kirblar024.bsky.social
@kirblar024.bsky.social
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watching people like Charles Murray be (correctly!) horrified by the rise of people like Nick Fuentes is sort of bleakly funny. uh oh! maybe those hysterical libs had a point Chuck! maybe there was something there to worry about!
November 25, 2025 at 6:16 PM
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19 ex-members and bringing both your girlfriend and your dog on tour are all pretty flashing red warning signs, tbh
The death metal band’s sole remaining member has launched a GoFundMe to get home to Portland

stereogum.com/2480744/vitr...
November 25, 2025 at 9:01 PM
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"By 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, with the impact accumulating gradually over time. We estimate that investment was reduced by between 12% and 18%, employment by 3% to 4% and productivity by 3% to 4%"

Read the Stanford report:
siepr.stanford.edu/publications...
The Economic Impact of Brexit
Other
siepr.stanford.edu
November 25, 2025 at 7:31 PM
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It's 2025, nearly 2026, the era of "make up odious accusation about person you disagree with for unrelated reasons" doesn't work anymore and it's time to stop. In fact it never really worked, it just pissed off people who hadn't been enemies at all (while you're stranded by actual enemies).
No, I do not “pick on” trans people, I have never done anything like this. And frankly, I think the willingness of some people to completely invent accusations of transphobia in the desperate search for a cudgel against ideological opponents suggests they don’t really care about transphobia
Listen dude, you can try and ride for this guy all you want, but the trans userbase of this platform fucking hates him because he picks on them. I'm going to listen to the trans people I know who are telling me he's bad. Plus I've been in these threads and seen it
November 25, 2025 at 4:58 PM
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there's an old stereotype of china as outcompeting america because of masses of cheap labor. but as michael pettis puts it, contemporary chinese firms don't act as if labor is free. they act as if capital is free
“Yang Jiemin, VP of the state-owned company behind the port, said its highly automated operations require 60% fewer workers than traditional ports. It underscores one advantage Chinese companies have in deploying AI versus the U.S.: no independent labor unions.” www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-r... (🎁🔗)
Robots and AI Are Already Remaking the Chinese Economy
China’s factories and ports are learning to make and export more goods faster, cheaper and with fewer workers.
www.wsj.com
November 25, 2025 at 3:08 PM
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basically American agriculture massively dwarfs everything else in water usage. it's like 80-90 percent of all usage.
November 25, 2025 at 5:51 AM
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gonna have to do ag reform if you want to fix the water. sorry. they’re the problem.
November 25, 2025 at 5:28 AM
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for instance, GPT-3 took 700,000 liters of water to train. That sounds like a lot! It is roughly the amount of water used to raise the amount of beef that *two* Americans eat in a year.
November 25, 2025 at 5:38 AM
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a lot of falsehoods are getting repeated about b) by people who rightly believe a), and it doesn't help credibility.
a) The social harms of AI are vastly under-appreciated and go far beyond displacement of labor

b) The environmental harms of AI, though not trivial, are nevertheless small potatoes compared to many other industries like farming (and AI demand may even help accelerate electrical grid upgrades)
weird header for an article about the very real dangers of modern industrial agriculture
November 25, 2025 at 5:18 AM
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the left nimby crashout bc Zohran actually wants to build more housing is genuinely so funny
November 24, 2025 at 11:59 PM
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Is the problem the economic "messaging" or the economic "outcomes"
November 24, 2025 at 10:46 PM
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This should have been an instructive moment in people’s understanding of just how much people are willing to pay economically for racism and xenophobia.
Still reeling from the Stanford report on Brexit. Reduced GDP by up to 8% and investment by as much as 18%. The UK Treasury would have £40 billion more each year if Britain had remained in the EU. Devastating self-immolation.
The Economic Impact of Brexit
Other
siepr.stanford.edu
November 24, 2025 at 3:27 PM
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Archetypal example is “capitalism ground me down so I quit my job and set up a small business so that I’m my own boss”. You didn’t dislike capitalism! You disliked authority!
November 24, 2025 at 11:46 AM
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In the alternative universe, America in the early 1980s (disastrous 1970s, back to back recessions, high inflation, Iran's hostage crisis, crime, drugs, HIV epidemic starting up, freshly elected president who ran against the system) was doing well
November 24, 2025 at 7:43 PM
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Much like most of the press, the wrecker left thought re-electing Trump would make them relevant like they were 2017-2019, & it's gone just as well for them as it did for the press.
November 24, 2025 at 6:44 PM
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There is a really bad habit on the left of middle class people trying to dress their concerns up as the views of the impoverished and down trodden, and this basically formalizes it
Man, gotta love some Wall Street guy who decides It’s Time To Care About Poverty and uses vibe math to recalculate the poverty line, as… $136,500

Extreme “it’s one banana, Michael” energy
November 24, 2025 at 3:22 PM
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also not only CAN you build your way out of climate change, it's the only way out, and not building our way out of climate change dooms hundreds of millions to misery and displacement.
November 24, 2025 at 1:37 AM
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Trump’s Tariff War Is Leaving Ohio Farmers in the Red and China in Driver’s Seat
Trump's Tariff War Is Leaving Ohio Farmers in the Red and China in Driver's Seat
This isn’t the art of the deal but the wages of a foolish pursuit of protectionism. U.S. agriculture has been paying the price for years.
www.cato.org
November 23, 2025 at 11:44 PM
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In other words they are not arguing that the hardship of the epidemic pushed people to the GOP for mystical reasons of out of abstract despair, opioid addiction drove voter demand for touch on crime policies that Republicans were offering.
November 24, 2025 at 12:19 AM
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This is a very cool paper with a clever identification strategy to test the causal impact of the opioid epidemic on various political outcomes.

A key point that’s not in the abstract —causal mechanism is voters agreed with GOP tough on crime rhetoric and policy.
November 24, 2025 at 12:17 AM
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This chart (which applies even more to social media than it did to TV) lives in my head rent free.

Social media enveloping traditional media means everything and everyone is now competing in the entertainment market. Boring stuff like policy that affects millions of lives doesn’t stand a chance.
November 23, 2025 at 8:24 PM
People have been massively underrating how India/Pakistan tensions are warping discourse online
the last 24 hours on X, summed up:
November 23, 2025 at 11:33 PM
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can’t really overemphasize how much the constituency for this does not exist
Trump had found an issue more unpopular than his handling of inflation - attacking Venezuela:

www.cbsnews.com/feature/cbs-...
November 23, 2025 at 11:22 PM
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yep, it genuinely is racist to implicitly assume that Chinese people or Indians or some indigenous group are incapable of rigorous, reproducible science! Like it unironically is the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Reflecting further on this point: all cultures have produced revelationist (woo) and systematic-observational knowledge traditions. Any association in between woo and nonwestwern ideas is an artifact of western revelationists invoking nonwestwern traditions to appeal to secular westerners
This will be a battle because there’s a lot of well meaning anthropologist types who really do believe it‘s racist to say that eg: traditional chinese medicine is mostly bullshit, but it’s a fight well worth having.
November 23, 2025 at 7:10 PM