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citereader.bsky.social
indiscriminate reader
@citereader.bsky.social
48 followers 110 following 22 posts
The only thing I like more than citations are detailed footnotes.

I like sharing what I'm reading.
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citereader.bsky.social
From "Last of the Great Plowup" in Egan, Timothy. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. Mariner Books, 2006.

💙📚
#monetaryPolicy
#tariffs
#history
quote about tarriffs from the book cited. "And the rules put in place on the way down, the tariffs and tighter money, only made the problem worse. The consumer stopped consuming all but basics. The depression was now global."
April 21, 2025 at 12:05 AM
citereader.bsky.social
from chapter 12 in Pargin, Jason. I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom. St. Martin's Press, 2024.

#📚💙
#Fiction
#Billionaires
#Project2025
#Entitlement
A highlighted quote from the cited novel: "In sci-fi and fantasy stoires, rebellions are usually the oppressed, impoverished underclasses rising up against their wealthy and powerful oppressors. In the real world, it's often those who are the most comfortable in the system who want to bring it down."
March 13, 2025 at 4:55 PM
citereader.bsky.social
from Harari, Yuval N. Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI. First U.S. edition, Random House, 2024. Chapter 5

#📚💙
#strongman #dictator
#courts #media #elections #government
highlighted quote from cited text: The most common method strongmen use to undermine democracy is to attack its self-correcting mechanisms one by one, often beginning with the courts and the media. The typical strongman either deprives the courts of their powers or packs them with his loyalists and seeks to close all independent media outlets while building his own omnipresent propaganda machine. Once the courts are no longer able to check the government's power by legal means, and once the media obediently parrots the government line, all other institutions or person who dare oppose the government can be smeared and persecuted as traitors, criminals, or foreign agents. Academic institutions municipalities, NGOs and private businesses are either dismantled or brought under government control. At that stage, the government can also rig the elections at will for example by jailing popular opposition leaders, preventing opposition parties from participating in the elections, gerrymandering election districts, or disenfranchising voters. Appeals against these antidemocratic measures are dismissed by the government's handpicked judges.
March 6, 2025 at 4:33 PM
citereader.bsky.social
from Harari, Yuval N. Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI. First U.S. edition, Random House, 2024. Chapter 2

#📚💙
#storytelling
#branding
#corruption
screenshot highlights quote from cited book "A corrupt billionaire can be branded as the champion of the poor; a bungling imbecile can be branded as an infallible genius; and a guru who sexually abuses his followers can be branded as a chaste saint. People think they connect to the person, but in fact the connect to the story told about the person, and there is often a huge gulf between the two."
March 5, 2025 at 6:52 PM
citereader.bsky.social
from Winfree, Paul. "Federal Reserve". Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, p. 733

#Project2025 #DOGE
#Unemployment #Inflation
#FederalReserve #DualMandate #PriceStability #MaximumEmployment
Several highlighted pull quotes within page 733 of cited book. Topic is the dual mandate of the Fed to consider full employment and price stability in addition the original purpose of "furnishing an elastic currency". Project 2025 recommends eliminating the dual mandate, so that the Fed is no longer concerned with maximum employment rate or price stability.
February 16, 2025 at 6:53 PM
citereader.bsky.social
from Harari, Yuval N. Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI. First U.S. edition, Random House, 2024. Prologue.

#booksky #ignorance
#networks #Orwell #history
one of three screenshots from prologue of cited book. "But for tens of thousands of years, Sapiens built and maintained large networks by inventing and spreading fictions, fantasies, and mass delusions-- about gods, about enchanted broomsticks, about AI, and about a great many other things. While each individual human is typically interested in knowning the truth about themselves and the world, large networks bind members and create order by relying on fictions and fantasies. That's how we got, for... 2 of 3:"..example, to Nazism and Stalinism. These were exceptionally powerful networks, held together by exceptionally deluded ideas. As George Orwell famously put it, ignorance is strength." 3 of 3: "We should not assume that delusional networks are doomed to failure. If we want to prevent their triumph, we will have to do the hard work ourselves."
February 13, 2025 at 6:48 PM
citereader.bsky.social
ibid, p. 73

#RIF
#FedWorkforce
#Chaos
Quote text: Reductions-in-Force. Reducing the number of federal employees seems an obvious way to reduce the overall expense of the civil service, and many prior Administrations have attempted to do just this. Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama began their terms, as did Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, by mandating a freeze on the hiring of new federal employees, but these efforts did not lead to permanent and substantive reductions in the number of nondefense federal employees. First, it is a challenge even to know which workers to cut. As mentioned, there are 2 million federal employees, but since budgets have exploded, so has the total number of personnel with nearly 10 times more federal contractors than federal employees. Contractors are less expensive because they are not entitled to high government pensions or benefits and are easier to fire and discipline. In addition, millions of state government employees work under federal grants, in effect administering federal programs; these cannot be cut directly. Cutting federal employment can be helpful and can provide a simple story to average citizens, but cutting functions, levels, funds, and grants is much more important than setting simple employment size. Simply reducing numbers can actually increase costs.
January 31, 2025 at 11:35 PM
citereader.bsky.social
from Devine, Donald, Dennis Dean Kirk, and Paul Dans "Central Personnel Agencies: Managing the Bureaucracy." Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project, 2023, p. 71.

#Project2025
#ImReallyGoingToReadThis
#SpoilsSystemPart2
highlighted text from cited document: "The civil services was devised to replace the amateurism and presumed corruption of the old spoils system, wherein government jobs rewarded loyal partisans who might or might not have professional backgrounds."
January 31, 2025 at 11:19 PM
citereader.bsky.social
from Vought, Russ. "Executive Office of the President of the United States." Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project, 2023, p. 62.

✔️
#Project2025
#ImReallyGoingToReadThis
Pull quote text in a screenshot: "The President should immediately revoke Executive Order 1402041 and every policy, including subregulatory guidance documents, produced on behalf of or related to the establishment or promotion of the Gender Policy Council and its subsidiary issues." The president did this on January 20, 2025.
January 24, 2025 at 5:02 AM
citereader.bsky.social
text from "Foreword." Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, pp. 14-15

📚💙
#TerribleAnalogy
#ImReallyGoingToReadThis
highlighted text from book: "Nighttime satellite images of the Korean peninsula famously show the free-market South lit up, with homes, businesses, and cities electrified from coast to coast. By contrast, Communist North Korea is almost completely dark, except for the small dot of the capital city, Pyongyang, where a psychotic dictator and his cronies live. The same phenomenon is on display in the infuriating fact that four of the six richest counties in the United States are suburbs of Washington, D.C. -- a city infamous for its lack of native productive industries." NASA Earth Observatory imagery from 2016 with hand-written annotations highlighting brightly lit up East Coast with DC metro barely notable among the brightly lit urban areas of the US and also highlighting the relative darkness of North Korea Map of income by county in the US (Census 2018-2022 data) highlighting that relatively wealthy counties are more widely distributed across the US than insinuated by the quoted author. Screenshot from From Census 2021 CBP data table showing top NAICS sectors for DC Metro MSA. The area's largest private industry sector is Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services. Jobs in this sector include things like scientific research, engineering, and IT (among others). In the modern knowledge economy, this is the sector where there are jobs focused on producing intellectual property and innovative materials, technology, and processes that eventually go to market in manufactured products (like new pharma, computer chip technology, construction materials, etc.).
January 24, 2025 at 4:19 AM
citereader.bsky.social
from Navalny, Alexei. Patriot: A Memoir. Alfred A. Knopf, 2024. Chapter 16.

💙📚
#TikTok
#Twitter
#SocialMediaNostalgia #theMoreThingsChange
#shame #dumplings
excerpt from Navalny memoir: "And then into my life came TikTok. Skimming through it, I sometimes feel ashamed for the whole of humanity. But it works! That is where loads of viewers get their news about politics. So now there are times when I dance and event open my mouth (pretending to sing) to music. True, I often grumble like an old granddad about the good old days, when people read books, but nevertheless I make videos on TikTok." followed by an anecdote about posting pictures of what you eat to Twitter.
January 17, 2025 at 11:23 PM
citereader.bsky.social
from Navalny, Alexei. Patriot: A Memoir. Alfred A. Knopf, 2024. Chapter 16.
#Books #Instagram #politics #change #ERA #bravery
💙📚
highlighted quote including "But when I started to post on Instagram, it became clear that everyone is interested in politics and the women were as prepared as the men to do something. In fact, women prove to be much tougher than men: they don't scare as easily; they're more persistent and often more radical"
January 17, 2025 at 11:19 PM
citereader.bsky.social
from Navalny, Alexei. Patriot: A Memoir. Alfred A. Knopf, 2024. Chapter 10.
#Books
#photons #electrons #physics
#bravery #progress
💙📚
screenshot of digital book cited here. describing 1927 Solvay Conference on Physics as "brave nerds"
January 15, 2025 at 3:38 AM
citereader.bsky.social
from Navalny, Alexei. Patriot: A Memoir. Alfred A. Knopf, 2024. Chapter 7.
#Books
#nostalgia
#history
💙📚
a highlighted page segment from this book describing a problem of nostalgic feelings overwriting the memory of hardship.
January 8, 2025 at 3:44 PM
citereader.bsky.social
from Navalny, Alexei. Patriot: A Memoir. Alfred A. Knopf, 2024. Chapter 7.
#Books
💙📚
highlighted screenshot from this book describing an anecdote regarding differences between Russia and America.
January 8, 2025 at 1:02 AM