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@machineecon.bsky.social
I teach economics at a small, private college. Originally from Somewhere in Middle America. I like fun socks.
Talarico’s argument is simple: Stop treating marijuana like a crime. Legalize it. Regulate it. Tax it. Stop wasting police resources on low-level marijuana offenses. Clear the records of people whose lives have been derailed by nonviolent marijuana convictions.
Friends, I slap ^s like it's 1999 when I'm working in the cloud.
Heather Burns@heatherburnstech.bsky.social · yesterdayThe most terrifying enshittification I've discovered has been learning that Microsoft Word documents no longer auto-save if you are not saving them to one of their own proprietary cloud services. I'm slapping control-S like it's 1999.
Thank goodness my institution added yet another new Assistant Vice President position!
Or loans and financing for personal computers in the 80s.
Tim “Positive Subway” Smith@positivesubway.bsky.social · yesterdayThis is when I’m reminded that my grandfather wrote a lot of personal loans for *TV sets* while working at a small Midwestern city bank in the 40s–50s
Almost every human on earth, much less American voter, is dead fucking wrong on like 10 things. Big deal. Doesn't make them generlizably morons. It costs nothing to be nice as long as you don't actually implement dumb policies.
This seems absolutely rife including on the left. Someone told me last week I couldn’t be part of the pro-Palestine movement after I commented in support of the Moroccan migrants. Nativism is always a scourge and if we have to constantly fight it on the left, too, we’re toast
Joel S.@joelhs.bsky.social · 2d agoA shocking number of people believe, with zero evidence, that Israel is behind Moroccan migrants into Spain, which is just the Great Replacement conspiracy. Meanwhile, US Jewish orgs have declared war on Mamdani for accurately describing Netanyahu as a war criminal. www.haaretz.com/world-news/e...
Of course, nobody PREFERS cheap crap. Consumer choice is about weighing benefits AND costs.
I was going through some old papers earlier and sorting them into piles to file, scan, or shred, and it occurred to me that they were basically marry, fuck, kill piles.
The overwhelming right wing sentiment is that COVID was an engineered bioweapon that was also harmless. Trump overreacted to it by shutting down the country, then engineered a drive to create a vaccine that was the real bioweapon that killed millions, and it's Joe Biden's fault.
When a vacuum cleaner filter is clogged does it suck or does it not suck?
About ten years ago a sociology colleague came to my office asking how to calculate odds radios from their logit coefficients. I think my response of "why would you want to do that - why not just calculate average marginal effects for the probabilities in Stata (or SPSS, I forget)?" turned her off.
Julia M. Rohrer@dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 6d agoNew blog post! Odds ratios are...a bit weird. Here I explain two problems (interpretation, non-collapsibility) and provide some simple recommendations for improved reporting. www.the100.ci/2026/07/30/r...
Yes. This point is not sufficiently recognized in the global imbalances debate. If you think your CA deficit is excessive and caused by factors outside your borders, you should tax or otherwise discourage capital inflows. Tariffs are a very blunt tool at best. +
Michael Pettis@michaelpettis.bsky.social · 2w ago8/9 I agree, and this suggests that rather than encourage capital inflows, economies that want to strengthen their manufacturing and productive sectors and to benefit workers by raising productivity and wages should consider capital controls as a far more effective tool than tariffs.
I've been saying for years that a trade deficit is an investment surplus to anyone who might listen.
Dani Rodrik@drodrik.bsky.social · 2w agoYes. This point is not sufficiently recognized in the global imbalances debate. If you think your CA deficit is excessive and caused by factors outside your borders, you should tax or otherwise discourage capital inflows. Tariffs are a very blunt tool at best. +
Putting out your house fire will only encourage your neighbors to take up smoking in bed.
Salt M. Bank 🍉@saltmbank.bsky.social · 2w agoYes your house is on fire but imagine if we fully extinguished the fire, that would be such a radical change that we could alienate your neighbors. Under my proposal we can incrementally fight the fire with a single garden hose. If we remain patient, we could stop the fire in a matter of weeks.
Proving once again that these dumbasses are not in fact libertarians: they're solopsists, and rather petulant ones at that.
Bill@bill-of-lefts.bsky.social · 2w ago??????
Never minding the "I have a lot of sympathy for the changes under Trump" statement, this is really poor journalism. Numerous studies estimate the deaths and other harm to shutting down USAID. Just effing Google the research on topics you're asking about.
Jonathan Harris@jonathan-a-thon.bsky.social · 2w agoHe's quite possibly one of the worst people to have ever lived.
cops hate automated enforcement *because* its fair. They conceptualize their role not as punishing rulebreakers but punishing "bad people" (poors and minorities). They dislike red light/speed cameras because they wind up punishing "good people" for doing something they see as essentially harmless
William B. Fuckley@opinionhaver.bsky.social · 2w agoit's fucking insane that so many people get away with hiding their license plates so that they can get away with running red light cameras and cops mostly don't care (I'm sure some of them do on their personal vehicles too). like this is something where broken windows policing actually makes sense.
”Tracking”, or splitting students into separate tracks which lead to vocations or college, is a common feature of other country’s education systems. The American rejection of this is, in my view, exceptional and laudable.
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 2w agoLinda McMahon says some elementary school students should be put on a "pathway" to become plumbers
Children should not be put on a path that determines their future career options based on test scores in elementary school, as is so often the case around the world.
People are owed permanent, well-maintained toilets & sanitation & sewage systems. When you don't have those, you are not only risking local outbreaks, but--as could be the case right now--you risk outbreaks farther down the line. Sanitation is one of the great achievements of public health and law.
Cyclospora Spreads Through Human Feces. How Did It Get Into Our Food Supply? (Gift Article)
The large number of cases suggests that excrement entered the food system on a “surprising scale.”
nytimes.com
In light of yesterday’s discourse, starvation is a mostly-solved problem in the USA due to government benefits But maybe not anymore
Andrew Russeth@russeth.bsky.social · 2w ago"Four months into an appeal, Ms. McDonald, a cancer survivor who weighs 69 pounds, bustles to food banks, stretches ground turkey with oatmeal, and skips meals to feed three teenage boys." www.nytimes.com/2026/07/20/u...
This is true, but one problem is that the gains don't show up in starting salaries; they show up in upward mobility over your career. This makes debt financing of college a problem. College grads make a ton more, but don't accrue the gains until they ideally would have already paid off the loans.
Cooper Lund@cooperlund.online · 2w ago“You can make more without a college degree because of how much college costs” is the ultimate conservative dumb guy college take, grounded in the idea that there are a ton of trades jobs out there that will make you like $100k a year, and the data for it just isn’t there.
We have lost our ability to talk about the world as it exists and instead talk about the world in the way we know will resonate with internet audiences. So "everyone's two paychecks from the street" seems almost self-evidently true even though a moment's reflection will reveal it as absurd
I initially opposed traffic cameras for reasons similar to Kevin's; more evidence came in and instead of doubling down on incomplete analysis, I changed my mind. That's what intelligent people do. I'm fact, I think every busy intersection should have one with cops mostly out of traffic enforcement.
Gravel Influencer@gravelinfluencer.bsky.social · 3w agoI wish this "speed cameras are cash grabs" trope would die. We have recent studied in the U.S. showing that after an initial surge in ticketing, fines decline as behavior changes and people speed less.
Extreme heat is damaging El Salvador's corn harvests, eliminating farm jobs, and prompting workers to migrate to the United States using established migrant networks, say researchers at Economía Uniandes, @ucl.ac.uk, Cornell, and @cudenverclas.bsky.social. #econsky www.aeaweb.org/research/mig...
Climate change and migration
Extreme temperatures in El Salvador destroy farm jobs and push workers abroad.
aeaweb.org
Using surveys, administrative data, and a randomized controlled trial to show that personalized information shifts students toward better study methods and improves exam performance, from Agustina Affonso, Esteban M. Aucejo, Stephanie El Khoury, and Tomás Larroucau www.nber.org/papers/w35436
Wait till someone tells him the likely effects of foreign investment into the United States on the trade balance.
George Pearkes@peark.es · 3w agoSomeone has finally briefed him on the realities.
