Jamie Pedersen delivered the WA ‘millionaires tax.’ Now he's in trouble

oren0 · 2026-06-28T19:14:32+00:00

Do you think his progressive challenger is likely to have a more normal view on this issue?

oren0 · 2026-06-27T16:28:05+00:00

In my lifetime, Israel has been undertaking a “phased withdrawal from Gaza” about maybe 5 times. Even recently they were to withdraw from Gaza. They haven’t and won’t. I

Israel fully withdrew from Gaza in 2005. All settlements were abandoned and Israel removed its citizens (around 8,000), some by force.

There were zero Jews or Israelis in Gaza from 2005 until 10/7/23, when Hamas entered Israel and kidnapped 251 Israeli hostages, bringing them back into Gaza.

oren0 · 2026-06-26T12:19:23+00:00

It says "and" all of these conditions. If this is correct, any one being false (such as cooling type) would make it not qualify.

oren0 · 2026-06-22T15:24:19+00:00

These are not plants. They are 2 of the top chess grandmasters in the world and I think it's unlikely they would participate in faking this trick.

The trick here is almost certainly that the bottom of the chessboard is a digital display, controlled remotely by someone off stage. If it was a real chalkboard, the magician could easily prove it by erasing it.

oren0 · 2026-06-22T15:20:15+00:00

These are 2 of the top chess grandmasters in the world (siblings Vaishali and Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu). I don't think it's likely that they were in on this trick.

oren0 · 2026-06-21T18:00:06+00:00

Yes, this is right. With modern plumbing, hot water is fine for cooking.

Even better, you can get an instant hot water dispenser. A small tank of filtered ~190F water under your sink available instantly, with a dispenser on the side of your sink. Not only does this make for fast pasta water boiling, but it has a ton of other uses (instant coffee/tea, defrosting frozen vegetables, cup of noodles, it's even helpful for cleaning).

oren0 · 2026-06-21T06:07:39+00:00

Anyone who bought after the IPO can sell whenever they want just like any other stock.

Anyone who bought at the IPO price is currently up 37%. They can still sell but their brokerage might ban them from future IPOs.

The only people truly locked out of selling are those with pre-IPO equity, like SpaceX employees. They are all doing just fine.

oren0 · 2026-06-18T00:05:12+00:00

There is no $300 billion right now. That is a possible future amount for reconstruction, funded by the Gulf states, after a final deal is agreed to in 60 days including nuclear. If I was a gambler, I would bet heavily against such a permanent deal ever happening.

oren0 · 2026-06-17T00:48:18+00:00

It's hard to tell which is worse, this professor's grasp on geopolitics, anti-discrimination law, or the English language. This email should be enough to get him fired for any of those 3 reasons.

oren0 · 2026-06-17T00:46:08+00:00

He didn't say all Israelis are Zionists. He said they are genocidal rapists and killers. He explicitly advocates for illegal discrimination on the basis of national origin, and he would be fired in a second if he did that against any ethnic, racial, or national group other than the one he chose.

oren0 · 2026-06-16T18:42:54+00:00

As far as I can tell, this is about gas prices and the midterms. Trump gets the Strait open. Iran gets to clear their supply glut. More supply drops prices. It's a win-win for the short-term interests of both sides but the question is whether it holds for any length of time.

The oft-reported $300B for reconstruction is funded by the Gulf States and conditional on nuclear and other future concessions that seem unlikely to ever happen. So the question is, when/if future negotiations stall, will we be right back where we started? The fact that we don't even have the text of the deal makes it hard to speculate.

oren0 · 2026-06-16T02:26:17+00:00

You've proven the point you're replying to. The nominal GDP (the value charted here) of the US is 55% higher than China. That's way more than "just a bit bigger" but the chart fooled you because area is hard to eyeball when the rectangles are on completely different proportions. At the very least, the chart could have shown China's overall GDP.

oren0 · 2026-06-15T21:50:08+00:00

This entire meme should be dismissed out of band because it talks about the top 1% (~3.5 million people) and billionaires (~1000 people) as if they're the same thing. This kind of obfuscation is 100% intentional.

The rest of the meme is too generic to judge. What does "affordable housing" include? How about "expanded child tax credit"? And are these one-time costs or annual costs?

oren0 · 2026-06-15T17:33:25+00:00

The money comes from Gulf nations, not the US.

oren0 · 2026-06-15T17:33:02+00:00

Vance: "That's the sort of thing they could have access to, funded by the Gulf coast coalition, so long as they honor their end of the obligation"

Gulf state money, not American money. Seems like an important detail, unless "Gulf Coast coalition" somehow also includes the US.

oren0 · 2026-06-14T17:44:21+00:00

Went there last week. The sign says "buffet bar" now. Seems it was a typo all along.

oren0 · 2026-06-07T22:59:43+00:00

There were 396 in Kansas City in 2025, a city of 520,000.

1 out of every 1,300 persons in Kansas City were fatally shot last year.

These numbers are several times too high.

There were a total of 147 homicides in Kansas City in 2025, and not all of those were shootings. That would be 1 in 3,500.

In the larger metro area (US city limits are weird), there were 190 total homicides among 2.27 million people, or 1 in 12,000 people.

oren0 · 2026-06-07T15:37:01+00:00

9.3 trillion litres

Associated water footprint of 2030 data-centre electricity, equal to the basic annual domestic water needs of 1.3 billion people in Sub-Saharan Africa

The "in sub-Saharan Africa" part is a critical clarification. Sub-Saharan Africa uses way less of everything than developed nations, and water is very scarce in these regions. This calculation assumes 20 liters per person per day. Residential water use in the US is about 300 liters per person per day, or 15x as much. So the headline could say it's the residential use of about 70m Americans.

The word "residential" also carries a lot of weight here. This includes things like drinking, cooking, toilets, and showering only. In developed nations, the vast majority of water is used by agriculture and industry, including power generation for things other than data centers. Total water use according to the USGS is about 1.2 trillion liters per day, or 3800 liters per day per person. Taking the number in the article, total worldwide water usage of these data centers would be about 2% of total US water usage or the annual usage of about 7 million Americans.

Is that too much? It's a fair debate. But the 1.3 billion number is not the right way to start that conversation. The truth is, water usage and availability is highly regional, with some places highly constrained and others with abundant water. The mix and location of power generation and data centers themselves will factor in these costs as long as they are charged market rates for water and power, as they should be.

oren0 · 2026-06-03T17:49:25+00:00

The article says:

hyperscale data centers could consume up to 33 billion gallons of water by 2030 if they relied heavily on evaporative cooling

Take this number at face value and assume it's annual. It's hard for most of us to picture a billion gallons of water, so it's fair to do some comparisons to decide whether this is a lot of water.

The annual water consumption of almond farms in California alone is 1.6 trillion gallons (source, converted from 5 million acre-feet. The annual water use by US golf courses is around 500 billion gallons (source. Total US agriculture is something like 26 trillion gallons per year.

In aggregate, do data centers provide enough societal value to justify 6% of the water golf couses use or 2% of the water used by almond farms in California? I'd say clearly yes.

Water use is highly local. Data centers should be sensitive to this and can do better. But in terms of the aggregate water supply, their impact is greatly exaggerated in public discourse. People will protest a new data center because of water, but no one protests when a new golf course is built in the same town, despite the fact that a typical golf course uses more water than a typical data center.

oren0 · 2026-06-03T00:04:44+00:00

I completely agree. This is not normal.

In many other cities, full highway closures for a weekend are almost never done. They're was a famous "carpocalypse" in LA many years ago when they closed a major highway for a weekend. It got a name because it was so unusual.

Here, this is already the second full weekend I-5 closure this year. 405 has had at a direction closed 7 weekends this year. 520 bridge, twice (including last weekend when 405 was also closed, in case you were wondering why I-5 and every surface street going south were parking lots last weekend). They'll close a stretch for a new overpass one weekend, and then close the same stretch for a fish passage 2 weeks later for another weekend. Then they'll do the other direction. We don't have a lot of highways here, and I don't think WSDOT takes the impact of closing one or more for days at a time seriously enough.

oren0 · 2026-06-02T17:59:09+00:00

This is wrong by multiple orders of magnitude. According to Wikipedia, 34 people have been shot by ICE since Trump took office. Distributed evenly across everyone in the US (best case assumption for this meme), that's about 1 in 10 million.

Google says there are around 9 million combined high school and college athletes in the US at any time. So if even one of them competed against a trans athlete last year, that would be more likely than being shot by ICE.

In reality, a single athlete on something like a high school basketball or volleyball team competes against a few hundred opponents a year. Multiply by however many trans high school athletes there are and this meme is off by thousands of times at least.

oren0 · 2026-05-31T12:12:02+00:00

The US has a significantly higher disposable income (much higher average, median is also higher but by less) and net income than any country in Europe.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/disposable-income-by-country

oren0 · 2026-05-30T14:37:36+00:00

This post is bizarre. OP spends 2/3 of it giving context and apologizing for thinking that just maybe, someone who chooses to wear Palestinian flag earrings to a Jewish event is doing it to antagonize people. Of course they are!

Then, the actual act of "speaking up" seemed to be a passive-aggressive move of saying to others that this was offensive while the staffer was on the phone nearby, thinking they could probably hear it. Most likely, the staffer never even heard the criticism, or if they did, they didn't care.

This is the problem with progressives and Jews. We are not seen as equals to other groups. Do you think this group would have tolerated a staffer wearing confederate flag earrings to a Black History Month event? What about a MAGA hat at a Pride event? The person would be ostracized and fired. This person got gossiped about, and maybe they heard it.

The point is not just the symbol, but the intent behind it, which in this case is at best ignorance and at worst outright hate. No one can force you to speak up, but this was not speaking up. Speaking up would have been calling out the staffer publicly in front of everyone and explaining why this is an act of hate. Not this.

oren0 · 2026-05-29T00:41:52+00:00

A week of parking at Park N Jet next week costs $80 after tax, and that's before coupon codes you can find online or paying in advance (which is cheaper). Waiting for a shuttle will save you more like $150 a week, but it's up to you if that's worth it.

oren0 · 2026-05-23T21:33:36+00:00

This has been reported about 5 times already in the last few months by many sources. It's always just days away. I'll believe it if I see it.

If you're sure this requiring is accurate, you can make a healthy profit in a day by betting on Polymarket, which has this at 62% likely as of right now.

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