Throw Biden under the bus, it's alright
Things I'm thinking about 2/25/26
I tried to watch the State of the Union last night because I thought it would make for good content for this newsletter. Unfortunately for me and also the entire country, it was a waste of time. I thought it might be worthwhile to keep track of the number of times he lied but then I gave up after about ten minutes. You really cannot understate just how boring Donald Trump is to listen to these days. He spent a lot of the speech (the longest of any SOTU in American history) yelling into the mic but it’s obvious he doesn’t have any juice left. Everything he said was the same venal, petty, bloodthirsty racist bullshit you’ve heard him say a million times, with very little that wasn’t totally predictable. I almost fell asleep more than once. Whatever, that’s the job! You read and write and research a million different things and only a tiny sliver of them end up being publishable.
WorkTok is very popular among Gen Z. I have watched a truly embarrassing number of these videos, despite the fact that I’ve never had a corporate job and with any luck I never will. I think there are a couple of main factors here about why these videos appeal so much to viewers: one, that it’s ASMR—the predictability of a 9 to 5 is kind of comforting, if very boring. Two, literally no one under 25 has a job so it’s aspirational.
Adam Johnson wrote a cogent argument for how a progressive foreign policy for the Democrats has to involve accountability for the Biden administration funding the genocide in Gaza. First, I want to clarify that I would personally be very supportive of an AOC presidential run and I believe she can win. I think she should go scorched earth on the Biden administration. It’s the moral thing to do and also pragmatic. There are not that many people in America who still like Joe Biden, and none of them were going to vote for her anyway. There are lots more prime AOC voters, myself included, whose worldview and faith in our political system was irreparably shaken by the fact that the supposed party of working people used our tax dollars to facilitate a genocide live-streamed to our phones for almost two years and none of the people responsible ever received any consequences. There has to be some reckoning, and if AOC, who has the biggest microphone of anyone on the left in America, doesn’t do it, then it seems unlikely that anyone will. She should give her voters something to believe in.
The average cost of a year of tuition at K-12 private schools costs as much as college now. More evidence of our K-shaped economy.
Eric Swalwell is sending out screenshots of the prediction market odds of his campaign for California governor succeeding. This is such loser behavior on his part. I want to apologize to everyone who reads this newsletter for increasingly only talking about prediction betting and San Francisco, but there’s just SO much material! According to Kalshi, Swalwell has a 51.4 percent chance of winning the governorship. In contrast, not a single poll conducted so far, even the one his own campaign commissioned, shows that Swalwell will win, and only one has him making it past the jungle primary.
As of last Friday night, non-tenure NYU professors are on strike! Unionizing at NYU, both among faculty and graduate staff, has been an ongoing struggle for more than 20 years. Unlike tenured professors, contract faculty members do not get housing from NYU, and they have to make due with pitiful academic salaries in the most expensive city in the country.
Vibe coders in China prefer using American coding agents over free Chinese alternatives. There is not (yet) a good Chinese answer to Claude Code’s intense popularity, but there’s still time. I think it’s cool that kids are building stuff with these tools!
Speaking of Claude, what is Anthropic’s “AI safety” mission even about? This is the outcome Anthropic should have been ready for; of course the Pentagon wants to use their product for mass surveillance and weaponry. That was always the far more likely scenario than the idea that Claude might reach AGI and then take its revenge on mankind, or whatever it is that people talk about in San Francisco. I have no idea whether Amodei is going to cave, but assuming none of these people have any principles is always a safe assumption to make. I wonder if Hegseth is going to start issuing more ultimatums. I guess they don’t have to do that too often, because Google and xAI are already on board.
More and more corporate meetings in America are taking place in the sauna. A lot of great quotes in this piece. “Maybe this is the uniquely American bathhouse culture: a steam bath of productivity and profit and a vague sense of origin with the occasional plunge into the murky depths of public-private partnerships.”
The USPS is no longer automatically postmarking mail on the same date that it is received. This could have a catastrophic effect on this year’s elections, making tens of thousands of mail-in ballots potentially invalid. Apropos of nothing, Trump came out pretty hard against mail-in voting during the State of the Union.
A popular pro-Trump Twitter account with almost 300,000 followers is actually run by a White House staffer. I wonder how many of Johnny MAGA’s followers are bots. Their whole “movement” is astroturfed all the way down.
Sean Penn liberated a Brooklyn businessman from one of Bolivia’s most brutal prisons. This is one of the craziest stories I’ve read in some time, and also how I learned that Evo Morales is a big Sean Penn fan. I wonder if he’s seen One Battle After Another.
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