TL;DR: Bass signs an executive order making it easier to build "100% affordable" (i.e. price-controlled to a level affordable to households at 80% of AMI) housing, but provides no funding. Without all the red tape, this is actually profitable, even with the price controls, so builders go nuts. Then Bass starts adding additional regulations to shut it down.

In "Karen Bass is a garbage human being" news, this is amazing if true (and I assume Yglesias isn't just making stuff up, but the article is paywalled).

Dude, why are you posting comments here instead of working on making more Jews? We're running out!

Some version of the Major Questions Doctrine is obviously correct. Congress can't just delegate unlimited lawmaking power to the executive branch. There has to be some limit. But it's not really feasible for Congress to specify every detail. The reasonable compromise between these extremes is that Congress can delegate the finer details of implementation of a law to the executive, but that the executive must stay comply with the spirit of the law and not unilaterally decide major questions.

I believe that you can have standing recognized on the basis of imminent harm. Though even then, I do supposed that it might take more than a day or two to get things going.

Has anyone heard anything about lawsuits to block the use of tariffs on Major Questions (or whatever) grounds making their way through the system?

Chat GPT---which often makes things up!---suggested this:

There was a notable Juul Law in Illinois, passed in 1913, sponsored by State Representative Juul, which extended the school year and raised education standards. It was controversial, especially among business interests who were concerned about the impact on child labor (since a longer school year kept children out of the workforce longer).

A document discussing the activities of the Illinois state legislature in 1913 makes a brief reference to it, but assumes that the reader knows what it is.

The revenue law has been amended by providing that sinking
funds for the payment of bonds and interest on bonds may be
raised outside of the limitation on the total amount of taxes under
the Juul law

It's kind of weird how Argentina got an American President and we got an Argentinian President.

Really? That's it? I'm far from his number one fan, but if you can't off the top of your head name several legitimately good policies he's put into place---among many very bad ones!---then you might have drunk too deeply of the neurotoxic waters of Portland.

Right, we discussed this last month. It wasn't really clear what Bezos meant. One comment, whose brevity and tone imply that it was typed with one hand, characterized it as "another billionaire bends the knee."

Bezos is getting on in years, and time is not kind to knees. Maybe it'll take him some time to bend his.

A month after the announcement that the Washington Post opinions page would focus on promoting personal liberty and free markets, it's still hammering Trump every day. I suppose that maybe the change is on hold until a new editor is hired, but so far, it looks like Bezos meant exactly what he said.

Who are you talking to? Did anyone here vote for Donald Trump?

Now restored, as is the Gen. Charles Rogers Medal of Honor Monday page that people were talking about earlier.

As much as the idea that they're trying to erase all record of black achievement might turn you on, I'm pretty sure that's not what's happening.

Why would Republicans want to selectively suppress the vote of married women? Married women lean Republican!

From the Thrillist article on why grape ice cream isn't a thing:

On the first point, grapes are about 81-84% water, meaning working with whole grapes can lead to not-so-delicious icy chunks. "Making ice cream at home, you can get fruit like grapes pretty close to a puree, but when you are using fruit as a base on a large scale, that's when you run into problems," Ben & Jerry's PR lead Sean Greenwood told Thrillist.

Strawberries are 91% water, though!

There's a long history of the federal government using tax money to bribe people, organizations, and states to do things it lacks the constitutional authority to force them to do, or to do itself.

I'm all for the Courts cracking down on this, but the people who were cheerleading while Democrats did it, are only now crying foul, and will go back to cheerleading when Democrats are back in power, can die in a fire.

Oof. That just moved farther and farther down the left tail as it went on, and I'm not talking about the political spectrum.

Really long. He publicly announced his diagnosis in 2014. I wasn't a consistent reader, so after five years or so, when he kept turning up alive, I figured he had beaten it, but I guess that's not really a thing with multiple myeloma.

It's a shame. I had my political differences with him, but he was smart, and interesting, and I preferred a world and a blogosphere with him to one without him.

The editorial board is still going HAM on Trump. I'm still not sure whether this is in keeping with the new opinions policy, or a last hurrah:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/03/04/trump-tariffs-mexico-canada-address/

How tariffs will make America poorer

The president’s plans reveal an indifference to his voters’ pain.

The Wall Street Journal recently ran a story about a report from Moody's Analytics claiming that the top 10% of households by income now account for 50% of consumer spending. This immediately jumped out to me as incompatible with everything we know about the level of economic inequality in the US. I wasn't able to find the actual report, and they didn't respond to my questions, so I don't know exactly where they went wrong, but I wrote up an explanation of why this is almost certainly not true.

In a separate post, I addressed the argument that capitalism is unsustainable because it requires infinite growth, and infinite growth is impossible with finite resources.

No I don't. My initial comment expressed skepticism, and then I posted another comment, two hours before you posted this one, saying that it's unclear what exactly he means.

The interesting question is whether this is a reaction to Trump being more anti-market and just plain stupid than expected, or if "free markets and personal liberties" is just a euphemism for whatever Trump is doing today.

This was not on my bingo card for today:

https://x.com/JeffBezos/status/1894757287052362088

I'm not sure what to make of this. It could go well, but it could also go very badly if not done well. I wonder if Megan McArdle is on the shortlist.

I'm not asking you to defend things you think are insane. I'm asking you what things you think are defensible. Specifically, the outer bounds of what you think is defensible.

I'm pretty sure we're not in substantive agreement here. It's not that we both think that universities should be doing race-blind admissions and firms and government should be doing race-blind hiring, and we just disagree about whether that's what "DEI" is.

I'm trying to figure out what the actual disagreement is.

My main objection to DEI as actually practiced is that it's premised on the idea that black and indigenous underrepresentation (Asian and Jewish overrepresentation? MODEL MINORITY MYTH!) in cognitively demanding positions, both academic and industry, are largely attributable to things like discrimination, hostile environments, implicit bias, etc.

This premise is clearly contradicted by data on pre-market factors, chiefly high school test scores. Yes, yes, systemic racism, but that's a whole other rant about the rock-bottom standards of inferential rigor in the slummier parts of academia.

Because the problem is misdiagnosed, and the obvious solutions (like not discriminating) have failed to yield the desired results, failure to reconsider the diagnosis has led, predictably, to more and more deranged attempts to root out more and more obscure forms of "racism," like 8th-grade algebra, standardized tests, race-blind hiring, research on the genetics of intelligence, and more.

Maybe you support those approaches. If you don't, that's why I asked.

I read Delgado and Stefancic's Intro to CRT, and one thing I found really striking is that it almost systematically went through and contradicted virtually every claim that was being made by CRT defenders in the media. Not intentionally; the book was written before that, but just by explaining what CRT is, it contradicted almost every talking point.

The people defending CRT were either lying or had no idea what they were talking about (and thus were lying by implying that they knew anything).