Moby writes: This piece argues that the reason Biden's popularity lags the performance of the economy is because of covid-related grief and it not being processed. It sounds reasonable. I think I processed my grief in 2022 because in 2021 I was reading too much about people on ventilators and I was waking up at night short of breath. But it also might be that I exercised my way out of a mild case of sleep apnea. Or that the relief of Trump not being president took a while to show itself as a lower level of anxiety. I lean toward the latter because it explains why I feel worse the closer we get to the next election.

Heebie's take: This sounds like a plausible factor. I do basically buy the premise of talk therapy:

To come to terms with a traumatic experience, as clinicians know, you need to do more than ignore or simply recall it. Rather, you must rework the disconnected memory into a context, and thereby move it firmly into the past. It helps to have a narrative that makes sense of when, how, and why something transpired.

We're clearly at the beginning of a collective forced remembrance of 2020, due to the rematch, and so I think some of this narrative-forming is going to be thrust upon everybody via hundreds of lazy pundits. At the very least, I can't see how rehashing 2020 works in Trumps favor. (I hope.)

A different psychological mechanism I think about sometimes is Kahneman's Peak-End explanation for the most salient memories that form from experiences. You remember the emotional peak and how something ended. What I take from that is the January 6th has to carry a lot of weight in what ordinary people recall about Trump's presidency. That also can't work in his favor, I hope.

Hawley is a tool and Stoller is a troll and yet this really is an evisceration and a righteous one. When extremely rich lawyers make the "everyone deserves vigorous representation" argument in defense of taking on freaking hedge funds, they deserve nothing but scorn and derision. Anyone who would try to wrap their own lucrative amorality in the cape of constitutional protection for the marginalized is...partner material!

Just an evisceration of Biden judicial nominee and ex-hedge fund lawyer Sparkle Sooknanan. Wow. @HawleyMO asks why she repped vulture funds impoverishing Puerto Rico, Sooknanan said every client deserves 'vigorous representation.' Then she lied abt resigning from Jones Day over... pic.twitter.com/cFMogEkoOQ

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) March 20, 2024

My kids keep singing the extremely catchy German Barbara's Rhubarb Pie rap.

Version with subtitles:

@germanonliners Replying to @Aeryn Barbaras Rhabarberbar is a classic🔥 Song credit: @Bodo Wartke #lernenmittiktok #deutschalsfremdsprache #learngerman #lernedeutsch #deutschlernen #nemcinaonline #german #deutsch #nemcina #нiмецькамоваонлайн #нiмецькамова #deutschonline #němčina #languagelearning ♬ Barbaras Rhabarberbar - Bodo Wartke & Marti Fischer

Version the Geeblets like best:

1. Did Boeing kill a whistleblower? "If I die, it's not suicide" sure sounds like a clue!

2. Something that's been jarring lately is how much my typical idealogical fellows deviate from my opinion of large language models. Setting aside things like Atrios derisively calling it "Clippy" and comments about "the plagiarism machine," people really do seem to think that they're not good for much.

Partly this seems ideologically motivated, insofar as these things are seen as a tool of rapacious capitalists (some truth to that!) which are a threat to creatives (some truth to that!) and a pain in the ass for teachers (for sure) and spammers (yup).

And in part it seems to stem from people reacting to the hype, playing gotcha and triumphantly scoffing that the chat box isn't a PhD in everything.

But I think the uncanny valley between actual intelligence and the chatbot is causing people to miss how amazing this technology is, and when people adjust their expectations, and some lucky companies build effective pipelines for using LLMs, it's going to be amazing

Here are a couple of things I've done with ChatGPT recently.

- My garage door broke. I know nothing about garage doors. I took a picture of the mechanism and asked ChatGPT what was wrong. It correctly said my torsion spring was broken. This is something I wouldn't have expected from tech in my lifetime. I'm sure it would be wrong some of the time and useless some of the time, but even this one success blows my mind.

- More prosaically, my son's school puts his sports schedules up in a table on their website. I copy and paste the table into ChatGPT, give it a few handling rules, and ask for the contents of an .ics file back, which I can then import into my calendar. This takes a little back and forth, but it's about five minutes, and I'm saved manually entering 30 calendar events.

People get really hung up on hallucinations and confabulation and the inability to actually reason, but if you focus on what it can do, and practice using it as a tool--rather than actively trying to thwart it--I think you begin to understand some of the excitement.

Y'all, I don't think that's Kate!

1. There's a wildly giant, sprawling industrial portion of Houston, which is (unsurprisingly) poisoning the air for those who live around it.

2. Mexico City is going to run out of water, maybe.

I miss spring break.