i'll take shock theater if it means creating broad prosperity

Beyond it being exciting to see an important policy being made real in NYC, the other groundbreaking thing about Mamdani loudly and doggedly supporting universal childcare is that it's not coming from a woman or even a parent. It's being championed by a childless man.

The Disillusioned College Grads Turning to the Labor Movement At workplaces from Starbucks to Apple, highly educated downwardly mobile young people are organizing for better conditions.

Once upon a time, people with college degrees turned their noses up at unions. Today, the professional-managerial class has turned heel, embraced solidarity, and flocked to labor. Why?

I wrote about Noam Scheiber's new book for @newrepublic.com

newrepublic.com/article/2087...

Not Enough Workers for the Job - The American Prospect Understaffing has become an epidemic in American workplaces of all kinds.

1/ As I reported my book, I noticed something that has completely changed American life: widespread chronic under-staffing. It leads to, among other things, deadly medication errors at pharmacies, flight delays, messy stores, and the crime wave. From me @prospect.org

prospect.org/2026/03/19/u...

5/ Flight delays caused by a lack of air traffic controllers

4/ Retail workers, especially grocery stores workers, told me that understaffing partially explained the crime wave that gained media attention during the pandemic: with scant workers stocking shelves it became incredibly easy to steal.

3/ The state of Ohio found the understaffing was so rampant they used the pharmacy giant and won a $1.5 million lawsuit. Regulators in the state found stores in complete disarray, boxes all over the floors and high temps destroying medication.

2/ A big part of the story is the spread of monopoly businesses like CVS, who, because they control all the pharmacies in their area, do not care that patients have to wait up to a month for their medications to be filled bc they have so few pharmacy workers.

Not Enough Workers for the Job - The American Prospect Understaffing has become an epidemic in American workplaces of all kinds.

1/ As I reported my book, I noticed something that has completely changed American life: widespread chronic under-staffing. It leads to, among other things, deadly medication errors at pharmacies, flight delays, messy stores, and the crime wave. From me @prospect.org

prospect.org/2026/03/19/u...

Not Enough Workers for the Job - The American Prospect Understaffing has become an epidemic in American workplaces of all kinds.

Great piece from @robinks.com on an underrated epidemic in modern America: understaffing.
From nursing homes to retail, railroads to air traffic control, nobody hires enough people for the job anymore.
prospect.org/2026/03/19/u...

Five years ago, worries about sparse digital competition were well founded. A handful of giants — Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft — dominated the tech economy. Most major product categories had only two or three serious competitors, such as search (Google and Microsoft’s Bing) and mobile operating systems (Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android). When new markets like cloud computing emerged, incumbents quickly took control.

There are no lazy monopolists in the A.I. space coasting on past advantages. Over the past year, the top spot on the Arena leaderboard has moved among those three companies, with strong performances from newer arrivals such as the Chinese company DeepSeek and the French firm Mistral — many of which require far less capital than earlier generations of A.I. companies.

Shorter Jason Furman: it used to be that the tech industry was dominated by only five companies. But AI has changed all that: now there's open competition from five whole companies!

This is AI-as-management

Part of the problem here is a long-standing issue of mine: The public gets a huge benefit from beat journalism—but the journalism industry does not, by and large, recognize beat journalism for its value or when it comes to awards and prizes. Those go to investigations and "one big thing" features.

I’m not going to get into this again but the defund the police critique remains complete bullshit

yes we can was nonspecific

lock her up doesn’t lay out why or for what

make america great again couldn’t be less specific

this critique is pure reactionary nonsense filtered through pundits

Ryszard Kapuscinski's recollections of being a 7 y/o in Poland 1939 as the Red Army was taking over and deporting people to prison camps (from his book "Imperium"). Scary flash backs to today:

"In school, during breaks, or when we are returning home in a group, the talk is of deportations."

I don't really like the arguments that Zohran should be careful about opposing the NYPD because of what the NYPD did to BDB's daughter. This is all stuff that any mayoral candidate had to be aware of before taking the job. Anyone to the left of Bloomberg was going to have to take this fight

Aliya Rahman, woman who was dragged out of car by ICE in Minneapolis: "I've spent the last month learning the names of the tendons in my shoulder, because both of my shoulders are torn -- cartilage and tendons. But what I haven't learned is the names of the people who did this to me."

Donald Trump killed two of my constituents. He is a liar and should be ashamed of himself.

Researcher finds that middle managers, fearful of losing their jobs to automation, pretend to use AI in order to keep their jobs. HA HA HA
www.techpolicy.press/in-weak-job-...

excellent

The ICE Contractor Down the Hall A tour through the Midtown intelligence firms and courier services that help keep the agency running.

new from me at @curbed.com: everyone ICE did business with in New York City last year www.curbed.com/article/ice-...

Tech workers in a fierce competition to write the best resignation letters What we can learn from the flood of "why I quit" letters from researchers at Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI.

For Business Insider, I took a look an emergent literary form: the AI company resignation letter.
www.businessinsider.com/resignation-...

AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says Imported chips and hardware mean the AI investemtns are translating into US GDP growth.

AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says gizmodo.com/ai-added-basically-zero-...

Gavin Newsom’s Struggle For Everyman Cred “Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery” tries to recast a life of privilege in often baffling ways.

I read Gavin Newsom‘s memoir so that you don’t have to. Suffice it to say the book does not achieve what it sets out to do and I’m looking forward to everyone on bluesky being extremely normal on this subject.

A lot of people were probably hoping for the Trump administration v 1.0 in which they spent three years just trying to fill basic appointment and only passed a tax cut. I think people prefer a president who does nothing.

Households With 2 Kids Need to Earn Average of $402,708 to Comfortably Afford Child Care Families don’t make enough on average to afford child care for two children, according to government benchmarks.

I would love to see the pro-natalist Silicon Valley types respond to the fact that a family with two kids needs to make over $400k to comfortably afford childcare (under 7% of income).

www.lendingtree.com/debt-consoli...

The Army will soon have senior warrant officers bid against each other in an eBay-style auction for retention bonuses and six-year service commitments. Soldiers who agree to take a “minimum” bonus can cash in, while those who ask for larger ones will lose out, Army officials announced in a recent press release. Dubbed the “Warrant Officer Retention Bonus Auction,” the system will debut in March, an Army official said Friday. In the news release, Army officials said the new system represents a “shift from traditional, fixed‑rate bonuses to a more flexible, market-driven system and that the auction encourages warrant officers to bid their “true value.”

This is seriously fucked up taskandpurpose.com/news/army-wa...

The "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em!" drum just needs to ring a *little* louder

"amazon prime for human beings"