Recent quotes:

Cutting Government Is Easy... If You Go After McKinsey

Why take on management consultants? Well, for starters, the government spends far too much on people giving it advice. In it's 2024 budget, the Biden administration requested $70 billion for management consulting, aka “professional services,” which is 5% of all discretionary spending. The Defense Department alone asked for $32.9 billion. So just cutting all management consulting would be a big chunk of savings. But it goes beyond just the raw spend on consultants, to how consultants misdirect other monies. An important study in 2023 on what it costs to resurface roads at a state level - a very simply and standard need everywhere - showed why procurement waste in America is so persistent. A key reason is consultant bloat. It turns out, when you hire government employees for long-term planning, costs go down, but when you use third party consultants, they go up.
#USAUSA #consulting #DOGE - thebignewsletter.com

The influencer lawsuit that could change the industry - The Verge

“I do think that there’s space and definitely enough money for everyone that’s in [the Amazon influencer] program,” she tells me as we sit on her cream sofa. After all, Sheil’s aesthetic is spare, bland, or, if you wanted to be ungenerous, you could call it basic. It’s a look and feel so commonplace on the internet that I can’t imagine anyone claiming ownership over it, especially in a legal context. The next day, I fly to meet with Sydney Nicole Gifford, 24, the Amazon influencer that is suing Sheil, at her home outside of Minneapolis. Gifford and her mother, Laura, greet me at the door. They are enthusiastic and inviting. Stepping inside, I am overwhelmed by a familiar palette: alarmingly neutral, not a single speck of color in sight. The house is still and silent, a vessel for content creation. In other words, it’s like I never left Sheil’s house — someone just shuffled the pieces around and plopped me onto a different set.
#USAUSA #social-media #amazon #lawyers #influencers #style-substance #affiliate - theverge.com

A Firsthand Account of What Homelessness in America Is Really Like

And can I truly afford to live in affordable housing? Based on my past experience, rent is about one third of your income. My SSDI is $960. Paying $320 a month in rent, I would be left with $640 to live on. I would have to get a job, maybe at a gas station, a job I might be able to handle. Out of every $100 I made at this job, the housing authority might take $33. If I’m paid minimum wage, $14 an hour, I might only keep about $9. To make up for the original $320 subtracted from my $960, I’d have to work about thirty-six hours. Nine hours a week doesn’t sound like much, but I know that I would struggle to perform the job well enough to retain employment. And then I’d have no more money than I have now, and I’m not making it. I’d have to work more hours for what amounts to $9 an hour. But I can’t work many more hours without jeopardizing my SSDI. How many other people are in this position, too ill and poor to afford affordable housing? And too poor to be homeless?
#USAUSA #homeless - esquire.com

Jaywalking Is a New York Tradition. Now It’s Legal, Too. - The New York Times

About 92 percent of the 463 people who received summons last year for crossing a street against a signal were Black or Latino, according to city records.
#USAUSA #nyc #race - nytimes.com

Trump in FB

I think it's a mistake for Democrats to focus on calling Donald Trump a fascist. Of course, Donald Trump probably is a fascist, or at least has fascist beliefs. He believes that a single man rules better than the messy back and forth of a democracy comprised of consensus-building mechanisms, institutions, and checks and balances. He believes the military should be loyal to him, not the Constitution. He believes his opponents should be imprisoned or expelled. He believes in "American blood," not American values. But from the perspective of winning an election, Democrats would do better to call Donald Trump un-American. I'll offer seven quick arguments, though I'm sure there are hundreds more out there. First, and most importantly from the perspective of winning votes, my guess is that while "fascism" may sound bad to many voters, the concept does not viscerally alarm many people. It's not that voters like fascism; they're just not sure exactly what the word means. "Fascism" as a concept or historical movement last came up in middle school history class in the chapter on WWII. The last time the USA was actively at war with fascists, Donald Trump hadn't yet been born. (It doesn't help that the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, our sworn enemies from 1945–1990, constantly described the U.S. itself as fascist.) Second, if the goal is connecting with undecided voters, it is far more powerful to call Trump un-American because he abhors so many beliefs that are foundational to the USA. Trump is anti-democracy. He actively works against core American principles of "liberty, equality, and justice for all." He wants to deploy troops against U.S. citizens. Even when his own VP's life was on the line and scores of police officers were being pummeled by thousands of his own supporters on January 6th, Trump watched gleefully and waited hours to lift a finger (assuming he types with just one finger) to try to quell an attack on the U.S. Capitol. Today, Trump calls those bashers of cops and trashers of history "heroes." Trump is anti–rule of law. He thinks Lincoln should have compromised on the South's demand to continue slavery. Trump admires authoritarian anti-democrats—who also happen to be our military and/or ideological enemies—like Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Viktor Orbán. Third, although (or maybe because) all of Trump's grandparents were born outside of the U.S., didn't grow up speaking English, and came here to avoid destitution or prison—Grandpa Drumpf was a German draft dodger, after all—Trump actively ignores the fact that most of today's U.S. citizens are descended from people who came here without visas, and that America's great strength as a society and economy is our diversity. Fourth, Trump talks regularly about repressing freedom of speech and a free press — American values that are so bedrock that they're spelled out in the very First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The Founding Fathers—Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and many others—had lived the First Amendment before they wrote it, conceiving and refining the idea of the United States in newspaper articles and speeches over the span of 50 years. Fifth, Trump has said regularly that POWs and wounded American soldiers are suckers and losers. This alone makes Trump un-American. (And, BTW, mildly unfascist, since fascism glorifies warriors as the ultimate representatives of their country.) Sixth, Trump has bragged on tape about molesting women ("grab 'em by the pussy") and gawking at naked teenagers at beauty pageants he hosted. While these aren't the acts of a fascist, per se, viewing women as objects to exploit rather than as agents of progress is certainly un-American. Finally, Trump tries to wrap himself in the flag, claiming to embody America. Calling out Trump as unAmerican directly addresses the brazen fraud— just as in his bankrupt casinos, airline, steaks and university — in Trump's attempt to hijack the American flag and the institutions it signifies.
#USAUSA

Military veterans support Trump by wide margin in 2024 election | Pew Research Center

63% of veteran voters identify with or lean toward the Republican Party, while 35% are Democrats or Democratic leaners. As with voters overall, there are demographic differences in veterans’ partisan identification. For example, about seven-in-ten White veterans (72%) identify with or lean toward the GOP. That compares with just 11% of Black veterans, who overwhelmingly identify as or lean Democratic (82%).
#USAUSA #trump #GOP #military - pewresearch.org

You Can Still Get Tickets to Burning Man - Bloomberg

This is speculation, but I do think it's possible that yeah, Burning Man has become too mainstream and if you see a drop in popularity, it might be reflecting that. It might be reflecting people feeling like this thing that used to feel like an unusual or sort of like counter-cultural thing to do is just kind of normal now. Um, I wonder if it's just a victim of its own popularity and that, like, as with many things, it starts off as this, like, weird side thing to do and then, like, just, the more popular it is, the less it is that and, you know, what once was a signal about Eric Schmidt versus other CEO candidates, now it's kind of like I think, you know, at your most cynical, you could say that if you're in Silicon Valley, going to Burning Man is a good way to network. Like that is a very different scenario than it was, you know, 10 or 15 years ago.
#USAUSA #burningman - bloomberg.com

Right on Red: The Culture War Comes for Traffic Lights - POLITICO

“The anti-home rule Republican effort to interfere in D.C. traffic laws, a quintessentially local issue, by inserting riders in the annual D.C. appropriations bill is a petty, offensive attempt to meddle in local D.C. affairs,” said D.C.’s non-voting Congressional delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton. “The nearly 700,000 D.C. residents, a majority of whom are Black and Brown, are worthy and capable of self-government. These riders are an antidemocratic attempt to govern D.C. without its consent, and I will do everything in my power to defeat them.”
#USAUSA #cycling - politico.com

Trump's Messianic Video About God Sending Him To Save World

I need somebody who can shape an ax but wield a sword. Who had the courage to step foot in North Korea? Who can make money from the tar of the sand turned liquid to gold? Who understands the difference between tariffs and inflation? We’ll finish this 40 hour week by Tuesday noon, but then put in another 72 hours. So God made Trump.
#USAUSA #trump #religion #nationalism #video - mediaite.com

Goodbye to the Bull Market for US Treasury Bonds - Bloomberg

Second, the US government’s fiscal health keeps deteriorating: Last month, the Congressional Budget Office raised its estimate of this year’s federal budget deficit to $1.7 trillion from $1.5 trillion, and no improvement is likely anytime soon given the political deadlock in Washington. The outlook will probably deteriorate further as higher interest rates drive up debt service costs and retiring baby boomers push up Medicare and Social Security expenditures. Larger deficits push up r*, and add to the bond term premium by increasing the risk of long-term lending to the US government.
#USAUSA #bonds #debt #yield-curve - bloomberg.com

Pret a Manger, Itsu Founder Says High UK Interest Rates Not ‘End of the World’ - Bloomberg

Americans, it's a fundamentally different thing. So your marketing and your communication in America has got to be unbelievably clear because Americans are much more gullible and less cynical than here in Europe. Europeans are unbelievably cynical where Americans are not. Americans on the whole will believe you so your marketing communication has got to be unbelievably good. So when we opened it … initially Itsu made a terrible mistake in America where everything was self service for speed and Americans … they can't get their head around the concept of fresh food being self service. They like interaction, they're so used to bespoking their food. So they have to be able to make it theirs. Now we are ready. If we went into America today, Itsu would probably be very successful. We would have to do better on communication. Healthy is too blunted. You have to really, really communicate why it's better for them. And are they ready to eat gyoza? Maybe now. Yeah, maybe. As long as you can explain.
#USAUSA #food #advertising - bloomberg.com

How the Other Half Votes: The United States, Part One – Sabato's Crystal Ball

Overall, Joe Biden won 126 of the 151 top half counties, although that still means that Donald Trump won 25 of them, which might be somewhat surprising in a national electorate where population density seems so highly correlated with partisanship. Biden’s haul was up from Obama, who won 112, but Obama won more counties overall, 692 to 538 for Biden (those numbers come from Crystal Ball Senior Columnist Louis Jacobson, who wrote about county-level voting patterns for us in 2021).
#USAUSA #politics #networks #modernity - centerforpolitics.org

Car dealers and electric vehicles: At a blowout party for unsung GOP heavyweights, the men were drunk—and anxious.

As of 2021, the top 10 dealership groups in the U.S. had annual revenues around $100 billion, more than any company that actually makes cars.* The NADA became one of the most influential lobbying entities in Washington, with 16,000 dues-paying businesses spanning 32,500 franchises. Soon enough, a stop at the annual NADA convention became routine for presidential hopefuls and even presidents. Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and Hillary Clinton all attended ahead of presidential runs; Bill Clinton and both Bushes came after they left the White House.
#USAUSA #cars - slate.com

Car dealers and electric vehicles: At a blowout party for unsung GOP heavyweights, the men were drunk—and anxious.

hen the first car dealership opened in 1898, in Detroit, it was seen as a convenience for cash-strapped manufacturers, who were overwhelmed just by producing the cars. They needed a means to reach customers without having to build their own sales networks. A class of middlemen sprang up. Car dealers quickly became pioneers of influence, concocting new and astonishing breakthroughs in the very American alchemy of converting riches to political sway. As the automobile industry flourished, so did the dealership model—but the American entrance into World War I threatened to interrupt that ascent. So, in 1917, a group of 30 Chicago dealers went before Congress to argue that cars shouldn’t be classified as luxuries by the tax code. The luxury distinction would have allowed car-manufacturing facilities to be converted to use for wartime production. That would have been fine for manufacturers, which would have continued making money manufacturing, but disastrous for car dealers, who couldn’t just sell tanks.
#USAUSA #cars - slate.com

Car dealers and electric vehicles: At a blowout party for unsung GOP heavyweights, the men were drunk—and anxious.

Auto dealers are one of the five most common professions among the top 0.1 percent of American earners. Car dealers, gas station owners, and building contractors, it turns out, make up the majority of the country’s 140,000 Americans who earn more than $1.58 million per year.* Crunching numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau, data scientist and author Seth Stephens-Davidowitz found that over 20 percent of car dealerships in the U.S. have an owner banking more than $1.5 million per year.
#USAUSA #wealth - slate.com

Does Hungary Offer a Glimpse of Our Authoritarian Future? | The New Yorker

Lauren Stokes, the Northwestern historian, is a leftist with her own radical critiques of liberalism; nonetheless, she, too, thinks that the right-wing post-liberals are playing with fire. “By hitching themselves to someone who has put himself forward as a post-liberal intellectual, I think American conservatives are starting to give themselves permission to discard liberal norms,” Stokes told me. “When a Hungarian court does something Orbán doesn’t like—something too pro-queer, too pro-immigrant—he can just say, ‘This court is an enemy of the people, I don’t have to listen to it.’ I think Republicans are setting themselves up to adopt a similar logic: if the system gives me a result I don’t like, I don’t have to abide by it.”
#USAUSA #trump #orban - newyorker.com

Does Hungary Offer a Glimpse of Our Authoritarian Future? | The New Yorker

Representation in Hungary has grown less proportional in recent years, thanks to gerrymandering and other tweaks to the electoral rules. In April, Fidesz got fifty-four per cent of the vote but won eighty-three per cent of the districts. “At that level of malapportionment, you’d be hard pressed to find a good-faith political scientist who would call that country a true democracy,” Drutman told me. “The trends in the U.S. are going very quickly in the same direction. It’s completely possible that the Republican Party could control the House, the Senate, and the White House in 2025, despite losing the popular vote in every case. Is that a democracy?”
#USAUSA #Hungary #democracy - newyorker.com

Human tracks may be earliest evidence of people in North America | NOVA | PBS

Months later, they came. The seeds revealed that the footprints they were embedded within are between 21,000 and 23,000 years old—thousands of years older than what scientists generally consider to be the earliest evidence of people in the Americas. “For forever, people thought Clovis were the first people to cross over [the Bering Strait] about 13,000 years ago,” Pigati says, referring to the commonly-held view among archaeologists. As the story goes, ice sheets in what is now Canada blocked passage between what is now Alaska and the rest of the Americas. Once these ice sheets began retreating, people came south through an ice-free corridor, Pigati explains. His team’s findings now challenge this belief. Carbon dating of the seeds within the White Sands footprints suggest that people were in the Americas while ice sheets still covered much of northern North America. “A lot earlier” than previously thought, Pigati says.
#USAUSA #1491 #clovis - pbs.org

The girl in the Kent State photo and the lifelong burden of being a national symbol - The Washington Post

John remembers the soldiers ordering students who were lingering at the scene to disperse — “or they’d shoot again.” A few moments later, soldiers using bullhorns announced that the university was closed. “They ordered everyone to go home.”
#USAUSA #ohio - washingtonpost.com

If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Turns out it’s just chance. | MIT Technology Review

The wealthiest individuals are typically not the most talented or anywhere near it. “The maximum success never coincides with the maximum talent, and vice-versa,” say the researchers. So if not talent, what other factor causes this skewed wealth distribution? “Our simulation clearly shows that such a factor is just pure luck,” say Pluchino and co. The team shows this by ranking individuals according to the number of lucky and unlucky events they experience throughout their 40-year careers. “It is evident that the most successful individuals are also the luckiest ones,” they say. “And the less successful individuals are also the unluckiest ones.”
#USAUSA #wealth #meritocracy #luck - technologyreview.com

Private Schools Are Indefensible - The Atlantic

The most astonishing of Gallagher’s admonitions was this: “While I often arrive at the office well before 8:00 a.m., that does not mean a parent should ever be waiting for me in the vestibule, parking lot, or outside my office door.” This is what prosecutors in murder cases call “lying in wait.” Gallagher’s email made it clear that parents had been trying to thwart others’ college prospects in order to enhance their own children’s odds. He sent his missive shortly before winter break, which in private schools is the equivalent of a Friday news dump. It was the kind of school communication that simultaneously put bad actors on notice and reassured the other parents that evil was not triumphing. Inevitably, every parent in the senior class was freaked out that their own children might have been targeted. After the break, the school’s head, Bryan Garman, sent a follow-up email reiterating the policies Gallagher had announced. He also reminded parents that the college counselors would not “respond to any inquiry for student records” for other people’s kids. The parents’ behavior, Garman said, had become “increasingly intense and inappropriate” and had included “the verbal assault of employees.” But these transgressions were placed within a therapeutic context of acceptance and nonjudgment. College admissions, he wrote, “can stretch the patience and emotional capacity of parents.” (If you want to know if you’re rich, try behaving badly and see if someone in authority will apologize for stretching your patience and emotional capacity.) By the end of the school year, two of Sidwell’s three college counselors had quit.
#USAUSA #inequality #education #meritocracy #elites - theatlantic.com

How Getting Canceled on Social Media Can Derail a Book Deal - The New York Times

The clauses vary from publisher to publisher, and even from one literary agency to the next — every agency strikes its own deal with each publishing house — but the general principle is that they take aim at conduct that would invite widespread public condemnation or significantly diminish sales among the book’s intended audience, and that the publisher didn’t previously know about when it signed the deal. If an author has a propensity for getting in fistfights, for example, the book cannot be dropped because he or she gets in another one.
#USAUSA #publishing #racism #free-speech - nytimes.com

The politics of synonyms: Subtle choice of synonyms may tip your hand as to which political party you support -- ScienceDaily

In the study, the researchers used machine learning to scan the Congressional Record (2012 to 2017) and the presidential debate corpora to isolate linguistic variation between the two political parties. They identified 8,345 words that were part of the Republican corpus and 7,873 with the Democratic corpus.
#USAUSA #politics #language - sciencedaily.com

#StopTheSteal: Timeline of Social Media and Extremist Activities Leading to 1/6 Insurrection

Most of the material found in this report was posted in plain sight on social media platforms and online forums, designed to convince more Americans of falsehoods about the 2020 elections. The Stop the Steal movement was far from monolithic, though, and included groups across a spectrum of radicalization: hyperpartisan pro-Trump activists and media outlets; the neo-fascist Proud Boys, a group with chapters committed to racism and the promotion of street violence; unlawful militias from around the country with a high degree of command and control, including the so-called Three Percenters movement; adherents to the collective delusion of QAnon; individuals identifying with the Boogaloo Bois, a loosely organized anti-government group that has called for a second civil war; and ideological fellow travelers of the far-right, who wanted to witness something they believed would be spectacular.
#USAUSA #trump #social-media #capital-riot - justsecurity.org

[Article] The Paranoid Style in American Politics, By Richard Hofstadter | Harper's Magazine

the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world
#USAUSA #history #paranoia #rationality - harpers.org

Republican congressman Andy Harris’s real Hungarian roots – Hungarian Spectrum

So, Zoltán Hariss was never a forced labor inmate in the Gulag. Instead, he got involved with a very bad cause and ultimately served under the Hungarian branch of the SS. I suspect that Andy Harris is not entirely familiar with the true story of his father’s involvement with the Hungarian Nazi movement, which applauded the extermination of Jews and sent more than 400,000 people to die in Auschwitz. But if he is ignorant of his family history, it would be high time to learn the true facts.
#USAUSA #Hungary #communism - hungarianspectrum.org