Matthew Yglesias

1 week ago | slowboring.com | Matthew Yglesias

I was at WelcomeFest a couple of weeks ago, and my role was to moderate a panel featuring rural Blue Dogs who overperformed the national fundamentals by enough to win in districts that Donald Trump carried. And I’ve been annoyed that the leftist hater community has since dubbed the event “Abundance Coachella,” because I think this massively overstates the actual role that abundance ideas are playing in the larger push for a big tent Democratic Party.

1 week ago | slowboring.com | Matthew Yglesias

One of the most frequent questions I get is why I’m not spending more time sounding the alarm about Donald Trump’s authoritarian tendencies and his threat to the stability of American democracy. One reason is temperamental. But a much bigger reason is that, analytically, I don’t think that telling my audience to become more alarmed is generally a very productive course of action.

1 week ago | bloomberg.com | Matthew Yglesias

Will they ever finish? (Bloomberg Opinion) -- If President Donald Trump follows through on his recent threats to cut off federal funding for California’s long-troubled high-speed rail project, it would be better for all concerned: For all intents and purposes, this thing went off the rails (sorry) a long time ago. Escalating costs have made it clear that no money was or ever would be available to realize the vision of a modern bullet train between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

2 weeks ago | slowboring.com | Matthew Yglesias

Before we get to today’s questions, I wanted to flag Sam Altman’s recent blog post, “The Gentle Singularity,” in which he reiterates the view (common among AI professionals) that super-intelligence is coming in the relatively near future, and then goes on to be excessively breezy about the technical and policy challenges associated with making this change be good rather than bad.

2 weeks ago | slowboring.com | Matthew Yglesias

I continue to feel that Donald Trump is pulling off something close to the heist of the century by creating so much news on other topics that there’s barely any public attention on the multi-trillion dollar piece of legislation that already passed the House of Representatives and is pending in the Senate.