Jason Lalljee, reporting for Axios Tuesday:

President Trump’s nomination of Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Monday drew criticism from economists across the political spectrum. Why it matters: The growing negative consensus among conservative economists is unusual given Antoni’s own conservative pedigree.

Here we go with “unusual” as a euphemism for “unprecedented” — or perhaps, most accurately, “crazy” — again. The dichotomy here is that Trump and MAGA have flipped what “conservative” means in US politics. Some legitimate economists are left-leaning, some are right-leaning. It’s a field of study, like the law, that attracts from across the political spectrum. But all legitimate economists believe in trying to objectively measure the economy. MAGA kooks have overrun Republican elected politics, but not so with economics. So of course legitimate conservative economists are objecting to Trump’s nomination of this guy Antoni, who both is a crackpot kook of the paranoid style and looks like one, with crazy eyes and, of all things, a devil beard.

To the commentary:

Antoni’s “work at Heritage has frequently included elementary errors or nonsensical choices that all bias his findings in the same partisan direction,” Stan Veuger, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told Axios’ Courtenay Brown and Emily Peck.

Dave Hebert, an economist at the conservative American Institute for Economic Research, wrote in a post on X that he’s worked with Antoni before and implored the Senate to block the nomination. “I’ve been on several programs with him at this point and have been impressed by two things: his inability to understand basic economics and the speed with which he’s gone MAGA,” Hebert said. [...]

Jessica Riedl, a senior Manhattan Institute fellow, shared another example from X, in which Antoni appeared not to know that the BLS’ measure of import prices did not account for the impact of tariffs. “The articles and tweets I’ve seen him publish are probably the most error-filled of any think tank economist right now,” she wrote. “I hope we see better at BLS.”

That’s the take on Antoni from conservative economists.

Emma Roth, reporting for The Verge back on July 1 (emphasis added):

Threads’ DMs are currently available to users aged 18 and over on Android, iOS, and the web, but you can only have one-on-one conversations right now. Moving forward, Threads plans to roll out the ability to choose who can send you messages, including people who don’t follow you on Threads and Instagram. You’ll also be able to review a folder dedicated to message requests, similar to what’s offered on X. Threads is working on a group messaging feature and inbox filters, too.

Though the platform says its DMs are “protected by our robust privacy standards, account protections and safety infrastructure,” Threads spokesperson Alec Booker confirmed to The Verge that “Threads will not support end-to-end encryption for messaging.” Booker adds that Meta will “continue evolving DMs on Threads based on feedback from the community.”

The lack of E2EE for a new messaging platform in 2025 is unconscionable. Either don’t offer DMs at all or only offer them using E2EE. That would be for Meta’s benefit, not just its users. They shouldn’t even want the ability to look at private messages.

That said, I found myself chatting with an old friend on Threads last night, using the app on my phone. Somehow we’d never exchanged iMessage credentials. We more or less just used the Threads DM chat to exchange current phone numbers to move the chat to iMessage. Today, at my desk, I wanted to double-check that there was nothing in the Threads chat I’d want to save — and, I couldn’t figure out how to see DMs in Threads’s web app. I found a few articles, like the one above at The Verge, that said it was available on the web, but ... it isn’t. At least not for me, or most people. One never knows how many people are getting an A/B test or early rollout with Meta.

From a press release from the UK’s National Drought Group this week, quoting group chair Helen Wakeham (emphasis added):

“We are grateful to the public for following the restrictions, where in place, to conserve water in these dry conditions. Simple, everyday choices — such as turning off a tap or deleting old emails — also really helps the collective effort to reduce demand and help preserve the health of our rivers and wildlife.”

To reaffirm that she did not misspeak, from a list of tips for conserving water at home, which includes legit tips like taking shorter showers and turning off the tap while brushing your teeth (Sidenote: Who leaves the water running while brushing their teeth?):

Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.

This is so profoundly stupid and wrong that I don’t even know how to make fun of it. But it sure speaks to how futile it might be to hope that the UK government understand the first thing about end-to-end encryption. (Via Jason Eccles.)

Bloomberg:

The Trump administration is in talks with Intel Corp. to have the US government take a stake in the beleaguered chipmaker, according to people familiar with the plan, in the latest sign of the White House’s willingness to blur the lines between state and industry.

A deal would help shore up Intel’s planned factory hub in Ohio, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. The company had once promised to turn that site into the world’s largest chipmaking facility, though it’s been repeatedly delayed. The size of the potential stake isn’t clear.

The talks come just a week after President Donald Trump had called for the ouster of Intel Chief Executive Officer Lip-Bu Tan, accusing him of being “highly conflicted” because of concerns about his earlier ties to China.

Bloomberg was first (this time), but the WSJ seconded the report shortly after.

No cause for alarm here. Just a bit of a sea change. The Republican Party has always been in favor of social ownership of the means of production. Just like we have always been at war with Eastasia. Sane steady leadership from our 80-year-old dear leader, who is definitely not succumbing rapidly to a dangerous mix of dementia, megalomania, and paranoia.

Greg Ip, chief economics commentator for The Wall Street Journal, under the euphemistic headline “The U.S. Marches Toward State Capitalism With American Characteristics”:

A generation ago conventional wisdom held that as China liberalized, its economy would come to resemble America’s. Instead, capitalism in America is starting to look like China.

Recent examples include President Trump’s demand that Intel’s chief executive resign; the 15% of certain chip sales to China that Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices will share with Washington; the “golden share” Washington will get in U.S. Steel as a condition of Nippon Steel’s takeover; and the $1.5 trillion of promised investment from trading partners Trump plans to personally direct.

This isn’t socialism, in which the state owns the means of production. It is more like state capitalism, a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.

China calls its hybrid “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The U.S. hasn’t gone as far as China or even milder practitioners of state capitalism such as Russia, Brazil and, at times, France. So call this variant “state capitalism with American characteristics.” It is still a sea change from the free market ethos the U.S. once embodied.

Ip’s piece is, on the whole, a decent factual survey of the Trump 2.0 administration’s economic policies, six months in. (Or, if you prefer, one-eighth over, and a quarter of the way through until the mid-term election.) But I can’t help but feel that if it were any Democrat — Biden, Harris, whoever — whose early presidential term’s stewardship of our capitalist economy could aptly be described as “starting to look like China”, the tone would be less “a sea change” and more “ALL CAPS ALL THE TIME TOTAL FUCKING FREAKOUT”. It’s the same slippery slope of obeying in advance as describing blatantly unconstitutional shakedowns as “unusual agreements”.

There’s grading on the curve and then there’s grading on the curve. Ip knows damn well that if left unchecked, Trump’s mad-king style policies, like firing the economist in charge of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because the jobs report for July was bad, are going to prove disastrous. That move is more like North Korea than China, and everyone who doesn’t have Fox News injected into their veins knows it. Greg Ip is not drinking the MAGA juice, but he’s not calling fair balls and strikes, either. That’s a problem.