Dave Vasilevsky
SFF reader, programmer, cyclist. He/him
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- British (+0.7%) and Japanese (-0.2%) Q1 GDP data came in today, which means another update to my G7 GDP growth chart Here's each country's cumulative increase in real GDP, since just before the pandemic: 🇺🇸 +12.9% 🇨🇦 +8.7% (thru Q4) 🇮🇹 +5.9% 🇬🇧 +4.1% 🇫🇷 +3.7% 🇯🇵 +0.6% 🇩🇪 +0.0%
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- Although relatively little ground combat has been going on since the ceasefire ended, the IDF has been busy demolishing the emptied city of Rafah building by building. “We will replicate the model implemented in Rafah in other areas of the Strip as well,” the IDF said this week.
- we looked at how well the congestion tax worked in NYC and said “trying to improve society is illegal now actually”
- The new Ontario budget promises to take away Toronto’s ability to ever bring back the vehicle registration tax. Wasn’t likely to happen anyway, but still another loss for municipal autonomy. budget.ontario.ca/2025/pdf/202... (PDF)
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- I deleted this bc there are discrepancies in reports. Original report from Denver7 says pilots flying into Denver were unable to speak with air traffic controllers for up to six minutes. Denver Post said 6 mins, then changed to 90 secs. CBS says 90 secs & that flights never lost full contact.
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- this is a letter to the editor from a high school track runner who came in second to a trans girl in a race. her state house rep in maine started talking about it. so she wrote this: www.pressherald.com/2025/05/14/r...
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- I don't know what this means, but I'm the one who wrote a fully updated, 624-page hurricane response plan at FEMA that took over 2 years of work and careful coordination among state and federal agencies. He could start by studying that.
- Breaking WSJ: The newly appointed head of FEMA acknowledged in private meetings that with two weeks to go until hurricane season, the agency doesn't yet have a fully formed disaster-response plan. www.wsj.com/politics/pol...
- 🧵 Thread. This story about the Trump admin leaning on African countries to give business to Musk’s Starlink should be a huge scandal, But because there are huge scandals every 5 seconds it’s barely a blip. www.propublica.org/article/trum...
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- The reality of our government is that it's a sprawling and occasionally inefficient system because you can't deliver services to 330 million people without having to deal with edge cases, and to someone who doesn't know the edge cases, that looks like waste or fraud www.nextgov.com/digital-gove...
- It’s not just Trump’s $400 million plane. I wrote about Qatair Force One and the extensive efforts of Qatar to buy influence in America and beyond, from conservative media to members of government. It's wild stuff. Gift link (but with no expectations in return!):
- This is just not true. The majority view among researchers at this point is that work requirements do not work. There is a reason they do not cite a single study here.
- political journalists obsess over the public’s lack of trust in our profession but strangely see that as downstream of things like “we didn’t talk enough about how biden was old” and not “many of us appear to be indifferent to a nihilistic attack on the constitution”
- whenever i travel to speak to audiences — in places as different as green bay, wisconsin and durham, north carolina — i get more questions about why the media won’t call a spade a spade with trump, than i do about biden being old
- and honestly, the obsession over “we should have said more about biden being old” starts to grate when the currently serving president is very obviously impaired by age and cognitive decline, to crickets from the press
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- Before Oct 2023, there were 28,332 buildings in Rafah, housing 200,000 people. Today, only 4% of Rafah's buildings stand undamaged. 73% were demolished entirely, mainly by military bulldozers. www.972mag.com/israel-gaza-...
- The Nintendo Switch version of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door changes Mario's sleep timers, which inadvertently buffs Luigi's ability to bore people to sleep. Before, listening to him was 2.6 times more boring than doing nothing; in the remake, it is 6.46 times more boring.
- Do you think they have solved the problem (which appears to completely evade Amazon) of generating an AI that can spot the breaks between acts that were written into the original TV show, rather than just slamming down a commercial break in the middle of a sentence of dialogue?
- Even though Solicitor General Sauer has been raked over the coals, it’s hard to see who the fifth vote is to deny the government’s applications here. I didn’t hear *any* real skepticism from the Chief Justice or Justice Kavanaugh, and we already know where Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch stand. Sigh.
- To be clear, it’s not that there are five votes to *uphold* Trump’s patently unlawful and unconstitutional limits on birthright citizenship; it’s that there seem to be five votes to hold that district courts can grant relief only to plaintiffs—so the policy would go into effect against all others.
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- I just created a quick map depicting which portions of the United States are now (as of today) or will imminently be (by early June) without 24/7 local National Weather Service coverage (per Washington Post reporting). #CAwx #CAfire #CAwater #ORwx #AKwx #WYwx #KSwx
- The Cuomo thing seems like Bad Boys 4, Jurassic World Rebirth, Mission Impossible The Final Reckoning. Stale but known IP doesn’t have to be good to make a few hundred million dollars, and the box office gross doesn’t necessarily signify anything other than the audience’s familiarity with the IP.
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- I kept seeing this screenshot today and assumed it was a joke, given the fact that X seemed to be successfully deleting Grok's "white genocide" answers now. But it's real. Incredible.
- What this student is saying is so bog-standard that most of the US’s European allies use similar language at the UN pretty regularly. What’s extraordinary is the willingness of American institutions to punish students for this kind of speech, and therefore the bravery required to say it
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- Starmer's language was deplorable. It was grotesquely offensive, accusing people who have brought their gifts to this country of doing "incalculable" "damage"; & politically foolish, in endorsing Farage's claims of an establishment conspiracy. But bad analogies with Powell miss the key problem. 🧵
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View full threadPowell could not have said, like Starmer, that "Migration is part of Britain’s national story and an essential element of a strong economy". Nor could he "celebrate" "a diverse nation". Starmer's "island of strangers" claim was about a lack of social cohesion & shared obligation, not subordination.
- Starmer's remarks were deplorable, not because they echoed Powell (they didn't) but because they endorsed the core claims of *modern* populism: - that a "squalid" establishment conspired against the people; and - that immigration is to blame for Britain's poor economy, housing & public services.
- If you're going to attack immigration levels in 2022-3, you need to say something about provision for Ukraine & Hong Kong (which Labour backed). Blaming a "one-nation experiment in open borders" is not levelling with voters or restoring trust. It's telling the kind of lie on which populism thrives
- If Britain is an "island of strangers", that's not because of people who've raised families here, built new lives & contributed to our schools, industries & public services. It's because of changing technologies & patterns of work, social atomisation, declining social provision & rampant inequality
