"Using new data from the Gallup Workforce Panel, we document a persistent partisan gap in self-reported AI use at work: Democrats are consistently more likely than Republicans to report frequent use. In 2025:Q4, for example, 27.8% of Democrats report using AI weekly or daily, compared with 22.5% of Republicans. Democrats also report deeper task-level integration, using AI in 16% more work activities than Republicans. Consistent with this, Democrats are employed in occupations with higher predicted AI exposure based on task-content measures and report larger perceived differences in AI-related job displacement risk. However, in regression models the partisan gap in AI use disappears once we control for education, industry, and occupation, indicating that observed differences primarily reflect compositional variation rather than political affiliation per se."
From the text:
"Put differently, partisan differences in exposure primarily reflect sorting into industries with higher predicted LLM exposure rather than within industry exposure differences."
It remains to be seen whether greater exposure of progressives (than of conservatives) to AI on the job will translate into fear or, instead, into opportunity.
However that may be, my intuition is that the poltics and rhetoric of AI will take on a life of their own, rather than simply tracking self-interest at the workplace.
Progressive laptop workers will both use AI a lot more, and also support making it a lot more expensive by making it hard, slow, and expensive to build datacenters and supporting electrical capacity and other infrastructure. They will also rarely see a new proposed regulation of AI they don't like, not just raising costs, but making the AI output less effective and less trustworthy. AI-using firms will be strongly tempted to develop and keep proprietary AI capabilities in-house because of concerns of how the government will regulate the big players, and what it might force them to monitor and divulge.
Online sports betting got out of control really fast, and this is just the beginning. I was recently at a high school track events, and if they weren't racing, all the senior boys above 18 (and I suspect many below) were busy intensely socializing on the subject of their simultaneous feeding of sports betting addictions via their smartphones. I haven't seen anything like that outside Northeast Asia frantic gambling dens or descriptions or works of entertainment from "the past is a foreign country" old days of betting-obsessed America (think "Guys and Dolls" on steroirds). I thought the age restriction would have been 21 like it is now for cigarettes, and it is in most states, but when I looked it up it turned out that Washington DC allows it at 18 and I think Maryland did too until recently. We are gonna regret this one for sure.
Peak crypto at the Super Bowl was 2022…along with all of the celebrity endorsements. That revenue needed to be replaced in 2026…along with all of the celebrity endorsements, so we got betting apps. Neither the NFL nor the broadcasters seem to much care as long as everyone gets his/her equitable share of the loot from the working class and that some 800 number in a mini font exists at the bottom of the ads for those that might have a gambling problem.
Let’s brainstorm new and creative ways to separate people from their hard earned money. Everything is the same, only slightly different.
In a significant sense, professional golf is a far more transparent about how it directs ads to its upper middle class audience.
The easiest ways to separate people from their money is by exploiting the most common vices, which is why such business was the kind of thing best handled by "the mob" as cultural institution that one hopes doesn't get into violent turf wars too often: sex (pornography and prostitution but also places like night clubs and motels that, back in the day, facilitated adultery and fornication), drugs (including alcohol) "rock and roll" (see night-clubs above) and gambling of all kinds (and the way most people do speculation on stocks, land, crypto, etc. is often hard to distinguish from casino gambling). The mob's best minds like Siegel and Lansky alwasy knew that the real money to be had was from going "legit" and mainstream like any huge coroporation (but with special consideration to managing competiting and maintaining a lock on the market share in new ways that didn't mean regular shoot-outs.) Today, we are well on our way to seeing the vice-legalization-and-normalization process run to completion, and well, we are just starting to get what we deserve, good and hard.
Actually, I left out one important vice industry to mob used to cater to but which, so far, thanfully, no one has proposed to liberalization, which was what you might call the "assault sector" of the economy, paying at the very least to threaten and intimidate, sometimes just to seriously hurt or injure, and occassionally just to kill some target as hit men. I think this one will stay in Pandora's Box, but you never know, maybe the next version of "Fan Duel" will be meant much more literally!
My wife taught me long ago to always look to the third world like her native Viet Nam for the best practices at revenge. Sulfuric acid and its permanent facial deforming qualities will probably always be a better substitute to death itself.
I can’t wait for Arnold to visit the comments. What started out as a simple post on a remembrance of a somewhat romantic walk throughout downtown Austin quickly degenerated into something else he probably never imagined. 🤣
In Northern Virgina there was a very large detest for data centers and the new governor seems to share the sentiment. Every campaign add I saw from the democrat side attacked data centers.
I figure the usual suspects against the datacenters are gonna just hand West Virginia a few dozen billion dollars of investment and energy projects that would otherwise have been built in NoVA. Incidental interstate econonic development redistribution initiative. West Virginia, "Say, anti-datacenter Virginians, anything we can do to help? Would you like a bunch of zero marginal product workers with not much to do all day and available for rent-a-protester day work, because, well, I think we can arrange for busing as many of them to you as you care to pay for! Heck, we might just pay for it ourselves, in the spirit of neighborliness! And if you'd like to keep those people in Virginia, just let us know, please, really, let us know."
I have been to no other presidential library except the George HW Bush one, and I think that the LBJ library did a terrific job of showcasing the red boxes of presidential files, part of the building essentially, unless they’ve changed it.
Find Lady Bird’s desk, a lovely tangerine formica.
I hope they still have the animatronic LBJ. A little niece of mine shushed people coming in: “The President is speaking.”
San Antonio Native (and current resident). The pace of Texas Construction was lethargic in the 80s-90s. (My grandfather once joked that he'd wished he'd gone into road construction so he could get paid for doing nothing). But at some point (when I was away for fifteen years) it improved. They are doing a 7 year project on a highway a mile from my house, but you can see changes month over month .... (clearing rocks, flattening, widening, paving, etc, slowly moving down the highway). It's not slow, just huge. For example, the overpass they built is bigger than one that took ~15 years by itself to do when I was a child, but was just a small part and done in a few years (along with a second overpass at the other end).
I'm not sure what changed to speed things up, but it did. I used to go up to Austin twice/month for work a few years ago and could see the changes on I-35 during most trips.
In order to reliably compete in the large states, Republicans need to create a comparable system of job banks, transfers, and kickbacks. For AI the answer could be redundant domestic data centers, compliance jobs, and other jobs ostensibly related to national security. John Robb has suggested a data bill of rights that provides cash dividends to social media users based on use of their private data and likenesses. I don't think the proposal makes that much sense in the abstract but it could be an OK mechanism for maintaining political support.
On the construction zone observation, this tracks my experiencing during a brief visit to Texas. It just feels like things are happening there. It felt dynamic and relatively permissionless (emphasis on the relatively of course). Like you were watching creative destruction unfold in real time.
The lady troll is less a sign of Austin weirdness, than its opposite. One of those “city now wealthy enough to purchase the (exact) same sort of ‘whimsical’ public art that other cities do”. It’s banal globalism, however delightful you may find it.
A few years ago in the same park, a European artist built woven vegetation huts, which at least had the ancillary effect of getting some invasive Asian ligustrum (privet) cleared.
Both are at least more impressive than the “light artist” who (literally) threw a bunch of LED lights on the ground at Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and called it art, complete with merch tent and expensive drinks; repeat in umpteen other cities.
30 years ago I attended a city meeting (we didn’t yet call it a charette) about Shoal Creek, and the advisability of reducing impervious cover to mitigate the massive runoff that produces on occasion, dangerous flooding in that particular creek.
There were then - and are more now - useless parking lots and near-defunct shopping centers.
Nothing came of it. Think how far the money would have gone then!
But of course, nothing so good as that troll, expressive of our Scandinavian heritage.
Asian lingustrum (privet) is invasive? It was used for hedges (smelling wonderful in June) near my grandparents place in Maryland and here in eastern Massachusetts. I've never seen it spread outside of a hedge. And as long as the hedge is trimmed back every few years, the hedge itself doesn't spread.
It is the number one invasive here in any riparian or mesic area; in East Texas perhaps rivaled only by tallow.
It becomes a big tree here.
Should AK walk along the Barton Creek greenbelt, it is the number one plant he will see in terms of biomass. It flowers multiple times a year.
*AI: Chinese privet covers 2.5 - 3 million acres of Southern forest, including much of East Texas forest.
(That remaining which has not been flooded by the government, or become houses.)
And of course, there are 3 and maybe four kinds - the Japanese privet chokes urban waterways especially, and Austin enjoys a little leaf variety that forms thickets impossible to uproot.
Together these ligustrums obey the victim that Asia is the source of superinvasives that will eventually eliminate the native understory.
And they are the answer to the question why does Texas look like the setting for a jungle combat movie?
Maybe the MTA can come take a look at real construction headway and get motivated? Or perhaps the incentives for the MTA don't precisely match up with accomplishment...
Re: "By the end of this year, if you do not oppose AI then they will take away your Progressive movement membership card."
Compare Nicholas Bloom & Christos Makridis, "The Politics of AI" (NBER Working Paper 34813, February 2026), at the link below:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w34813
Here is the abstract:
"Using new data from the Gallup Workforce Panel, we document a persistent partisan gap in self-reported AI use at work: Democrats are consistently more likely than Republicans to report frequent use. In 2025:Q4, for example, 27.8% of Democrats report using AI weekly or daily, compared with 22.5% of Republicans. Democrats also report deeper task-level integration, using AI in 16% more work activities than Republicans. Consistent with this, Democrats are employed in occupations with higher predicted AI exposure based on task-content measures and report larger perceived differences in AI-related job displacement risk. However, in regression models the partisan gap in AI use disappears once we control for education, industry, and occupation, indicating that observed differences primarily reflect compositional variation rather than political affiliation per se."
From the text:
"Put differently, partisan differences in exposure primarily reflect sorting into industries with higher predicted LLM exposure rather than within industry exposure differences."
It remains to be seen whether greater exposure of progressives (than of conservatives) to AI on the job will translate into fear or, instead, into opportunity.
However that may be, my intuition is that the poltics and rhetoric of AI will take on a life of their own, rather than simply tracking self-interest at the workplace.
Progressive laptop workers will both use AI a lot more, and also support making it a lot more expensive by making it hard, slow, and expensive to build datacenters and supporting electrical capacity and other infrastructure. They will also rarely see a new proposed regulation of AI they don't like, not just raising costs, but making the AI output less effective and less trustworthy. AI-using firms will be strongly tempted to develop and keep proprietary AI capabilities in-house because of concerns of how the government will regulate the big players, and what it might force them to monitor and divulge.
Online sports betting got out of control really fast, and this is just the beginning. I was recently at a high school track events, and if they weren't racing, all the senior boys above 18 (and I suspect many below) were busy intensely socializing on the subject of their simultaneous feeding of sports betting addictions via their smartphones. I haven't seen anything like that outside Northeast Asia frantic gambling dens or descriptions or works of entertainment from "the past is a foreign country" old days of betting-obsessed America (think "Guys and Dolls" on steroirds). I thought the age restriction would have been 21 like it is now for cigarettes, and it is in most states, but when I looked it up it turned out that Washington DC allows it at 18 and I think Maryland did too until recently. We are gonna regret this one for sure.
Peak crypto at the Super Bowl was 2022…along with all of the celebrity endorsements. That revenue needed to be replaced in 2026…along with all of the celebrity endorsements, so we got betting apps. Neither the NFL nor the broadcasters seem to much care as long as everyone gets his/her equitable share of the loot from the working class and that some 800 number in a mini font exists at the bottom of the ads for those that might have a gambling problem.
Let’s brainstorm new and creative ways to separate people from their hard earned money. Everything is the same, only slightly different.
In a significant sense, professional golf is a far more transparent about how it directs ads to its upper middle class audience.
The easiest ways to separate people from their money is by exploiting the most common vices, which is why such business was the kind of thing best handled by "the mob" as cultural institution that one hopes doesn't get into violent turf wars too often: sex (pornography and prostitution but also places like night clubs and motels that, back in the day, facilitated adultery and fornication), drugs (including alcohol) "rock and roll" (see night-clubs above) and gambling of all kinds (and the way most people do speculation on stocks, land, crypto, etc. is often hard to distinguish from casino gambling). The mob's best minds like Siegel and Lansky alwasy knew that the real money to be had was from going "legit" and mainstream like any huge coroporation (but with special consideration to managing competiting and maintaining a lock on the market share in new ways that didn't mean regular shoot-outs.) Today, we are well on our way to seeing the vice-legalization-and-normalization process run to completion, and well, we are just starting to get what we deserve, good and hard.
Actually, I left out one important vice industry to mob used to cater to but which, so far, thanfully, no one has proposed to liberalization, which was what you might call the "assault sector" of the economy, paying at the very least to threaten and intimidate, sometimes just to seriously hurt or injure, and occassionally just to kill some target as hit men. I think this one will stay in Pandora's Box, but you never know, maybe the next version of "Fan Duel" will be meant much more literally!
My wife taught me long ago to always look to the third world like her native Viet Nam for the best practices at revenge. Sulfuric acid and its permanent facial deforming qualities will probably always be a better substitute to death itself.
https://e.vnexpress.net/news/travel-life/vietnam-s-brutal-acid-attack-epidemic-3685509.html
Yeah, better to not get anywhere near opening the door to "Disfiguration Dash" as the next deregulated online service provider.
I can’t wait for Arnold to visit the comments. What started out as a simple post on a remembrance of a somewhat romantic walk throughout downtown Austin quickly degenerated into something else he probably never imagined. 🤣
In Northern Virgina there was a very large detest for data centers and the new governor seems to share the sentiment. Every campaign add I saw from the democrat side attacked data centers.
I figure the usual suspects against the datacenters are gonna just hand West Virginia a few dozen billion dollars of investment and energy projects that would otherwise have been built in NoVA. Incidental interstate econonic development redistribution initiative. West Virginia, "Say, anti-datacenter Virginians, anything we can do to help? Would you like a bunch of zero marginal product workers with not much to do all day and available for rent-a-protester day work, because, well, I think we can arrange for busing as many of them to you as you care to pay for! Heck, we might just pay for it ourselves, in the spirit of neighborliness! And if you'd like to keep those people in Virginia, just let us know, please, really, let us know."
The toe of WV is booming.
I have been to no other presidential library except the George HW Bush one, and I think that the LBJ library did a terrific job of showcasing the red boxes of presidential files, part of the building essentially, unless they’ve changed it.
Find Lady Bird’s desk, a lovely tangerine formica.
I hope they still have the animatronic LBJ. A little niece of mine shushed people coming in: “The President is speaking.”
“So far, my wife and I have attended two music concerts. At each one..”
Kenny Wayne Shepherd at Austin City Limits on 2/20. He never preaches because his guitar always does it for him.
https://youtu.be/j526vcUcSJw?si=52Lm0bH-iop8ndtL
Thanks for the photo. He gives me further link to you. Enjoy how you address problems without being .judgy”.
San Antonio Native (and current resident). The pace of Texas Construction was lethargic in the 80s-90s. (My grandfather once joked that he'd wished he'd gone into road construction so he could get paid for doing nothing). But at some point (when I was away for fifteen years) it improved. They are doing a 7 year project on a highway a mile from my house, but you can see changes month over month .... (clearing rocks, flattening, widening, paving, etc, slowly moving down the highway). It's not slow, just huge. For example, the overpass they built is bigger than one that took ~15 years by itself to do when I was a child, but was just a small part and done in a few years (along with a second overpass at the other end).
I'm not sure what changed to speed things up, but it did. I used to go up to Austin twice/month for work a few years ago and could see the changes on I-35 during most trips.
In order to reliably compete in the large states, Republicans need to create a comparable system of job banks, transfers, and kickbacks. For AI the answer could be redundant domestic data centers, compliance jobs, and other jobs ostensibly related to national security. John Robb has suggested a data bill of rights that provides cash dividends to social media users based on use of their private data and likenesses. I don't think the proposal makes that much sense in the abstract but it could be an OK mechanism for maintaining political support.
What are the betting odds that Arnold will try Texas BBQ during his stay? And, will he order his brisket wet or lean?
This comment is sponsored by FanDuel. Bet $5, get $300 in bonus bets using code “have a nice day!”
On the construction zone observation, this tracks my experiencing during a brief visit to Texas. It just feels like things are happening there. It felt dynamic and relatively permissionless (emphasis on the relatively of course). Like you were watching creative destruction unfold in real time.
The lady troll is less a sign of Austin weirdness, than its opposite. One of those “city now wealthy enough to purchase the (exact) same sort of ‘whimsical’ public art that other cities do”. It’s banal globalism, however delightful you may find it.
A few years ago in the same park, a European artist built woven vegetation huts, which at least had the ancillary effect of getting some invasive Asian ligustrum (privet) cleared.
Both are at least more impressive than the “light artist” who (literally) threw a bunch of LED lights on the ground at Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and called it art, complete with merch tent and expensive drinks; repeat in umpteen other cities.
30 years ago I attended a city meeting (we didn’t yet call it a charette) about Shoal Creek, and the advisability of reducing impervious cover to mitigate the massive runoff that produces on occasion, dangerous flooding in that particular creek.
There were then - and are more now - useless parking lots and near-defunct shopping centers.
Nothing came of it. Think how far the money would have gone then!
But of course, nothing so good as that troll, expressive of our Scandinavian heritage.
Asian lingustrum (privet) is invasive? It was used for hedges (smelling wonderful in June) near my grandparents place in Maryland and here in eastern Massachusetts. I've never seen it spread outside of a hedge. And as long as the hedge is trimmed back every few years, the hedge itself doesn't spread.
It is the number one invasive here in any riparian or mesic area; in East Texas perhaps rivaled only by tallow.
It becomes a big tree here.
Should AK walk along the Barton Creek greenbelt, it is the number one plant he will see in terms of biomass. It flowers multiple times a year.
*AI: Chinese privet covers 2.5 - 3 million acres of Southern forest, including much of East Texas forest.
(That remaining which has not been flooded by the government, or become houses.)
And of course, there are 3 and maybe four kinds - the Japanese privet chokes urban waterways especially, and Austin enjoys a little leaf variety that forms thickets impossible to uproot.
Together these ligustrums obey the victim that Asia is the source of superinvasives that will eventually eliminate the native understory.
And they are the answer to the question why does Texas look like the setting for a jungle combat movie?
Hmmm. The privet around here only flowers once a year, in late June/early July.
Maybe the MTA can come take a look at real construction headway and get motivated? Or perhaps the incentives for the MTA don't precisely match up with accomplishment...