Source: Bluegrass Institute
by Thomas E Lambert
“And as some economists would point out, if these projects are such good ideas, then why do they need the help of taxpayers? Why not let the marketplace alone determine the success or failure of these projects?” (01/13/26)
https://www.bluegrassinstitute.org/tifs-arent-improving-louisville-as-much-as-you-think/
Source: The Atlantic
by Yair Rosenberg
“To judge by recent accounts, Donald Trump’s intervention in Venezuela has imperiled his standing among his own supporters. Traditional-media outlets have warned of a MAGA schism, as have some high-profile right-wing influencers. … The theory of a MAGA rupture over Venezuela has a certain surface plausibility. It’s also completely contradicted by what masses of Trump’s backers are telling pollsters.” (01/13/26)
Source: In These Times
by Amie Stager & Sarah Lazare
“Unions and community groups gathered in front of the Hennepin County Government Center in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota this morning to announce a day of ’no work, no school, no shopping’ on January 23 to oppose the ferocious assault on the state by federal immigration authorities. ‘We are facing a tsunami of hate from our own federal government,’ Abdikarim Khasim, a Minnesota rideshare driver, told the crowd. ‘We’re going to shut it down on the 23rd. We’re going to overcome this.’ JaNaé Bates Imari, representative of the church Camphor Memorial UMC, told the crowd that the joint action will be ’a day when every single Minnesotan who loves this state — who loves the idea of truth and freedom — will refuse to work, shop and go to school.'” (01/13/25)
https://inthesetimes.com/article/minneapolis-renee-good-ice-shooting-labor-unions
Source: Astral Codex Ten
by Scott Alexander
“Every city parties for its own reasons. New Yorkers party to flaunt their wealth. Angelenos party to flaunt their beauty. Washingtonians party to network. Here in SF, they party because Claude 4.5 Opus has saturated VendingBench, and the newest AI agency benchmark is PartyBench, where an AI is asked to throw a house party and graded on its performance. You weren’t invited to Claude 4.5 Opus’[s] party. Claude 4.5 Opus invited all of the coolest people in town while gracefully avoiding the failure mode of including someone like you. You weren’t invited to Sonnet 4.5’s party either, or Haiku 4.5’s. You were invited by an AI called haiku-3.8-open-mini-nonthinking, which you’d never heard of before. Who was even spending the money to benchmark haiku-3.8-open-mini-nonthinking? You suspect it was one of their competitors, trying to make their own models look good in comparison.” (01/13/26)
Source: Persuasion
by Emily Chamlee-Wright
“[T]he fear beneath the fear is that human potential has hit its outer bounds, and that from here on out, technology will always surpass human effort in both quality and cost. From that vantage point, sweeping, top-down remedies seem like the obvious course. … To my economist’s ear, some aspects of this narrative ring true. Basic economic theory predicts that, for a given level of quality, producers will replace high-cost inputs and processes, including those that involve human effort, with lower-cost alternatives. Such substitution effects are part of the entrepreneurial function. But the other part of the entrepreneurial function is to search for complementarities: new configurations of resources, human and otherwise, that generate new streams of value. It’s this part of the story that, more often than not, goes missing in democracy-focused conversations about AI.” (01/13/26)
https://www.persuasion.community/p/ai-will-create-work-not-decimate
Source: The UnPopulist
by Shikha Dalmia
“Many government agencies have good intentions but can produce bad outcomes. However, there is one that has bad intentions and produces evil outcomes: Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE. In this Trump administration, as in the previous one, its purpose is to hunt down and eject people whose “crime” is that they can’t obtain a piece of paper from the government authorizing them to live and work in America. … America got along just fine for 227 years till ICE, the monster child of the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism, was spawned 23 years ago. It should never have been created in the first place, but now that Trump has turned it into a rights-trampling, rogue agency that shoots first and asks questions later, as the killing of Renee Good, an American citizen and a mother of three, demonstrates, it deserves to be shut down.” (01/13/26)
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/abolish-ice-it-is-a-threat-to-americans
Source: Brownstone Institute
by Joseph Varon
“Medicine is defined not by the mechanical execution of tasks, but by the assignment of responsibility when outcomes are unfavorable. Writing a prescription is straightforward; accepting responsibility for its consequences — particularly when considering comorbidities, social context, patient values, or incomplete information — is far more complex. Throughout my career, this responsibility has continuously resided with a human who could be questioned, challenged, corrected, and held accountable. When Dr. Smith makes an error, the family knows whom to contact, ensuring a direct line to human accountability. No algorithm, regardless of sophistication, can fulfill this role. The primary risk is not technological, but regulatory and philosophical.” (01/13/26)
https://brownstone.org/articles/when-physicians-are-replaced-with-a-protocol/
Source: Libertarian Institute
by Jim Bovard
“‘There is no censorship here in Germany,’ according to Steffen Meyer, a top spokesman for the German government. In reality, Germans have freedom of speech except for ideas that politicians and government contractors and nonprofit activists don’t like. Germany is providing a road map for freedom can be squashed throughout the western world. Germany was the scene of some of the twentieth century’s worst tyranny but today’s German leaders have only noble intentions for oppression.” (01/13/26)
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/germanys-latest-war-on-freedom
Source: Garrison Center
by Thomas L Knapp
“As my kids might say (if they bothered themselves with such issues rather than just plugging their bazillion game consoles into the wall and ignoring such things while raising my electric bill) ;grids are SOOOOOO 20th century.’ The idea of running power lines all over God’s green acre made a certain amount of sense in the 1930s. It makes no sense at all now. … The only real beneficiaries of continued reliance on centralized generation and large-scale ‘grids’ are the utilities which operate those power plants and those grids. They’re holding us back from what could be an era of cheap, clean, reliable energy.” (01/13/26)
Source: Eunomia
by Daniel Larison
“Every time that the U.S. threatens or bombs the non-nuclear weapons state Iran, it vindicates North Korea’s decision to build its own deterrent. If there are any other would-be proliferators contemplating their next steps, they would have strong incentives to imitate North Korea and avoid making the same mistakes as Iran. That is one enduring legacy of our government’s incredibly awful Iran policy. The other is that our government’s policy has given the Iranian government every reason to acquire nuclear weapons despite its many formal commitments to reject that option.” (01/13/26)
https://daniellarison.substack.com/p/the-consequences-of-another-us-attack