"I think that these things are going to create a radical spectacle and exuberance for socialist policies that’s going to kind of light a fire for socialism around the country — unfortunately."

David Friedberg explains why Mamdani’s government grocery stores will actually succeed in the short term, and why that’s the entire point.

They don’t need them to work long-term.
They just need the spectacle in time for 2028.

“I think that these things are going to create a… pic.twitter.com/vp0U5iX4vL

— jay plemons (@jayplemons) July 31, 2026

"New York City bodega owners came to City Hall last week for a 'roundtable discussion' at the invitation of Julie Su, deputy mayor for economic justice..."

"... only to get barraged with 'intrusive' questions about their businesses, a source close to the situation said.... 'What items are sold the most at your stores?'... 'Where is your profit margin the greatest?' sources said. The bodega reps declined to answer.... 'They wanted us to share proprietary information with them but they don’t answer our questions and that’s why there is distrust,' said a bodega rep who did not want to be identified.... Mamdani’s plan to subsidize the grocery stores with taxpayer funds so they can offer rock-bottom prices on essential items threatens grocers who operate on 2% to 3% profit margins.... 'What is the main thing people come into your store for? What else do they buy while there?' 'It seems like a clumsy, one-sided fishing expedition,' a food policy expert who did not want to be identified told The Post.

From "Mamdani officials scramble to ease concerns about public supermarkets — but local business leaders aren’t buying it" (NY Post).

Su insisted that the city "wanted to understand is whether there are key products bodegas sell and rely on that we should not sell." And "That’s how serious we are about not undercutting them." The whole idea is about undercutting them. Now, the city seems to be trying to assure them that they won't undercut them too much. But the bodega owners don't trust the city. If there's a "2% to 3% profit margin" generally, but the city wants to know "Where is your profit margin the greatest?," it looks like the city wants its own operation to take advantage of the most profitable items. 

"The German economy, once known for its efficiency, orderliness and stability, is in a terrible mess."

"It’s not just that the numbers are dire.... No, the worst of it is that our dynamic economy gave postwar Germany a sense of identity. For all our flaws, we had a country that functioned better than others...."

I'm reading "Germany Has Lost What It Did Best," a guest essay by Konstantin Richter, in the NYT.

"Mr. DeCock hasn’t left New York in as long as he can remember. He barely even goes to Brooklyn."

"'Everything I do is in the neighborhood,' he said.... What Mr. DeCock doesn’t do, he said, is buy clothes or shop for much of anything, including groceries. He does not drink coffee at home. His fridge is empty.... Mr. DeCock... stopped cooking after the pandemic, when he admitted to himself that he was terrible at it. Now, he goes out for almost every meal — although he often skips lunch or dinner without noticing. He might run across the street for an order of the $27 seitan scaloppine at his favorite vegan restaurant, or walk a few blocks to a Mexican restaurant, where he’ll order the vegetarian enchiladas for $24.50. When Mr. DeCock is home and not working or sleeping, he’s often watching television. His big splurge is cable, his Spectrum bill is $250 a month. He also pays for Netflix, $19.99 a month, and Hulu, $18.99 a month. A Colorado native, Mr. DeCock sometimes misses nature, so he compensates by watching reality television shows about people who have to survive in the wilderness."

I'm reading "Affording New York/How a Hairdresser and Painter Lives on $70,000 a Year in Chelsea" (NYT). The 750 square foot studio apartment, in the Hotel Chelsea, costs $2700 a month.

"Affording New York" is a series. I love seeing how people express who they are by how they economize. This is the case of someone who's really splurging on food and television and making it work by harshly scrimping on travel and anything that might be shopped for. Gerald DeCock, 67, lives in a great part of town and he just stays put, getting the most out of that precise place. It's not just money he saves.  He saves a lot of time by avoiding all shopping and staying off the subway and every other form of transportation. Frankly, this way of life is appealing quite aside from the question of making it fit $70,000 a year. 

We were talking about raspberries.

We were talking about the level of pain and sacrifice Americans are willing to endure to make it through these perilous war weeks.

The New York Times brings harrowing forebodings: "Where Might the Iran War Hit Your Wallet? Start With Raspberries. It takes a lot of fuel to produce this delicate fruit, which can be a sensitive barometer as oil costs rise."

Raspberries are the divas of fresh produce.... They do best stacked lightly in refrigerated trucks cooled and powered with diesel fuel. Even on a plane, the berries must be refrigerated. All this makes them one of the most fuel-intensive items in the produce aisle. And they bear a message from the near future: The Iran war is likely to grow your grocery bill. Raspberries were already expensive, but the wholesale price of fresh berries has doubled since January, according to federal Agricultural Marketing Service reports. At a Whole Foods Market in Atlanta on Tuesday, a six-ounce plastic container of organic raspberries cost nearly $8. That’s about 20 cents a berry....

You know what you could do in support of the war effort? If the price of fresh raspberries doubles, eat half as many raspberries. Or don't buy fresh raspberries when they are out of season. Be more of a locavore and pick something that is in season or buy frozen berries. They're fine in a smoothie. I mean this war with Iran has been going on since the Carter administration and we're currently very heavily committed to forcing it to end decisively. Can't you handle this insanely minuscule raspberry problem? Who is this out-of-season-berry-munching Whole-Foods-shopping lady who won't contribute?

Remember when women dug in and helped:

"Weight-Loss Drugs Could Save U.S. Airlines $580 Million Per Year... lower fuel costs as slimmer passengers lighten their aircraft’s loads."

The NYT reports.

"Part of the sausage making process."

What happens when the minimum wage goes up? Well, California is getting an experiment in that right now. Just ask @gavinnewsom. Reason's @BessByers shares what happened after AB 1228 implemented a government-mandated pay raise for all fast-food workers. 🍔 pic.twitter.com/FFL7hkMOKk

— reason (@reason) December 31, 2025

Excellent video, but let me focus on Gavin Newsom's use of the old analogy between lawmaking and sausage making. The idea is you like the results but you'd be disgusted to see the process. So I guess Newsom's best argument for the bizarre exceptions in California's minimum wage law is that we'd be grossed out by the details if we saw them, but the final product is something we love. But with sausage, the final product has all the strange ingredients blended into one coherent-looking whole. The law Newsom is defending has unexplained exceptions right there in the text. It's more like sausage that has visible chunks of weird things that don't seem to belong and you want to know what the hell is that... and that... and that? You don't eat that sausage. And that's another thing. With sausage, if something about it makes you suspicious, you don't eat it. You're not forced to eat it just because the sausage-factory made it. Don't buy it. If it's served to you, don't eat it. Laws, we're forced to eat. 

***

The oldest version of the law/sausage analogy seems to be: "Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made." I'm told that was written by the poet/lawyer John Godfrey Saxe, in 1869, in an article in the Daily Cleveland Herald. You probably heard that Otto von Bismarck is part of the story, but stories are like sausages: Everyone's always imagining what's in there, how it got in, and whether it belongs there. 

"It’s really hard to say that you would have a child if given X amount of money from the government, because I think that’s just not the calculus. It is a very intimate, personal decision that people make."

Said Christina Gibson-Davis, a sociology and public policy professor at Duke University, quoted in "Raising kids is too expensive, most Americans say in new survey/Seven in 10 respondents said raising children is too expensive, a notable jump from 2024, according to an annual public opinion survey on U.S. family life" (WaPo).

"I mean, the crazy idea — but in the spirit of crazy ideas — is that if the world — there's like 8, roughly 8 billion people in the world — if the world can generate, like, 8 quintillion tokens per year..."

"... if that's the world, let, let, actually, let's say the world can generate 20 trillion quin- 20 quintillion tokens per year, each word generated by an AI — okay, just making up a huge number here, okay? — we'll say, okay, 12 of those go to, you know, the normal capitalistic system. But 8 of those 8 quintillion tokens are gonna get divided up equally among 8 billion people. So everybody gets 1 trillion tokens. And that's your kind of universal basic wealth globally. And people can sell those tokens. Like, if I don't need mine, I can sell them to you. We could pool ours together for some like new art project we wanna do. But, but instead of just like getting a check, you're getting — everybody on earth is getting — like a slice of the world's AI capacity, and then we're letting the, like, massively distributed human ingenuity and creativity and economic engine do its thing. I mean, that's like a crazy idea. Maybe it's a bad one, but that's the kind of thing that I think sounds like someone should think about it more."

Said Sam Altman, in the new episode of Theo Von's podcast (audio and transcript at Podscribe).

The word in boldface is the word that I said out loud as I was listening to the podcast, through earbuds, as I walked in the woods just now. I would describe my tone of voice as: derisive. Art! Art reared its goofball head in the midst of that insanity. I've heard it before, this notion that if only we were set free from the limitations of the workaday world, what we would do would be to make art.

"If anything, it is a very effective form of antifascist economic policy," said Zohran Mamdani, asked to describe "Zohranomics."

Quoted in "The Case for Zohranomics/As some Wall Street billionaires melt down over Zohran Mamdani’s policy platform, a prominent progressive economist argues that it meets the moment."

ZM continues: "We are at a moment where the crisis of economic security, of affordability, that comes with basic questions of dignity and identity are being used by the far right in ways that fuel the return of fascist tendencies. I think that having an agenda that is laser-focussed on the needs of ordinary people is what we need, and that is basically where the Democrats fell flat last year. At the federal level and the global level, we are dealing with the consequences of that lack of vision right now."

I ran to Grok where my second prompt was: "Don't just restate it. I can read it. I can understand it as a series of sentences. But I regard it as empty of meaning. So tell me, quickly, what is there of substance. No bullshit."

I got this: "Anti-fascist economics means policies that ensure economic security—fair wages, affordable housing, healthcare—to prevent the far right from exploiting people's struggles. It’s about meeting basic needs to stop fascism’s appeal. The Democrats failed at this, leading to political consequences. That’s the core."

Even shorter: "Anti-fascist economics: policies ensuring economic security to counter far-right extremism. Democrats failed, causing political fallout." That's Grok. The idea is to give people so much that they won't want to change to anything else. Right now they're so deprived that they do want radical change. 

"We're not gonna make t-shirts in this country again."

That line stuck in my head. It's from yesterday's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast yesterday, "Why a Worrisome Economy Doesn’t Seem to Worry Trump." (That's a Podscribe link with transcript and audio.)

The speaker is NYT economics reporter Ben Casselman. Context:

There are a lot of economists who reject the very idea that we need to re-industrialize the country in some way, right? They argue that over the decades, free trade has left Americans better off on the whole. That even if it has hurt some people, that on average it has been beneficial. I think most economists would make that point. But there's certainly been a lot of rethinking among at least some economists over the past couple of decades about the way that free trade has played out. Again, complicated subject, but I think the thing that there's pretty broad based agreement about is we can't just turn the clock back. We're not gonna make t-shirts in this country again.

"Let's just take Superbowl Sunday. Mmkay? It's gonna affect beer. Mmkay? Most of it — Corona, here — comes from Mexico. It's gonna affect your guac. Because what is guacamole made of? Avocados. Both from Mexico."

Chuck Schumer claims that President Trump's tariffs will raise the price of beer because "most of it comes from Mexico" while holding a can of corona.

This might be the most embarrassing thing I've ever seen a politician do lmfao. pic.twitter.com/z4Z0W22gUe

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) February 3, 2025

Chuck Schumer is attempting to lure Americans away from Trump by tempting us with the humble indulgences beer and guacamole — drinking and snacking — paired with watching television. But even if Americans were hopelessly addicted to these fattening pleasures, we could still, easily, choose a non-Mexican beer and serve those tortilla chips with melted cheese instead of that avocado paste. That might work out well for Wisconsin — home of beer and cheese — and quite badly for Mexico. What is it going to do with all those avocados if we say we'd rather push for Mexico to help us with the border problem than continue to mindlessly consume that that green goo... that sludge... that guck... 

This is fresh fruit, farmed in vast quantity in Mexico, where it will rot if not sold. What am I missing? We will easily win this trade war. And I'm sure Schumer knows all this and is embarrassed to be smarmily plying us with a beer and an avocado.

By the way, Americans didn't use to care about avocados at all. Here's an 2015 article in The Atlantic — "The Selling of the Avocado/How the 'alligator pear' went from obscure delicacy to America's favorite fruit":

"Like the ouroboros, I believe Big Tech is eating itself alive with its component companies throwing more and more cash at investments in each other that are most likely to generate less and less of a return...."

"[T]hese companies... will one day disappoint those who view them as safe assets. And the self-cannibalization will not just reveal itself to be a mediocre investment but a shaky bet on an illusion propagated by a mythical and messianic belief in technology and these companies.... One need not look at ancient folklore to find depictions of the ouroboros. The economist Joseph Schumpeter...wrote of a cycle of industrial mutation' that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.'"

Writes Harvard law and business professor Mihir A. Desai, in "The Future of A.I. May Not Be as Revolutionary as We Thought" (NYT).

"I'm looking for famous quotes that express the idea that the person who controls X controls Y."

That's how I prompted Grok just now. I was inspired by something Kakistocracy wrote in the comments in last night's café:

It’s weird to think that Musk will end up having paid far less for the United States Government than he did for Twitter.* To be fair -- what he paid for twitter was kinda the down payment for the presidency. It was a package deal. He needed both.

Here are the quotes Grok fished up for me: 

• "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." This quote from George Orwell's "1984" emphasizes how control over information (history) leads to control over future outcomes.

• "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes its laws." Attributed to Mayer Amschel Rothschild, this quote suggests that control over a nation's monetary system equates to control over its governance.

• "He who controls the media, controls the mind." This is a variation on a quote by Jim Morrison, highlighting how control over information dissemination (media) can shape public perception and behavior.

• "Control the money, you control countries. Control the food, you control the world." A quote often attributed to Henry Kissinger illustrates the power of controlling essential resources like finance and food to influence global or national control.

I'd like to have those 4 over to dinner at the same time. We could talk about controlling things. Who would control the conversation, hmmm? I say Orwell. 

Anyway, Grok and I — at my prompting — proceeded to talk about the ancient Archimedes quote "Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." (It's different from those other 4 quotes, but not completely different.) And then I fed Kakistocracy's quote to Grok thusly: 

"Researchers argue that home solar panels are raising the price of electricity and reducing the need for cheaper large solar farms — making the entire transition to clean energy more expensive...."

"Researchers say that... many states and utilities provide very lucrative deals for users of rooftop solar — often compensating owners of home panels more than the value of their solar to the grid. In states like California and Arizona... in the middle of the day homeowners might get 20 cents back for each kilowatt-hour they send to the grid. But for a grid already flooded with solar, the value of that extra energy is close to zero. The result is that richer homeowners who can afford solar get cheap electricity bills — while poorer residents see higher bills to compensate. In California alone, researchers at UC Berkeley and the California Public Advocates Office estimated that rooftop solar will add between $4 billion and $6.5 billion to customers’ bills in 2024...."

From "Everyone loves rooftop solar panels. But there’s a problem. One of the most popular methods to cut your household’s carbon footprint may be a mixed bag" (WaPo).

This is the article I've been wanting to see but — at this point — thought I'd never see.

"Kamala Harris and the Influence of an Estranged Father Just Two Miles Away/Donald J. Harris rarely speaks to his famous daughter, who lives nearby. But he helped shape who she became."

That's the NYT, and I'm giving you a free-access link.

Dr. Harris’s spectral presence in Ms. Harris’s life began when he and her mother separated in 1969, when Ms. Harris was 5. The couple divorced in 1972 after he lost a bitter custody battle that brought his closeness to Ms. Harris and her younger sister “to an abrupt halt,” Dr. Harris wrote in a 2018 essay. The sealed divorce settlement, he said, was “based on the false assumption by the State of California that fathers cannot handle parenting.”

He added that it was “especially in the case of this father, ‘a neegroe from da eyelans’” who “might just end up eating his children for breakfast! Nevertheless, I persisted, never giving up on my love for my children.”...

They're eating the.... 

The question is why Kamala Harris never found a way to connect to him. Did she not want to understand what happened in that momentous court case? Was her father discriminated against by the U.S. authorities? She is forefronting her genetic inheritance from her father (and making that her dominant racial identity over that of her mother), so shouldn't she want to make that connection to her father? Compare Barack Obama, who made an elaborate search for his father — recorded in "Dreams From My Father." And his father had not been there in his young life or fought to preserve the relationship the way Harris's father (apparently) did.

"The labor market appears to have shifted into a lower gear, reinforcing concerns that businesses have little appetite to hire..."

"... as interest rates weigh on investment and the path of consumer demand remains uncertain. Employers added 142,000 jobs in August, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Friday, a weaker-than-expected showing for the second consecutive month. And totals for the previous two months were revised downward.... The August jobs report comes at a critical time for Federal Reserve officials. They have shifted their attention from inflation, which has fallen markedly, to the health of the labor market...."

The NYT reports.

ADDED: Earlier this morning, the NYT had this headline:

Are we still talking about "price gouging"?

From "Dems defend Harris’ economic policy but don’t go all in on price-gouging/Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear was alone in discussing the particulars of a policy designed to stop price gouging" (Politico).

Prominent Democrats flooded the airwaves Sunday morning to defend Vice President Kamala Harris’ economic platform — but they were hesitant to specifically back a proposed price gouging ban that has raised eyebrows among Republicans and some economists.

“I think picking this one proposal of the many she’s put out misses the broader point, which is that Vice President Harris is continuing the work of President Biden in reducing costs faced by working Americans,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) told Shannon Bream on “Fox News Sunday.”...

From "Kamala Harris’s new economic plan draws Democrats’ praise, GOP’s scorn/Democrats touted her proposals, from grocery prices to health care, as addressing Americans’ daily concerns" (WaPo).

As Vice President Kamala Harris’s new economic proposals dominated Sunday morning’s political shows, allies touted her ideas to address food and housing costs as beneficial to middle-class Americans, while critics — including Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), the GOP vice-presidential nominee — slammed her plan as unworkable and unrealistic.

Harris’s economic plan... includes a ban on price gouging for groceries and food....  

Democrats on Sunday defended Harris’s economic proposals as targeting many Americans’ key needs, and they noted that her speech... represented the start of her policy pitch, with more detail to come....

"It’s rare to find anyone these days who actually wants to get to early retirement by living off beans..."

"... those people, with their stringent penny-pinching, are largely known in the community as LeanFIRE. A lot more people aim for CoastFIRE (a more measured approach that involves front-loading your retirement savings and 'coasting' on compound interest and working lightly until you’re ready to quit) or BaristaFIRE (quitting your job but buttressing your retirement with a side gig, such as that of a part-time barista, to receive health-insurance benefits) or FatFIRE (a luxurious, no-sacrifice approach to retirement, the polar opposite of LeanFIRE — and the subset to which Wong belongs). You might be tempted to regard early retirees as layabouts, soaking up sunshine while everyone else toils. But why not see them as brave maniacs, daring to build an entirely new vision of the world?"

Writes Amy X. Wang, in "Your Neighbors Are Retiring in Their 30s. Why Can’t You? Meet the schemers and savers obsessed with ending their careers as early as possible" (NYT)(free access link).

FIRE = Financial Independence Retire Early

I'm glad this article mentions the 1992 book "Your Money or Your Life" (commission earned). Here's a WaPo article from a couple years ago, "Why this 1992 personal finance book still has a cult following" (free access link).

The NYT article was the subject of yesterday's episode of The Daily Podcast, and it's an excellent listen, with things that are not in the article. I was drawn in by this part, going into the psychology of one of the "FatFIRE" retirees, Alan Wong, who looked at the question "who am I without work?" 

"Is Gavin Newsom trying to help Donald Trump?..."

"California’s [gas] prices are the highest in the country—$5.21 a gallon on average vs. $3.59 nationwide—owing to hefty taxes and burdensome regulations, such as its cap-and-trade program and low-carbon fuel standard. The difficulty of operating refineries in the Golden State has caused many to shut down. More than 60% of the refineries that opened in California during the past 100 years are reportedly no longer operating. Econ 101 teaches that reduced supply increases prices.... California refineries supply nearly 90% of Nevada’s gasoline and half of Arizona’s. Gasoline prices in Nevada ($4.38 a gallon) and Arizona ($3.90) tend to rise in tandem with those in California....."

Writes Allysia Finley, in "Gavin Newsom’s Battleground Gift to Donald Trump/The governor’s war on gasoline will hike prices in California, but also Arizona and Nevada" (Wall Street Journal).