Musk chose the robo-taxi date 8/8 not because they're ready, but to dog whistle to neo-nazi white supremacists adl.org/resources/hate-symbo… Find me on threads: threads.net/@aaronbstrauss

I'm over at the other app with professional news: joining up with others to figure out how Dems can win more elections! bsky.app/profile/aaronstraus…

I spent some time today digging into the voting-center level results recently posted by the Venezuelan opposition (resultadosconvzla.com/) 1) Their dataset has ~81% coverage - doing some modeling to extrapolate the data they collected to the rest of the country, I'm estimating that the Opposition got 66% of the vote compared to 32% for Maduro. 2) Unsurprisingly, the ~20% of missing precincts are modeled to be substantially more supportive of Maduro (Opposition 19) than the precincts they did collect (Opposition 37) and also are quite a bit smaller, lending some credence to the data generation process. Even if Maduro won all of the votes in these precincts the opposition still would win easily. 3) The opposition saw it's largest gains in lower-income precincts that went strongly for Maduro in 2013, winning ~2/3rds of precincts that Maduro won eleven years ago 4) It's hard to "prove" that a set of election results are real - but having spent a decent amount of time doing regressions on the results, they show the same kind of complex relationships with previous election results and demographics that I have seen in American elections, in a way that I think would be pretty difficult to replicate out of thin air.

This paper had everyone at NBER talking this week. Amazing natural experiment, important results! "The Impact of Denying a Wanted Abortion on Women and Children" by @juliana_londono & Estefanía Saravia conference.nber.org/conf_pap…

🚨 HUGE spike in awareness and rejection of Project2025 JUNE 24, 2024: -9 points FAV: 10% UNFAV: 19% JULY 14, 2024: -32 points FAV: 11% UNFAV: 43%

This decision puts @JoeBiden in a pantheon of selfless American political heroes. We have to compare @POTUS to three of our greatest Presidents, who all made a similar decision: Washington, Truman and LBJ. History will embrace @JoeBiden!

Get a load of this guy...

He sounds so tired

Genuinely don't want this guy on my TV for the next four years.

Honestly hard to fit this much antisemitism, anti-Blackness and misogyny into a single comment. Truly an advanced level of bigotry from JD Vance

The @nytimes is has *deceptively edited a JD Vance quote* to make it appear that he opposes a national ban. Here's the 2022 quote they use: “Ohio is going to want to have a different abortion policy from California, from New York, and I think that’s reasonable."

ON JD VANCE’S WHOLE DEAL

Oh. I was reliably told by Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, and other Russian assets that NATO expansion was the reason Russia invaded Ukraine…

NEW: 11 shuttered auto plants will become EV factories thanks to $1.7 billion Biden program theverge.com/2024/7/11/24195…

CS Lewis said once, "“Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible?" A lot of Gaza discourse on this site feels to me like it runs off a determination to enjoy the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible. And there's plenty of grist for that - even if you don't invent any from whole cloth - but it's a destructive impulse and more than that it's a masturbatory impulse. It doesn't save a single person in Gaza. I don't know what will, but I think you have to start by doing your best to actually estimate the numbers you care about, not just pull out creative arguments for inflating them.

Trump’s Press Secretary is literally starring in recruitment ads for Project 2025

US Soccer will never be a successful program as long as they continue to ignore the nation’s most talented players and prioritize the players whose parents can afford travel fees, tournament registration, summer camps and everything else involved in the sham that is youth soccer.

"Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had everything to do with that. And that shows you how disinformation can kill.” This Vanity Fair piece on RFK Jr. is a must-read for a number of reasons, including this anecdote. vanityfair.com/news/story/ro…

If the Roberts Court's understanding of the Constitution is correct it's hard to understand what the authors of the document could have meant by a President being guilty of "high crimes and misdemeanors". Perhaps the framers were simply wrong in understanding their document?

""Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal" -- @dick_nixon and now, sadly, SCOTUS