Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Harshit Singh
“Anyone who has spent time in a group project recognizes an uncomfortable pattern. A small number of people end up carrying most of the work, while the rest contribute unevenly at best. Look at almost any workplace, and the same pattern emerges: a handful of employees are responsible for a surprisingly large share of what actually gets done. Walk through any city, and a few restaurants stay full while most sit half-empty. On streaming platforms, a small number of songs absorb most of the listening. Seen once, it looks like a coincidence. Seen everywhere, it starts to look like a law. That’s because it is one.” (07/15/26)
“The real risks of AI are not the existential ones that people like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei obsess about and that Sanders has taken to repeating. Instead, they stem from the more tangible effects AI has on regular people’s lives: how dependence on chatbots can affect cognition and critical thinking, create addiction that isolates people from their human networks, and can even coach them down harmful paths of self-harm and suicide. That’s not to mention how AI has polluted the information environment, enabled the creation of nonconsensual deepfakes, and is actively degrading cultural production. While she may have been an ally of Sanders on the data center moratorium, Ocasio-Cortez does not seem to have fallen for the deceptive narratives of the AI industry in the way that he has.” (07/15/26)
“In the 2016 Brexit referendum, the loudest institutional voices, the CBI, the IMF, the Treasury, most of the FTSE 100, and Downing Street itself, were all lined up behind Remain. Business leaders who broke ranks knew they would be cast as reckless or self-interested, and all three took real flak for it. Dyson in particular was accused of hypocrisy given that some of his manufacturing was already overseas, and commentators seized on that. Martin faced boycott calls and mockery in the press. Going against your own trade bodies and much of the commentariat, in a campaign that quickly became personal took some courage.” (07/15/26)
Source: The Erick Erickson Show
by Erick-Woods Erickson
“New York just became the first state in the country to sign a moratorium on data centers. I want you to sit with that, because it tells you everything about the two paths in front of us. One path builds the infrastructure that runs the next fifty years of the American economy. The other talks itself into a moral panic, bans the future, and then acts surprised when the jobs and the money show up in somebody else’s state. I am here to defend the data centers, and I want to walk you through why, because most of the fear you are hearing is manufactured.” (07/15/26)
“I guess there are subdivisions of automatic devices that can be split based on function. Some devices help and are ‘non-invasive’ in terms of imposing on the human part of humanity. Some devices are quite ‘invasive’ in this same way. Many – if not all – devices made in the last century fall into the latter subdivision. I think of these as inflictions upon humanity masquerading as ‘convenience’, as opposed to devices that make our human lives better. Many examples exist and play a daily role in our human lives today.” (07/15/26)
“A few years ago, nuclear power looked doomed. Plants were shutting down. Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo won applause bragging about closing a nuclear plant ’14 years ahead of schedule.’ ‘Why would they applaud?’ asks former nuclear engineer Ray Rothrock in my new video. ‘They shut down New York’s finest source of clean energy.’ Rothrock has met with presidents, trying to persuade them to embrace nuclear power, but ‘nothing was ever addressed.’ Until now.” (07/15/26)
“ran is being swept by a wave of nationalism, while the United States is being swept by a wave of explosive diarrhea—do you ever get the feeling that Hegelian capital-H History is laughing at you? In a war with a filthy little junta in Tehran, Donald Trump has managed to make the United States of America the bad guy. If you are looking for a quick-and-easy definition of shmuck, there you go. Of course, it doesn’t help that it is an illegal and immoral war being waged by an incompetent game show host. … Trump may declare total victory twice a week, but in the real world the likeliest outcome is one that is economically and strategically worse for the United States than the status quo ante bellum.” (07/15/26)
“‘I’m guessing I’ll be in line,’ former FBI Director James Comey quipped after Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced a ‘settlement agreement’ between President Donald Trump and the IRS that included $1.8 billion in taxpayer money for targets of ‘lawfare and weaponization.’ Comey’s joke encompasses two reasons why the Senate should not confirm Blanche as attorney general: a flagrantly unconstitutional prosecution and a brazenly corrupt arrangement that delivered huge favors to Trump, his family, and his followers at taxpayers’ expense. Blanche’s participation in both of those scams demonstrated his eagerness to please his boss, which explains why Trump nominated him to replace Pam Bondi. But that same tendency should alarm anyone who thinks the attorney general should pursue justice rather than the president’s personal agenda.” (07/15/26)
“Donald Trump entered office promising to end America’s endless wars. Instead, he chose a war openly aimed at regime change in Iran that has predictably become a quagmire, trapping the United States in an open-ended cycle of tit-for-tat strikes, economic blockades, and escalating confrontation over the Strait of Hormuz, with no plausible military path to victory. The immediate crisis is dangerous enough. The larger problem is that Washington is once again doubling down on a decades-long strategic obsession with Iran that has repeatedly produced the opposite of what American policymakers sought to achieve.” (07/15/26)
“In their second fatal shooting of the wrong person in just days – and as his three-year-old daughter watched – ICE thugs murdered a young Colombian husband and father legally working in Biddeford, ME for simply trying to driving away. … [US Senator Susan] Collins, forever on the wrong and bloody side of history and drunken rapists, was the deciding vote last month to approve the extra, mind-boggling $75 billion in ICE funding, though most Mainers want to see it abolished. Last year, after the murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, she voted against both language seeking to curtail further violence and funding for mandatory body cameras, which most thugs are clearly not wearing anyway.” (07/14/26)
