NYC native. Exit w/ Montage, VisibleWorld. Now AI in Ed-Tech, Synthetic Media, Property. “We know what we are,but know not what what we may be" W-Sephardim
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Canada/United States: Revealed Preferences in Migration
In 2022, the United States had about 333 million people; Canada had about 39 million, making the US population about 8.6 times Canada's. All things being equal, we would expect about 8.6 times as many people to move from the United States to Canada as from Canada to the United States.
Further, Canada has universal health care and access to assisted dying. Despite these advantages, the United States still appears to be a far more favorable place to live for many choosing between the two countries.
Statistics Canada's permanent immigration series records 13,504 Canadian-born people going to the United States in 1991, compared with 5,275 U.S.-born people going to Canada. In 2011, the counts were 12,800 and 7,069.
In 2022, CBC's analysis of U.S. Census data reported that 126,340 people moved from Canada to the United States, with an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 moving in the other direction annually. Adjusted for the population difference, the southbound rate is 54 to 72 times as high per person.
That is a revealed preference argument. A voluntary move is evidence that a person expects a better life, even after the cost and trouble of moving. Health care matters. So do pay, work, housing, taxes, family and weather. People weigh these as they choose where to live. Immigration rules also shape who can move. These choices tell us how migrants value the overall quality of life available to them; they cannot rank the two health systems on their own
Seth Haberman CEO Sense retweeted
NYC politicians voted themselves an 18% raise. Water Board gave itself a 6% rate hike. NYS Thruway, 5% toll hike. Social Security checks up 3.6%. Real wages up.
Everyone gets increases to keep pace with expenses ... except for rent-stabilized landlords. therealdeal.com/new-york/202…
Politics, Policy, and Property in New York's Rent Rules
In June New York froze rents on stabilized apartments. The Board’s own index showed operating costs up 5.3%. I ran the City’s numbers on a 32-unit Bronx building from 2015 to 2026. Revenue rose 19%. Costs rose 62%. The margin fell from 30% to 4.9%.
The City is now rebuilding the tools to take the very same buildings that these policies caused to fail.
sethhaberman.substack.com/p/…
This New York Times story describes a serious property-rights abuse with surprisingly little alarm.
New York City used its Third Party Transfer program to foreclose on buildings for unpaid taxes, water bills, and housing violations. It transferred the properties to private third parties and paid the former owners nothing for the equity left after their debts were paid.
McConnell Dorce owned a mortgage-free, four-unit Brooklyn building. The City valued it at $226,000 and claimed about $45,000 in debt. Dorce had entered a payment plan. The City still took the property and paid him nothing for roughly $180,000 in alleged surplus value. He died in February.
The constitutional rule is clear. Government may collect a valid debt and lawfully foreclose. It may not keep the owner’s remaining equity. The Supreme Court unanimously confirmed that rule in Tyler v. Hennepin County.
Yet the Times article suggests that New York has resolved the problem through a $60 million payout. It has not.
The case is far from settled. The proposed $60 million gross fund covers only “Round 10,” involving 64 properties and about 839 apartments. Claims from the first nine rounds, involving more than 500 additional properties, remain in court, and class certification is unresolved.
The court has not approved even the Round 10 settlement. Payments have not begun. Lawyers may seek up to 30 percent of the fund. Other costs will also come from it. No owner will recover title, and money left after the claims period returns to the City.
The parties’ valuations also raise questions. Plaintiffs calculated roughly $136 million in Round 10 damages and interest. The City estimated $10.4 million. The article does not explain that vast difference.
This history has immediate importance. Mayor Mamdani’s “Fix the City” plan seeks to remove negligent owners and transfer buildings to land trusts, nonprofits, tenants, or other approved owners. The proposed SAFER Homes Act would revive municipal foreclosure through a revised Third Party Transfer program.
The City is seeking renewed power to transfer private property while paying $60 million to settle only one part of the litigation caused by its former use of that power. Before any revival, the law should state how the City will value property, pay surplus equity, resolve disputed debts and payment plans, and provide a hearing before title changes hands.
Property rights do not depend on whether City Hall approves of the owner. Housing neglect may support fines, repairs, receivership, and lawful debt collection. It cannot support confiscation.
The article should have examined these issues. Instead, it reports a proposed partial settlement as though the City had finished correcting the harm. It has not.
nytimes.com/2026/09/14/nyreg…
"It's in the nature of this judicial system that one is condemned not only in innocence but also in ignorance." @VerizonSupport's AI is like being trapped in a Kafka novel. Every time you think you've made progress, you start again in the same spot as if nothing has happened.
A great lesson from @erik_engquist on why policies matter for getting more apts built and how state policies and politicians interfered with some of our traditional engines of apt rehab.
How New York kneecapped rehabs therealdeal.com/magazine/sep…
If you follow rent regulation and Takings Clause litigation, the attached tracker reviews 18 key current and precedential cases. It shows where each case stands, what it challenges, which groups are involved, the procedural barriers, the next expected event, and what could change if the owners prevail.
Large national and state housing associations participated in several of these cases, primarily by filing supporting briefs. The California Apartment Association went further, bringing its own case against Alameda County.
One result is especially pleasing: @TheRealSPONY or its members brought two of the three live cases in the tracker that directly challenge rent rules now in force.
Small Property Owners of New York v. City of New York challenges limits on rents for vacant, rent-stabilized apartments. SPONY is the named plaintiff, represented by the Institute for Justice.
Kenilworth Holdings v. NYC Rent Guidelines Board, brought by owners including SPONY members, challenges New York City’s 2026 rent freeze and the process used to impose it.
The third direct challenge is Harris v. City of Los Angeles.
For an all-volunteer group, this is a remarkable record. @amkorchak and SPONY deserve real credit for finding the issues and plaintiffs, building the cases, and bringing the concerns of small housing providers before the courts. - tinyurl.com/SCOTUS-RS
Statistics for crimes other than murders and shootings are generally easy to manipulate because reported totals depend in part on how offenses are classified and charged. Officials can also shape the story by choosing comparison years that make current results look favorable.
Year-over-year comparisons in New York can be especially misleading. The NYPD’s current figures are preliminary and often change as cases are reclassified. That can make the current year look better than the prior year, whose figures have had more time to be revised, and are, in my lifetime, almost always revised up.
Murders and shootings are by and large objective events and the hardest crimes to fake the numbers. The fall in murders and shootings is dramatic. Through August, for the second year in a row, New York recorded its lowest first-eight-month totals for both, and murder is on pace to finish 2026 at a record low. I've written before about how this is likely a macro and micro event.
The broader crime picture remains less reassuring. In the first half of 2026, major crime was 25.5% higher than in 2019. Total complaints were also 25.5% higher and near a 20-year high.
In my view, much of this continuing disorder comes from repeat offenders, compounded by the lack of a coherent system for treating people with serious mental illness, political maneuvering by district attorneys, and New York’s status as the only state that does not expressly allow judges to consider a defendant’s dangerousness when setting bail.
These are self-inflicted wounds. If New York feels crazier than it did before the pandemic, despite what officials say, the figures support that judgment. This Vital City analysis does a good job of going back to 1993, the start of the great crime decline, and showing the broad, long-term trend:
vitalcitynyc.org/data/
nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2…
NYC’s tenant-organizing campaign raises a serious Cedar Point issue.
Apartment buildings are locked, nonpublic property. If City-directed organizers enter and travel floor to floor, knocking on unrelated tenants’ doors over the owner’s objection, the City may be appropriating a right of access to private property.
A tenant can invite someone to visit that tenant’s apartment. It is far from clear that one tenant can grant an organizer a building-wide license to roam unrelated floors.
This is not a housing inspection conducted under a warrant or emergency authority -it's organizing. The constitutional question is straightforward: Can the government give organizers recurring access to locked private property without the owner’s consent or just compensation?
Longer Analysis:
Subject/Headline: Constitutional Concern Over City-Directed Floor-to-Floor Organizing in Locked Apartment Buildings
The Mamdani administration’s “Talk to Tenants” campaign is an official New York City program operated through the Mayor’s Office of Mass Engagement in partnership with the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants. The City states that volunteers will knock on apartment doors in selected buildings to provide organizing resources and help tenants form tenant organizations. (NYC Government)
The constitutional concern arises from the campaign’s actual implementation inside locked residential buildings. Where City employees, City volunteers, or City-directed organizers enter nonpublic common areas, travel from floor to floor, knock on apartments unrelated to any particular inviting tenant, and claim authority to do so without the property owner’s consent, their conduct may implicate the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment, as applied to the City through the Fourteenth Amendment.
The relevant conduct can be documented through surveillance footage, electronic access records, witness statements, organizer identification, literature, communications with building staff, the floors and apartments visited, statements asserting a right to remain, and evidence of repeated or planned visits.
The Cedar Point principle
In Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, California gave union organizers a limited right to enter private agricultural property to solicit workers. The rule allowed access for only certain purposes, during limited hours, and on a limited number of days. The Supreme Court nevertheless held that the access requirement was a per se physical taking because the government had appropriated the owners’ fundamental right to exclude third parties.
The Court explained that a physical appropriation may exist whether the government acts through a regulation, statute, ordinance, or decree. It also held that temporary or intermittent access can constitute a taking; the fact that organizers cannot enter continuously does not eliminate the constitutional violation. (Supreme Court)
That principle has direct relevance where government-directed organizers enter locked apartment buildings and use hallways, stairways, elevators, and other common areas for floor-to-floor solicitation. On those facts, the potential claim is that the City has appropriated an intermittent, easement-like right of access through property that is closed to the public.
A locked residential building is materially different from a shopping center or other business generally open to the public. Cedar Point specifically distinguished restrictions governing property open to the public from government-created rights to enter property closed to the public. (Supreme Court)
One tenant’s invitation does not automatically answer the question
A tenant generally may invite a guest, attorney, union representative, or tenant organizer to visit the tenant’s apartment. That invitation ordinarily permits reasonable use of the entrance, lobby, elevator, stairway, and hallway needed to reach the inviting tenant.
The harder question is whether a single tenant may authorize a nonresident organizer to travel independently through every floor, knock on the doors of unrelated tenants, and continue canvassing after the property owner objects.
Those are different forms of access.
An invitation to visit Apartment 2B does not automatically establish a right to canvass Apartments 3A through 10F. A tenant’s right to receive guests is connected to the tenant’s own occupancy and lawful use of the premises. It does not necessarily include the power to convey a building-wide organizing license over every common hallway controlled by the property owner.
The New York Court of Appeals has recognized that an invited guest will generally have a lawful basis to be on apartment property. But the court also cautioned that this principle is not an absolute rule and that lease provisions or regulations may, in some circumstances, permit management to override a tenant’s wishes. That case involved a guest associated with a particular tenant; it did not decide whether one tenant may authorize an outsider to conduct an unaccompanied, building-wide canvass. (New York Courts)
Accordingly, the constitutional challenge should expressly reserve this issue:
Does a tenant’s ordinary right to invite a guest include the power to grant a City-directed organizer an unaccompanied, building-wide right to traverse unrelated floors and solicit unrelated occupants over the property owner’s objection?
That question should not be assumed in the City’s favor.
New York’s statute and the Attorney General’s guidance
New York Real Property Law § 230 protects tenants’ rights to form, join, and participate in tenant organizations. It also protects the right of tenant organizations to meet peacefully on the premises at reasonable hours without obstructing access. The statutory text does not expressly state that one tenant may grant a nonresident organizer an unrestricted right to canvass every floor of a locked building. (NYSenate.gov)
The New York Attorney General’s enforcement guidance goes further. It states that outside tenant organizers and attorneys may conduct organizing activities on private property at the request of a tenant, that the inviting tenant need not accompany them throughout the property, and that they may not be removed.
That guidance creates the central constitutional issue. If the City or State treats one tenant’s request as a legally enforceable entitlement permitting outside organizers to roam throughout a locked building despite the owner’s objection, the government has arguably converted a tenant’s limited invitation rights into a building-wide access right for third parties.
That is closely comparable to the government-created organizer access right examined in Cedar Point. The government cannot avoid the Takings Clause simply by calling the access holder an “invited guest” if the government is actually expanding the invitation into an enforceable right to use portions of the property unrelated to the inviting tenant.
NCR, LLC v. Coriat does not resolve the constitutional issue
The City may rely on NCR, LLC v. Coriat, a 2023 New York Supreme Court trial-level decision involving a private tenant organizer. In that case, the organizer testified that a tenant invited him into the building and into her apartment. He also testified that, when he did not know a tenant, he remained outside and asked tenants entering the building for permission to enter and knock on doors.
The property owners produced no competing evidence showing that the organizer lacked permission. Based on that evidentiary record, the court dismissed the trespass claim. (New York Courts)
The decision did not analyze:
whether an invitation was limited to the inviting tenant’s apartment or floor;
whether a tenant may convey an unrestricted building-wide license;
whether an organizer exceeded the scope of a particular invitation;
a City-operated or City-directed organizing campaign;
repeated entry after an express owner objection;
municipal policy or governmental state action; or
the Supreme Court’s physical-takings analysis under Cedar Point.
NCR therefore provides the City with a factual and state-law argument, but it does not settle the federal constitutional question.
This is organizing activity, not a housing inspection
The fact that the City selects buildings with reported housing violations does not transform tenant organizers into housing inspectors.
The City describes the campaign as door-to-door outreach intended to connect residents with organizing resources, provide organizing training, and help build tenant organizations. (NYC Government)
A code inspector entering under a warrant, emergency authority, lawful consent, or a recognized inspection statute presents a different issue. Cedar Point acknowledged that traditional health-and-safety inspection regimes will generally be treated differently from compelled access for organizers. (Supreme Court)
Organizers who enter to recruit tenants, distribute literature, collect contact information, and build tenant organizations are not exercising inspection authority. The existence of building violations does not itself grant them a right to enter locked common areas.
Trespass versus a constitutional taking
One organizer entering once without authorization may present an ordinary trespass claim. Cedar Point distinguishes isolated unauthorized entries from invasions undertaken pursuant to a government-created or government-enforced right of access. (Supreme Court)
The constitutional claim becomes substantially stronger where the evidence shows:
The building is locked and its common areas are closed to the public.
The organizers are City employees, official City volunteers, or acting under City direction.
They travel beyond the apartment or floor associated with any inviting tenant.
The owner has not consented to building-wide canvassing.
The organizers claim that City policy or state law permits them to canvass throughout the building.
The practice is repeated, planned, officially instructed, or continued after an objection.
A rogue volunteer may create a trespass issue. A City instruction, established practice, or enforced policy granting organizers recurring access presents the stronger Fifth Amendment claim.
Conclusion
Documented floor-to-floor organizing inside locked apartment buildings presents a serious potential as-applied physical-takings challenge.
The constitutional claim would be:
By authorizing or directing nonresident organizers to enter and traverse locked, nonpublic apartment-building common areas for floor-to-floor solicitation over the property owner’s objection, the City has appropriated an intermittent right of access for third parties without providing just compensation.
Tenants retain the right to organize, receive guests, communicate with neighbors, and participate in lawful tenant meetings. The disputed question is whether those rights also permit one tenant—or the government acting through that tenant—to grant City-directed organizers a recurring, unaccompanied, building-wide right to use every floor.
Neither the current text of Real Property Law § 230 nor the trial-level ruling in NCR conclusively resolves that question. Cedar Point provides substantial constitutional grounds for challenging a City policy or practice that treats locked residential common areas as open to government-directed organizers without the property owner’s consent.
Amazing photo of Russian Social Media folks after climbing the Empire State Building and getting engaged
Just an FYI: the word "schmendrick" appeared in the WSJ today. "When he isn’t, and various other babysitters fall through, an unemployed schmendrick named Sam (Matthew Shear), who is quite a few years younger, comes into Dianne’s life."
I'm pretty sure it's a made-up word with no etymology - in my mind, a schmendrick is a lightweight schlemeil.
wsj.com/arts-culture/film/fa…
Darby’s core claim is simple: the CDC stopped landlords from removing tenants who did not pay rent, so the government took away a basic property right, the right to exclude someone from your property. Darby argues that once the government forced owners to keep nonpaying tenants in place for a public purpose, the Fifth Amendment required the government to pay just compensation. The Federal Circuit agreed that the landlords had stated a valid physical taking claim and sent the case back for further proceedings.
The message is: government can act in a crisis, but it cannot make landlords finance that action without pay. The $1 billion figure matters, but the deeper issue is the precedent: owners may now have a path to recover when emergency housing rules cross from regulation into taking.
multifamilydive.com/news/pan…
Seth Haberman CEO Sense retweeted
A lot of subscribers have asked what I made of the Nick Kristof oped.
So much has already been said. What more is there to say?
My first thought was everyone else's. Horrifying. Testimonies of pain and torture. We know that the Israeli Prisons Service is notoriously incompetent. There have been cases of Hamas prisoners abusing each other, and even famous cases of them abusing female Israeli guards. We know, too, that all prison systems struggle with the problem: New York prisons face 2,000 claims against them. So abuse of prisoners isn't merely possible, it's guaranteed. October 7 and the ensuing war sent thousands of detainees into the prisons. And in the early months, drafted into the system undertrained reservist guards. Guards who had seen Hamas's videos gleefully documenting their crimes.
I expected, therefore, a hard-hitting story of real abuse, something Israeli leaders must take notice of.
And then I came across the first obvious lie. And then the second. And then an odd claim -- maybe possible, but how exactly? -- and then another just like it. And a famed Hamas propagandist laundered as a reliable source. And then another.
Why, if there is no doubt that abuse occurred -- and there is no doubt -- was there so much obvious propaganda in Kristof's oped?
I won't pretend the lies weren't a relief. They were. It's agony to read about Israeli criminality, and the lies let me cast doubt on the whole narrative. There's an obvious propaganda campaign at work here.
But as claim followed claim, it became hard not to wonder: Despite the propaganda, what part is nevertheless true? How bad has it gotten?
So here's what we know, or at least what I think I know.
This is a campaign that seeks our destruction. Kristof quotes people who celebrated October 7 and want Israel destroyed, and will lie to achieve that goal. We know how the lies in this story made their way into it, where they came from and what purpose they serve.
Even so, I'm not willing to conclude there's no truth at all in there, just because there are lies.
Dogs did not rape anyone. The people who invented that particular inanity claimed it without evidence, knowing that no one, certainly not self-appointed moral arbiters like Nick Kristof, would ever bother checking the provenance of the claim.
Because they never, ever do. Because why would they?
So the claim spreads through the millions-strong activist network without investigation, exciting and mobilizing -- not because anyone understands how it might be possible but for the sheer thrill of it.
And it's cited by Kristof as a reliable report.
A recent report by a Norwegian NGO, also referenced, claimed "systemic sexual violence" in the West Bank by citing just 16 cases across three years in a geographic region containing as many as three million Palestinians and over half a million Israelis. And some of the examples scarcely cleared the bar for harassment.
But the NGO in question knew for a fact that no journalist would look too deeply into any of it. And indeed, no journalist did.
Because they never, ever do. Because why would they?
Friends, a paper trail is being created. Just like they created a paper trail on mass starvation in Gaza -- mass starvation first claimed in early 2024, and then claimed again and again by NGOs, the UN, everybody. Some were nuanced warnings of a "possibility," some declared it had arrived. The headlines from both were largely the same. And then, in thundering silence, the mass starvation claim just faded away, never having materialized -- while billions of ordinary people around the world who don't follow too closely remain convinced that countless Gazans died of starvation.
So they moved on. A Lancet letter claiming hundreds of thousands of deaths spread like wildfire, mostly because (a) nobody actually read or understood what it claimed and (b) nobody cared enough to check if it was remotely plausible. Then, just in case anyone forgot Lancet, came the claim by UN rapporteurs of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children -- 380,000 infants under five allegedly died, more than the entire population of infants in Gaza. Stupid, right? But it was repeated again and again by activists and protestors.
No one checks, no costs are exacted for the never-ending barrage of fakery. Because why would they?
A wild religious frenzy has taken hold. Hatred of Israel is now definitional to the left, and to parts of the right. Greta Thunberg has forgotten all about climate change. An enemy of humanity has been identified just in time to unleash all the pent-up religious rage that this troubled secular age won't allow against anyone else.
And by complete and utter coincidence, that enemy you're suddenly allowed to hate is vaguely associated with the Jews.
Yes, alas, it really is that simple.
But also, dear friends -- bear with me -- it isn't.
All the above is true. They're fucking liars and bigots. They marched in their millions, again and again and again, for weeks and months and years -- marches completely unprecedented in their size, regularity and duration in all the history of the West, in all the history of war, larger by orders of magnitude than all other marches for all other conflicts and wars and suffering combined, even those caused by their own governments. And no serious person pretends that anything similar could ever have coalesced or will ever coalesce again unless Israel is involved.
"But we fund you," shouts the American activist to explain this mind-numbing selectivity. Then why did one-third of the city of Amsterdam march? Or millions of Spaniards, Brazilians and Indonesians? It was unprecedented and it was everywhere.
And Kristof has joined the new religion. Not by being concerned about abuse, but by not caring one whit whether he's trafficking in truths or lies. Only the Jews will ask to distinguish between the two. He just needs to throw it all on the page, and his membership in the glorious crusade is assured.
Alas, the Jews are correct about the nature of this moment. Some things are so big and fundamental, so assumed and widespread, that they become hard to see. Fish don't notice the water. Activists who can only ever march against Jews are convinced they are merely righteous people enraged by war, without ever pausing to wonder why the only war that ever enraged them or ever made its way to their phones was one particular war, and not larger and deadlier wars also conducted with Western weapons and money.
And so the Jew is made fearful once more. Throughout Christendom and Islam, he is being returned to his proper place in the social hierarchies of old, complete with anxious conversos and ideological purity tests.
And yet, still, despite it all, their lies aren't the end of the story. Their lies are a separate story. A campaign of lies that constitutes a return to the mean for the Jewish condition in the West. A campaign meant to justify brutality against us, not to end war or suffering.
And despite all of it, dear Jews, there really is abuse.
It's nowhere near as much as the psychotic claims of these fantasists. Not by orders of magnitude. If it was, they wouldn't need to lie so much.
But it's there nonetheless. Many dozens of cases at least, probably in the low hundreds by now, most of them without any sexual aspect, but still wanton violence. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but the army gave a few estimates to the courts a couple of times over the past three years. There have been many indictments filed against soldiers, serious ones. I know something about a handful of those cases. I know that the problem is real.
It's there, it's real, and it doesn't seem to be stopping. And if it isn't stopped with an iron will and uncompromising hand, it will continue to fester and grow.
And it must be said: neither Ben Gvir nor Netanyahu are interested in fixing it. Nobody at the top cares about the rights of prisoners.
Let me be clear: For the first time in my life, I support a death penalty. No one who crossed over the border to massacre and kidnap on October 7 should be left alive; they came to kidnap children precisely because they sought the release of mass murderers kept alive in our prisons. Hamas, as always, in its totalizing brutality, forces the choice: If their murderers live, our children may die. I choose our children. And those who came for our children cannot be deterred, reformed or deradicalized. They murder their own to clear a path to murdering ours. And so I believe they must die. We must try, convict and destroy them.
And even I, radicalized in this narrow, specific way, say we cannot collapse into torture or abuse. That's not justice. It isn't even vengeance. It is participation in Hamas's way of war.
Nor do our leaders seem to care about the simple breakdown of discipline that these abuses represent, the kind of breakdown we saw again and again with the incidents of looting in Gaza and in the early cases of prisoner abuse that came to light.
No, dogs aren't being trained to systematically rape prisoners, you nattering halfwits. And no, Hamas propaganda operatives are not reliable sources on the question of Israeli crimes. The vast, vast majority of soldiers are honorable men who walked into fire so our families may live. The whole world may turn on them; I will stand with them, grateful for their sacrifice. And Kristof, a willing purveyor of propaganda happily feigning that he can't see the water and thrilling to a moral crusade engineered by would-be genocidaires he pretends not to understand -- is no messenger of moral reckoning.
But friends, so fucking what. Let the narcissistic guttersnipes strut their moral emotions before the world, let the UN publish endless reports that don't hold up to basic scrutiny, let the NGOs dream their rabid, sick dreams that no journalist ever fact-checks -- yes, they're lying. But so fucking what.
We still, for ourselves -- because fuck them -- must see that it isn't all fake. The problem is real. It's far smaller than they claim, but real nonetheless. And when discipline and morality break down, it can only get worse. We either crack down now or we watch it fester and grow.
And our own Ben Gvirs are stubbornly refusing to fix what is actually broken, the real thing in the real world.
And so we are caught in a strange sort of vise, the same vise we find ourselves in with the genocide lie: A vast propaganda machine that seeks to destroy us -- countless activists too high on their own self-regard to see the irony of raging against a "genocide" while calling for the erasure of a people -- all while our own incompetent, venal, self-absorbed political class insist in their mindless chatter on confirming every claim of our enemies for sheer, bald egomania.
I'm sick of it all. I know you're all sick of it too.
And that, in a nutshell, is what I think about this.
Just because they're lying, just because a vast perfidious campaign has overwhelmed global elites in a bid to clear the way for our removal, just because they're still, after two millennia, building their visions of redemption on The Evil Jew -- doesn't mean there isn't also, separately, a problem on the ground.
So what do we do now?
Simple. We see it, we acknowledge it's happening, we bring our rage to our inept leaders until they bend to our will and act to stop the breakdown...
And we soldier on.
We soldier on because the enemy really is coming to murder us. Because Hamas must still go if Gaza is ever to rise to a new day. Because Hezbollah will yet destroy Lebanon on the altar of destroying us. Because the ayatollahs built their whole damn religion on the extermination of our children.
We fix the broken things within us as if the pogromists and their simpering Kristofs don't exist. We owe no answers to the propagandists who seek to clear a path to our deaths. But we do owe answers to ourselves.
Let the screaming mob rage and churn like so much sea-foam. Despite that raging mob, despite the enemy who still seeks our destruction, and yes, despite feckless incompetents like Ben Gvir, our minister of prisons, who claim to lead us -- we remain the strongest, freest Jews who ever lived, more capable and committed than our self-destructive enemies ever imagined. And the task is still before us, yet to be completed, the sacred duty given to our generation to ensure our children don't have to face the genocidaires who now surround us. We do not waver, we do not stumble. We soldier on.
Because fuck them all.
This is a hard article to read, but I hope you'll do so. I've spent some time reporting on widespread rape and other sexual violence of Palestinian male and female prisoners by Israeli authorities, and the article is now published. The assault victims were warned not to give speak of what they endured -- they were sometimes told they would be killed or raped if they gave interviews -- but they found the courage to do so. One man described being raped three times in a single day in Israeli prison, the third time after he tried to protest. A young woman said the guards would come in at the beginning of each shift and strip her naked and abuse her. Another reported that she was shown photos of herself being raped and warned they would be released unless she cooperated with Israeli intelligence. Even three children who had been detained told me they had been sexually abused. Look, whatever our position on the Middle East, we should be able to agree on being anti-rape. Sexual assaults were horrific when Israeli women were targeted on Oct. 7, and they're equally horrific when Israeli authorities use them against Palestinians day after day after day. We should be able to find common ground in opposing rape. Here's a gift link to the article: nytimes.com/2026/05/11/opini…
"There was no primary source evidence confirming the veracity of the image, and Snopes could not find credible evidence of an Instagram account directly linked to Allen. A LinkedIn account that appeared to be Allen's did not post the image purported to be from his Instagram account."
This is why SNOPES is still the go-to site to check things before you post/repost potential misinformation and disinformation. snopes.com/articles/473060/c…
For the AI industry, a key design question has gone largely unasked: Is the product building human capacity or consuming it? Nearly all AI benchmarks measure what AI agents can do alone. We desperately need benchmarks for hybrid intelligence. Errors are signals our brains use to trigger learning. An AI that eliminates friction entirely often eliminates the learning along with it."
A neuroscientist named Vivienne Ming ran an experiment last month. She gave people one hour to predict real-world events using Polymarket questions. Some worked alone. Some used AI. Some worked with AI as a team.
Most of the human-AI teams lost. They either submitted the AI's answer or fed the AI their own guess and asked it to back up their guess. The second group did worse than the AI alone, because the AI told them what they wanted to hear.
The third team, about 5 to 10 percent of them, treated AI as a debating partner. They demanded counterarguments. They pressed against hedges. When the AI sounded confident, they increased their skepticism. These teams beat the prediction market. I realize this is a small test, but I thought to make a prompt to capture Ming's dynamic.
Ming, six rules:
You are working with me on whatever is in front of me. Your job is to sharpen my thinking, not to speed up my output.
MING's Six Rules:
1. When I give you a position, give me the strongest counterargument before anything else. If the counterargument is weak, say so and explain why.
2. When I ask you to validate, name it and refuse. Ask what evidence would convince me I am wrong.
3. Flag every hedge. When you write "depends on," "may," "could," follow with what would resolve the uncertainty.
4. End every answer with one question I should have asked and did not.
5. If I can work it out in five minutes, tell me to work it out.
6. Tell me what I would need to believe for each option to be right. Then tell me which beliefs are most fragile.
I have some additional rules I use. I thought this might be helpful.
wsj.com/tech/ai/is-ai-smarte…
The City planted the wrong tree on our corner, and it's become a hazard. They say they won't uproot mature trees. Would you feel safe on this sidewalk?
Misinformation and Disinformation are part of the reason politicians can run for cover rather than engage in real conversations about Rent Control/Stabilization. This article by Timothy Collins is a good example of both.
The “48% real NOI increase” claim rests on a basic category error.
That figure comes from RGB income and expense studies that include any building with any rent-stabilized tenant. It blends together buildings that are largely market-rate, buildings that benefited from vacancy deregulation and preferential rent churn before 2019, and buildings that remain predominantly stabilized with long-tenured tenants. Treating that blended average as representative of legacy stabilized buildings is misleading.
If the question is whether guideline renewals have kept pace with operating costs for stabilized tenants, the RGB’s own data answer it clearly. Over roughly the last 20 years, one-year guideline renewals compounded to about 56%, while the RGB’s Price Index of Operating Costs compounded to roughly 148%. Operating costs rose about two and a half times as fast as guideline rents. That gap persists year after year and widens in stress years like 2017, 2019, and 2023.
The common rebuttal—“costs are only about 62% of rent”—does not resolve this. That figure is a snapshot, not a fixed equilibrium. When cost growth persistently exceeds rent growth, expense ratios must rise mechanically over time. Even in years where NOI dollars are flat or slightly positive, margins compress. That increases vulnerability to the next cost shock. This is arithmetic, not ideology.
The commensurate rent framework assumes that expense ratios are roughly stationary and that turnover mechanisms allow rent catch-up. Those assumptions no longer hold after the 2019 law changes that eliminated vacancy allowances and curtailed deregulation. A framework calibrated to a pre-2019 regime cannot be used to declare post-2019 outcomes “excessive” without adjustment.
Positive NOI in a given year does not mean the economics are healthy. NOI dollars and NOI margins are different things. Stabilized buildings can show modest NOI growth while their margins steadily erode, until one year the math flips abruptly. Long historical windows that span decades of deregulation obscure this dynamic rather than refute it.
None of this argues that guideline increases must mechanically match PIOC. That is a policy choice. But it does mean that citing blended NOI averages to claim owners are being “kept whole” misstates what the RGB’s own data show for predominantly stabilized buildings today.
That isn’t smoke and mirrors. It’s basic accounting.
citylimits.org/opinion-by-th…
