Where did people get this idea that property taxes only apply to something you owe money on?

Bone chilling stuff. Arguably the end of the republic.

I lived in Vienna for 6 years and can confirm it's an awesome place to live but it comes with A LOT of downsides: 💸 you will pay 50% tax as a self-employed The 48% income tax bracket in Austria is starts with €70k, and if you are growing your online biz you will reach it soon Founding your company elsewhere like Dubai or Singapore won't work – Austria looks at the effective place of management, and if you live in Austria you will need to pay both PIT and CIT here no matter where your company is set up Social security contributions in Austria are a de facto progressive income tax as well. Your base for it is capped at €97k per year, but below that you will pay 27% of income for social security + complusory state health insurnace The state health insurance doesn't cover dentist work and you will still need to pay 10% of the cost of each doctor's visit You will also never fully use your social security until you reach pension, because entrepreneurs in Austria are not automatically entitled to unemployment benefits unlike regular employees (absurd, given how much tax u pay) 💃 nightlife in Vienna is practically non-existent. Austria is a nation of early wake-upers. People get up at 6 ot 7, do a lot of sports (which is nice), but most restaurants close before 23:00, and clubs are empty at 2 AM already 🛒 grocery shops close at 8 PM on weekdays and don't work on Sundays. this creates a lot of stress cause you need to plan all your groceries, and grocery/healthy food deliveries after 8 PM don't exist In no other place have I spent so much time on day-to-day chores such as cooking, cleaning, and groceries as in Vienna – outsourcing chores in Austria is simply not a thing Vienna is a great place to raise a child or live off your wealth after you turn 60, but it's pretty terrible for young people and especially entrepreneurs

My favorite part of campaign debates is watching everyone find indisputable proof that their preferred candidate won and the other is a disaster / was unprepared / is too old / is evil.

holy shit ChatGPT is actually developing humanlike academic skills

People keep treating a 5% 10-year and a 7% mortgage like a crisis. They are only a crisis if your window is the last 20 years. That window is the aberration. From 2001 through the pandemic, the 10-year averaged about 3.25%. The 30-year mortgage averaged about 5%. Those are the cheapest long rates of the modern era. QE, ZIRP, and a decade of inflation that refused to show up. Anyone who bought a house or refinanced in that stretch got a once-in-a-lifetime price of money. That is not the baseline. That is the exception. Stretch the window to 50 years and the picture flips. From 1976 to 2000 the 10-year averaged about 8.5%. Mortgages averaged about 10%. The 1980s alone averaged over 10% on the 10-year, with the peak near 16% in 1981. A 7% mortgage in 1986 was a relief, not a shock. Even the 1990s, after Volcker had already broken inflation, still ran mortgages mostly between 7% and 10%. So the current setup, a 10-year around 5.3% and a 30-year mortgage around 7%, is elevated against 2012 or 2021. It is ordinary against 1976–2000. It sits below the 50-year norm, not above it. This is also not 1979 or 2022. Those were inflation breaks. CPI at 14%, then 9%, and the Fed hiking into it. Five-year forward inflation expectations are sitting near 2.4%. Anchored. Yields can stay higher because real growth is fine and the Fed is no longer pretending money is free. That is normalization, not a rerun of the inflation spikes. The political and market panic is mostly people anchoring to the cheapest credit of their adult lives and calling anything else abnormal. Abnormal was 2% mortgages. A 7% mortgage with inflation near target is what the previous half century looked like for most of the time.

If this were true, then the race in my district would be much more competitive. I’m not seeing it.

The reason reps aren’t responding to you is very very obvious. There’s now 47 polling companies and YouGov runs 30 polls a week in every state now. They find you annoying and are just going to quietly vote

Historically this has been a useful subconscious indicator. Will be interesting to see if that holds true.

I built two county-based paths to Talarico +3. O’Rourke’s 2018 map comes to R+2.6 on 2018 turnout shares. Talarico +3 is 5.6 points beyond that. Path A applies a uniform swing from 2024: the Triangle’s cores run 5 points ahead of Beto, the suburbs 10 ahead, and the three rural regions 6–8 ahead. The border remains 14 points below his margin. Path B restores the border to Beto’s D+30 and holds rural margins at 2024 levels. The cores then run 7 points ahead of Beto and the suburbs roughly 12 ahead. In both, regions holding roughly 70% of the vote must run well past the best Democratic result since 1998. These aren’t the only possible paths, of course, and I didn't intend for them to be exhaustive. Turnout shares could change, and gains could fall differently across regions. But they show the scale of movement needed at those turnout shares. So take this as an effort to capture the results of a stress test, not proof that either map is impossible. The polls may be right or even mostly right. But the uncertainty around how that stronger Democratic coalition comes together belongs in any forecast that is partly or mostly based on polling + fundamentals, etc. Including our own.

The only generation that knows how computers work is also the most relaxed about AI:

This account is a must-follow for early voting tea leaves.

So I see it's going to be another 30 days of "no really, please don't pay attention to early voting but if we must I'm really not sure it tells the story you think it tells that just happens to magically confirm your priors."

I guess next time you have a trifecta, pass some more bills.

I'm a former writer. Professors aren't as important as we think.

Fall in the valley, winter on the peaks, and a beautiful display of dancing light below. A new image from the San Juan Mountains.

I think we have a problem

All right folks, here it is! After hours and hours of crunching the numbers, I present to you my official winter 2026-2027 outlook. Plan accordingly! 😂

As I've started following SpaceX much closer this year, I've realized how many people are seemingly actively rooting for them to fail What the hell is this about? SpaceX is literally doing some of the most insane engineering magic humanity has ever seen (safely) and it's already changing the lives of millions of people around the world for the better (Starlink) I'll never understand. Some people are so weird