If the rain comes | They run and hide their heads Brooklyn flooded on Friday. Again. Subway lines shut down as water poured off streets, down stairways and into stations. A niece reported she had to take cabs into the city for work and the basement entry was knee-deep. Nancy Walecki wrote last week at The Atlantic: New York City’s sewer system is built for the rain of the past—when a notable storm might have meant 1.75 inches of water an hour. It wasn’t built to handle the rainfall from Hurricane Irene, Hurricane Sandy, or, more recently, Hurricane Ida—which dumped 3.15 inches an hour on Central Park. And it wasn’t built to handle the kind of extreme rainfall that is becoming routine: The city flooded last December, last April, and last July—an unusual seasonal span. “We now have in New York something much more like a tropical-rainfall pattern,” Rohit Aggarwala, New York City’s environmental-protection commissioner, said yesterday at The Atlantic Festival. “And it happens over and over again.” It happened today.
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… is right twice a day Matt Gaetz on the House floor: “It is going to be difficult for my Republican friends to keep calling President Biden feeble while he continues to take Speaker McCarthy’s lunch money in every negotiation.” pic.twitter.com/LXNxi9YMs4 — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 2, 2023 That will make a nice campaign ad, don’t you think? Gaetz didn’t pull the trigger on the motion to vacate. But he told the press on the capitol steps that he still plans to do it later when the full congress is back in town. Stay tuned.
Democrats are being pouty because they don’t have a young, dazzling superstar like Barack Obama to fall in love with. But they will vote and they will vote for Biden because they hate Trump. Negative partisanship is as powerful a motivator as 2008 style adoration.
I will be eternally grateful to all the scientists who made the mRNA vaccines that have saved millions of lives during he COVID pandemic. Today two of them received the Nobel Prize for medicine: Two scientists won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discoveries that enabled the creation of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 that were critical in slowing the pandemic — technology that’s also being studied to fight cancer and other diseases. Hungarian-American Katalin Karikó and American Drew Weissman were cited for contributing “to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health,” according to the panel that awarded the prize in Stockholm. The panel said the pair’s “groundbreaking findings … fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system.” Traditionally, making vaccines required growing viruses or pieces of viruses and then purifying them before next steps. The messenger RNA approach starts with a snippet of genetic code carrying instructions for making proteins.
One of the outcomes of the W3C worldwide technical conference, TPAC, this year, was a suggestion from W3C staff that we consider forming a new Social Web Working Group (WG) for revising the ActivityPub and Activity Streams 2.0 standards. There has been some controversy about this idea, which I wanted to address with a blog … Continue reading A New Social Web Working Group at the W3C
An essential component of Neoclassical microeconomics is the proposition that firms maximize their profits by equating marginal revenue—the addition to total revenue caused by the last unit sold—to marginal cost—the addition to total costs caused by the last unit produced. This proposition plays a fundamental role in all DSGE-based macroeconomic models too, in the form … Continue reading "Profit Maximization in the Real World"
Is McCarthy making deal with Democrats? Rep. Matt Gaetz is planning to attempt to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy from the role this week after the House leader worked with Democrats to avoid a government shutdown on Saturday. Speaking with CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union,” the Florida Republican said he intends to file a motion to vacate this week, which would force a vote on whether McCarthy will keep his job. “Speaker McCarthy made an agreement with House conservatives in January and since then he’s been in brazen, repeated material breach of that agreement,” Gaetz said Sunday. “This agreement that he made with Democrats to really blow past a lot of the spending guardrails we set up is a last straw.” e added, “I do intend to file a motion to vacate against Speaker McCarthy this week. I think we need to rip off the Band-Aid.
The GOP is actually devolving After a day of campaigning, this is the message waiting for me outside my hotel room…#PrettyPatheticTryAgain#YouJustMadeMyCaseForMe pic.twitter.com/htbSumo58r — Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) October 1, 2023 We’ve often noted that the GOP (and in some respects out culture in general) is suffering from a massive case of arrested development: Former President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign early Sunday left a birdcage and bird food in front of GOP presidential hopeful Nikki Haley’s hotel room door in Des Moines in reference to his new nickname for her, “Birdbrain,” per a photo shared with The Messenger. The Trump campaign shared the photo early Sunday with The Messenger and later posted the picture on Twitter. Trump debuted the moniker prior to Wednesday’s debate on his social media platform Truth Social. It’s unclear why he came up with that nickname in particular. “MAGA, or I, will never go for Birdbrain Nikki Haley,” Trump wrote in the post. “Birdbrain doesn’t have the TALENT or TEMPERAMENT to do the job.
Sarah Huckasanders honors her mentor with some idiotic corruption Photo of the $19,029.25 lectern purchased by the Sanders administration in June. The expense was reimbursed by the Republican Party of Arkansas, according to records. #arpx #Arkansas #ARNews pic.twitter.com/mERP6QvHHP — AR Democrat-Gazette (@ArkansasOnline) September 26, 2023 Here’s some good-old Arkansas gothic politics. I hadn’t allowed myself to hope that Sarah might find herself in the middle of one of these but it looks like she’s going to: An anonymous former state employee came forward Friday claiming to have evidence that the Arkansas governor’s office doctored documents and unlawfully withheld financial records that should have been made public under the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA. Attorney Tom Mars, who is representing the whistleblower, sent a letter today to Sen.
I’m sure you’res sick of seeing all these demented Trump clips but I wanted to post this just so that we could have it on record for when the right wingers try to claim Joe Biden is senile. Please… Montage of 33 clips of the stupidest, most vile, insane, weirdest, addled dementia-ridden, psychotic statements made by Trump over the past two weeks. pic.twitter.com/iCbt5PtzBX — Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) September 30, 2023