Reading

Created
Tue, 10/09/2024 - 23:32

The Washington Post headline reads: “A big problem for young workers: 70- and 80-year-olds who won’t retire.” For the first time in history, reports Aden Barton, five generations are competing in the same workforce. His article laments a “demographic traffic jam” at the apexes of various employment pyramids, making it ever harder for young people “to launch their careers and get promoted” in their chosen professions. In fact, actual professors (full-time and tenure-track ones, presumably, rather than part-timers like me) are Exhibit A in his analysis. “In academia, for instance,” as he puts it, “young professionals now spend years in fellowships and postdoctoral programs waiting for professor jobs to open.” I’ve written before about how this works in the academic... Read more

Created
Tue, 10/09/2024 - 23:00
Republicans would rather rule The mailing of over 100,000 North Carolina absentee ballots in-state and to armed service members and others residing overseas will be delayed for weeks. (Dare we again use unprecedented?) North Carolina’s state Supreme Court on Monday ruled for RFK Jr. on his demand that his name/party that he fought to include on state ballots now be removed. One hundred county Boards of Elections have already printed roughly 3 million in-person and absentee ballots with Kennedy’s name on them. His delay in withdrawing from the presidential contest to endorse Donald Trump means strapped county boards must pay reprinting costs. As we noted on Saturday, “2,348 ballot styles will have to be reformatted, reproofed, reprinted, mailings re-prepared by staff, and voting machines recoded in 100 counties.” The cost of Kennedy’s vanity project to North Carolina taxpayers and delay to voters will be considerable. State law requires absentee ballots to be mailed 60 days ahead of the general election. That was Friday, September 6.
Created
Tue, 10/09/2024 - 22:00

We here at the Department of Energy wanted to thank you for being conscientious about your energy usage this summer. Your efforts haven’t gone unnoticed. As a token of our gratitude, we wanted to highlight all the small but powerful steps you’ve taken to conserve energy over the past few months—and how that energy has instead been used to fuel the insatiable beast that is AI.

Created
Tue, 10/09/2024 - 18:00
Colm Manning and Alice Crundwell No country is an island – in terms of economics at least, if not geography. Trade and capital link all the economies of the world. Relative to GDP, the UK has more foreign assets and liabilities than any other large economy. These external liabilities – UK assets owned by overseas … Continue reading We are not an island: how have the UK’s external balance sheet risks changed over the past two decades?
Created
Tue, 10/09/2024 - 11:26
Taking just five minutes to scroll through X, these are the first five posts we witness, the stories often not picked up in our mainstream media. The circumstances are different for the un-chosen And he’s yet to utter one cohesive sentence! pic.twitter.com/shtUJgrHYM — Rania (@umyaznemo) September 9, 2024 And how the Palestinians honour the death Continue reading »
Created
Tue, 10/09/2024 - 09:30
Why? You have probably heard about Tucker Carlson’s interview with a pro-Hitler, Holocaust revisionist whom he called “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” a few days back. Yeah. This article in Vox wonders if the GOP is going to go along with him on this. Guess what? The Trump camp — which sets the tone for the entire party — has so far done nothing to distance itself from the increasingly toxic Carlson. [JD] Vance, who has pre-taped a Carlson interview and is scheduled to speak with him at a live event in two weeks, refused to denounce Carlson after the Cooper fiasco — with a spokesperson saying in a statement that “Senator Vance doesn’t believe in guilt-by-association cancel culture.” A Trump campaign source told the Bulwark that while it’s “not ideal timing” for Vance to appear twice with Carlson before Election Day, “it is what it is.” (Donald Trump Jr. is also scheduled to attend.) It is what it is.
Created
Tue, 10/09/2024 - 08:00
I wish the Atlantic offered gift links because this is one I’d really love to share with you. Here’s a gift link to this article in the Atlantic. It’s from Mark Liebovitch and it’s about the invertebrate cowards in the Republican Party. Donald Trump had them pegged: In the summer of 2015, back when he was still talking to traitorous reporters like me, I spent extended stretches with Donald Trump. He was in the early phase of his first campaign for president, though he had quickly made himself the inescapable figure of that race—as he would in pretty much every Republican contest since. We would hop around his various clubs, buildings, holding rooms, limos, planes, golf carts, and mob scenes, Trump disgorging his usual bluster, slander, flattery, and obvious lies. The diatribes were exhausting and disjointed. But I was struck by one theme that Trump kept pounding on over and over: that he was used to dealing with “brutal, vicious killers”—by which he meant his fellow ruthless operators in showbiz, real estate, casinos, and other big-boy industries. In contrast, he told me, politicians are saps and weaklings.