a few days ago brian kilmeade said homeless people should be executed. jesse waters accused the left of trying to start a civil war. fox news spent years telling verifiable lies about dominion and the 2020 election. canceling jimmy kimmel isn’t about an offensive line in a

This chart should be a five-alarm fire for US policymakers.

The new $100k/year H1B fee is pure economic self-harm—workers making **5 times the median US income**, who contribute massively to the US, would still basically be unable to afford this fee Oh, but never fear, the White House reserves the right to dish out exemptions as favors!

Critical part of the President's new $100,000 charge for H1-B visas: The Administration can also offer a $100,000 discount to any person, company, or industry that it wants. Replacing rules with arbitrary discretion. Want visas? You know who to call and who to flatter.

Nobody knew these people were going to be so phenomenally productive and successful before they arrived. They exceeded expectations. Would their first employers have paid a $100,000 fee plus salary, benefits, and lawyer fees to sponsor them? No, and we'd be poorer as a result.

A group of Western VCs goes to China, not to invest but to see what the competition is like. They realize that China is too far ahead on clean tech and decide the only way forward is to work with Chinese companies. One VC describing a visit to Chinese battery giant CATL:

We let China dominate global clean energy manufacturing simply because we politicized climate change. What a mistake.

Serious scholars have examined what happens when we change the number of H1-B visas issued. Cities that get more H1-B immigrants subsequently see the wages of natives *rise* substantially. Skilled immigrants bring new ideas, fill labor shortages and make us all more

Blue cities intentionally breaking part of the housing system that isn't broken (like no longer allowing building supers to install stoves) so a tiny connected constituency can get paid is part of why there's a housing crisis. There's only 1,000 master plumbers in all of NYC!

The ongoing decline in college enrollment since 2010 has been healthy, falling entirely on the lowest quality institutions like U of Phoenix (-77%) & ITT (-100%). Meanwhile, the top 40% of colleges ranked by student outcomes have seen enrollment increases. via Preston Cooper

Tariffs are deindustrializing America

she’s toed the line so well that chunks of the left still hate her. the DSA rescinded their endorsement. Schumer will be 77 in 2028. why shouldn’t AOC succeed him? what is this undying reflexive hostility to any sort of new blood, especially when it comes with youth support?

This pretty much sums up what went wrong with Biden era industrial policy:

The new Trump H-1B rule just dropped! It prioritizes DOL "Wage Levels," not real wages. DOL thinks an experienced acupuncturist making $40k is a higher "Wage Level" than an early-career AI scientist making $280k. That means more visas for outsourcers, fewer for real talent.

wrote today about how even if you've heard of Mississippi's surge in reading scores, you're probably underestimating it:

Illiteracy is a policy choice: Good piece from Kelsey Piper documenting how kids in blue states are falling behind despite massive spending because education officials are ignoring the lessons from southern states that turned things around. theargumentmag.com/p/illiteracy-i…

In Santa Cruz County only a fraction of houses have been rebuilt after the fires there from years ago and one reason is there’s a single person for the entire county to evaluate and approve permits. Not being able to rebuild after a fire is a policy choice.

It’s crazy the things we used to be able to do before NIMBYs and bureaucratic red tape strangled our cities. WE USED TO BUILD FOR THE FUTURE. WE USED TO BUILD JUST BECAUSE WE COULD.

NYC is really really REALLY lucky city planners in between the Civil War and WWII massively overbuilt the city, planning for the century ahead. Today we don't plan for the future anymore. We create an overly idealized version of the past in our minds and fight any change to it.

Technological progress (not scolding or hairshirt activism) has made tremendous progress against climate change but there are still major unsolved problems. Climate funders should be much more focused on helping to solve them. slowboring.com/p/climate-advo…