Friends of [insert river]

This would hamstring cities’ abilities to raise revenue for water systems/infrastructure right as potentially very large cuts to AZ’s allotment of Colorado river water.

The usefulness of useless knowledge Politicians aren’t the best judges of the merits of scientific research

Ok. But any discussion of ‘useless’ knowledge should also appreciate scientists’ incentives to claim uselessness. The history of performative irrelevance (e.g. Faraday claiming he could see no uses for the electron; Polanyi saying the same about Einstein while the bomb was being built) is rich.

ok I would definitely watch baseball if each team got one (1) animal to let loose during the game. when will you use your animal delay. what animal will you choose

You couldn’t make this up.
And if you did, everyone would say it’s too much.

She has said exactly one line of dialogue on screen, what the fuck are we doing here

So, so instructive to compare media response to Afghanistan withdrawal -- months of hysterical garment-rending & catastrophizing, relentless criticism of the admin -- with the response to an unprovoked, unmotivated, illegal war of aggression, ie, "some critics say maybe Trump should have reasons."

Israel and the US strike Iran. It is a tragedy of Tehran's own making Iran's strategy rested on the critical assumption that the US administration preferred a deal to a war. That proved fatal on Saturday.

In a new opinion piece, @nicolegrajewski.bsky.social argues that Iran's nuclear strategy rested on the critical assumption that the US administration preferred a deal to a war.

Almost certainly true, and another opportunity to remember that Netanyahu would willingly trade away the safety of every Jew on earth to save his own political career and avoid going to prison for his crimes.

FWIW, this is sec. 2(c) of the War Powers Resolution:

15 States Sue H.H.S. Over Revisions to Vaccine Schedule

Copying Denmark’s vaccine schedule without copying Denmark’s health care system doesn’t give families more options—it just leaves kids unprotected from serious diseases.

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/24/h...

Incredible stuff happening on Housing Bluesky.

Is Email Making Professors Stupid? It used to simplify crucial tasks. Now it’s strangling scholars’ ability to think.

To be a professor in 2026 is to be a middle-manager who has to teach from time to time and who likes to write in their spare time.

www.chronicle.com/article/is-e...

as someone who thinks a lot about Woke 2 and its emerging sensibilities, i think it's worth saying that the Woke 2 aesthetic is the opposite of the "anti-aesthetic" of "an LLM that has been instructed to win elections but not to govern"

instead: a bit funny, a bit demented, entirely militant

Twitter is bad because the posts are bad & will cook your brain, and, for science & research, there is nearly zero benefit to reading or posting on twitter anymore. It's gone, man. Has been for a while. Bsky is just better for all the reasons old twitter was. Mid posters who can't rebuild here, well

I had no idea that the “known unknowns”/“unknown unknowns” phrase - a legitimately perfect summary of an important concept - had such a rhetorically dishonest origin.

I need to get a job just being a normal person for tech companies. Like pay me a bunch of money to just look at your shit and say ‘people are going to hate that’ before they spend millions on new ads and products

In the blanket incident, Noem had to switch planes after a maintenance issue was discovered, but her blanket wasn't moved to the second plane, according to the people familiar with the incident. The Coast Guard pilot was initially fired and told to take a commercial flight home when they reached their destination. They eventually reinstated the pilot because no one else was available to fly them home.

The details of the Kristi Noem blanket incident are just fucking perfect

i think it is a massive fucking problem that the first best use for LLMs was to cheat in school

in a text string after the shooting, a fellow agent told Exum he's a "legend"
"Beers on me"

Feels like the US has spent the last 5+ years on the verge of some kind of secular moral revival that keeps getting channeled into weirdo lifestyle puritanism

Jeffrey Epstein’s Money Mingled With Silicon Valley Start-Ups

At the end of his life, Epstein had assets of around $600m. A large part of that was due to his ability to get in early to hot tech deals. The returns he made off those deals helped fund his lifestyle.

Here's a gift link for those who want to read the full piece: www.nytimes.com/2026/02/05/b...

has anyone written on how betting markets, once perhaps understood as "wisdom of the crowd" type predictions now shape outcomes? Like 'An engine, not a camera' premise but applied to kalshi or whatever?

Context Widows or, of GPUs, LPUs, and Goal Displacement

"LLMs did not create what economists, with their penchant for meaning-destroying dimensionality reduction, would call science’s incentive “structure.” Rather this technology arrived into this context, offering a faster way to produce the artifacts the system rewards."

one thing the trump era has made clear, i think, is that the american people themselves are far more committed to the values of our founding documents than our elites

The year the media oligarchs bowed to Trump We warned last year that Donald Trump’s second term as president would turbo-charge the political right’s burgeoning media-intimidation complex. Republican officials and right-wing billionaires were a...

The underlying dynamic is that for Jeff Bezos and the other media oligarchs, their news business is a tiny fraction of their overall business holdings and they are willing to sacrifice it to appease Trump. They resisted in term one; this time, they capitulated. www.mediamatters.org/cbs/year-med...

I generally agree with this. I'd add that other tools for gathering the views of public can be useful in smaller contexts, like federal agency actions where there's little guidance from congress/politics at large. It's good for technocrats to account for and act on public values.

Trump, in an Escalation, Calls for Republicans to ‘Nationalize’ Elections

Trump is pre-rigging the system so losing doesn’t mean leaving. He is laying the legal traps now to challenge, toss, or take over election outcomes later.

Officials at every level of government should take this blatant election interference seriously, including Congress.

The Department of Energy has announced that it is establishing a categorical exclusion for the application of NEPA procedures for advanced nuclear reactors.

Read more on Nuclear NewsWire: https://www.ans.org/news/2026-02-02/article-7727/doe-announces-nepa-exclusion-for-advanced-reactors/

If you're rich you get a tax cut, if you're not you have to work longer and harder. Populism! bsky.app/profile/atru...