Derrick Flakoll

the man without qualities

What if the US and UK had let Mohammed Mossadegh do his thing as the elected Prime Minister of Iran in 1953? Imagine the amount of bloodshed that might have been avoided.

But then again, British Petroleum didn’t want to sit idly by and let a country nationalize its oil reserves. The horror.

IT'S A STAR WAR NOW, COOP. THEY CAN BLOW UP PLANETS. WHOLE PLANETS BLOWN TO SMITHEREENS. IMAGINE IT COOP. NOW THAT'S REALLY SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT. I PLAN ON WRITING AN EPIC POEM ABOUT THIS. BUT LATER. RIGHT NOW I'M HOPING FOR SOME GOOD NEWS FROM YOU, COOP. IT'S AWFUL DARK IN SPACE AT THE MOMENT.

⏰ Briefing on the 2026 Sustainable Energy in America Factbook is happening now! Tune in at www.eesi.org/livecast to watch. Follow along with EESI in the 🧵

When we think of budgets, we really should be thinking about collective commitments to a common cause, a common institution, a shared social contract. Not bean counting, which is always partial, skewed. Alas, this kind of thinking goes against the way many disciplines and academics operate.

A useful way of thinking about this would be: imagine if every student in, say, sociology, required $100,000s in equipment and space to learn how to be a sociologist. Surely, we'd be claiming its unfair to be treated in the same way as, say, econ, or history, or literature.

Toward the end of his two-volume Treatise on the Venom of the Viper, published in 1781, the Tuscan naturalist Deluxe Fontana declared: "I have made more than 6000 experiments; I have had more than 4000 animals bit; I have employed upwards of 3000 vipers and may have been deceived; some essential circumstance may have escaped me: I may have neglected some other, not thinking it necessary; my consequences may have been too general, my experiments too few in number. In a word, I may very easily have been mistaken, and it would be almost impossible that I should never have been so in a matter so difficult, so obscure, and likewise so new."

Fontana thinking his 6000+ experiments may not have been enough to feel confident in his conclusions in the 18th century while we expect our singular experiments and their standalone replications to do wonders some 250 years later... (excerpt from the intro of Jutta Schickore's About Experiment)

In an Intense Election Year, New Post Office Rules Could Trip Up Voter Registration - Bolts A change in how mail is postmarked could lead some voters to miss key deadlines, including voter registration. Advocates worry the people most affected will be those already facing voting barriers.

NEW: The USPS changed its rules on how it postmarks ballots.

This may affect elections at every stage at which there's a mail deadline.

An underplayed one: VOTER REGISTRATION.

Many voters who send in their registration forms by mail could be postmarked late, missing out without realizing it.

Now that IS a take

Watch #1 is of course objectively correct

*him.

The other laws actually pretty clearly do give home the authority to impose tariffs, but generally under more limited conditions and with more legal process.

I am the wrong kind of Black professor - The Boston Globe I’ve staked my career on my interest in the dead white men of 19th-century British letters. I can’t count the times I’ve been told what a waste it is that I’ve done so.

Tyler Austin Harper is Black www.bostonglobe.com/2023/06/02/o...

Wait, i’ve missed the update on stochastic parrots - what was wrong about that one?

A graph of US imports form Taiwan and China showing imports from Taiwan reaching $300B annualized as imports form China sink to $250B annualized

Crazy milestone in the US trade data released today—America now imports more directly from Taiwan than from China for the first time since 1992

The trade war has cut US direct trade with China, and the AI boom has caused a surge in spending on Taiwanese-made semiconductors

Industrial food is both.

Processing has been used to make food safe and cheap and varied and available year-round: ACHIEVEMENT

Also used to make calorie-dense nutrition-free food designed to be overeaten: VILLAIN

Drivers of global tourism carbon emissions - Nature Communications The tourism carbon footprint grew 2.3 times faster than the rest of the economy, reaching nearly 9% of global emissions by 2019. Rapid tourism demand growth (3.8% per year) has outpaced energy efficie...

"The breakdown is as follows: direct emissions amounted to 1.8 Gt (52% from aviation, 18% from road transport), indirect emissions were 2.5 Gt (34% from utilities, 14% from petroleum manufacturing), and private vehicle emissions added 0.9 Gt."

#Tourism

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

you need to be quantum entanglementmaxxing. your wave function should go fully collapse-mode when observed. measurements of your properties should be perfectly correlated with your twin. you should be doing spooky action at a distance.

*We are ALL Gritties on the roof

My kingdom for an edit button…

“Here in our little city of brotherly love, you could say we are Gritties on the roof”

Incredible art of gritty playing fiddle on the roof of a west Philadelphia row home. In Yiddish it says Fidler Oyfn Fakh פֿידלער אױפֿן דאַך)

We put on an all-Yiddish community production of fiddler on the roof in Philadelphia and cast member and local artist Sofie Rose Seymour created the most amazing show poster that ever was

1. Even exact replications of an original true result are not expected to produce perfectly reproducible results.
2. Most replications are not exact, and they are non-exact in non-trivial ways, affecting the reproducibility.

8/n

Our Carrie Bradshaw index of Europe’s priciest cities for renters The average earner struggles to afford rent in all but eight of the places we looked at

I put together our latest Carrie Bradshaw Index, measuring how affordable it is to rent alone in major European cities from Brussels to Budapest. If a relocation is on the cards, there are some surprising results 👇
www.economist.com/graphic-deta... @economist.com

Avoid a basic election analysis error with this one neat trick… Don't build conclusions on voter movements from change in aggregate vote share

Written a short explainer on one of the most common and avoidable errors in election analysis at the moment: building conclusions on how voters are moving from vote change.

Share it with anyone who needs to see it, which includes an alarming number of people in Westminster.

They’re gonna sell plushies and fund eleventy billion ballrooms. Buy stock in Coalie

A Note on State Capacity In the previous section, I discussed regulatory reforms that emphasize urban planning over project-by-project political contestation. Such reforms are important, but they will only be successful in a context where the relevant public-sector bodies (city planning departments, regional governments, etc.) have the capacity to engage in serious, large-scale planning. That’s one reason why YIMBYs tend to be preoccupied not just with stimulating more supply but with enhancing government capacity. A rule-bound, abundance-oriented regulatory regime can’t function as intended without the support and careful oversight of empowered, competent government departments. These departments need to be able to accurately assess the potential social, economic, and environmental impacts of particular building projects—not just in isolation, but in their broader regional context. They also need to be capable of evaluating trade-offs, considering the competing priorities of various stakeholders, and reaching judgments that best serve the public interest. Many other developed countries have planning departments and other civil service agencies that are better at achieving those goals. (See Dan Davies’s “The Problem Factory” for a useful comparison between the Anglo-American planning model and the continental European one.) These agencies are often larger, better-resourced, and more flexible than their American counterparts. Bringing the managerial strength and competence of American public bureaucracy up to the standard of peer nations must be part of any comprehensive YIMBY program.

Third: Planning is everything, and for that you need state capacity. rooseveltinstitute.org/publications...

Lessons from YIMBYism: Taking “Abundance” Back to Its Fundamentals Lessons from YIMBYism examines how supply-side reforms, public investment, and state capacity can make progressive social policy work as intended.

Second: broadly speaking, you can increase supply through regulatory reform, public investment, or both. Think of these as complementary tools. Regulation isn't intrinsically good or bad; it's an instrument, or rather a category of instruments. rooseveltinstitute.org/publications...

I think sometimes the framing of colleagues & similar publications as “competitors” can be really motivating— healthy competition is a good thing! — but also it can make us lose sight of being in pursuit of the same goals of transparency, accountability, dissemination of information, human stories.

The benefit of having parents who immerse you in the Deep Lore is that I have in fact watched that

This plus the fact that old tv shows are accessible on streaming makes me think the old phenomena may return

A bit like how friends, the office, and Seinfeld are tentpoles for streamers even now

The thing is, do people talk or meet in theatres? If you’re going with friends you can also hang out at home to watch a movie. It’s sad to miss the electric thrill of an audience spontaneously sharing a laugh, scream, or cheer, I feel that, but I wonder how truly important that anonymous crowd is.

I dig the "tailor coat."

IG mysteryfashionist