atomenthusiast.bsky.social
@atomenthusiast.bsky.social
“The Krugmans of the world”

(Nobel Prize winners who were criticizing the overwhelming bipartisan consensus to slash medicare and institute austerity, and explained the zero lower bound to casual audiences during the Obama era when Will was a child)
A Republican is president so all the Krugmans of the world immediately flip from “the vibecession is mystifying” to “the vibecession simply captures deeper unfairness, that happens to perfectly align with trendy Dem messaging.”
November 30, 2025 at 9:05 PM
Reposted
i once made an instagram post about this with a very helpful infographic
November 30, 2025 at 2:46 AM
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"One thing I should make clear, though, is that I’m not a jerk. I don’t have to have my way. I’ll do this in a Kia Forte too."
I Like to Almost Kill People by Driving Past Them at 125 mph in My Modified Honda Accord
Everyone’s got their thing. For some, it’s baking. Others, gardening. Me? I like to take a modified Honda Accord, drive over 100 mph, and swerve be...
buff.ly
November 22, 2025 at 3:30 PM
This is outrageously good
November 23, 2025 at 12:09 AM
Call me crazy but I don’t think one of the defining problems of our society is an unwillingness to tell socialists they’re bad
Everyone’s fave funny, mean socialist accounts are basically responsible for getting us to this place and the reason we can’t fix it is that no one wants to be the killjoy who says “what if the funny, mean socialists are Bad, Actually”
November 21, 2025 at 6:25 PM
This number is in large part a rolling time integral of mortgage rate at sale /current income. If home prices have taken a gigantic jump the last five years, what does that imply will happen to this number, and should you look at its value as an indicator of recent trends?
In actual fact the share of income Americans spend on housing appears to be fairly stable over the medium term, a fact it is inconvenient to acknowledge on Bluesky because everyone will yell at you, but isn’t any less true because of that. Which gets us back to the whole “what’s the crisis” thing
Americans are exorbitantly wealthy & consume more than anybody else in the history of the world

and

an insane portion of that wealth is sucked up by housing costs, the recent explosion of which is absolutely due to longstanding policy issues but still constitutes an acute crisis worth addressing
November 20, 2025 at 11:44 PM
Would NJ Democrats really want to hurt old friend Jeff Van Drew, the former Democrat they threw their weight behind in a primary against a public school teacher?
NJ Senate President Nick Scutari claims Dems are "not in a position" to pass a constitutional amendment that would allow them to redraw the state's congressional map.

But Dems have supermajorities in both chambers & *gained* seats this month. www.politico.com/newsletters/...
November 20, 2025 at 5:08 PM
How could this possibly happen when the algorithms haven’t changed?
November 20, 2025 at 4:53 PM
Hey man, out of curiosity did you ever bring up your concerns about the education system in any of the group chats you had with the VCs who are systematically destroying it?
The UCSD math situation is typical of a frequent failure mode — tons of self-identified progressives will agree that it’s bad.

But no institutions in the progressive ecosystem are equipped to identify this kind of problem in its infancy and stop it because you’d be a bad coalition player.
November 19, 2025 at 11:23 PM
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Would hate to have to work with Wa-Luigi Coates on a group project
Imagine looking around America in 2025 and thinking, "What we need less of is morality."
November 19, 2025 at 4:44 AM
It’s fascinating to me that you you have spent years insisting any bad opinions of the economy or Biden are hallucinations derived from an online simulacrum, but that American suburbs are simply revealed preference.
You can be a YIMBY but it isn’t enough. You must also deny that the suburbs exist for any reason but the failure to enact Full YIMBYism
November 19, 2025 at 4:07 AM
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Will they made it literally illegal to build non sprawly neighborhoods and tore a bunch of them down to build freeways
November 19, 2025 at 1:40 AM
A few years ago some urbanism folks suggested it would be nice for everyone to be able to walk to the grocery store in 15 minutes, and a cabal of billionaires has spent every minute since paying to blast out the idea that this is a globalist plot to enslave people in an Escape From New York scenario
Why would nefarious forces conspire to force you into suburbs against your will? Like, does that actually make sense
Then why does your argument seem to be "well there sure are a lot of suburbs" what evidence is there that people would naturally build American style suburban development if it wasn't being forced on them?
November 19, 2025 at 1:38 AM
Wow that’s crazy, are there any other reasons urban multifamily living might have different levels of appeal in NYC and Phoenix?
I think this is plausible, but urban multifamily living isn't actually that expensive in a lot of the country. There's definitely a shortage in a few places, which gets us back to the core dispute, which is that the experiences of NYC/LA/SF/Boston are not very representative.
American's preferences are highly heterogenous and while there's evidence that a large majority might prefer suburban living, revealed preferences show that safe, high-amenity urban living is extremely undersupplied compared to demand.
November 19, 2025 at 1:27 AM
Chris: Will you actually make any sort of prediction we can actually grade your centrist political philosophy against?

Matt: (sound of a car speeding away)
November 19, 2025 at 1:24 AM
Upzoning suburbs and letting dense metro areas expand has been something I’ve constantly heard from YIMBYs for a decade. What the fuck are you talking about man?
YIMBYs often absolutely cannot admit this because it suggests that you can only achieve so much by upzoning the city. In fact some of the biggest gains from upzoning, I’d argue, are to be found in UPZONING THE SUBURBS, allowing low-density burbs to become moderate-density burbs.
The level of denial in the replies is amazing. Lots of people like living in the suburbs. That’s just all there is to it.
November 18, 2025 at 10:32 PM
The major Northeast and West Coast metro areas account for approximately 1 in 5 Americans. Do 20% of voters matter. Impossible to say.
“If you cherry-pick places where housing prices are high, housing prices are high”

This is transparently bad data practice. Yes, there are places where housing is more expensive than average. There are also places more affordable than average. About half, in fact. So what?
Will, my guy, you *gotta* look at city areas as opposed to the country as a whole, we’re a nation of urban islands surrounded by oceans of real estate, and the cities are where basically all economic value is generated.
November 18, 2025 at 10:16 PM
What does it imply is happening if housing prices heavily outpaced income growth, but the share of income spent on housing stays the same? And as a follow up, why might this be upsetting to people?
November 18, 2025 at 8:07 PM
I have no problem synthesizing this: lots of people are using chatgpt and they’re all morons.
Whenever I point out the latter reality, with supporting facts (users have made ChatGPT a top 10 website in the U.S. solely by typing in the URL, their Sora app is consistently at the top of the App Store), I *consistently* get responses where people say one or two things:
November 18, 2025 at 5:53 PM
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Someone should write a Moynihan report on our elite class, explaining that their problems are not socioeconomic but the product of a pathological ghetto culture.
November 18, 2025 at 12:20 PM
A national media which spent my entire life obsessing over conservative cultural values, apparently disinterested in the revelation that themselves and elite society range in decorum approximately from alley hooker to guy handing out candy in windowless van.
November 18, 2025 at 4:35 AM
What should be infuriating to you is that you got tricked into thinking anyone in Congress authentically cared about disinformation, despite plenty of people explaining to you why they were actually passing this law, including Democrats outright admitting it in public forums.
What’s infuriating about the TikTok ban is how lawmakers have essentially nullified the law they themselves wrote. They have quietly agreed to say nothing while Trump has abused and ignored the ban, with the goal of delivering one of the world’s most important media platforms to his friends.
so how's that tiktok ban coming along......... www.theverge.com/policy/82216...
November 17, 2025 at 7:08 PM
The average sale price of a home went up by over 100,000 dollars in 24 months.
November 17, 2025 at 6:21 PM
The 15 or so largest metro areas account for something like 1/3 of the US population, so if the cost of housing in major metros is pricing people out of major job centers, it actually it is a pretty big, national problem.
What, precisely, is the crisis? When will it be resolved? People have been talking about housing crises since the 80s. I agree that there’s a long-run upward drift in housing costs; I agree some high-cost metros have real issues. But what are we seeing right now that’s a nationwide crisis?
Stancil being a housing crisis denier is the darnedest thing
November 17, 2025 at 4:45 PM
I’m not an expert or anything and I can only speak for myself, but this does call into question, just a tiny bit, whether any of these people actually believe in anything.
Raskin: We are a big tent. We must be a huge, vast tent. I say this is a party that’s got room for Marjorie Taylor Greene if she wants to come over.
November 17, 2025 at 1:09 PM