Notes

In a recent White House press briefing, Karoline Leavitt was asked about the upcoming Trump tax cuts bill. Her response:

"This bill does not add to the deficit. In fact according the Council of Economic Advisors, this bill will save 1.6 trillion dollars."

Kai Rysdall, the fantastic host of the Marketplace economic news program calls her out and added some great context in the closing of the episode.

"It is the policy of this program as I have said repeatedly over the years that facts matter. So here are the facts. The president's press secretary is lying. I'll cite a group not inside the White House for evidence. The Penn Wharton Budget Model. The overall deficit increase in the bill as approved by various house committees is 4.9 trillion dollars over 10 years. That is offset Penn Wharton and the White House do say, by spending cuts totaling 1.6 trillion dollars. So in fact the bill does add to the deficit to the tune of 3.3 trillion dollars, again over 10 years. And just so we're all clear, no tax cut in the history of taxes or cuts to them, has ever paid for itself."

Inside Flock, employees have voiced concern about the Nova product, according to the Slack messages. One pointed to the use of hacked data like the Park Mobile Breach. “I was pretty horrified to hear we use stolen data in our system. In addition to being attained illegally, it seems like that could create really perverse incentives for more data to be leaked and stolen,” they wrote. “What if data was stolen from Flock? Should that then become standard data in everyone else’s system?”

Privacy nightmares feel like they're like a snowball rolling downhill.

But deep down, all I want for my personal website is to give back to the web. I want anyone, regardless of skill level, to inspect elements, understand the structure, and learn from readable code. And I am fully aware my code isn’t perfect. It’s old and there’s a lot of room for improvement.

For now, I am happy to carry on with this approach. My imperfect and unpolished code on my personal website isn't the full reflection on my technical abilities or knowledge of web development standards. It’s a constant draft where my handwriting is legible and where I want optimization takes a backseat. It’s where I use the little free time I have to actually write on it and prioritise the experiments I want.

Ana articulates well how I feel. Learning website development back when I first started, being able to view the source was a great crutch to see how to do things. I experiment with my site, it doesn't have to be perfect, just mine.

It’s about much more than central bank reserves. It’s a about controlling the global financial system. It’s what trade is denominated in, what foreign loans for many countries are denomined in. Why is it good for the United States? The obvious reason is that it allows us to borrow cheaper than we would otherwise, probably half a percent to a percent. And when I say cheaper, it’s everything. Mortgage loans, car loans across the board because the dollar is very liquid. There are deep markets in it. People wanna hold it and it makes it cheaper. And by the way, when you move towards a tri-polar system, let’s say the Euro and the renimbi, taking up some of the dollar’s market share, that’s gonna bring that interest rate we pay up. But there are many other things.

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But there’s something much deeper than that that I people are less aware of. Because the dollar is so central to everything. Many, many financial transactions which happen in far-flung places end up circulating through the United States before they clear. So when you see a modern spy, CIA, and when you say the US always have this ridiculously good information about everything, a part of that is our financial data. Of course the Chinese hate it, the Russians hate it. The Iranians hate it but believe me, the Europeans hate it They would like their privacy. They don’t really want Donald Trump to see as much as he can. I guess one other thing I should have said, it maybe is a corollary of being able to borrow cheaper. When there’s a crisis, the pandemic, financial crisis, the US can go really big in a way other countries are reluctant because they’re afraid their interest rates will move up and make it painful. That does happen to the United States, but it’s more gentle. So after the financial crisis, there were many complaints the US should have stimulated more and I think probably they should, but it did much more than most other countries. And in the pandemic, it was doing double what other countries were doing. And that’s part of the privilege. Now, why does that matter to an ordinary person? It matters because believe me, next time there’s a crisis, you will feel it that the government can’t do as much. You will feel the pain, just as other countries have to do.

I worked in the Writing Center in college, and whenever a student came in with an essay, we were supposed to make sure it had two things: an argument (“thesis”) and a reason to make that argument (“motive”). Everybody understood what a “thesis” is, whether or not they actually had one. But nobody understood “motive”. If I asked a student why they wrote the essay in front of them, they’d look at me funny. “Because I had to,” they’d say.

Most writing is bad because it’s missing a motive. It feels dead because it hasn’t found its reason to live. You can’t accomplish a goal without having one in the first place—writing without a motive is like declaring war on no one in particular.

This is why it’s very difficult to teach people how to write, because first you have to teach them how to care. Or, really, you have to show them how to channel their caring, because they already care a lot, but they don’t know how to turn that into words, or they don’t see why they should.

Instead, we rob students of their reason for writing by giving it to them. “Write 500 words about the causes of the Civil War, because I said so.” It’s like forcing someone to do a bunch of jumping jacks in the hopes that they’ll develop an intrinsic desire to do more jumping jacks. But that’s not what will happen. They’ll simply learn that jumping jacks are a punishment, and they’ll try to avoid them in the future.

I wonder how much better writers some might be if they had chances to write more about something they want to. I don't remember many chances in school for open writing. Being able to write well is an important skill even for non-writing professions.

Yet business is not back to usual. Even if the tariffs stay paused and prohibitive ones on China come down, trade barriers and uncertainty will remain. Those risk being to America Inc what Brexit was to uk plc—a persistent drag on growth. In a new working paper Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University and colleagues find that by 2024 Britain’s exit from the eu had cut productivity by 3%, business investment by 12-20% and gdp by 6-9%. American ceos should put away their pandemic diaries and chat to their British counterparts instead. They won’t like what they hear.

Having the economy be at the whim of someone who doesn't understand economics and has no interest in learning is a dangerous thing.

I think we exist to bring new things into existence. If you ask me, to the extent there is a meaning of life, that’s it. We exist to create. It lights us up in a way nothing else does, putting something new into our world—and in doing so, fundamentally changing it, in whatever way, however big or small.

What you create, and how you do it, is entirely up to you. That’s the beauty of it.

I love side projects as a tool to help improve my skills, learn something new, and build a tool that might help me solve a problem I'm having. Even if no fully fleshed product ultimately comes out in the end, the creating and learning is fulfilling.

If America’s government degrades the dollar’s role, whether by design or by accident, other countries may try to defend themselves by throwing up barriers to capital and falling back on new and less sophisticated financial networks. Without a true successor, the result would probably be a world of competing currency blocs, inadequate alternatives to Treasuries, barriers to trade and reduced efficiency. The past few weeks have been a taste of such a future—and they have not been pleasant.

MAGA conservatives love Viktor Orbán. But he’s left his country corrupt, stagnant, and impoverished.

We're already seeing signs of it.

What is this Hungarian model they so admire? Mostly, it has nothing to do with modern statecraft. Instead it’s a very old, very familiar blueprint for autocratic takeover, one that has been deployed by right-wing and left-wing leaders alike, from Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to Hugo Chávez. After being elected to a second term in 2010, Orbán slowly replaced civil servants with loyalists; used economic pressure and regulation to destroy the free press; robbed universities of their independence, and shut one of them down; politicized the court system; and repeatedly changed the constitution to give himself electoral advantages.

But the most chilling revelations came from an unguarded moment before the official White House stream began. In footage captured by Bukele’s team, Trump can be heard urging the construction of five more CECOT-style camps, specifically mentioning his desire to send “homegrown” — meaning US citizens — to these facilities

This is beyond scary. You now have a US President openly defying the Supreme Court and threatening to send US citizens to what essentially are concentration camps. We shouldn’t be sending anyone to El Salvador, full stop. The fact that the current administration is sending people there without any kind of due process, and is now considering sending citizens there as well should be raising every single alarm bell.

If you don’t see all of this as one of the darkest days in American history, in which the President is openly embracing disappearing people without due process in the name of “liberty,” you are a part of the problem. Fascism has risen in America, and it is being aided by a foreign dictator whom Trump admires.

Couldn’t say it better myself.

Probably the single most important lesson I’ve learned in my career, the thing that I would argue is the hallmark of “experience”, is understanding just how much work it takes to turn a working program into a viable product. It’s why developer estimates are so notoriously optimistic - and why experienced developers are so notoriously cynical.

Experience teaches so much.

One of the genuinely positive things about tools like Copilot and ChatGPT is that they empower people with minimal development experience to create their own programs. Little programs that do useful things - and that’s awesome. More power to the users.

But that’s not product development, it’s programming. They aren’t the same thing. Not even close.

Let’s be real: we would rather make our products in the USA. Doing business in China is hard: a different language, a different culture, a different legal system, and a very long and expensive plane flight every time you have to pop over to help fix what’s gone wrong. So why don't we make keyboards in the USA instead—and why don’t the vast majority of consumer electronics manufacturers, be they big or indie?

Most of our electrical components are made in China. Sometimes we’ll use or consider components not made in China—and they’re made in Japan, Taiwan, or Germany. The USA doesn’t make the components we need.

We’re a small company making niche products; we don’t have the volume to justify opening our own factory. We definitely don’t have the capital to do it. We rely on contract manufacturing, where we pay a network of factories to make products to our specifications, without us owning the machinery or hiring the workers ourselves.

I think there are many companies who would like to be able to make their goods in America, but the economics just don't work out. Anyone who thinks that re-shoring manufacturing to America is simple, easy, or cheap are deluding themselves.

I regret to tell you that there is no grand plan. There’s not even a proper conspiracy. It’s happening because Trump is an idiot and has filled his administration with fellow idiots and yes men. They’re just dumb fucking people, careless people, people who reject the notion of expertise as a liberal conspiracy, who don’t understand how the world works, and who don’t care when they break things.

I really have nothing more to add. This administration is just disaster after disaster. In this case, they're just causing so much harm unnecessarily.

Real people are going to have their lives destroyed. The economy isn’t just a series of numbers, it’s real people. People will lose their businesses, their jobs, their savings. Children will go hungry in America (and many other countries) because of this. We’re killing jobs and growth and markets in service of one delusional idiot’s resentment of foreign trade. And I hate even more the parade of sycophants who still try to dress it up as some sort of grand strategy. There’s nothing behind the curtain. The emperor has no clothes. He’s just a dumb idiot and you will keep being wrong about him until you incorporate this fact.

Perhaps most importantly, the actual announcement and implementation of these tax increases has made the incompetence and thoughtlessness of this administration even more obvious. The nonsensical “reciprocal” tariff rates published on April 2 were, as best as anyone can tell, generated by a chatbot. Officials repeatedly lied about how the rates were calculated, claiming that each economy’s “tariff and non tariff barriers” policies were quantified individually, when all they did was use a simple-minded formula based on bilateral trade balances in goods with the U.S., which imply nothing about anything. It is becoming increasingly difficult for the administration’s apologists to claim that there is some grand strategy here, or a secret plan, or a complex design that outside observers are simply failing to understand.

And most importantly:

The tariff hikes will harm Americans, they will harm people in the rest of the world, and they will likely fail to accomplish whatever they are supposed to do.

Trump's tariffs make no sense as an economic policy, but they are familiar to anyone who's spent time around organized crime (like, say, Trump)

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This isn't capitalism – it's gangsterism. It's a system that will annihilate trillions of dollars in value to put billions of dollars in the pockets of Trump and a few of his cronies – at the expense of all the other rich people.

What a nice business you have there. It would be a shame if something were to happen to it.

This wasn’t some minor technical slip-up that just needs a policy reminder. This was top officials deliberately choosing to conduct classified military planning on unauthorized systems. The fact that they accidentally included a journalist just exposed what they were doing — but the underlying violation was using Signal in the first place.

And here’s what should really keep you up at night: we only know about this because they happened to add a journalist who went public about this single chat. How many other sensitive conversations are happening on Signal or other unauthorized platforms? How many other “accidental” additions might have gone unnoticed? How many foreign intelligence services are already exploiting this administration’s casual approach to operational security?

Let’s put this in perspective: this is the same Trump team that turned “but her emails” into a movement over Hillary Clinton’s private email server. We were critical of Clinton’s server too — it was a legitimately bad security practice. But what we’re seeing here makes Clinton’s server look like amateur hour.

Clinton used a private server for mostly unclassified State Department business, with a handful of retroactively classified emails found in the mix. These guys are literally planning military strikes over Signal, complete with operational details so sensitive that journalists won’t even publish them. And they’re doing it specifically to dodge both security protocols and federal records laws.

The private server versus Signal distinction matters too. Clinton’s setup, while improper, was at least a dedicated system. These officials are just using a consumer app, making it virtually impossible to properly archive communications as required by law. They’re not just mishandling classified info — they’re deliberately choosing tools that help them hide their tracks.

What Clinton did was not good. This, on the other hand, is so much worse.

But there’s a user-centric point to be made here too: when you re-invent the look, appearance, and functionality of basic form inputs for every website you’re in charge of, that means every user is forced to encounter inconsistent form controls across the plethora of websites they visit.

This is one of the many reasons it is useful to stick with more standard controls. Between accessibility and everything else, knowing and recognizing standard controls can make it easier for users everywhere to fill out forms.

Even the most motivated person engaging with an interface is more distracted than they realize and has less cognitive bandwidth available than they’re aware of. We’re designing for humans who are juggling multiple tabs, notifications, and interruptions — even while actively trying to focus on our application.

I like to think I normally do a good job focusing on what I’m working on, but we all get distracted or pulled away by some random thought or tangent. Simplifying controls and user experience, while not always easy, can be so beneficial to us all.

A great piece by Cory Doctorow and his conclusion is damning.

Trump and his fascist movement wont't let up on their assault against institutions that support free inquiry, care, justice and openness. Rolling over for them now will not keep you safe tomorrow. But with every betrayal, these institutions alienate more and more of the public, without whose support they are ultimately doomed. Supporters will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no supporters.

This is outrageous regardless of criminality. Even if any of these people have committed some as-yet-unknown, as-yet-unproven crime, covertly whisking them away to another country's torture chambers without due process is the kind of lawless cruelty that makes me want to believe in a retributive hell. Coupled with this administration's targeting of trans people, its antisemitism, its incarceration of Mahmoud Khalil for his support of Palestine, its insistence that "diversity, equity, and inclusion" are four-letter words, and its decimation of a federal workforce that has been a pillar of the black middle class, it's easy to see what the Trump administration is trying to build: a country where everyone outside the umbrella of Christian nationalist white supremacy is not only a potential target of the state, but also has no legal recourse to protect themselves.

We all need to stick up for each other. The 2024 election results damaged my belief that it's possible to score political wins by appealing to empathy, and it's clear that the ruling class has none, but it remains important to me that we do not lose our own.