Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Ora Tor

Patrick Chovanec @prchovanec.bsky.social · 6m

My problem is not that federal money is being either spent or cut, but that it is being spent or cut unconstitutionally.

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Patrick Chovanec @prchovanec.bsky.social · 2m

It is Congress' power and responsibility to make those decisions either way (with the President, of course, exercising a veto when a bill is passed). But via DOGE, OMB, and other guises, that power is being hijacked and that responsibility abdicated.

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Gregory Pratt @royalpratt.bsky.social · 36m

Chicago federal court chief judge says she has not requested National Guard for courthouse

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Grudgie the Whale @grudgie.bsky.social · 17m

Um - that makes no sense. Those hospitals would lose even more money.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 40m

SCARBOROUGH: The Nebraska Rural Health Association says at least 6 rural hospitals would have to close bc of the big beautiful bill

FLOOD: Here's the deal: Some hospitals that are rural hospitals are going to eventually have to transition from being acute bed hospitals into being an ER model

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Owen Jones @owenjones.bsky.social · 1h

Woahhhhhh.

A poll that shows the Greens surging to 15% - and just 2 points behind the Labour party.

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Ora Tor @splitrailfence.bsky.social · 1h

Republican quandary: Newsom pulls a Michelle Obama, but Bob K Jr. did too, so what to do and how to feel? GOP needs a leader man to help them sort this out, I bet.

KTLA 5 @ktla.com · 15h

Newsom signs first-in-the-nation bill restricting ultra-processed foods in California schools

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday signed a first-in-the-nation bill that legally defines ultra-processed foods and begins phasing out the most harmful ones from public school meals. Assembly Bill 1264…

ktla.com

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Jeff Roush @jeffroushwriting.bsky.social · 12h

As Banned Books Week continues, we revisit the US Supreme Court’s ruling in Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico. While limited in precedential value, the case outlined important, enduring First Amendment principles. (Thread)
www.freedomforum.org/how-a-40-yea...

How a 40-Year-Old Supreme Court Ruling May Quash the Book Banning Wave

Some scholars and First Amendment advocates regard the 1982 decision as a win for students.

www.freedomforum.org

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Marc Elias @marcelias.bsky.social · 1h

Washington Post vs Democracy Docket.

Support independent, pro-democracy media by subscribing to Democracy Docket today. hubs.ly/Q03M8rql0

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Island Girl, Unapologetically Pro-Choice, Staunch Resister 💙 @bluepolitico.bsky.social · 1h

Katie Porter just stuck a fork in her gubernatorial ambitions.

thehill.com

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Ora Tor @splitrailfence.bsky.social · 1h

On literacy and AI: "Nobody has ever studied the harmful effects of hammers on learning and concluded that teachers must all hit their students with hammers “responsibly.”"
An important thread ⤵️

Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 2h

A striking thing about articles I’ve read claiming to “study the effects” of generative AI on student writing skills and consumption of information is that (1) they nearly always find the effects are negative and (2) most “conclusions” are still written assuming that we must use AI, for some reason.

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 2h

Imagine studying a technology whose presence in the classroom is so detrimental to the development of writing and research skills (including even the will to know the sources behind claims!) that mitigating its effects becomes a central goal of course design, and concluding with tips on adopting it.

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 2h

It is also remarkable how far what is essentially advertising copy has penetrated into ostensibly neutral, scholarly contextualizations even of critical studies — rote invocations of AI’s “power,” “potential,” and ubiquity, untethered to any specific sources or data, are just background noise now.

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 2h

It is hard not to connect these observable features of “academic” work on AI to the collapse of faculty governance in universities. Even academics in the midst of *doing* academic work *about* their academic work write as if they have no real choices about the material context in which it occurs.

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 2h

Generative AI, in both form and content, and whether looked on favourably or critically, seems to embody a collective hopelessness about the prospect of human learning and creativity, if not human knowledge altogether. It’s as if climate change had fans.

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 2h

This also indicates the essential dishonesty of saying “it’s just a tool.” A hammer is a tool. Nobody writes about the “inevitability” of hammers. Nobody has ever studied the harmful effects of hammers on learning and concluded that teachers must all hit their students with hammers “responsibly.”

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Ora Tor @splitrailfence.bsky.social · 3h

But I'm into the Hume thing. Thanks for posting a "nevermind" because I'm minding it!

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Janet Bufton 🍁🌻 @janetbufton.ca · 3h

Mean Girls waiting in a car with Adam Smith for you to hop in and try to figure out how rich or poor people were over long stretches into the past by using grain prices while workers earned near subsistence wages.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 22h

A good example of why direct inflation adjustment of this sort is more deceptive than clarifying when applied over very long stretches of time where consumption patterns are very different.

Basic foods (bread/grain) probably devours a third of Cratchet's income, but not the modern worker's.

Karly Kingsley @karlykingsley.bsky.social · 1d

👇

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 22h

One way to think about the comparison is in a 'grain wage' - how wages translate to calories and what that means for standard of living.

Grain prices in Britain in 1843 (when A Christmas Carol was published) were around c. 6 shillings per bushel.

www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gcla...

www.econ.ucdavis.edu

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 22h

Bob Cratchet's household - an adult male, an adult female, four children of varying ages - probably needs on the order of 11,000 calories per day, which is about 3.3kg of wheat; 23kg per week, 85% of a bushel.

So a third of Crachet's 15 shillings go to food at the cheapest option for food.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 22h

Let us compare a worker making just $8 an hour, working 40 hours a week. They make $320 a week, so we might compare how many calories a third of that value can buy to see if these two are similarly destitute.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 22h

Wheat-per-bushel prices wholesale vary, but over the last 20 years, between a $3-10 per bushel range, so a third of that minimum wage worker's paycheck ($106) is going to buy ~15 bushels a week (405kg, 1.35 million calories, 17 times what Cratchet is buying).

www.macrotrends.net/2534/wheat-p...

Wheat Prices (1959-2025)

Interactive chart of historical daily wheat prices back to 1975. The price shown is in U.S. Dollars per bushel.

www.macrotrends.net

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 22h

(Worth noting: wheat prices in the USA are generally expressed as cents-to-bushel on charts, not dollars, because for a commodity traded in bulk, a movement of a few cents matters a lot. So when you see that the wheat price today is 507, that's not $507, that's $5.07 per bushel.)

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 22h

The pressures of poverty on these two households are very different. Cratchet has to be sincerely worried about getting enough raw nutrition for his children (implied by Tiny Tim, probably suffering rickets); the minimum wage household is poor, but not the same extreme kind of poor.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 22h

And of course that's before we consider any of the impacts of income transfers, SNAP benefits and such for the minimum wage family.

By contrast, Cratchet's government in 1843 is not only not helping him feed his family, through the Corn Laws, they are actively *raising* the price of grain.

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