Joey Politano 🏳️🌈
@JosephPolitano
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Writing a data-driven newsletter about economics @ | Nuance? In this economy? | he/him | Bi/pan
Washington, DC
Joined June 2015
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🚨BIG PERSONAL NEWS🚨
In the last year I've published 78 articles, created 438 charts, and written thousands of words to explain our complicated modern economy.
Today I'm excited to announce that I'm taking the leap—and writing my newsletter full-time!🧵
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Incredible that we, as a society, have simply lost the battle to spam.
80% of the physical mail, phone calls, text messages, DMs, and friend requests I receive are either unwanted junk or scams trying to separate me from my money. Entire modes of communication made unusable.
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It's two burritos, Michael. What could it cost, $50?
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The funniest part of living in Northern Virginia is constantly seeing metro ads that are exclusively targeted at like ~4 procurement officers at the Pentagon
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Lots of people discover that money is a social construct and think they've stumbled onto some kind of earth-shattering revelation.
Can someone explain to me why the paper above is more valuable than the paper below?
Serious question.
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Devastating night for the "student loan forgiveness will cost Dems the election" coalition
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the number of times I have thought "surely there's no way this is made in excel" only to discover that yes, in fact, it is made in excel
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Matt evidently has an unparalleled skill for getting under Elon's skin lol
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That sounds you hear is the assembling of an army of copyright lawyers, the largest the world has ever seen, who have been in cryosleep since the Napster lawsuits and have just now been reawakened for one last job.
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1 in 6 Americans live in the Northeast Megalopolis stretching from Boston to DC, even if high speed rail only worked in this part of the country (it doesn't) it would still be a valuable service to tons of Americans.
When I lived in DC I took the train to NYC all the time because it wasn’t that much longer than flying (particularly when security/getting to and from airports was factored in). That’s one of probably five places in America rail really makes sense.
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Someone with a net worth in the ballpark of $100M complaining about groceries at an upscale San Francisco store being $350 is accidentally an amazing microcosm of how consumer sentiment is formed
Three bags of groceries—$350 (!!)
[ some high end items like lox, but my lord everything is $12 now ]
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Between sports gambling, crypto, and meme stocks, America's fastest growing industry is just stealing from disaffected low trust 18-34 year old men
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guy who makes $400k a year and doesn’t think of himself as rich complaining about being unfairly targeted by taxes is like, the platonic ideal of a wsj post. Great job team.
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Oh yeah? Then explain these:
My mother once said “America, unlike other empires which built the Taj Mahal or Coliseum, spent our imperial loot on useless mid-level management jobs for people without skills.”
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There are 3 types of succesful companies in Europe:
1) world-famous luxury goods brand worth 17 gabillion dollars
2) financial services firm with history of international crime
3) high-tech manufacturer that is the world's only producer of some machine you've never heard of
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I do think it's funny that the only way some Americans can imagine building wealth is just to create rings of suburbs further and further out from city centers, so each generation can get their own ring. By 2075 exurban Dallas shall stretch to Wisconsin.
It's quite simple.
30 years ago, boomers bought cheap acreage inside the red circle with 9% rates. Today they're wealthy.
Today, millennials could buy cheap acreage inside the yellow circle at 7% rates, wait 30 years and be wealthy.
You can be a victim or be patient.
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Still extremely underrated how lucky the college class of 2019 was. Completely dodged remote learning, graduated into the strongest labor market since the early 2000s, then got showered in stimulus in 2020, and hasn't had to pay student loans for 3.5 years
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To recap, this is as if the US was struggling to invade Mexico so disgruntled Blackwater mercenaries seized San Antonio, shot down several helicopters, and drove halfway to DC before the Prime Minister of Jamaica negotiated a ceasefire where the Secretary of Defense was fired
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In the 1950s there were three cars for every 10 Americans (compared to 9 cars for every 10 today), the homeownership rate was 55% (66% today), and 6% of Americans had a college degree (38% today)
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The core of the quiet quitting/nobody wants to work anymore/etc narratives is just execs and VCs going "well of course *I* work hard, and everyone I know work hard, but *gestures vaguely outside* THOSE people aren't working"
YOU WERE ALSO ON AN 11AM WALK LIKE EVERYONE ELSE!!!
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I will never understand Silicon Valley's obsession with reinventing the wheel in finance
Users will soon be able to pay for purchases with the X app just like a debit card.
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@JoePostingg
"what's the reason for these yellow poles"
You! you're the reason for those yellow poles!
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$10k in student debt forgiveness is not enough. We need to forgive...hold on let me check...$36,135.72.
Anymore than that, though, would just be a giveaway to the rich that would increase inflation.
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Tale as old as time
“we must keep housing prices high but also make housing more affordable”
what
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Okay I knew Europeans used a lot less air conditioning than Americans but I didn't realize it was like, basically zero air conditioning.
europe's heat pump adoption is leading them to use air conditioning, which bites back on some of the emissions benefits
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All I see is an extremely successful case of rapid cultural assimilation: I have never met a native-born Canadian who did not complain about crazy rent, the cold weather, and food in conversation, usually in that order.
Ukrainian describes Canada as:
-shitty food
-cold winters
-expensive rent
Is she ungrateful and wrong? ...... Or bang on?
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BREAKING: The Pentagon says it overestimated the value of the weapons it has sent to Ukraine by $6.2 billion over the past two years, resulting in a surplus that will be used for future security packages - AP
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It's official—For the first time ever, the European Union now imports more energy from the United States than from Russia!
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besides the obvious "who consumes the oil?" question, I want to know what kind of messed-up system of carbon accounting produced a result where Shell emits ~20x what Saudi Aramco emits despite Aramco producing many times more oil than Shell
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In the 1950s there were 3 cars for every 10 Americans (compared to 9 cars for every 10 today), the homeownership rate was 55% (66% today), and 6% of Americans had a college degree (38% today)
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I knew America had disproportionately high traffic fatalities, but I don't think I realized just how truly bad we are.
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America has basically one comprehensive public transit system (NYC), every other city just has a bunch of bus lines in a trench coat pretending to be a network in comparison
It's
#SpotifyWrapped
time! In our version of
#TransitWrapped
, see the U.S. public transportation agencies with the highest ridership between Sept. '23 and Oct. '22.
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@MTA
2.8 Billion
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@metrolosangeles
280 Million
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@cta
270 Million
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@wmata
243 Million
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@MBTA
239 Million
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If we're talking about government art that goes incredibly hard let me present "Man Controlling Trade", the statue outside the FTC's headquarters in DC.
this goes so hard, i can't believe it's on a government building. need more of this energy
nuclear reactors should have prometheus stealing fire from the atom
datacenters should have an angel with a flaming sword holding back chaos
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Very funny to remember an era in internet history where Elon Musk was considered an archetypical Science Guy like Stephen Hawking or Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Sorry it's not 1743 anymore but modern cities require you to occasionally see tall buildings
This is now London, a pastiche Manhattan quite unrelated to the country in which it stands.
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From China's perspective, Australia must be super annoying. It's this
fiercely democratic island with a population smaller than Chongqing that you are dependent on for coal. Then as soon as you make the electric transition guess what? They're the world's largest source of lithium
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Instead of telling you when it's safe to cross the street, the walk signs in Crystal City, VA are just repeating "CHANGE PASSWORD".
Something's gone terribly wrong here.
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If you go ask to withdrawal your money from a bank they legally have to give it to you, if the bank goes under the government gives you the money instead, and the entire system is regulated to prevent the exact kind of awful things FTX did.
People are mad at FTX for doing the exact same thing that the banks do every day. Don’t believe me? Walk into your bank and ask to withdraw all your money and see what happens.
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Parody is dead because if a movie put in a scene where a male tech VC billionaire mocked a 23-year-old woman online for complaining about her 3-hour-a-day commute and inability to afford NYC rents it would be considered too on-the-nose commentary
Oh princess… 😢 I’m sorry you had to commute and work and have a job and everything — it’s like so extra!
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Joe Biden when he realized he could just rename his green energy and tax reform bill the "Inflation Reduction Act" and people would support it
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Men only want one thing for Christmas and it's disgusting:
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Wow, turns out life is easier when you happen to be wealthy and live in a country where wages are so low you can employ a small army of personal servants to handle housework and childcare for you.
I wonder if the maid has any opinions on how easy it is to raise kids in India?
Raising a child in the US seems hellish compared to India.
US—Wake up early, cook, drive kid to work, both parents work, do groceries, chores, cleaning. Lonely.
India—Maid cleans, driver drops you, groceries in 15mins, cook cooks, parents babysit. Community.
(requires $$)
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Congestion pricing is progressive but I need people to understand that it's actually the squishy, technocratic, moderate centrist compromise policy compared to the truly progressive position of simply banning single occupancy passenger vehicles from large chunks of Manhattan.
WHY ARE THEY PUTTING TOLLS IN MANHATTAN?!?!
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There is a certain terrible class of people who worships The Military as a concept, as an idea, and as a hyper-mythologized jingoistic entity, but holds nothing but scorn and disdain for the actual flesh-and-blood service members who make up the real institution.
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STOP MAKING UP NEW FAKE NAMES FOR NORMAL PARTS OF THE LABOR MARKET
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Still very funny to me that BRICS was just made up by a guy at Goldman Sachs and then everyone just willed it into being a real thing.
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All it took was 4% interest rates to convince this man that fighting pronouns, not mars colonization, was the real purpose of his life.
Truly incredible what monetary policy can accomplish.
The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters
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>look at booming minor island economy
>ask them if it's a tax haven or natural resource exporter
>they look at me puzzled
>pull out beamer slides explaining the difference in intricate detail
>they laugh and say "it's a good economy"
>go in
>it's a tax haven
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I worry things get worse long before they get better. The new scam seems to be unprompted text messages from random numbers asking me how my day is going in an attempt to impersonate new contacts I guess.
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Incredible meme material here, I'm buying now to get in on the ground floor
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Saw a $10 bill on the ground and thought of that classic joke where an economist walks past the $100 bill she sees on the ground because "if it was real, someone would have already picked it up".
Picked up the $10 bill to discover it was just an ad for a local ministry.
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economists when someone tells them that humans don't act rationally
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Demand for weight-loss drugs Ozempic/Wegovy is so large that the government of Denmark (where drugmaker Novo Nordisk is from) now has to publish GDP data excluding it
Since the first half of 2022 (left), headline GDP growth has been 1.7% (blue), but ex-Pharma it's -0.3% (green)
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Wow, I wonder if the Soviets ever did anything bad to the Ukrainian people that would make their symbolism disliked
Workers have begun removing the Soviet hammer and sickle from Kyiv's iconic Motherland statue. The Ukrainian trident will replace it.
The symbolism, of course, is lost on no one.
Video:
@yurasov_vitaliy
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JUST IN:
@SecDef
announces Operation Prosperity Guardian, which brings together multiple countries including the UK, Bahrain, Canada, France, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Seychelles and Spain, "to jointly address security challenges in the southern Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden"
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Not a novel observation but it is genuinely horrible how much of the international norms surrounding "territorial annexations are prima facie wrong" have completely deteriorated over the last ~5 years
🇻🇪🇬🇾 Venezuela is holding a referendum vote today on the issue of annexing 160,000 sq km of neighbouring Guyana.
Territorial dispute is more than a century old, but has taken on a far more serious and immediate tone following the discovery of vast Guyanese oil reserves.
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THE PEARS RIPEN ON THE BOAT THE COST OF TRANSOCEANIC FREIGHT TRANSPORTATION IS EXTREMELY SMALL BOYH IN DOLLARS AND CARBON PLUS THE PRIMARY CONSUMERS OF PACKAGED PEARS ARE IN SOUTHEAST ASIA
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Oh and of course it is literally impossible to even mention certain words (cr*pt*, b*tco*n) on social media without getting swarmed by bots trying to impersonate celebrities or exchanges in an attempt to get you to transfer all your money to them.
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They'd probably think "oh my God I can finally breathe"
Beautiful footage of Londoners in 1931.
What would they think of their city today?
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Saying things like "I regularly fantasize about killing cyclists" is among the most sicko behavior that has just been completely normalized online
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1/3 of American white collar workers will not permanently lose their jobs in the next 2 years
🧵 AI is going to nuke the bottom third of performers in jobs done on computers — even creative ones — in the next 24 months
White collar salaries are going to plummet to the average of the global work force & the speed at which the top performers can write prompts
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The funniest type-of-guy that has recently emerged is "vehemently anti-remote-work Tech Venture Capitalist," just a bunch of people whose self described job is launching revolutionary digital technologies looking at a tech-enabled work revolution and saying "Wow I hate this"
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Every Western State is just:
Water Usage:
Residential: 12%
Commercial: 10%
Industrial: 5%
Farming: 70%
someone who is good at water allocation please help me budget this. I don't have enough water for residential use.
Breaking News: Arizona will limit some new housing construction in the Phoenix area because of a shrinking water supply. It's a glimpse of the challenges facing the West as climate change worsens.
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"Forgiving student debt won't increase inflation" speak for yourself. Now that my loans are forgiven I vow to make inflation worse.
I have filled my pool with 5,000 gallons of gasoline. Every day I go to the port of Los Angeles and stop the cargo ships from unloading.
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The US manufacturing construction boom is massive—I keep having to raise the Y-axis on this chart!
Historic increases in computer/electronic manufacturing thanks to the CHIPS Act, and massive increases in transportation equipment (read: cars/electric vehicles) thanks to the IRA.
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@bennyjohnson
But they voted in a Republican AG.
Make it make sense. The Democrats are rigging it, again.
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Okay so Fukuyama is really leaning into the "fine, I'll do it myself" attitude to ending history at this point lmao
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International food transport emissions are such a rounding error that you are responsible for more carbon every time you throw out an egg or keep your car running to warm up than you are for buying pears that have traveled the length of Magellan's voyage
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The other thing I will add is that Elon is clearly not a free speech absolutist even excluding the (extremely bad) fact that he readily complies with authoritarian governments' censorship requests (like i.e. banning substack links or banning ElonJet at his own discretion)
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The year is 1972: Public intellectuals speculate that we finally have enough compute to solve the economic calculation problem
The year is 1997: Public intellectuals speculate that we finally have enough compute to solve the economic calculation problem
The year is 2023...
Controversial take: Centrally planned economies probably work better than market economies with today's compute
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Pretty brutal to watch the UK fall like a decade behind the US in real per-capita consumption
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No, US inflation is not secretly 12%
Good morning.
Inflation is 12% in the US if you use the SAME CPI baskets our governments used to use in the 1980s.
Stop listening to anyone who is gaslighting you into believing inflation is 3%.
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Fun investing fact: A used Toyota Prius has outperformed the S&P 500 over the last year.
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A structural UK economic problem is they only have 1 rich city (London) and it has an extreme housing shortage
You could solve this by building more housing in London, connecting more areas to London, or spreading out growth (hard)—but ongoing UK policy is "none of the above"
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I hate this genre of tweet because it frames lack of European growth as an intentional tradeoff for welfare instead of a recent macro policy failure, thereby excusing it
As if having a better subway network is the reason the German economy hasn’t grown in 5 years. Ridiculous
Europeans aren't poor. They are illiquid. Much of Europe's wealth is stored in safe streets, nice parks, public transit, "free" healthcare, etc. which, it turns out, are too socially expensive for Americans to maintain. Americans take the money instead. The rest is only natural.
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I think comments like this (from the Dallas Fed Survey of retailers) are so funny.
The last stimulus check was in March 2021! Enhanced unemployment benefits ended two years ago! The Child Tax Credit has expired! You are not competing with new government transfer programs!
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Elephant in the room is that Twitter is banning links to it's major American social media competitors (all the way down to something I've never heard of called Nostr) but not TikTok/Weibo because Musk doesn't want to upset the CCP given Tesla's involvement in China.
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Globalization has truly destroyed the locally made, artisanal, small-batch conspiracy theory.
Nowadays everything is monopolized by the same major 3-4 major global conspiracy theories that just use a local coat of paint for different markets.
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Lots of people discover that money is a social construct and think they've stumbled onto some kind of earth-shattering revelation.
"People get confused sometimes they think an economy is money. Money is a database for exchange of goods & services. Money doesn't have power in & of itself. The actual economy is goods & services"
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80% of personal finance content is either "how I budget as a 20 year old making $750k a year in LA" or "if you make more than $30k you MUST max out both your 401k and IRA"
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Okay, so we can drop the "lol Twitter was overstaffed 5-10x" talking point now, right?
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First it was "shut up and pay $8" now it is "shut up and take your free blue checkmark" lol, things are going absolutely great
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Remote work isn't creating homelessness, a lack of housing is.
This is the most dishonest framing of the housing crisis I've ever seen.
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Every State Election since Dobbs has been like
Control of State Legislature:
D: 51%
R: 49%
Should The National Guard be Placed on Permanent Deployment to Defend The State's Abortion Clinics?
Y: 78%
N: 22%
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Am reliably informed that there is a massive convoy of pizza delivery drivers, perhaps 20,000 strong, moving across Northern Virginia and heading towards key US security buildings like the Pentagon and CIA headquarters.
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