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Created
Wed, 05/02/2025 - 22:00

Nothing in the Gay Hussar’s long life was quite like the leaving of it. There we were, the bedraggled survivors of many a long lunch/dinner/afternoon under the table, some of us from the departing rear guard unit, the ‘Goulash Co-operative’, set up to save the famous restaurant from closure or, worse, being turned into some […]

Created
Wed, 05/02/2025 - 22:00

One afternoon in April 2022, Josh Saltzman, the owner of a sports bar in Washington DC, opened his inbox to find what looked like a french fry price-fixing conspiracy. Saltzman had received a notice from his bar’s food distributor that effective 4 April, the four major suppliers of frozen potato products, which sell products like […]

Created
Wed, 05/02/2025 - 22:00

Faint murmurings of renewal are stirring the still reservoirs of hope on Labour’s fragmented left. Talk of a new party is spreading — again. The mood — let’s stay realistic — is evident in discrete sectors of the party membership, among disenchanted MPs, in the diaspora of expelled or disaffected members, and in several Labour movement grouplets, at […]

Created
Wed, 05/02/2025 - 22:00

In late September 2024, Hurricane Helene, the deadliest to hit mainland USA since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, struck the Big Bend region of Florida. The damage inflicted by natural disasters in the US is sometimes reported in terms of ‘insured losses’, which in this case ran into the tens of billions, but the human cost […]

Created
Wed, 05/02/2025 - 22:00

In his mid-nineteenth-century prose poem Crowds, the French symbolist Charles Baudelaire declared that it ‘is not given to everyone to take a bath among the multitude’. More than this, he elaborated in the same poem: [E]njoying the crowd is an art; and he only can make, at the expense of the human race, a lively […]

Created
Wed, 05/02/2025 - 19:04
I am devastated by the heartbreaking news of the tragic death of Michael Burawoy, a preeminent, inspiring, and brilliant sociologist, and above all, an extraordinary and gentle human being. What an unfathomable contrast lies between a fleeting, detached report in a local newspaper about a hit-and-run accident that claimed the life of an “Oakland resident” […]
Created
Wed, 05/02/2025 - 19:00
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Created
Wed, 05/02/2025 - 11:30
Brian Beutler has some useful thoughts on how to focus as we confront this complicated crisis. He writes: To my mind we have four main kinds of provocation raining down on us: headfakes, attacks on liberal pluralism, policy sabotage, and genuine constitutional crises. In the headfakes category he has Greenland, The Panama Canal and other grandiose ideas that may or may not happen or could just as easily be like the 25% tariffs which make a big splash but end up just being PR moves for Trump to declare victory. The attacks on liberal pluralism are all the heinous assaults on DEI, transgender kids, immigrants etc which makes us want to scream but which he says, and I think he’s right, still fit into the category of normal politics even though they are grotesque, cruel and disgusting which is not unprecedented. He says, and he’s right about this too, that a lot of this is bait to make us focus on that while they destroy the very firmament of our government and democracy. And these are all wedge issues designed to create division among Democrats.
Created
Wed, 05/02/2025 - 11:30
Using Australian tax and survey data, we exploit discrete eligibility cut-offs to estimate the effect of several business investment tax breaks, including tax credits and instant asset write-offs, implemented over the past 15 years. Policies implemented during the global financial crisis increased investment. Responses are larger for unincorporated businesses, possibly reflecting reduced efficacy of investment stimulus under Australia's dividend imputation system. However, we find mostly no evidence of an effect for other investment policies, including those implemented to address the COVID-19 pandemic.
Created
Wed, 05/02/2025 - 10:00
Notus Asked GOP Senators about President Musk and his wrecking crew. They’re more than fine with it: “He’s doing exactly what he should be doing,” Florida Sen. Rick Scott said Monday night. “He’s going through every agency and looking at how to make sure the money’s spent right.” Wait, isn’t that explicitly the role of Congress? “It doesn’t look like Congress is doing their job,” Scott answered simply. And sure, there may be a little bit of Constitutional hanky-panky but it’s really no biggie: North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, even acknowledged that what Musk is doing is unconstitutional — but “nobody should bellyache about that.” “That runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense,” Tillis said.