hilzoy.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

This is why I take the time to explain bureaucracies to my students. They’ve only ever heard it as a bad word, but haven’t stopped to think why they exist. Any organization of sufficient size, I tell them, requires a bureaucratic structure in order to function.

submitted 18 hours ago • 5 comments

Why on earth not? I am an academic, and a Coastal Elite, and an inhabitant of a city Trump calls a 'hell-hole'. People have been saying horrible things about people like me forever. This is called 'living in a country that has free speech.'

submitted 18 hours ago • 4 comments

An absolutely terrifying passage: "But what actually happens in the government’s IT systems to make sure that those people are eligible for deportation? Who makes sure that that is reflected in the database? That is where DOGE comes in"

submitted 18 hours ago • 3 comments

“The administration seems to basically be saying they have the right to essentially declare people equivalent to dead who have not died. That’s a hard concept to believe, but it brings enormous risks and consequences.”

submitted 18 hours ago • 8 comments

Krugman:

submitted 18 hours ago • 2 comments

"But a DOGE engineer recently deleted many federal officials’ permissions to post grant opportunities, without informing them that their permissions had been removed, the people said." (This is the site on which the federal government posts grant opportunities so people can apply for them.)

submitted 18 hours ago • 2 comments

Glad to see we’re addressing the root cause of all of this: Luther’s heresy

submitted 1 day ago • 44 comments

Welp, got an answer to this question: Apparently the answer is no tariffs are being collected. Trump broke the system www.cnbc.com/2025/04/11/c...

submitted 1 day ago • 373 comments

Don't overlook this: Trump is leaving Abrego Garcia to rot in a foreign gulag even though the admin can always bring him back and retry him for deportation in a lawful way. That they won't do this shows their case against him is nonsense. New piece from me: newrepublic.com/article/1939...

submitted 19 hours ago • 162 comments

One more case of people who don't know what they're doing finding things that seem wrong and not bothering to find out whether there's a perfectly good explanation.

submitted 18 hours ago • 2 comments

Over 650 known cases so far, and most have nothing to do with pro-Palestinian advocacy. The admin seems to be engaged in a breakneck effort to kick out every foreign student who has had even the most minor interaction with the police possible, including for TRAFFIC CITATIONS and JAYWALKING tickets.

submitted 1 day ago • 77 comments

Trump has made clear that he thinks tariffs will (a) bring manufacturing back to the U.S., (b) reverse trade deficits, and (c) fund tax cuts, deportations, and other policies. Individualized trade "deals" won't do any of these things, and actually works against two of them.

submitted 1 day ago • 21 comments

If you wanted to make sure that any faculty member who is good enough to have other options leaves the Florida university system, this would be a good way to start.

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

Recap: Vance insulted our NATO ally Denmark in bizarre bid to take over Greenland Commander on the ground says his comments did not reflect the working relationship btw US and Denmark *She is fired The mildest pushback against their authoritarian fantasies is enough www.bbc.com/news/article...

submitted 1 day ago • 120 comments

And wait until we see, on the other side of the ledger, higher borrowing costs (from decreased demand for Treasury securities) and decreased revenues (from laxer tax enforcement if not also tax cuts).

submitted 1 day ago • 92 comments

Dept of Labor is hiring 8 new security hires to provide a permanent security detail for the DOGE-aligned Dep Secretary for abt $2 million a year. They're also relying on the US Marshals to deputize the new hires since there's no legal authority to guard the Dep. talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/doge-...

submitted 2 days ago • 44 comments

One of the most heartbreaking and frustrating things about the gutting of the NEH is how personal this hits. Growing up in rural western states, the public libraries and small-town museums were a refuge for me. They sparked my love of learning and my interests in history, geology, cooking, and more.

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

The White House. The actual White House. This is the attitude of every abuser, who is now fearful of the consequences of their abuse.

submitted 2 days ago • 905 comments

This turned out to be nothing, btw — just the White House not understanding a constantly revised policy and so putting out something that turned out to be wrong www.nytimes.com/live/2025/04...

submitted 2 days ago • 3 comments

Daily🧵of cartoons: when you get to the end, click on Continue Thread. If you save a cartoon, keep caption w/ artist's name & handle. Previous 🧵s under Feeds tab of my profile. Mike Luckovich @mluckovich.bsky.social

submitted 2 days ago • 8 comments

You can prioritize education, working to keep really great teachers, or you can prioritize the culture wars. Even if I agreed with anti-trans people, WHICH I DO NOT, this is the wrong choice to make for anyone who actually cares about kids.

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

This is a fascinating case. Trump admin senior officials, and Trump himself, claimed this guy was an "MS-13 leader." It's clear that this guy was illegally possessing guns. But when they took him to court, THIS was the only mention of MS-13 in any DOJ document. Now they're moving to drop the case.

submitted 2 days ago • 28 comments

This is driving me crazy too. Not long ago 10% universal tariffs were considered the worst-case scenario, something even Trump wasn’t crazy enough to impose. Now have those PLUS 125% tariffs on China. Together, these raise raise inflation by about as much as original “Liberation Day” tariffs did!

submitted 2 days ago • 127 comments

No doubt they want to return to the 1890s, including the bank runs and the periodic major recessions that followed (many of) them.

submitted 2 days ago • 2 comments

Thread. Why? Why would any police department or prosecutor's office do this?

submitted 2 days ago • 11 comments

Join us in wishing Dolores Huerta a very happy 95th birthday! ¡Únete a nosotros para desearle a Dolores Huerta un muy feliz cumpleaños número 95!

submitted 2 days ago • 6 comments

This is by Deborah Blum, whose excellent book The Poison Squad is the best antidote to "government sucks!" libertarianism I know of.

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

In a firmly paywalled subscribers-only article, CNN reports Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, voted in Hawaii last year after signing a sworn declaration of Texas residency and claiming a homestead exemption in that state. www.cnn.com/2025/04/09/p...

submitted 2 days ago • 273 comments

"This regime of governance-by-regulator has imposed particularly severe costs on energy production, where innovation is critical. The net result is an energy landscape perpetually trapped in the 1970s." Da fuq? This is the guy who wants to revive beautiful coal. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

submitted 2 days ago • 2 comments

jeeeeeesus boingboing.net/2025/04/09/t...

submitted 2 days ago • 207 comments

This story was written before Trump paused some of the tariffs. But it's a story of waste: wasted effort, freight prices going up as companies scrambled to get their products loaded ahead of the deadline that never came, all kinds of things misdirected. We will all pay for all this waste.

submitted 2 days ago • 2 comments

It may be regarded by policymakers as a report from a different world given what has happened to tariff policy recently But the March CPI report was exceptionally cool. Headline CPI fell -0.05%, and core CPI rose just 0.06% This lowered the 12-month rate for both measures to a 4-year low

submitted 2 days ago • 6 comments

So bad, and so, so stupid.

submitted 2 days ago • 2 comments

I don't see how any business could make any plans for investment or capital expenditure as long as Trump is President & Congress is AWOL.

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

Weird way to say I caved under pressure

submitted 3 days ago • 17 comments

A simple fact. No countries were coming asking for deals. Everything I've heard is that that is factually the case. But beyond that we're not playing cards where the other guys can't see our hand. If you're in Germany or Brazil you can see what's happening in the US. You cld see that our ...

submitted 3 days ago • 87 comments

These lies are reprehensible. That includes what they're saying about Mr. Abrego, a man who has never even been charged with a crime and whose sole criminal arrest was for loitering outside a Home Depot seeking work; they've called him a "violent criminal" and accused him of human trafficking.

submitted 3 days ago • 12 comments

We need to ban private trading not only by members of Congress, but by anyone working in the administration. They can put their money in index funds while they serve the public.

submitted 3 days ago • 2 comments

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.: “Chaos is its own form of tariff. Who invests in a nation that can't have a set of dependable laws that people can count on?”

submitted 3 days ago • 50 comments

We coulda future proofed and upgraded US steel making, starting with a plant in Middletown Ohio, in the heart of Trump country and JD Vance's hometown. But the bucks came from Biden, so we can't have that. No sir. Not in Trump's America. 😡

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

If Hitler turned into Mussolini or Franco, I would rejoice.

submitted 3 days ago • 4 comments

Trump tells his followers to buy stock in the morning, minutes after the market opens, then announces he is pausing tariffs 4 hours later. Nothing to see here.

submitted 3 days ago • 664 comments