iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

90% of the determinant of a doughnut’s quality is “is it hot?” and 10% is everything else

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

claiming that Tompkins County is part of the Southern Tier will get you in a fight here

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

On the academic front, I'm now a visiting scholar at Cornell, so I will be keeping one foot in the history department here. And of course, NIMBY NATION: The War on Growth That Created Our Housing Crisis and Remade American Politics is still due out from Bloomsbury in 2027

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I am excited to return to the think tank world, particularly through this one-of-a-kind ACLS program which creates opportunities for recent PhDs in the social sciences and humanities to work for nonprofit organizations. Learn more about it here: www.acls.org/programs/lea...

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Delighted to announce I have started a new role as @acls1919.bsky.social Leading Edge Fellow and Manager of Academic Engagement and Impact at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Did you know: cities used to have balloons that would just follow children to school, until General Motors bought all the balloons and scrapped them

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

It's a legal requirement in several states that students at the state universities have to take a state history class

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

My impression is the general trend is toward reducing core requirements and especially humanities-related core requirements so at a lot of schools now it's entirely possible to not take any history classes

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

"San Antonio? I don't think there's a Cheeseboard Pizza there."

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Curry truly a Bay Area type of guy: moved there after college and under no circumstances will he ever leave

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

but that was not really about inflation

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

labor government in the UK did it in '67 and it was...not popular

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I remember those winter '98 gas prices. Got down to 89 cents where I lived.

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

it is quite fascinating how nepo baby has just come to mean "comes from money" when much of what has traditionally been called nepotism is rather class-agnostic

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

just buy amazon gift cards worth whatever their balance is

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

"look, back then a car only cost $2,000!" "yes but you see measured by labor-hours that was actually quite a bit m—" "yes, but $2,000! that's a really small number. today it's a bigger number."

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

something you realize if you spend any time in online comment sections is a substantial number of people are completely unable to conceptualize historical changes in purchasing power

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

“No I said ‘Union Bomber.’ Union. U-N-I—yes I know I know.”

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

can't believe the car that runs on millions of tiny explosions transmitting energy through a complex series of oily metal parts doesn't last as long as the one that's four wheels attached to a battery

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

“How can I best align my business with the interests of the people who would pay money to see my business continue to exist” is not a bad heuristic in terms of getting rid of people who just want to harass you

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

The only thing I’ll say about the Globe story is you encounter a lot of businesses in Ithaca that don’t seem particularly interested in making money and more often than not they convince you that the profit motive is not the worst thing in the world

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

There are funds that do this, if you want to pay a banker a modest fee to do it for you. Which I think gets back to the distinction between what is optimal for an extremely attentive investor and what is optimal for everyone else.

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Ah but that's why I said "over the long term." I agree that when specific anticipated needs for cash arise, bond funds can stop making sense.

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

"Bond funds are functionally equivalent to laddering over the long term." Do you disagree with this statement?

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

It would be less of a problem if it were truly US equities and not like a dozen tech growth stocks

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I do think there is a question as to whether BND is an overly conservative fund for its purpose. There is probably yield one could chase through other funds.

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I think the old aphorism applies here that time in the market beats timing the market, unless you are paid to time the market, and even then you will sometimes be wrong. Bonds outperform the money markets over the long term. For 99% of regular investors that is the only thing that matters.

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

This makes no sense to me. If you only buy into a bond fund when rates are going down, you're going to lose money relative to if you had just been buying new shares the entire time. And 99% of people don't want to rebalance their 401k every time there's a rate change!

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Well, I don't disagree, but the purpose is it's annoying to ladder bonds yourself for 40 years and a well designed bond fund does that for you. Whether that's "fundamental" I guess is a matter of opinion.

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

past results do not predict future results!

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Isn't the real point of comparison though a chart that approximates one's return having laddered regular bonds since 2020?

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

TIL the NYU Department of Politics is endowed by the Wilf family who are best known for owning the Minnesota Vikings, which leads me to conclude the Wilfs just like giving money to purple things?

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Notably neither of the footnotes on this paragraph says this

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I think it comes from a desire to explain why Oklahoma has a weird panhandle, but of course no one in 1850 knew that it would be a panhandle one day

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

One of the weirder internet myths is that the Oklahoma panhandle exists because Texas ceded it in order to keep slavery legal, and it's weird because it requires knowing several different things about the sectional crisis but kind of mashing them together incorrectly

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

My mom bought a GE fridge last year and I had to break the news that it's just a logo, nothing about the fridge has anything to do with the company that in her mind is GE, which just makes jet engines now.

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I have the same esteem for Zojirushi as a brand that our parents' generation once had for General Electric

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

the transplants contain potassium benzoate

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

you just don't get it. transplants are bad, unless they are immigrants in which case they are good, unless they work for tech in which case they are bad, unless their work involves content creation in which case they are good, unless the content creation involves AI in which case they are bad

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

in French it does this weird thing where it calls 80 "four twenties." Insane.

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Mamdani obviously a skilled politician but it certainly helps re. his relationship with Trump that their pools of potential voters have little overlap. Mamdani lost independents. Mayor is basically the highest level of office where that can be the case and you can still win.

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

here to report that even if you are location-agnostic it's barely better

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Jake Anbinder @jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

"it's ok if the writing's not my own because it was my idea to assemble or direct other people/bots to assemble the writing in the way that I wanted" is a pretty widely held view in academia (not in my field though)

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