The Rodent Maginot Line surrounding Alberta is one of my favourite Canada facts.

how do I get Theodor Herzl’s haircut without showing my barber a picture of Theodor Herzl

Per @mtkonczal we can stop speculating about the nature of the vibecession, because conveniently real wages have gone negative.

NEW: @SherrodBrown's labor allies have a bone to pick with him. Brown launched an all-out assault on data centers in Ohio. It's testing longtime relationships he built with unions, who've seen demand for their work explode thanks to the data center boom politico.com/news/2026/09/25…

it's funny how many committed leftists have the cultural tastes of, like, a 19th century minor aristocrat or bourgeois. they love reading balzac and trollope, read the financial press, listen to orchestral music and operas.

visual representation of why housing is so hard to build

Cook Political Report ratings change US House 2026 NC-11: Lean R → Toss Up TX-15: Lean R → Toss Up FL-22: Lean R → Toss Up —— 🟦NJ-07: Toss Up → Lean D 🟦AZ-01: Toss Up → Lean D —— 🟥CO-05: Likely R → Lean R 🟥TX-35: Likely R → Lean R 🟥MT-01: Likely R → Lean R 🟥FL-27: Likely R → Lean R 🟥FL-13: Likely R → Lean R 🟥WI-01: Likely R → Lean R 🟥NV-02: Solid R → Likely R 🟥VA-05: Solid R → Likely R 🟥NY-21: Solid R → Likely R 🟥TX-09: Solid R → Likely R cookpolitical.com/analysis/h…

New York State has spent 22 years throwing its weight and public subsidies into renewables projects. Ratepayer money is only collected and awarded for actual power generation of course. But the vast majority of those projects have NOT resulted in operating renewable power. It's not for the state's lack of trying! In total about 20 GW of unique projects have won subsidies from the state, but only 1.4 GW is operating today; 7.8 GW is pending; and 11.5 GW is straight-up cancelled. The chart below shows it in painful detail. Each column represents total MW worth of renewables projects from a year of competitively awarded NYSERDA subsidy contracts. The first column shows the projects from 2004-2017, before the modern contract program; the last column, with the green, are NYPA-backed projects explained later. Many projects cancel their contracts in one year and rebid for new contracts, at higher prices, in subsequent years. The hatch marks in the columns show these projects: red hatches show up in later columns where they rebid, and other hatches show up in earlier columns. Not all state-supported renewables are private projects with NYSERDA contracts, however. In 2023 the socialist-led campaign to "build public renewables" resulted in new expanded authority for the state's public power authority, NYPA, to enter the renewables market. NYPA-backed projects are shown in green. The last column shows their current projects that, according to my analysis, do not currently hold contracts with NYSERDA. 654 MW is entirely new and separate from NYSERDA awardees, while 796 MW are projects that had NYSERDA contracts that were cancelled. And the green vertical bar adjacent to those other columns shows which of the projects awarded NYSERDA contracts are backed by -- co-owned by -- NYPA. Disclaimer: The matching of NYPA projects to projects designated by NYSERDA as subsidy awardees is fuzzy and based on my own inference. All large-scale renewable generation projects supported by NYSERDA or NYPA are included (solar, land-based wind, offshore wind, hydro), counting capacity from new, expanded, and repowered projects. Storage and small-scale (distributed) solar are excluded.

Why is a car with New Jersey plates and a New York State-issued parking placard parked in a “Judges only” parking space in Lower Manhattan when only New York State residents can be judges? buff.ly/m860opJ

The idea that there have been enough good television shows to make a “100 best” list is absurd. There’s like maybe a dozen that meet a minimal bar of coherent storytelling.

The claim that "LLMs cannot think" is unscientific, unless supported by a very difficult argument about non equivalence of causal structure producing anthropomorphic outputs. The claim requires a formally rigorous definition of thinking that captures how humans mentally manipulate conceptual structure. Since LLMs can reproduce all kinds of human output that require operations that are typically considered to involve thought (eg. scene understanding, text summarization, translation, computer programs, mathematical proofs, common sense arguments, spatial cognition, theory of mind), it has to be shown that LLMs reach these results in fundamentally different ways than human minds. In principle, this is not impossible (given that thinking is still relatively poorly understood by cognitive neuroscience), but would be surprising, because it has been shown that the causal structure of computer vision models is structurally equivalent to what neuroscience discovered about visual cognition in primates. In any case, saying that LLMs don't think cannot reasonably mean that LLMs are inferior to human cognition (since that this evidently not true), but that LLMs discovered an equivalent yet at least equally powerful mechanism.