impunity in order to prolong the Vietnam War.

Some good Oliver Stone films about this.

https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1666141088154013697

Like we can beat around the bush, vaccines blah blah toxic chemicals blah blah but there's only one "conspiracy theory" that matters and you know in your heart that he's right.