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

“Pepfar has saved more than 26 million lives and prevented roughly 1,000 babies a day from being born with the HIV virus” Superb piece on how cuts to USAID will affect the world’s poorest, focusing on HIV on.ft.com/3QX1HhP

submitted 5 hours ago • 7 comments

This doesn’t count the increased costs from losing SNAP and Medicare benefits. I can’t believe most voters chose this.

submitted 12 hours ago • 7 comments

It has come to my attention that not nearly enough of you know about Bernd das Brot, the German children's program about a clinically depressed loaf of bread who enjoys studying his wallpaper and eating gruel and whose catchphrases include "my life is hell" and "I would like to leave this show."

submitted 17 hours ago • 171 comments

Good news: Austrian Parties Reach Deal to Form Government Without Far Right

submitted 3 hours ago • 0 comments

the most surprising and disappointing aspect of becoming a global health philanthropist is the existence of an opposition team

submitted 9 hours ago • 61 comments

When you take a step back, it’s genuinely stunning how far any of this is from anything Trump campaigned on. It aligns perfectly w Project 2025 of course, but in terms of Trump’s public rhetoric, this was totally absent.

submitted 9 hours ago • 223 comments

JFC. The US Economic Policy Uncertainty Index is at its highest level since 2000, higher than during the Financial Crisis, higher than during COVID

submitted 14 hours ago • 127 comments

Absurdly great piece of for-the-sake-of-it hacking. I wrote up a few more notes here: simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/27/...

submitted 13 hours ago • 3 comments

Dean Karlan, Chief Economist at USAID, has resigned www.npr.org/sections/goa...

submitted 16 hours ago • 8 comments

‘From now on the opinion section will consist of exactly one viewpoint’ is so funny to just say out loud dawg

submitted 15 hours ago • 5 comments

como diz a @ossodeborboleta.bsky.social , pompeia acabou de dropar mais uns afrescos!

submitted 17 hours ago • 4 comments

"It’s craven. He’s basically fearful of Trump." Marty Baron, former executive editor of the Washington Post, interprets what Jeff Bazos announced this morning. open.substack.com/pub/zeteo/p/...

submitted 19 hours ago • 148 comments

The Republican budget plan: -Cut SNAP by $230 billion -Cut Medicaid by $880 billion -Give $1.1 trillion to the top 1%

submitted 23 hours ago • 36 comments

A new McCarthy era is upon us. Stupid, depressing, and dangerous as ever. I wonder whose name will carry the dunce cap in the history books. Too many are complicit. I’ll need to find upset and action, but for now I’m feeling grief at the dehumanization inherent to all this.

submitted 1 day ago • 141 comments

When Republicans say "These tax cuts will pay for themselves" reporters should treat it the way they do "Trump won the 2020 election," as a proven lie that requires IMMEDIATE refutation in the reporter's voice, to make clear that they have repeated this assertion for decades and it never happens.

submitted 1 day ago • 22 comments

I can't vouch for the date source (ember energy?) but if it's accurate, I'm positively surprised. See the breakdown, with wind growing in the last ten years and solar in the last five.

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

The wealthiest man in the world spent hundreds of millions of dollars to put Trump in power, and one of the first things he did was to starve children. You decide if that was a feature or a bug.

submitted 1 day ago • 26 comments

When I worked in UK academia I recall hearing of a Japanese man who was baffled at how Britain had decided to run its universities like firms. “Why? Your universities are excellent and your firms are terrible.”

submitted 1 day ago • 21 comments

Maybe the worst Ezra Klein episode ever. Ezra: sophisticated question about the media environment interplay with politics Gurri: if you think about it, Trump was sent by God to usher in AI as the second coming. nytimes.com/2025/02/25/o...

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

Had never heard of this restaurant chain, and now it's the largest in the world by store count

submitted 1 day ago • 45 comments

DOGE savings (WSJ): $2.6b TSLA subsidies (10 years): $15b Annual increase in deficit: $900b Cuts to Medicare: $880b

submitted 1 day ago • 193 comments

I think I can explain this. As long as I've been following US politics, everyone involved in public discourse has obeyed Murc's Law: Dems are the only ones with agency, the only ones making choices for which they are accountable; the right merely reacts, is driven to its behavior by the left.

submitted 1 day ago • 35 comments

Was hat die Linke wiederbelebt? Der tolle @andreasrickmann.bsky.social zeigt hier, dass es einen Zusammenhang mit den Vorgängen im Bundestag rund um die gemeinsame Mehrheit von CDU/CSU, FDP und AfD geben könnte. Starkes Wachstum ab dem 29.1.25.

submitted 1 day ago • 4 comments

I love how papers like this--by taking a multi-level approach, can help us to understand how immigrant influx at one level (national) boosts prejudice, but at another (local) does the opposite. (PS go #intergroupcontact!) Worth getting your head around this. These scholars are really onto something

submitted 2 days ago • 2 comments

The company we now keep: "The United States voted with Russia, North Korea, Belarus and 14 other Moscow-friendly countries" Horrifying.

submitted 2 days ago • 12 comments

Data from Five takeaways from Germany’s historic election — in charts - on.ft.com/43c2OBk via @data.ft.com

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

More reasons for concern: AfD nabbed 40% of previous non-voters in a high turnout election.

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Election results in #Berlin in granular detail. The big black spot on the left is a forest, the marked green one is Tempelhofer Feld. interaktiv.tagesspiegel.de/lab/bundesta...

submitted 3 days ago • 9 comments

NEW: updated long-run gap in voting between young men and women in Germany: Gender divide continues to widen, but contrary to what is often assumed, young men continue to vote roughly in line with the overall population, while young women have swung sharply left. www.ft.com/content/29fd...

submitted 3 days ago • 202 comments

stancilculture.substack.com/p/the-intern...

submitted 3 days ago • 3 comments

Quite striking results for Germany’s young (+\- compared to 2021).

submitted 3 days ago • 7 comments

I don't even know what to say. So much vital, lifesaving research has come from this data.

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

Chilling read by @okwonga.bsky.social "Far right’s xenophobia is not at the fringes of German society: it can be found in voices at its very centre" www.theguardian.com/world/commen...

submitted 4 days ago • 7 comments

The trouble is, once I started imagining they were taking selfies I couldn’t unsee it

submitted 4 days ago • 122 comments

did not expect to be attacked like this at the art museum

submitted 4 days ago • 25 comments

An accessible piece of one of my favorite weird anatomical features: our brains literally clean themselves while we sleep, pumping cerebrospinal fluid in to wash away waste products. And many classes of sleeping pill lessen or prevent this action!

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

Used @graze.social for the first time today, to create a feed that mirrors my Following feed but is filtered by language.

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment