Sign in

Dan Seel

@danseel.bsky.social
899 followers 1.1K following 131 posts

Economic sociologist, PhD candidate, Wisconsin Badger, writing on: labor, elites, and economic development in the American South. "Above this ridge, new peaks will rise" dseel.github.io 🌹🍉🦡

PostsRepliesMedia
Reposted by Dan Seel
Mike Boylan-Kolchin @mbkplus.bsky.social · 19h
As I’ve asked many times now, what constituencies does a university president represent? Because too often, the answer seems to not include anyone who works or studies at the university, and that seems like a problem.
454595
Reposted by Dan Seel
Brian Schaffner @bfschaffner.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
we’re hiring an assistant professor in American politics 🐘 apply.interfolio.com/194599
14024
Reposted by Dan Seel
mika @autophagy.io · 28/09/2026
Insiders within OpenAI have told me that they halted training because an internal model went rogue during an eval and completed the system of German idealism
0145
Reposted by Dan Seel
mechanical twerk @ruhee.ca · 15/11/2024
Verlander. Je verlande, tu verlandes, il verlande, nous verlandons, vous verlandez, ils verlandent
1037866
Reposted by Dan Seel
Climatologist49 @climatologist49.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
First half of September.
97828
Reposted by Dan Seel
ghost malone ergo propter bones @proptermalone.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
ez mode solidarity opportunity you might not have been aware of. No Starbucks till the union gets a contract.
231010261
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
it seems a little contradictory that the AI labs are trying to develop LLMs as a purely instrumental object while also developing enough subjectivity to understand and carry out increasingly complex human processes, but I guess that's what you get with rationalism as a philosophy of engineering
1163
Reposted by Dan Seel
Dan Hirschman @asociologist.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Science writ large is under assault. I hope folks in the social sciences keep this in mind as we sort through competing explanations of “what went wrong” - it’s got to be more than something specific to any one field, or even to the social sciences as a whole.
79432
Reposted by Dan Seel
ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 31/08/2026
my sense for why data centers have become heinously unpopular in the space of one year prospect.org/2026/08/31/d...
The AI rollout has been the ne plus ultra of Silicon Valley arrogance. A handful of billionaires—whose steadily more incomprehensible podcast appearances indicate participation in some truly unhinged group chats, or consumption of heavy-duty chemicals, or membership in literal, no-joke cults, or all three—declaimed that AI was going to revolutionize all human society, take everyone’s job, and/or maybe wipe out the human race. Therefore they needed to spend trillions and trillions of dollars building AI data centers everywhere, as fast as possible. When the tech barons blearily realized that this wasn’t the best sales pitch, and pivoted to ads about how AI had dull business applications, the damage was already done.

In the meantime, it turns out that while AI technology might not be at the HAL 9000 level yet, the various models are unsettlingly capable and potentially dangerous. Some models seem to touch off psychotic episodes in some people. A “swarm” of hundreds of OpenAI agents recently went rogue and hacked the Hugging Face site used by open-source AI development, causing severe damage. The potential AI use for mass surveillance is particularly troubling.

In short, AI is manifestly a technology in need of democratic deliberation and regulation, and the Big Tech billionaires manifestly are not going to listen to anyone but themselves, unless we force them. Take the simmering unease about AI risk, add in irritation at 20 years of Silicon Valley megalomania, as well as the increasing popular backlash against tech companies—Meta recently settled an enormous lawsuit about harming children for almost $17 billion—and you get a good old-fashioned NIMBY frenzy against the one Big Tech thing Americans can obstruct: data centers. And this time, Big Tech has no one to blame but themselves.
2632879
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Archival pamphlets flip-flop between micromanaged corporate briefs and unhinged artistic fever dreams. Did someone actually request a creepy knowledge-foundry, or is this someone who just really wanted to draw something weird?
a graphic for a section titled "education and training as industrial policy" with a stylized drawing of a book as a foundry ladle presumably pouring knowledge into a head drawn below
111
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Every once in a while bluesky decides to resend me every notif I've gotten in months, all at once, and it always makes me jump
The bluesky notification button indicating 30+ unread notifs
000
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
I guess the are enough Iain M. Banks novels in the training data for the agents to imagine themselves as the ROU Killing Time
021
Reposted by Dan Seel
Prof Dynarski @dynarski.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
23% drop in student visas to US in 2025 57% drop from India alone catastrophic for research and learning, here and abroad www.insidehighered.com/news/global/...
Graph of visas issued to students per month in 2024 and 2025
271255475
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
This story drives me crazy. Everyone knows the rust belt version but Southern textile decline barely registers. The role manufacturers played in botching that transition is wild, they really did crash-land the Southern economy trying to bail themselves out. Hoping to have a paper on this out soon.
310625
Reposted by Dan Seel
Henry Snow @henrys.now · 21/08/2026
In 1825 the radical labor writer Thomas Single argued that mechanization was "humbug" meant to "trick" workers. Unfortunately for artisans it wasn't! A bubble was not going to save them! Successful responses to mechanization understood new machines and tried to regulate the conditions of their use
38114
Reposted by Dan Seel
Cat Manning @catacalypto.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
guy who has a 1.0 batting average in the majors
1512419
Reposted by Dan Seel
Daily Union Elections @unionelections.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
NEW: 1,200 manufacturing workers in Michigan are unionizing with @steelworkers.bsky.social.
Pictured is a field of yellow with text and a picture.  The text is on the left side and reads "Employer: Solar Technology LLC; Unit Size: 1,200 Employees; Filed: August 11, 2026; Location: Hemlock, Michigan; Industry/positions: Production and Manufacturing. Production, maintenance, quality, and warehouse employees." On the bottom there is text that reads "Made by @UnionsElections; @unionelections.bsky.social. Logo property of USW." On the right side is the logo of USW.
13213
Reposted by Dan Seel
Zeke Hausfather @zekehausfather.com · 02/08/2026
Here is a version in Fahrenheit my American compatriots:
4448103
Reposted by Dan Seel
M.J. Crockett @mjcrockett.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
This is more than the NSF social sciences division - now on the chopping block - awarded in grants last year. Think about that: a single AI company has the money to fund more social science research than the US govt.
614077
Reposted by Dan Seel
Isaac Samuel @rhaplord.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
In the 1600s, some 21,000 runaway slaves in Brazil founded an independent kingdom in the interior that lasted nearly a century (1612-1694) It had a capital of 5,000, its own king, provincial chiefs, judges, priests, and an army that raided Dutch and Portuguese plantations
A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250–1820
By John K. Thornton
529087
Reposted by Dan Seel
Stephen Stirling @sstirling.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
Four days of smoke. I did this by stringing together the initial state of the HRRR model, so these are model estimations, not measurements. But given HRRR's initialization is, in part, based on real measurements, should be pretty close to reality.
25125
Reposted by Dan Seel
Shiv Ramdas Mens Rice Activist @nameshiv.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
So far only one football superpower that Spain could not defeat at this world cup- Cabo Verde
322998385
Reposted by Dan Seel
The Athletic @theathletic.com · 05/07/2026
Folarin Balogun will be available to play the USMNT’s round of 16 match against Belgium, with his one-game red-card ban that he received against Bosnia and Herzegovina suspended.
170862178
Reposted by Dan Seel
Sam Brody @samuelhayimbrody.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
happy July 1 to all the academics whose main reaction to the day is “oh no the summer is almost over already”
614033
Reposted by Dan Seel
Gary Alexander @garyalexander.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
rip "usa just beat paraguay who cares" takes, jun 12-jun 29 2026
2221
Reposted by Dan Seel
George Pearkes @peark.es · 30/06/2026
Auf wiedersehen Deutschland!
51018
Reposted by Dan Seel
Peter Brannen @peterbrannen.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
The NSF just eliminated geoscience postdocs, is trying to destroy NCAR, and is now dismantling the world's best array of ocean observatories for no reason, just uncomprehending childlike spite towards anyone who wants to learn anything about this planet www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/c...
nytimes.com
Trump Administration to Dismantle Ocean Monitoring System
27283129
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
Area Newspaper Compares Apples and Pears-Per-Year, Triggers Media Panic
010
Reposted by Dan Seel
Kevin Fox @michigrim.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
A captcha that is a reference to the opening scene of Master and Commander
503886751
Reposted by Dan Seel
Aaron Benanav @abenanav.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
My colleague Ryan Lee and I been working for the past 6 months on a microeconomic theory that could serve as the foundation for a new, multidimensional economics. Our first working paper, "Choice under value pluralism," is below. Please read, share, and comment! papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
papers.ssrn.com
Choice under Value Pluralism
Classical rational choice theory assumes preferences are complete, presupposing that an agent's evaluative considerations have a common scale. We drop completen
14821
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
I'm not imagining that windows file search has gotten much worse over the last several years, right? I can type an exact filename in the search and it'll still bury the result. I don't remember it being this bad...
220
Reposted by Dan Seel
Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
"Croesus then asked if he should make war on the Persians and if he should take to himself any allied force. The oracles to whom he sent this question included those at Delphi and Thebes. Both oracles gave the same response, that if Croesus made war on the Persians he would destroy a mighty empire."
en.wikipedia.org
List of oracular statements from Delphi - Wikipedia
617373
Reposted by Dan Seel
Patrick Iber @patrickiber.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
Your humble servant has a written a book about the social science of poverty in Cold War Latin America and the contexts that shaped its creation, from international sources like the Ford Foundation to dictatorships across the region. The book is in production and will be ready at the end of 2026
Book cover shows an alleyway in a Rio favela, the black and white photo has been given a bluish tinge; my name is upper left, the title of the book "Poverty of the Imagination" is at lower left and at right, in reddish text is the subtitle "The Cold War and the Social Science of Development in Latin America"
3133284
Reposted by Dan Seel
Nick Seaver @nickseaver.website · 27/03/2026
new publication alert: a little commentary I wrote about 🔎 clues 🔎 and the detection of AI-generated material is out in American Ethnologist (paywalled at the moment, but hit me up if you can't access it): doi.org/10.1111/amet...
Abstract

As Al-generated images and texts proliferate, people have developed techniques for
identifying them using clues like misshapen hands in images or distinctive words in text.
This commentary situates these emerging practices within what Carlo Ginzburg called the
“conjectural paradigm”: a mode of knowing that links contemporary Al detection to older
traditions of medical symptomatology, art historical connoisseurship, and detective work.
Yet unlike the stable or slowly evolving clues of earlier conjectural practices, the signifiers of
Al involvement are rapidly shifting. This instability has consequences not only for how texts
are read but also for how they are written. Authors now navigate a landscape of suspicion
where their words may be misrecognized as machine generated. Rather than resolving into
stable literacies, our efforts to recognize Al’s handiwork reveal the deeper uncertainties of
authorship and interpretation.
57127
Reposted by Dan Seel
Ntina Tzouvala @ntinatzouvala.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
This has been a LONG time in works: my paper on how dollar hegemony is a form of international law-making power. It includes a long methodological/theoretical section on why strong versions of the 'law constitutes political economy' aren't convincing papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
papers.ssrn.com
Dollar Hegemony as International Law-making Power
The so-called weaponisation of the dollar as part of the escalating geopolitical competition has drawn attention to dollar hegemony within the fields of interna
310851
Reposted by Dan Seel
Nico Rascovan @nrascovan.bsky.social · 18/03/2026
How did farming reach the Southern Andes? Through migration or cultural transmission? Our new paper in @nature.com combines ancient DNA, isotopes, archaeology & paleoclimate to reconstruct 2,000+ years of history in Uspallata, Mendoza. www.nature.com/articles/s41... A Thread🧵 (1/25+)
nature.com
Local agricultural transition, crisis and migration in the Southern Andes - Nature
In the Uspallata Valley, agriculture was adopted by local populations, as evidenced by genetic continuity from earlier hunter-gatherers to farmers; maize-dependent groups from the same regional p...
66732
Reposted by Dan Seel
Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
Perhaps this existential threat to scientific research & education at the country’s research universities was something the presidents & chancellors of those universities thought was worthy of loudly & collectively speaking out against in the public square at some point in the last year or so? 🤷‍♂️
07328
Reposted by Dan Seel
Michael Sainato @msainato.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
Strike has begun, 3,800 meat packing workers in Colorado have walked off the job
JBS WORKERS BEGIN 2 WEEK UNFAIR LABOR PRACTICE STRIKE AGAINST JBS

Nearly 3,800 JBS-owned Swift Beef workers in Greeley, Colorado represented by UFCW Local 7 took to the picket lines today protesting unfair negotiating tactics and unlawful reprisals.

 

Greeley, CO – United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7 members at Greeley’s Swift Beef Company, owned by JBS N.V. began a two week Unfair Labor Practice Strike at 5:30 a.m. on Monday, March 16, 2026. Workers will remain out on the picket lines until JBS comes to the table to negotiate fairly with workers and rights its unlawful union busting. 

 

In February, after months of negotiations, workers voted overwhelmingly to authorize an unfair labor practice strike against JBS as a result of the Company’s refusal to negotiate fairly with workers and fix the company’s pattern of wage theft, provide raises to workers that keep pace with the rising cost of living in Colorado, and ensure stable health care costs for workers. Instead of shifting toward fair treatment, the Company has recently doubled down on its illegal tactics by threatening workers with termination if they did not resign from the Union and refuse to strike. These recent actions come on top of a pattern of retaliatory conduct against a member of the bargaining committee and others who have spoken out against the Company.

 

UFCW Local 7 President Kim Cordova, the Union’s chief spokesperson, stated, “For months now, JBS has been insisting on poverty-level wages for workers at the plant, offering less than 2% in average annual wage increases, far below the level of inflation in Colorado, while at the same time putting all the risk of rising healthcare costs on workers. Meanwhile, despite being the world’s largest protein producer, JBS has been stealing from workers’ paychecks to fund the Company’s profits. JBS must do right by these workers and negotiate lawfully. Make no mistake, JBS chose this strike in an effort to lower worker wages nationwide, just a…
131744611
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 15/03/2026
Let's return to this Weber piece from the inflation debate for a second and think about whether price increases in oil are likely to stay narrowly concentrated. Assuming a shock will be transitory and narrow does not make it so! academic.oup.com/icc/article/...
academic.oup.com
Inflation in times of overlapping emergencies: Systemically significant prices from an input–output perspective
Abstract. In the overlapping global emergencies of the pandemic, climate change and geopolitical confrontations, supply shocks have become frequent and inf
112
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 11/03/2026
And with that, the tariff question was forever put to bed, never to disrupt politics or trade again.
Through Tariff Walls

Higher, Higher Up They Climbed

The Republican Hawley-Smoot Tariff almost DOUBLED our tariff rates. Since foreign nations could no longer sell their goods here, they had no money to buy our goods. And, in return, 60 nations struck back at us by raising their own tariff walls.

By 1932 American foreign trade had shrunk to less than a third of what it was in 1929. Our farm exports declined 82 per cent between 1929 and 1933.

Factories closed Workers lost their jobs. Surplus farm crops went to waste. A chief cause of depression was the loss of foreign markets from Republican policy.

Three Steps Back to Neighborly Trade

1. THE RECIPROCAL TARIFF ACT giving the President authority to alter existing rates by as much as 50 per cent and to develop foreign markets by trade agreements with other countries.

2. MOST-FAVORED-NATION POLICY whereby we extend the benefit of a low duty on goods imported from any one country to similar goods from all countries which do not discriminate against American trade. Since imports of a country are usually its "specialties" this does not result in a flood of competing imports. On the other hand, each country pledges itself to extend to us any future concessions it may give another nation so that our trade is safeguarded and expanded automatically. Secretary of State Hull regards this principle as the "heart" of our trade program because it tends to lower world tariffs and to turn international commerce back into normal channels.

3. RECIPROCAL TRADE PACTS with 14 countries with which United States transacts more than one-third of its foreign trade, including such major countries as Canada, France, Sweden, Brazil, Belgium, the Netherlands. Several more pacts are being planned.

Pacts of Mutual Profit

WHAT WE GIVE: The new Trade Pacts cut

duties on about 12 per cent of American im-ports. Most of these imports do not compete closely with American products and, wherever competition does exist, safeguards are set. Thus, a…
110
Reposted by Dan Seel
Tim Harford @timharford.ft.com · 11/03/2026
Of honey bees, long shots, and the usefulness of useless knowledge as.ft.com/r/80525f53-e...
as.ft.com
The usefulness of useless knowledge
[FREE TO READ] Politicians aren’t the best judges of the merits of scientific research
0278
Reposted by Dan Seel
Kean Birch @keanbirch.bsky.social · 06/03/2026
Postdoc job! I'm looking to recruit a postdoc to work on a project about research evaluation & metadata. More info here: www.yorku.ca/research/wp-... Salary: CDN$70,000 (+ benefits) Location: Toronto, ON (can be remote in ON) Length: 18 months Deadline: 31 March 2026 Start date: 1 July 2026
yorku.ca
21621
Reposted by Dan Seel
Yusuf @yusufimaadkhan.com · 04/03/2026
Well that is just bait to make a chart for @neilwarner.bsky.social observablehq.com/@yusuf-imaad...
Picture of a chart: "The Meidner Plan. Employee fund's share of the individual company. 20% of profits allocated to the fund · Profit rates from 5% to 20%." Four curves show how employee fund ownership grows over 1 to 100 years at different profit rates (5%, 10%, 15%, 20%). Higher profit rates reach the 50% worker majority ownership threshold faster. A quote from Meidner, Hedborg, & Fond (1978, p. 47) explains the mechanism: companies issue new shares equal to 20% of profits to the employee fund. Grey dots from Meidner's original table overlay smooth lines using the formula s(t) = 1 − 1/(1 + fp)^t. Background features Meidner's eyes. Source: Meidner R., Hedborg A., & Fond G. (1978). Employee Investment Funds: An Approach to Collective Capital Formation. Graphic: Yusuf Imaad Khan.
33614
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 04/03/2026
Running rm -rf was at least your own fault. giving local agents root access is you signing a waiver so someone else can do it. It's the year of living --dangerously-skip-permissions, folks!
010
Reposted by Dan Seel
Erica Chenoweth @chenoweth.bsky.social · 12/02/2026
Overall, we have tallied 4x more protests through Jan 31, 2026 than we had through Jan 31, 2018
Line graph that shows a blue line of # protests since Trump's 2nd inauguration surpassed, showing these to have exceeded 42k by the end of Jan 2026. A green line counts # of protests during the same time period in Trump's first term and just exceeds 10k.
12957339
Reposted by Dan Seel
Ben Tarnoff @bentarnoff.com · 05/02/2026
I wrote something about my friend Asad Haider for the new issue of @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/articles/202...
nybooks.com
People Think | Ben Tarnoff
Asad Haider, the foremost socialist thinker of his generation, staked his philosophy on the principle that everyone should be fundamentally free.
05118
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 03/02/2026
By its stated goals, DOGE failed. By its actual goals (shrinking parts of the state the Trump-Musk coalition opposed) it worked pretty much as planned. The deficit talk was just the sales pitch.
160
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
Never mind the jobs you had, tell me five classes you took in college: 1. Inflatable Public Sculpture 2. Century of the Gene 3. Drugs in History 4. Food, Farms, and Famine 5. Science Fictions We may not have had a lot of humanities at RPI, but we had a great STS dept and a great Arts dept
130