Newmark's Door

Counting Crows.

Even better is this nu metal cover of the chorus by Maiasaura. (If the whole song is posted I couldn't find it.)

From The Onion. Gave me a big smile.

Kim Weston, excellently repping Motown.

As I travel past my neighborhood's 99.99% unused bike lanes, I wondered what they were there for. I casually assumed they were just more Liberal virtue signaling. I hadn't considered this very sensible explanation.

We need lots of replications--preferably with control groups--but based on this clip it seems effective.

A very long post detailing probably everything you wanted to know about the different types--63!---of Chinese cuisine.

As I've noted it's an interesting time to be a cosmologist.

Robert Pondiscio of AEI makes two really sharp observations.

Noting that there are a whole lot of worse things to spend government money on, I'd agree.

Sabine Hossenfelder is more pessimistic than what I gather the consensus is.

Something every college-aspiring high schooler should know.

From a Twitter account that is "A Compendium of [prize-winning physicist David Deutsch's] explanations". This post, arguing what we should do about global warming is, in my opinion, really excellent. A key excerpt:

Hence, we need a stance of problem fixing, not just problem avoidance. It's true that an ounce of prevention equals a pound of cure, but that's only if we know what to prevent. If you've been punched on the nose, then the science of medicine does not consist of teaching you how to avoid punches.

If medical science stopped seeking cures and concentrated on prevention only, then it would achieve very little of either.

By David Stockman former OMB director under Reagan who more than 40 years ago warned about $200 billion deficits "as far as the eye can see". (Oh, the naivete!) The numbers are truly staggering:

On paper, the public debt would power upward unabated to $150 trillion by mid-century under the CBO’s latest projection. Yet even the latter is based on a Rosy Scenario budget model that assumes Congress never again adopts a single new tax cut or spending program and that the US economy steams along without a recession, inflation recurrence, interest flare-up, or other economic crisis during the entirety of the next quarter-century!

Related: "Debt Politics" (interview with Mitch Daniels) and Francis Fukuyama, "A Letter to Elon Musk" (on the mechanics of actually cutting the budget).

Heck of an impressive chart.

Introduction to the Senior Executive Service, colloquially known on the Right as the "Deep State".

Favorable review of Nicole Gelinas, Movement: New York’s Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car. With this key sentence from the conclusion: "As she chronicles time and again, the supposed experts can get things terribly, terribly wrong."

I think the most important aspect of this article is found in a pull quote:

It’s embarrassing how few protections we have against fraud and how easy it has been to fool us.

"Farmers see a trail of broken promises and betrayal from the state government."

As Ed Driscoll writes, extending P. J. O'Rourke's famous comment, ". . . you can’t get good Chinese takeout in China and Cuban cigars are rationed in Cuba. And you can’t survive as a pot grower in California. That’s all you need to know about communism."

This must be a record or close to it: in about 2.5 months Keir Starmer's net approval rating has fallen from +11 to -38.

I spent five years in LA going to grad school. It was a nice place to visit, but I didn't--and, of course, now wouldn't--want to live permanently there.

John Cochrane:

Did “supply shocks” or “relative demand shocks” cause the recent inflation? Will tariffs raise inflation? Will deregulation and AI, by lowering costs, lower inflation? No.

Don’t confuse the price level with the inflation rate. Don’t confuse relative prices with the price level. These ought to be the first lessons of macroeconomics. But many economists, and most politicians and commenters get them wrong.

"That AI companies might not be quite the imminent threat to search that Google initially imagined would be a relief for the company if it didn’t have deeper, older problems."