Accidentally a week where I ended up writing a lot about the Charter of Rights and Freedoms at TVO. First, a piece about how municipalities trying to police speech rights really is bad and we should all say so, whether the case is righteous (women seeking equal protection under the law) or odious (musicians whose politics I don’t share.) Little did I know that Justice Paul Schabas would also be releasing his decision in CycleToronto v. Ontario this week, where he found that the province’s legislation to remove Toronto’s bike lanes at the Premier’s whim fail to pass a Section 1 test under the Charter. As I wrote:
That harm to Toronto’s cyclists is the Charter question here. Schabas accepted that the province has an interest in easing congestion in Ontario’s largest city, because of course it does. The justice also accepted that the government is allowed to cause people harm, because of course it is. The government needs the kinds of powers that can harm people, whether we’re talking about police, prisons, military, or something mundane like road design. The only thing the Charter requires is that the government’s stated means bear a reasonable connection to the end — the government needed to demonstrate that the real chance of harm to cyclists was going to result in improved traffic flow. It failed to do so.
In other words: there is no constitutional ratchet, because the government can always remove benefits, repeal policies, and rip out bike lanes, even when — as here — people can show that this will expose them to increased danger of injury or death (thus triggering the protection of a right to life and to security of the person). The catch? The the removals, repeals, and rippings out cannot be arbitrary and must be at least somewhat proportionate to what they will achieve, thus complying with the requirements of fundamental justice articulated by the Supreme Court in a long series of cases.
The protectionist argument for insulating the American auto industry from foreign competition not only draws the wrong lessons from history, it gets the history itself wrong. It rests on four myths, all of which I debunk in this analysis:
The U.S. auto industry has collapsed.
Globalization caused the death of Detroit.
Japanese imports nearly destroyed the auto industry in the early 1980s…
… until auto protectionism saved it.
Once these myths are set aside in favor of a clear, accurate understanding of the auto sector and its history, there is no reason to be optimistic that the Trump administration’s protectionist approach to the sector will work as intended. Indeed the case for it falls apart entirely.
I’ve written before that I’m sympathetic to the criticism that Yglesias and others make of “the groups” that comprise much of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, albeit with some reservations on my part. One of those reservations has to do with the implication that “the groups” are a specifically progressive phenomenon. In fact, centrist Democratic groups often indulge in the very pathologies that they ascribe to the left wing of the party: motivated reasoning, insularity, political naiveté, and a tendency to claim they speak on behalf of communities that they rarely (if ever) interact with.
Those pathologies are not personal failings—or at least they’re not only personal failings. They’re what happens when party politics gets monopolized by lavishly funded nonprofits, staffed by highly educated and affluent ideological dead-enders. Those lavishly funded organizations are sometimes referred to as the nonprofit industrial complex, which is assumed to be an exclusively progressive phenomenon. But it’s a no less accurate description of the WelcomeFest coalition.
“When we have these really hot years and marine heatwaves, it’s more than just temperature,” explains oceanographer Kelly Benoit-Bird, a Monterey Bay Aquarium marine biologist and co-author of the paper. “The whole system changes, and we don’t get the krill. So the animals that rely only on krill are kind of out of luck.”
Blue whales, the largest animals on Earth, were among the unlucky. Their massive jaws and pleated throats are built to engulf thousands of gallons of water at once—but only when krill are packed densely enough to make the effort worthwhile. “That swarming behavior is really critical to their survival,” Benoit-Bird says. “Each mouthful has to be worth the dive.”...
“We don’t hear them singing,” Ryan says about the underwater sound recording from that year. “They’re spending all their energy searching. There’s just not enough time left over—and that tells us those years are incredibly stressful.”
In our most recent Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO), we forecast nationwide U.S. retail electricity sales to ultimate customers will grow at an annual rate of 2.2% in both 2025 and 2026, compared with average growth of 0.8% between 2020 and 2024. The forecast reflects rapid electricity demand growth in Texas and several mid-Atlantic states, where the grid is managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) and the PJM Interconnection, respectively. We expect electricity demand in ERCOT to grow at an average rate of 11% in 2025 and 2026 while the PJM region grows by 4%. [emphasis mine -JMM]
We analyze a dataset of 200k anonymized and privacy-scrubbed conversations between users and Microsoft Bing Copilot, a publicly available generative AI system. We find the most common work activities people seek AI assistance for involve gathering information and writing, while the most common activities that AI itself is performing are providing information and assistance, writing, teaching, and advising. Combining these activity classifications with measurements of task success and scope of impact, we compute an AI applicability score for each occupation. We find the highest AI applicability scores for knowledge work occupation groups such as computer and mathematical, and office and administrative support, as well as occupations such as sales whose work activities involve providing and communicating information. Additionally, we characterize the types of work activities performed most successfully, how wage and education correlate with AI applicability, and how real-world usage compares to predictions of occupational AI impact.
I confess I looked at the score for “how likely is AI to replace journalists” [0.39] but there’s simply not that many full-time reporters left in the US economy; the actual bloodbath is going to be customer service representatives who are both more exposed [0.44] and vastly more numerous.
Those are the big questions that we face. The Democratic party’s crisis is one particular manifestation of it - a congeries of different groups that don’t particularly trust each other and are more focused on their internal problems and rivalries than the external challenges that they face. It’s enormously difficult to undertake bold, persistent experimentation under these circumstances, because every experiment is likely to piss off some key group or another.**** But if you look at the U.S. as a whole, the question reappears on a bigger scale. U.S. democracy is not built so much to solve problems so much as to dissipate political disagreements. Other countries face related dilemmas. So too for global politics.
Robertson said his company is facing potentially $84,000 in extra costs for the delays, under a "liquidated damages" clause of $4,000 for every day the project runs beyond its November 1 deadline.
"I am a Trump supporter, but I just don't think the raids is the answer," he said…
"The contractor world is full of Republicans. I'm not anti-ICE. We're supportive of what the president is trying to do. But the reality of it is our industry has to have the Hispanic immigrant-based workers in it," Harrison said.
What I found was astonishing. The economist Musharbash cites told me that his theories had been misapplied. The housing analysts quoted in the piece told me Musharbash distorted their points and reached dubious, or even flatly wrong, conclusions. The leading monopoly researcher I spoke to, whose work has been celebrated by the antitrust left, told me that the entire thrust of the article—and, by extension, much of the antitrust-housing philosophy—defied sophisticated antitrust analysis.
The essay you’re reading is very long. But I can sum it up in one sentence: The Musharbash essay on Dallas—like too much of the antitrust left’s work on housing—is filled with out-of-context quotes, overconfident assertions lacking evidence, and generally misguided claims. Now let’s go through them one by one.
Ontario has taken steps to regulate this emerging sector through a pilot program that sets rules such as a 24 km/h speed limit, a minimum rider age of 16 and a ban on carrying passengers. However, because the pilot requires municipalities to opt in, we’re left with a patchwork of inconsistent rules across town lines.
More fundamentally, regulation of the devices themselves remains inadequate. Citing limited authority over imports and sales, provincial and federal regulators allow retailers to market e-scooters that aren’t street-legal. As a result, many of us have seen riders zipping by on devices travelling far faster than common sense — or the law — would allow.
MALAGA, Wash. – July 30, 2025 – Helion, a Washington-based fusion energy company, today announced that it has begun work on the site of its first fusion power plant, Orion, marking a major step in bringing fusion electricity to the grid. Located in Chelan County, Washington, the site was chosen for its ready access to transmission and legacy of energy innovation.
In 2023, Helion announced the world’s first power purchase agreement (PPA) that will provide energy from the plant to Microsoft by 2028, with Constellation Energy serving as power marketer. With site work now underway, Helion remains on track to meet that goal.
Well I guess either Helion will actually deliver fusion-powered electricity by 2028 or someone is gonna look extremely foolish.
Yergin and co. would have us believe that new energy technologies are only ever additive. Someone should tell the whale-oil, town-gas and marine-coal industries. In fact, in order to believe the “additivity” theory, you have to believe that increased use of hay, firewood, charcoal, peat and animal dung in the developing world is causally linked to their decline in the OECD. Global energy trends are actually made up of wildly different trends in different parts of the world. A heuristic that says new energy technologies can only ever be additive is worthless – except, of course, to fossil-fuel companies.
Avocadoism is the idea that the reason millennials can’t buy houses is because they spend too much money on expensive luxuries like avocado on toast and fancy coffee. It sprang from the mind of an Australian millionaire with a penchant for making dumb statements for attention, but it captures a core belief - that millennials are actually well-off but profligate - that I would argue is common among Brits of a certain age…
The idea that millennials could afford houses if only they cut back on avocados makes complete sense to people who needed £4,000 for a deposit in 2025 money, for whom food prices were effectively twice what they are today once you account for their lower income. Boomers bought houses at a time when saving a couple of pounds per day taking a packed lunch to work would give you a house deposit in eight years. For a millennial this would take two centuries.
The puzzle of the Great Compression isn’t the fact that it happened — prices, wages, and many other aspects of the economy were subject to extensive government controls, not just between Pearl Harbor and V-J Day, but into 1947 and again from 1950 to 1953. The puzzle is that it persisted so long. What sustained the new normal?
A large part of the answer, surely, was the existence of a powerful union movement. Union membership soared during the late 1930s and rose even higher during the war. Unionization then declined gradually but was still a quarter of the work force as late as 1973…
These megaduplexes, often doubled up two to a lot, do not resemble the two-family Cape Cods of yore. One three-story building on West 36th Street near the University of Southern California has 28 bedrooms and 28 bathrooms. Across the street, another has 45 bedrooms and 47 bathrooms. Technically duplexes (one building, two units), they are in reality sprawling dormitories, co-living facilities aimed at students, working adults, and formerly homeless populations.
The buildings are a visual record of a California housing crisis that has so far left few permanent monuments. They’re also an interesting example for cities in general of how an overlapping, contradictory web of regulations can lead to unintended consequences. You don’t always get what you want. But perhaps, Los Angeles, you might find that a double duplex is what you need….
For tenants, the principal lure is the price. One property offers beds for $599 a month—provided you’re willing to sleep four to a room in bunk beds. There’s a weekly cleaning service and an on-site manager, and you can rent month to month. At another property near USC, you can get your own bedroom and bathroom for $845. You have to share a kitchen with 14 other people, but it’s about half the price of getting a place of your own in the neighborhood.
It’s not even a capitalist order. It’s a vision of economic life that sees trade not as a source of mutual growth but as a weapon of dominance. This is where Trump has really separated himself from the conservatives. The neoliberal belief in global markets as arenas of cooperation governed by rules is gone. In its place is a system where economic exchange serves political power, tariffs punish the weak, and supply chains are repatriated by force. It rejects capitalism in the sense that it no longer treats markets as autonomous or sees trade as a mutual good.
What comes out is a kind of neo-feudal regime where the global economy is no longer governed by rules or prices but by power and favor. This is what I mean by pre-modern. Allies are told to pay for protection. Corporations are pressured to show loyalty. Agreements are replaced with ad hoc deals, brokered not through institutions but by personal decree.
It is here, with this question of engagement, that the comparison between the Enlightenment and A.I.’s supposed “second Enlightenment” breaks down and reveals something important about the latter’s limits and dangers. When readers interact imaginatively with a book, they are still following the book’s lead, attempting to answer the book’s questions, responding to the book’s challenges and therefore putting their own convictions at risk.
When we interact with A.I., on the other hand, it is we who are driving the conversation. We formulate the questions, we drive the inquiry according to our own interests and we search, all too often, for answers that simply reinforce what we already think we know. In my own interactions with ChatGPT, it has often responded, with patently insincere flattery: “That’s a great question.” It has never responded: “That’s the wrong question.” It has never challenged my moral convictions or asked me to justify myself.
Another banger from Oh the Urbanity!: The Problem With Left-Wing NIMBYism
