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Will Wilkinson

@wlknsn.xyz
14K followers 4.2K following 1.9K posts

Tech policy and government affairs guy. Ex-Block, Niskanen, NYT, Economist, Cato. Los Angeles / Iowa City

PostsRepliesMedia
Will Wilkinson @wlknsn.xyz · 29/09/2026
The mood is upbeat here in Iowa City thanks to Saturday’s miracle at The Big House and today’s Atlanta Hawkeyes gaffe.
static.klipy.com
Caitlin Clark Cc
ALT: Caitlin Clark Cc
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Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈 @maxdubler.com · 28/09/2026
So-called “inclusionary zoning,” the practice of requiring home builders to rent new apartments at a loss to low-income tenants, is a tax on new housing that worsens the housing shortage and raises rents overall in exchange for a handful of means-tested units. It’s bad policy!
thecooldown.com
Greater Boston builders say affordable-unit rules stall housing, but Boston won't budge
Developers and city leaders across Greater Boston are clashing over whether affordable-housing requirements are helping address the region's housing shortage.
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Radley Balko @radleybalko.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Tennessee plans to execute a woman tomorrow. She was 18 when she committed the crime. She's now 50. Like most on death row, she's also a victim. And like most on death row, she's a far different person now than she was then. No one humanizes the condemned better than @lilianasegura.bsky.social.
theintercept.com
The “Satanic Panic” Made Her a True-Crime Obsession. The Truth Is More Haunting.
After 30 years on death row, Christa Pike faces execution for a grisly murder she committed at 18.
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Perry Bacon @perrybaconjr.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
"The 'economic issues not culture wars' frame adopted by much of the Democratic Party is entirely wrongheaded. It’s an example of intellectual dishonesty, moral cowardice, historical inaccuracy, and flawed electoral politics all wrapped together." newrepublic.com/article/2159...
newrepublic.com
Why Democrats Should Stop Using the Phrase “Culture Wars”
Texas’s Gina Hinojosa and others slamming the party for focusing too much on so-called cultural issues are pushing a flawed electoral and policy strategy.
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Will Wilkinson @wlknsn.xyz · 29/09/2026
Can’t wait for the steel factory we’re definitely getting!
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ae @aelkus.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
i think that the end goal of a lot of tech companies at this point is to destroy any point social or psychological mediation the individual has left, such that there are any only atomized individuals connected by computer networks, with the tech company oligarch as the owner or operator of said nets
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ae @aelkus.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
i broadly agree with the thesis, but not the way that WBF argued it
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Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
A provocative article in Rolling Stone titled "What some folks really mean when they claim to have never done the Humpty Hump."
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Will Wilkinson @wlknsn.xyz · 27/09/2026
I turned off Iowa-Michigan when Iowa was down with like 4 seconds left, sure the Hawkeyes had lost. What a pleasant surprise.
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JW Mason @jwmason.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
This is the master key to deciphering contemporary debates about free speech. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/se...
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Will Wilkinson @wlknsn.xyz · 24/09/2026
Is there another example of a market bubble driven by an ideological moral panic at all analogous to the way x-risk/alignment/“rationalist”/EA dogma are the driving force behind the AI boom? I cant think of anything else quite like it.
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Will Wilkinson @wlknsn.xyz · 24/09/2026
“Our models took actions we did not intend” = “we intentionally directed our software to perform a task without human supervision knowing that it is inherently unpredictable and might implicate us in the violation of laws or damage to others’ systems but we’d prefer to be exempt from liability, thx”
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Will Wilkinson @wlknsn.xyz · 23/09/2026
Look, let's clear this up. LLMs can't think or understand because those are evolved capabilities of embodied living organisms embedded in the physical and social world and LLMs aren't that. Don't make it harder than it is.
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Will Wilkinson @wlknsn.xyz · 22/09/2026
This story is so funny. Nobody at the University actually wants this center; it's being imposed by a bunch of MAGA Regents. But they can't competently impose their counter-programming program because just about everybody involved is a combative right-wing ideologue with a victim complex.
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Dave @daveamp.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
This is absolutely hilarious. There have been times when I would have cast a vote of no confidence in the Board of Regents, but not this time.
thegazette.com
Resignations follow no-confidence vote at Center for Intellectual Freedom
Casting a “vote of no confidence” in the Legislature’s Center for Intellectual Freedom at the University of Iowa, all but two of 13 out-of-state professors invited by Gov. Kim Reynolds to serve on the...
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Will Wilkinson @wlknsn.xyz · 20/09/2026
I get a lot of clips of Dem politicians running this cycle in my social media these days and the only ones that don’t drive me nuts are Ossoff and El-Sayed. I’m inundated with Iowa stuff and am getting actively discouraged by Rob Sand and Josh Turek’s own ads. Hope it works guys!
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Daniel Knowles @dlknowles.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
I really hate the framing of these stories as "an AI agent broke out and hacked something." No, an inadequate sandbox meant that a powerful and unpredictable computer program was set loose on the open internet by the company that designed it. The agency isn't with the "AI agent", it's with the firm
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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 18/09/2026
“Once you understand that the broligarchs are eugenicists who care more about hypothetical, future AI-enhanced lives than about today’s population…a lot of things start making sense.”
techpolicy.press
What Policymakers and the Public Need to Know About the Cult of AI
Nathalie Maréchal asks, why are we betting the economy and the future of democracy on cult-like beliefs?
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Perry Bacon @perrybaconjr.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
When I read a story that uses "working class" to refer to the entire mass of U.S. adults without four-year degrees, I assume the writer is engaged in a political project, not analysis. The project is to ignore the perspectives of economically-insecure college grads. newrepublic.com/article/2155...
newrepublic.com
The Term Working Class Is Useless
Too many political analysts and pollsters are relying on education to define the working class, and it’s leading us to the wrong conclusions.
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SE Gyges @segyges.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
I'm back, I missed you all. Since this is an important subject I know too much about, here's a 🧵 explaining that AI Safety Is Mostly A Sex Cult. I don't think these people should make policy. (1/?) (alternative title: Time For Some Cult Theory)
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James Medlock @jdcmedlock.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
Comic panel of Donald Duck and a wide-eyed young Mickey Mouse. Donald's speech bubble: "Democrats should do a huge middle class tax cut to address affordability." Mickey's speech bubble: "Fool that you are, for you treat taxation as a burden rather than the means by which our burdens are eased. Behold a civilization rich in private wealth yet starved of public provision, where every man owns what his grandfathers could not imagine and yet trembles at the thought of how he will weather an illness or loss of livelihood. Will you fight for an affirmative vision of broad contribution and universal benefit? Or will you perish like a dog?"
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Katie Tiedrich @katietiedrich.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
I’m not the first person to make this observation but the prevalence of nauseating ai-generated business logos means stuff like this hits CRAZY for me now
photo of a white truck with the logo for Bob’s BBQ Emporium, which is written in comic sans and has a charming rudimentary illustration of a pig
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Jennifer Van Goethem @jennvg.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
"AI systems that operate by autonomously executing LLM-generated plans are a really bad idea. Not because these systems are devious, or malicious, or inventing their own agendas, but because LLM output is unpredictable and non-normative." calnewport.com/has-ai-gone-...
calnewport.com
Has AI Gone Rogue? - Cal Newport
The AI story of the summer should probably be the ​uncertain financial position​ of the AI labs hoping to launch record-breaking IPOs shortly. Technology news, ... Read more
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Nils Gilman @nilsgilman.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
I don’t usually go for psychoanalytic explanations, but it seems obvious that data centers have become a point of political cathexis for anger over malignant futures being foisted upon people without their consent. dissentmagazine.org/article/ai-d...
dissentmagazine.org
After the Data Centers - Dissent Magazine
Data center opponents have assembled a potent political force. But without a more expansive vision, there is a risk that this techlash could be co-opted and fizzle out.
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Will Wilkinson @wlknsn.xyz · 04/09/2026
Though I live in Iowa and grew up in Iowa, I’ve never really had a distinctive Iowa dialect or accent and what I did have largely washed out from moving around so much.
Dialect heat map of the United States indicating that my dialect is most similar to people in California and south central Colorado and least similar to Mississippi, Alabama, Massachusetts, New Hampshire or Maine
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Asteroid Institute, a program of B612 @b612-asteroid.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Congratulations to Dr. Brian May, astrophysicist, Queen guitarist, and #AsteroidDay cofounder, on receiving the National Space Society’s 2020 Space Pioneer Award. He joins B612 cofounder and Apollo 9 astronaut #RustySchweickart, who received the award in 2009 for Historic Space Achievement.
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Will Wilkinson @wlknsn.xyz · 29/08/2026
Just had to explain to my six year old that the Harlem Globetrotters (making a guest appearance on “Dog with a Blog”) are the Savannah Bananas of basketball.
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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 26/08/2026
Can't parody this shit.
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Will Wilkinson @wlknsn.xyz · 26/08/2026
Watching all these Dolly performances, I’m fascinated by how she somehow managed to be so relatably, lightly, down-to-earth charming that you almost miss how insanely polished she was — just consistent flawless perfection. Hall of fame poise.
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Jay Willis @jaywillis.net · 25/08/2026
I have really enjoyed the experience of reading story after story about how good and selfless and beloved a recently deceased famous person was
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Farran Smith Nehme 🇱🇧 @selfstyledsiren.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Dolly Parton's 1980 cover of Woody Guthrie's "Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)." youtu.be/CEPUxpR64YE?...
youtu.be
Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)
YouTube video by Dolly Parton - Topic
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Kevin J. Kircher @kevinjkircher.com · 24/08/2026
Underappreciated: US farmland *already substantially produces energy, not food*, and does so very inefficiently. Corn ethanol (~40% of all US corn) requires about 100 times more land per vehicle-mile driven than solar photovoltaics -> electric vehicles. Shifting corn to solar *would free up land*.
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Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
Dependency is the goal.
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H.E. Cas Piancey @cascoinfoundation.org · 19/08/2026
I’m bumping this because I worked hard on it and I think it’s a really good article. I’d appreciate if you read it because it offers very real insight into Tether’s motives and strange corporate behavior. protos.com/what-the-tet...
protos.com
What the Tether audit means for the crypto industry
Tether has finally received the audit it's been promising for almost a decade. But will it put all the questions surrounding the firm to bed?
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M. Nolan Gray 🥑 @mnolangray.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Racial segregation wasn't an accidental or purely historical side effect of modern zoning—it was core to the story, and the resulting codes are still in effect in most US cities. www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...
tandfonline.com
The racial origins of zoning: Southern cities from 1910–40
This article argues that the desire to regulate black residential patterns constituted a major objective of the early zoning and planning movement in the United States, particularly in the South be...
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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
STOP GROWING FUCKING LETTUCE IN THE DESERT THIS IS ACTUALLY A VERY EASY PROBLEM TO SOLVE
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Will Wilkinson @wlknsn.xyz · 18/08/2026
The real story here is why the author is such a snide bitch about my beautiful boy.
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Justin Wolfers @justinwolfers.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
The decline in labor’s share isn’t just an American story.⁣ ⁣ Workers across industrialized countries are getting a smaller share of the economic pie.⁣ ⁣ Technology and the rise of superstar firms may help explain why.⁣ ⁣ newsletter.platypuseconomics.com/p/…
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The Bulwark @thebulwark.com · 14/08/2026
For my friends, loopholes
lnk.thebulwark.com
Trump’s Gift to the Money Launderers
Treasury isn’t merely shutting down an anti-corruption database. It’s deleting the data so future investigators can’t use it.
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Will Wilkinson @wlknsn.xyz · 14/08/2026
The best response to the pangram and watermarking panic is to to forget all the "clear and simple" prose propaganda and just let 'er rip syntactically and vocabularically. Robot would never.
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David Froomkin @dfroomkin.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
If I were better at self-promotion, no doubt I would have posted about this either when the articles were accepted or right after the Slaughter decision, but perhaps better late than never! I have two articles forthcoming that, in different ways, refute the unitary executive theory.
papers.ssrn.com
The Vesting Clauses Are Not Law
Separation-of-powers formalists treat the Constitution’s Vesting Clauses—the first sentences of Articles I, II, and III—as sources of substantive law. Perhaps m
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Waldo Jaquith @waldo.net · 13/08/2026
Congress passed the Corporate Transparency Act. Trump vetoed it. Congress overrode his veto on a bipartisan vote. So Trump has decided to simply not enforce the law. I do not understand the role of Congress anymore. I guess they just make suggestions?
nytimes.com
Treasury Scales Back Scrutiny of U.S. Shell Companies (Gift Article)
The Trump administration will not enforce reporting requirements of the 2021 Corporate Transparency Act, which was intended to crack down on money laundering.
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Michael Clemens @mclem.org · 12/08/2026
Incredible. When E—n M—k & his crew obliterated USAID in a weekend, they deleted a vast trove of publicly-funded knowledge: the Development Experience Clearinghouse. A Canadian high school student (!) happened to have downloaded the entire thing for a project. AidData has now posted it for all.
aiddata.org
Before reimagining development data, remember what we’ve learned
Why we’re publishing a free, searchable, and ungated archive featuring a quarter-century of USAID evaluation reports.
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isaac @sevier.io · 12/08/2026
If one half of this country's driving ideology is the murder, deportation, and neglect of people of color and "undesirables" then the opposing half should be unrelenting in their universal and unconditional affirmation and defense of those same people.
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Will Wilkinson @wlknsn.xyz · 11/08/2026
It's also the best argument for why it's needed. He is transparently deploying extremely concentrated wealth SO THAT extremely concentrated wealth can continue to undermine fair democratic processes and prevent republican self-rule. It's an act of hostility to the very idea of freedom.
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Will Wilkinson @wlknsn.xyz · 05/08/2026
My take on boots discourse is that we face a lemons problem with many consumer goods, given the acquisition of many storied brands by companies aggressively milking accumulated brand equity for higher profits, such that price and reputation for durability does not reliably predict higher roi.
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Will Wilkinson @wlknsn.xyz · 31/07/2026
I’ve been thinking a lot about the thoughtlessness of AI writing. One of the many things that makes Melville’s prose so dazzling is the EXTEME rigor of the way he surprises, deepens and extends his metaphors and cultural touchstones. AI simply can’t, and not for the same reason that most of us can’t
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Will Wilkinson @wlknsn.xyz · 30/07/2026
Nice work, Matt.
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arcadus @birdapp.rip · 29/07/2026
A scene from The Odyssey where Penelope stands before the suitors, but Tim Robinson has been added in. It’s a reference to I Think You Should Leave. Penelope says “Ronnie, I feel like you’re just here for the zip line” and Tim Robinson says “what?”
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