One of Matt Yglesias's defining political positions is that Democrats should be more moderate in order to attract more votes. This is generally invoked as a critique of the left and so naturally attracts left-wing ire, which Yglesias seems to enjoy.
It's been a while since I posted about my personal use of AI. I've been very busy. Below is a list of things I have been using it for, in case someone is curious.
As I explain in this video, this is what I have been trying to accomplish for the last 2+ years. It wasn't possible until the most recent models and harnesses. But with this skill and the API into my NLRB Research database, you really can just ask any labor law question and get a high-quality…
I produced this YouTube video tonight about a topic that has irritated me for a while, which is the discourse around so-called "AI agents." I think the way people talk about this is extremely confusing, mystical-sounding, and unhelpful.
I released a book today called The National Labor Relations Book , which you can buy over at NLRBResearch.com for $10 ( click here ). The book provides an introduction to the NLRA and NLRB by providing summaries of the 100 most-cited cases in this area of law using the 100 most recent cases citing…
I am a weird social position when it comes to the discourse over large language models or artificial intelligence more generally.
It's not surprising that Geoff Shullenberger doesn't know very much about me. After all, I only learned of his existence late last month when I tweeted an excerpt of an article in Compact Magazine. In the piece, someone named Zach Mottl argued that MAGA policy should be focused on the "America…
In high school and college, I became very interested in economic philosophy, specifically theories of distributive justice that seek to establish criteria for determining whether a particular distribution of resources within a society is just. When I started this website in 2011, I wrote a lot…
The discourse is full of argument but mostly devoid of argumentation theory. Most people read arguments impressionistically in much the same way that most people read novels, listen to music, or watch movies. There are people who have learned to technically dissect these forms and who, as a result,…
Societies have grappled with concerns over low or declining fertility since as far back as Ancient Rome . More recently, these concerns have been discussed most intensely in places like Japan, which has had sub-replacement fertility since the 1970s, South Korea, which has the lowest fertility in…
Matt Yglesias has a piece at Slow Boring where he criticizes the idea that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), enacted by Clinton, is a major driver of working class disaffection with the Democratic party.
In 2021, I had solar panels installed on my roof. They began generating electricity in January of 2022. In early 2023, I wrote a piece detailing how the finances of all that worked based on the first year of solar production. This is a follow up to that piece but now with three years of data…
For me, this election differed from the last two in that my particular policy interests — a universalist welfare state, mass unionization, and socialization of wealth — were absent. The Biden administration achieved nothing significant on these fronts. There was no primary campaign that featured a…
Ten days ago, Kamala Harris released her Lowering Costs Agenda (LCA), a five-page list of various policy proposals that all ostensibly relate back to lowering prices.
Joe Biden put up an issues page on his campaign website late last month. I have been publicly wondering when, if ever, we would get some kind of formal policy platform from Biden, and so I am happy to see that now there is one. Unfortunately, Biden's list of issues does not really contain much…
The prevailing consensus in the economics literature is that women suffer a significant earnings penalty after they have children. More precisely, women who have children end up with lower earnings than women who do not, holding all else equal.
Yale announced today that it will reinstate a requirement that applicants to the school submit scores from a standardized college admissions exam. Yale says that making these tests optional is harming low-income students whose scores could have helped them get in.
Brad Wilcox is an amusing situation where he's trying to promote a new book he wrote about marriage right after Melissa Kearney released a basically identical book and exhausted all of the media attention available for such things.
Matt Yglesias has a piece at Slow Boring about the attitudinal differences between socialists and anarchists. In his telling, socialists are focused on building alternative non-capitalist institutions, which often includes boring, technical administrative challenges, while anarchists are focused on…
Over the last 10 years or so, I have filed a number of high-profile unfair labor practice charges against coercive statements, with many of those statements being made on Twitter. I file those charges even though I am merely a bystander, not an employee or an aggrieved party.
Today, I personally filed an unfair labor practice charge against Cumulus Media, Inc. The charge alleges that the company maintains an employee handbook containing 17 rules that violate Section 8(a)(1) of the National Labor Relations Act. Below, I have uploaded the charge, a complaint from a…
Matt Yglesias has a piece titled Against Murder-Suicide Politics where he criticizes the left for threatening or actually withholding electoral support from Democrats who do not pursue their desired policies.
I’ve written three times before on the question of how much the Dobbs decision, which gave states the power to tighten abortion laws, has actually reduced abortion in the US ( I , II , III ). The upshot of those pieces was that it has not reduced abortion very much (~2%) because the vast majority…
Noah Smith wrote a piece at his newsletter (which I generally find interesting) titled "Western leftists have lost the plot" where he collects a handful of extreme reactions to the recent Hamas attack and then pivots to psychoanalyzing why the Left has reacted this way.
When you are in the discourse for as long as I have been, you start to spot certain patterns of discursive behavior. One such pattern is that groups of people who are loosely affiliated in some way will create and then reinforce myths and misinterpretations about individuals and institutions that…
Ross Douthat had a response to my response to the various promotional pieces about Melissa Kearney's new book. Douthat's response is generally OK but, in addition to clarifying my point, I do want to respond to one part of Douthat's piece here, as he says something that has been annoying me for a…
Melissa Kearney is promoting a book where she dares to speak a truth that nobody else is brave enough to say: marriage and two-parent families are very good. So stigmatized is this view that in the last three days alone, the New York Times , the Atlantic , and the Washington Post ( twice ) have…
It seems like everyone in the country is talking about this song from Oliver Anthony.
Late last year, I laid out in a very clear way why universal benefits cost less than means-tested benefits and why people who think otherwise are simply getting mixed up in accounting definitions rather than dealing with economic realities.
When I was in middle school, the United States invaded Iraq. For reasons that are not clear to me now, but probably having to do with my father's anti-war politics, I decided I was against the invasion and that I should vocalize this in school and elsewhere when the topic came up.