He is a character from some Charles Portis/Mark Twain novel. Truly one of those "only in America" personalities.

Caroline Fichter@franchiselawlady.bsky.social · 4h ago

Those poor kids are missing out on a hell of a story. My franchise law group did a franchise trivia game and there was a whole category devoted just to that man’s adventures.

Read it if you can.

Always helping

great odd lots episode with @briancallaci.bsky.social discussing the making of the franchise model.

How Franchise Restaurants Opened the Door to the Gig Economy

Podcast Episode · Odd Lots · July 24 · 45m

podcasts.apple.com

Started a new in-office job today. My wife is texting me photos of how the dog is handling it

The impact of AI on jobs is uncertain. What is certain: assessment of job-creation/destruction by tech company CEOs should be heavily discounted, or ignored altogether. Tech CEOs have no insights in labor economics, and have bad incentives on this issue.

Brings into relief the very dumb discourse that No Kings was "bigger than the civil rights marches." NK was good, but there's a qualitative difference b/t CR marches as demonstrations of deep organization and force and NK's loose one-off mobilizations.

I don’t think "Dem HR ladies" is labor coded or working class aligned. It comes from the same place everything that is terrible in the last two years has come from. The backlash to the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements.

A lot of HR haters on this thread. HR serves the executive & board and always acts in institutional interest not employee interest. The animus of “HR lady” is precisely anger at the overlap of employee and employer interest in preventing sexual misconduct. It’s not about “the man” it’s about the dog

Travis@unraptured.bsky.social · 4w ago

he's not wrong about the implicit vibes but again I'm wondering how many people saying this have ever had to actually deal with HR in a big company/on a non management level I saw one guy start his take on this with "as an executive" and I'm like yeah I bet you love having HR do your dirty work

Palestinian pediatrician, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, has spent 18 months in Israeli prisons without trial or charge. His lawyer reports his life is in immediate danger, following torture and poor treatment in prison.   He must be released immediately.

Detained Gaza doctor almost unrecognisable after injuries in Israeli jail, lawyer says

Hussam Abu Safiya faces ‘tangible danger to his life’ following 18 months in prison without charge or trial

theguardian.com

My dad had a middle finger rubber stamp he used to reject management contract proposals. One time my little brother (maybe with some sibling help) stamped his whole body in ink before we walked to school.

UAW Archivist@uawarchivist.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Always a special day when I can pull the box with Walter Reuther’s carved wooden hand. From the @uaw.org’s archives here at the @reutherlibrary.bsky.social. Learn more: youtube.com/shorts/_9o31...

I spoke to @newleftreview.bsky.social about the political economy of climate: supply chain geoeconomics, why Biden’s signature climate policy didn’t stick, political weakness of green capitalism, Chinese industrial policies, global South resource nationalism &more newleftreview.org/issues/ii159...

Thea Riofrancos, The New World Climate Order, NLR 159, May–June 2026

An interview about the new parameters of climate politics, with the breakdown of global consensus. As the EU re-opens coal-fired plants and the US shuts down wind farms, China gouges the earth to chur...

newleftreview.org

greedflation theory (sophisticated version) explains a lot

Dominique Baker@bakerdphd.bsky.social · last mo.

www.wpr.org/news/wiscons...

Protecting workers from #fissuring requires enforcing #jointemployment. Thanks to @timothynoah.bsky.social @newrepublic.bsky.social & @briancallaci.bsky.social for making the case. newrepublic.com/article/2124... @crampell.bsky.social @epi.org

How Trump Plans to Crush Fast-Food Workers

Franchising is usually a racket. Now it will be more of one.

newrepublic.com

With deviations correlated with being venomous. We are all 7 y/o boys.

Ashkaan K. Fahimipour@akfbio.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Reptiles with longer Wikipedia pages tend to be bigger. The relationship is a power law with exponent = 0.85. I guess humans really like writing about big lizards? The longest article is the Komodo Dragon.

The Spurs told ESPN that Jalen Brunson is going to have patch things up with San Antonio following last weeks finals victory

HuffPost@huffpost.com · last mo.

The House minority leader told CNN the mayor is going to have to patch things up with congressional Democrats follow Tuesday's primary upsets.

Sociologist C Wright Mills had a term for such ideologically blinkered “centrists” back in the days of the Cold War: Crackpot Realism.

Chase Madar@madar.bsky.social · last mo.

Representatives Goldman and Espaillat really should have moderated their extreme views on Israel-Palestine policy, views which are increasingly out of step with their constituents and American voters in general. The price of not getting out of your “ideological bubble”

went down to the centrist convention. they’re all shaking and crying, I heard one guy say “I’m starting to think a better world IS possible.” the lady next to him slapped him in the face

We could have had a very different rollout of LLMs than we actually did. It could have focused on building applications that made life easier for everyday use. Limited but useful. Instead, the buildout was focused on a radical and flawed proposition: that it could replace much of human labor.

Have to give Greenspan this: with his "traumatized workers" analysis of the declining influence of low unemployment on wages and inflation, he understood the institutional-political determination of reserve army/NAIRU dynamics better than most.

This is the entire story of the post-1980 period: GDP growth never recovered pre-1974 growth rates, but profits, stock prices surpassed anything seen since WWII. Misleading the well-off to believe we were in a time of wider prosperity than we were.

☀️ Jon Schwarz ☀️@schwarz.bsky.social · last mo.

The NYT Alan Greenspan obituary says he oversaw "a period of immense wealth creation." In reality, his time at the Fed from 1987-2006 was a period of average GDP growth — BUT the growth that there was flooded to America's richest people, making them think it was a period of immense wealth creation.

Working on presentations for book talks, so going back to my files for visuals. These are Dunkin' Donuts brochures from the 1960s. Amazing that franchisors (and related businesses) have avoided joint employer liability for this long.

One of the best explanations of causal inference I have read. Maybe it was a mistake to adopt the colloquial term "cause" rather than inventing a jargon word, since what social scientists mean by "cause" (a "what if" question) diverges from the plain English meaning (a "why" Q).

Frankly impressed that JD Vance has written two whole books on a subject as dull as JD Vance.

Earlier than I thought, the evolving English language has left me and my reading comprehension behind.

Joshua Erlich@joshuaerlich.bsky.social · 2mo ago

this website can’t handle this post. melvillemogged. whalegooned.

Honestly never really believed real-life book stores would carry it. Very cool to see!

Man voters just want to drink gas and man can't afford gas to drink.

Political polls@politicalpolls.bsky.social · 2mo ago

New - Democrats take the lead among man voters 🔵 Democrats 38% (+2) 🔴 Republicans 36% Last poll - Republicans +7a YouGov #A - Man V - 6/1

With University of Utah and the New School heterodox economics PhD programs under attack, the task is clear: Mayor Mamdani must create a PhD program at John Jay College, City University of New York