AI is trash. Don’t use it. I saw this right after doing my own post about how bad it is. NOT a coincidence. Examples are everywhere
Historian of America's old, weird political economy. Unincorporated but proudly unionized citizen of Delaware. Adding “levity to discussions of financing and high politics” since 2022. Wrote Trading Freedom: How Trade with China Defined Early America.
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AI is trash. Don’t use it. I saw this right after doing my own post about how bad it is. NOT a coincidence. Examples are everywhere
The smart money, such as it is, is asking Chat-GPT about Salazar while Bill Ackerman’s crew of ex-DOGE boys are asking about Russian capital markets after Stalin popped his clogs.
Dunno but I am sure junior analysts at least a dozen pod shops have been tasked with prompting Claude to gather “data” about index fund and bond yield movements following major dictator deaths.
this man 1) was allowed to speak 2) wasn’t booed when he spoke at the rally 🙃 bsky.app/profile/dael...
the mic being broken while delaware’s statewide elected delegation mumble weak platitudes while we all ignore their shoddy voting record on labor…a real metaphor for the delaware democratic party
Tomorrow(!), the blog returns to its regularly scheduled publishing program. But before we do, we wanted to share a brief 🧵 of helpful resources for new law students who might be curious about the Law and Political Economy movement.
"Ayup, sounds like what you got right thehea is a TWO chapter situation. Pretty common; you think you've got just the one, and whoops, now there's a peah of partridges in the tree, as the song says."
He’s definitely betting against it.
Historians have argued about whether or not we're living through a Second Golden Age (we are), but I think "Golden Age of Schemes II: Scheme Harder" is a strong contender, too – another synonym to help vary the text a bit.
"In fact, some researchers consider the 1800s the “Golden Age of Schemes” during which the term “confidence man” was coined, today shortened to con man or con artist."
Full citation: Jessica Eaton Guyer, “S. Adams Lee: A Perfect Scoundrel,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 92, no. 3 (2025): 414–55, muse.jhu.edu/pub/2/articl...
Now *that* is how you open an article abstract. "S. Adams Lee was a charming, accomplished author, scholar, lecturer, gallant disabled veteran, and distinguished cousin of General Robert E. Lee. Except, none of those things were true."
Ther ys power yn a union
I have an opinion piece in the New York Times today on how the labor movement has failed to step up to the moment in countering Trump, even as Trump unilaterally strips public sector workers of collective bargaining. Labor will die as a movement if this continues. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/o...
Frustrating that they can’t imagine spending the public grant money they administer as pass-through entities without also embracing wage theft - though certainly in keeping with how many cultural and social service nonprofits view workers.
Yes, but let’s not let the housing nonprofits off the hook. Meyer cites the DE chapter of Habitat for Humanity or the Delaware Affordable Housing Coalition (which, confusingly, includes “Housing Alliance Delaware” as a member) as supporting his anti-labor veto, too.
Y’know I’m beginning to think installing a Matt Yglesias subscriber as state executive might have some downsides
It matters, too, that neither of the most powerful forces in DE politics - the corporate defense bar, flush with billionaire cash, and the police, armed & short-tempered - don’t care about this fight, at all. If they did, we’d see Gov and Legislators line up on the same side, as they did in March.
Meyer fancies himself a professional & an entrepreneur, & so his allies are the real estate developers and construction firms who dominate the local chambers of commerce, and the PMC folks (passive aggressive anti-labor) who run large nonprofits
The irony here is that it’s two sets of centrists pitted against each other bc they have diff power based. The Dem leg leaders are sympathetic to the old (white, male, conservative) trade unions; +
Here's the public media write-up, which includes some more context of legislators being furious (and add'l news about his random Reefer Madness veto).
Happy Labor Day! Matt Meyer, the Democratic governor of my blue state, celebrated the holiday by vetoing an important bill that would have protected workers from one of the most common forms of wage theft (eg being reclassified as an "independent contractor"). Off to my union picnic!
some of them actually burst their blood-vessels in the boat
Dunno, “a settler-colonial state run for and by incompetent but unapologetic cannibals” is a shoe that fits so well it might appear on a Gavin Newsom poster next week. We may have put our fingers on a pretty good method for state characterization here!
In New England these days, there’s really only two states where that particular situation could happen as a matter of course, and Maine’s too big and empty for anyone to have noticed.
It’s a region rich in jerks. I had more in mind the town that white supremacist libertarians took over, lowered taxes in until they couldn’t afford any standard services, and then were overrun by bears. Certainly a scenario that could play out in any state with a right-wing political culture.
oh there was a bit of an incident with Rudy Giuliani there that seemed to be very New Hampshire in its tone
and Delaware* (well, tried to; first attempt went spectacularly badly for them down in Lewes)
Naturally, what’s prompted this wider awareness is that MAGA attacks / defunding mean the Kafkaesque managerial regime commonly applied to the humanities is now hitting STEM. Hard to cultivate a proper attitude of solidarity when the scientists are Columbusing “being goddamn aware of basic stuff.”
The economists noticing today that uni admins use arbitrary, political, & ever-shifting standards for alloting funding to depts & assessing program viability are killing me. In my exp, units are judged as often on credit hours as majors, or via a complex - often secret! - formula combining the two.
New Hampshire proposed “Live Free or Die” and has been resolutely pursuing option #2 since at least 1789
It’s not rain on your wedding day, it’s cutting taxes so low you get eaten by bears
A reminder from your local-Masshole-in-exile that New Hampshire is to New England what Florida is to the United States, what Staten Island is to New York City, or what a shovel is to the head.
An insightful essay: “Disney’s ethos began to change in the 1990s as it increased its luxury offerings, but only after the economic shock of the pandemic did the company seem to more fully abandon any pretense of being a middle-class institution. Data is part of what’s driving this shift.” 🎁 link
The collapse of the trad wife and blue collar wife who works from home model should be interesting for republicans. This isn’t Avon money anymore. A lot of of the female economy has kept middle class households afloat. But we will see 🤷🏾♀️
Imagine living the kind of life where you answer the phone with the Nuremberg defense: “When reached by phone on Friday via a number associated with his name, O’Hanlon confirmed he was the officer in the videos and said he was just doing the job he was told to do.”
“In 2017, O’Hanlon was captured at Trump’s first inauguration festivities in DC decked out in his full Eagle Scouts uniform. The photographer wrote on his personal website of “the Boy Scout kid that looked like a Brownshirt.””
Those willing, by contrast, to trade away the rights and dignity of transgender people or the poor cannot be considered friends of democracy any more than those who were willing to countenance second-class status for blacks and Jews.
ushering in the new illiberal arts www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...
“In a universe that is vast and uncaring, the human brain is a rebellious anomaly.”
Hungary is also a unicameral state without hard federalism that is the size and has the rough economy of Indiana. There is no comparison. None.
I also could read it as “make peace with corporatist dems,” which is an overlapping Venn diagram, and equally ineffective as a political strategy so far.
That is one way to read it.
Famously, they read Don’t Build the Torment Nexus, and then they just had to build it.
Yeah his history is not even Wikipedia level.
Also no real question we live in corporate-controlled territory, and specifically the corporations in question are theirs.
No question the plutocrats are nuts, but it’s pretty evident that Thiel et al have divisions at their command and their opponents don’t, eh? Trump’s all in on crypto.
“…what is crypto really for, besides crime and casino-like speculation? … Leading crypto evangelists… now openly discuss their plan to create a world of post-national “network states”. These would be corporate-controlled territories backed by crypto and tech billionaires like Thiel.”
ADMIN NOTE: i only just realized the bot is down, i think all of blue bots done quick might be. if you would like to scream at each other in the replies to tide one another over until it is fixed feel free but be warned it might reply to all your comments when it's back on at once
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHH!
Whole thread. (Read up and down).
trump has trapped america's leading evangelical theologians in a room with top officials at the SEC until they come up with an interpretation of the gospels that exempts cryptocurrency from jesus' idea of what makes a man rich
Quoted in Newsweek opining on how Trump’s corruption is a major break in American history, as contrast to some comically optimistic U Chicago professors and uh Rand Paul www.newsweek.com/donald-trump...
Quoted in Newsweek opining on how Trump’s corruption is a major break in American history, as contrast to some comically optimistic U Chicago professors and uh Rand Paul www.newsweek.com/donald-trump...
god i should've just blogged it. why didn't i blog it. read this
a scoopy one from me, with an assist from @accountable.us: Bill Pulte is using Palantir to gather "mortgage fraud" accusations and weaponize them against Dems in order to abet Trump's government capture. but, he formerly disclosed owning Palantir stock—and that's not his only potential conflict:
Wait wait wait *that* John Mosby? My god he got everywhere.
Feeling pretty good about this prediction, alas.
I can't *stand* the condescension of the people who think the only way to "embrace AI" is to buy into the bullshit narratives of the billionaires who are selling it. Tip: Ask early on, has your company ever enabled a genocide or made a product that encouraged self-harm? Maybe don't buddy up to them.
Happy Labor Day weekend, educators! Our union head is pleased to be recognized by the bosses for her willingness to help them destroy us - and our students. (And the planet to boot).
NEW: Tenure-track position in History at UC Berkeley in the GLOBAL HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY. We are casting a wide net here: *all* periods, places, and fields are under consideration. I'm on the search committee, so do let me know if you have questions.
No *you* put “I want it that way” on the union Labor Day picnic playlist
This is about Trump saying back on Aug 11 that Nvidia will pay 15% of H20 sales to the US gov't as a kickback. *NVIDIA COMMENTS ON US GOVT 'EXPECTATION' TO GET 15% OF H20 REV *NVIDIA: ANY REQUEST FOR % OF REV "MAY SUBJECT US TO LITIGATION" *NVIDIA: US GOVT HAS NOT PUBBED REGULATION CODIFYING 15%
Been a minute, so here are some of the vanity plates I’ve spotted recently:
President Trump just eliminated federal funding for Hispanic Serving Institutions in higher ed. Our new paper "White Flight in Higher Education?" has insights on the politics of racial avoidance behind Trump's assault on these schools. Open access in: @soceducation.bsky.social.
Regarding judging, harshly:
Sure do!
Per this article, the guy ginning up accusations of mortgage fraud to “justify” firing Fed governors is the same guy ginning up new ways to *do* mortgage fraud by requiring memecoins to count as collateral. One guy! Who got his federal job bc his wife used a Delaware LLC to bribe Trump directly.
Cost of housing about to go up in units of $Trump coins, cool cool cool
Behind every (alleged) great crime lies a Delaware business entity registration form, a continuing series… ML Organization LLC is a Delaware business, file no. 6836964, reg. agent CTC.
Data scientists taking on the mantle bored hacky economists set down
Oh my god where did you find this and is there a digitized copy somewhere please say yes
Prof. Sinha says it more directly and succinctly than I’ve managed so far, but hard agree. This is a very old sort of arbitrary tyranny, not a new “socialism.”
Hard to say, though, it suggests something about the nature and alignment of that group of people as a political force
Calls for "civility" are really calls for docility
A bit startling how much right wing figures can attack, demean, and harm members of the US intelligence community with no real consequences.
Fully automated terrorism for hire at $20 a pop.
catching up on reading and here's a nice visual from @bis.org of some of the different kinds of stress situations that could arise from the bank-nonbank financial institution intertwining sure would be nice to have financial regulation here in the belly of the beast www.bis.org/bcbs/publ/d5...
funland building, rehoboth beach, delaware, 1985
The biggest thing I have changed my mind about in the past five years or so, is that I now strongly believe relentless propaganda works, and that the far right has exploited liberal concerns about "censorship" astonishingly well to get their stuff across
Andrew C. McKevitt, Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America (The University of North Carolina Press, 2023) uncpress.org/978146967724... (On flash sale 50% off until midnight, I believe)
I’m gunning for those “passionate about his subject” course evals again this year tho
Oh all fine; it made a fun sound but nothing broken on me or the screen
Today’s learning moment occurred when - as I gestured expansively to emphasize something or other about American history - I discovered that it was a *glass and plastic* screen showing my slides at the front of the classroom, not a thin projector screen.
Very!
Here’s the link to file claims in the Anthropic case: www.lieffcabraser.com/anthropic-au...
Anthropic, you’ll recall, put out a report boasting that their software was an excellent tool for committing fraud. Anyway,
Hi authors! Please remember to file a claim!
The headline and subhead really misrepresent the piece - it’s not a glossy portrait that works toward the leader, but high-quality deep dive, filled with damning evidence, that indicts this man’s character.
Super-interesting from the finance industry newsletter Short Squeez: now that Trump is trying to turn the Bureau of Labor Statistics into a Trump propaganda vehicle, professional investors are making all kinds of other plans to get legit reliable data.
NBC is summarizing Anthropic’s own report (unironically titled “Threat Intelligence”), the exec summary of which is just … touting the product’s extraordinary capabilities for doing crime. It’s a crime bot! Terrible at everything else, but excellent at fraud. www.anthropic.com/news/detecti...
It’s weird to see a company brag that the most impressive use case for its billions-of-dollars product is theft
"The world's largest predictions market has received an investment from Donald Trump Jr.'s venture capital fund." @danprimack.bsky.social for @axios.com
An intersecting dynamic www.programmablemutter.com/p/short-post...
The contradictions can be suppressed for a time - decades, even - but in the long run, plantation capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with republican government. (One way to narrate the history of US political economy is as a tale of this this lesson, being painfully learned, repeatedly. )
