iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Fellow political scientists: if you don't understand the formal model, think twice before you say "I feel it could be moved to the appendix" unless you also recommend that statistical tables be moved there. Everything can be expressed in words, even string theory... just with a lot less precision.

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

New dog owner here: If I understand this correctly, at some point a wolf must have been born whose evolutionary advantage was to look really cute when begging for scraps?

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

ChatGPT Edu is now so attuned to me that when I ask dog-related questions, it suggests new data sources that connect dogs and political economy questions.

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

Why is it “don’t bite the hand that feeds you” and not “don’t chew up the flip flops of the person who feeds you” that seems far more common?

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

The kids may have aged out of this but I most definitely have not

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

Bets on how SCOTUS will rule on Trump’s tariffs?

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 24/09/2025

Somehow the autism question is now about something that women do, when the only known causal association is something that men do - have kids late in life, with women who may or may not be much younger.

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 11/08/2025

Why the heck do I get so many cat pictures in “Discover.” I’m not a cat person.

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 28/06/2025

@epsanet.bsky.social Excellent conference at Carlos III, but to whoever decided on the numbering of the rooms: the whole point of integers is that they’re consecutive in an agreed upon order

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 04/04/2025

Reminder that US imports are only ~13% of the global total and that this isn’t the end of the world unless you’re in the US (or right next door)

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

I really hope that nobody complains about APSA being held in Vancouver this year as opposed to somewhere in the US.

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

I’ll admit that when my son was six and we made our group chat for the soccer parents, we accidentally added the President of a third division Spanish club but he thought it was very funny

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 22/03/2025

Nine months from acceptance to proofs. Proofs arrive on Saturday afternoon with a 48h expected turnaround by the authors. Academic publishing is just strange.

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 16/03/2025

Guess what, that was one way to get news in Cuba that wasn’t government propaganda when you couldn’t afford internet

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 04/03/2025

Germans tend to be complacent until things get really bad and then turn everything around. Putting a trillion euros into defence and infrastructure feels a bit like when Klinsmann and Löw were appointed in 2004. www.reuters.com/world/europe...

reuters.com

Germany's conservatives, SPD meet for talks on coalition as major spending hike eyed

Election winner Friedrich Merz wants to sew up a coalition with defeated Chancellor Olaf Scholz's SPD by Easter.

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 04/03/2025

Why is it cheaper to see a Raptors game than Jordan Peterson what is this nonsense

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 02/03/2025

Why do European leaders even talk about peacekeeping troops? Who said peace was on the table? Why don’t we keep arming Ukraine until they decide they want to stop fighting? Trump and Putin are playing us.

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

I have a feeling that when the American people come to their senses, Musk will flee to Canada where he’s still a citizen

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Reposted by Mark Manger

Christopher Zorn @prisonrodeo.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

early 90s techno

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

If it’s any consolation, French X is just as filled with vile neofascists as American X

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

Having just returned a Chevy rental car, I suspect that “getting Europeans to buy more American cars” is still going to be a challenge for reasons unrelated to tariffs

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 25/02/2025

The story that the far-right is only strong where there are few immigrants and in deindustrialized areas is no longer true: The AfD is the 2nd or 3rd biggest party even in parts of Berlin and in the wealthiest parts of Germany on.ft.com/4hSNwWz

on.ft.com

Five takeaways from Germany’s historic election — in charts

Non-voters and young people turned out for the AfD and far left, depriving the CDU of an enthusiastic mandate

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 24/02/2025

Too many people here think that the surprising strength of Die Linke, a party that opposes any aid for Ukraine and that has fond memories of the GDR, is somehow reassuring.

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 15/02/2025

Most of the valuable natural resources that Trump demands Ukraine hand over are in territory under Russian control or close to the front line. If you want them to need to fight Russia, not suck up to Putin.

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 12/02/2025

In my political economy class I used say that presidentialism is inherently prone to instability and autogolpes, except in the US but no one knows why. That class will basically teach itself now.

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 10/02/2025

American exceptionalism on display. I guess this is a major sporting event but it’s really only 30 seconds of action spread over four hours.

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

EU membership for Canada could take a decade - but we could join Eurovision next year

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 07/02/2025

Could we now agree that voters as retrospective and poorly informed is a very plausible assumption

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

The heightened border security is already having an effect: Canadian officials are apprehending more people trying to enter Canada from the US www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

cbc.ca

One dead and 15 in custody after RCMP respond to recent Prairies border crossings | CBC News

Police revealed details about a trio of recent border crossings in Alberta and Manitoba in recent weeks

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

I don’t like these comparisons with the Nazis. The Nazis felt the need to pass a law authorizing them to dismantle the Weimar institutions.

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 03/02/2025

Not the banks. Let's give him something else, like opening up our dairy market to please Wisconsin. I much prefer boring, stable banks... @mcopelov.bsky.social x.com/brianlilley/...

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

ChatGPT doing deadpan humor: "While Spain has had delays in some major projects (e.g., Sagrada Familia), these successful infrastructure projects demonstrate strong planning, financing, and execution in Spanish public works..."

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

Our provincial Premier has just called an election, and right on time, every taxpayer receives a $200 cheque in the mail. Political business cycles exist! Also, this isn’t about Trump or tariffs. The logistics mean that the decision was made months ago.

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 25/01/2025

Econ textbooks are full of proofs by contradiction, yet such proofs are the least pedagogically useful.

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 18/01/2025

An indisputably positive masculine trait is stoicism; to be able to suppress your feelings and the instinct to seek flight when called upon, like when your wife wants to go see musical theatre

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

Advantage of TikTok: teenage boys learn how to fry up eggs and cook basic healthy meals Disadvantage of TikTok: teenage boys fry up six eggs every morning because some guy on TikTok says it’s great for getting ripped. Throw in egg price inflation and you have a political effect.

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

The IMF outsources its data provision to Microsoft, and as a result, the most important data sets it provides (International Financial Statistics and World Economic Outlook) are no longer available via the SDMX API. Well done.

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 10/01/2025

I urge you to read and share this bizarrely titled piece by Peter Thiel, friend of Musk and influential investor. I’m not left wing and yet it’s more worrying to me than anything Trump has ever said. When people tell you who they are, believe them. on.ft.com/407WVSF

on.ft.com

A time for truth and reconciliation

Trump’s return to the White House augurs the ‘apokálypsis’ of the ancien regime’s secrets

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 05/01/2025

Whoever this genius is, they recreated the college residence room perfectly in Animal Crossing

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 04/01/2025

“The Holidays” should be in the middle of winter, not at the very start

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

I take a derivative, set it equal to zero, and then put some words around it

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 25/12/2024

Latin America has enriched humanity with an incomparable corpus of music that in its entirety just about compensates for the “Feliz Navidad” song by José Feliciano

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 24/12/2024

If it’s crocodile in English and cocodrilo in Spanish, is there also a language in which it’s “cocrodil…”?

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 08/12/2024

Just over 1% of the Canadian population will have seen Taylor Swift in concert this year.

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 07/12/2023

“Tarek Saab” sounds like the name of an anime villain

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 07/12/2023

Janet getten tacos in D.F. with her staff

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Mark Manger @markya.bsky.social · 25/11/2023

If you’re looking for a style editor who has experience with social science manuscripts, I highly recommend my friend James at descriptor.co.uk/content-edit...

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