yungtuccs

[Jack Meyer 🏛️ @Jackbmeyer]

I know only a fraction of students actually pay full tuition, but $70k annually for tuition alone is a confounding sum, even for a relatively good private research university

[Pew Research Center @pewresearch]

In our 2026 political typology, the public is sorted into nine distinct groups based on their political and cultural values.

What are those nine groups? 🧵

[Jeffrey Kotyk @JeffreyKotyk]

@JustinYChoe @wlmphi

[yungtuccs @JustinYChoe]

@JeffreyKotyk @wlmphi Ok you gotta tell me

[yungtuccs @JustinYChoe]

@Vinncent Oh korean ones for me!

[Catholicism in East Asia @TheChurchInAsia]

A 1952 photograph of the Christians of Changnyeong, Korea. Taken from the archives of the Société des Missions Etrangères de Paris.

[猫の泉 @nekonoizumi]

岩波現代文庫7月。「日本の政治はなぜ思想的貧困から抜け出せないのか。明治啓蒙から大正デモクラシーの時代を生きた福沢諭吉、中江兆民、吉野作造ら10人の思想家たちは、理想と現実のはざまで格闘した。…」
⇒松沢弘陽
『日本政治思想』 https://t.co/iCjXw1pfao

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔In South Korea, "dopamine sites" have spread among Gen Z. Fake food delivery apps where you browse menus, fill a cart, and simulate an order you never place. Fake shopping sites where you track a courier that doesn't exist. Virtual smoke break rooms where you sit with strangers and watch a timer count down. Young Koreans spend up to 30% of their income on rent. The youth employment rate has dropped to 43.6%. Nearly half a million young Koreans have stopped looking for work entirely.

My Take
I don't know whether to call this sad or rational. Probably both. If you can't afford the delivery, faking the order and taking the dopamine without the bill is a better financial decision than going into debt for the food. That's a sentence I never expected to write, but the logic holds.

This is what the end of the consumer pipeline looks like. Companies spent decades fine-tuning every app and every checkout to trigger the purchase impulse. They got exactly what they built. A generation wired to consume. And then the economy priced that generation out. The dopamine sites are the honest version of what every shopping app already does. The only difference is they took the transaction out. Every other shopping app is a dopamine site that also charges you.

Hedgie🤗

[BabelColour @StuartHumphryes]

I have cleaned this amazing Autochrome portrait of the French Impressionist painter Claude Monet (1840-1926), photographed in colour by Étienne Clémentel near the water Lily pond in Monet's garden at Giverny in 1917 (often dated online as 1921). It was taken in colour over a century ago using an early colour glass plate process and isn't colourised.

[山本浄邦Joho@『K-POP現代史』ちくま新書 @Joho35595176]

@drjpstudies 現在の韓国論で気になるのは、「内需の小ささ」があまりにも万能説明になっていることです。
例えば韓国の半導体も、造船も、K-POPも、映画も、ゲームも、すべて「内需が小さいから海外へ出た」で説明される。しかしそれぞれ成功した時期も制度も担い手も全く異なります。

[lusso @luusssso]

The veil is extremely thin in so many parts of the American South

[Wrath Of Gnon @wrathofgnon]

Central Tokyo has on average 6 dedicated purpose built public restrooms per square kilometer (maxing at over 12 in very central locations like Shibuya, 120-130k nighttime pop). London in comparison has 0.01 per square kilometer. These numbers do not include Tokyo's convenience stores that often have restrooms open to the public (12 per square kilometer) nor the other shops or restaurants or stations (497 train and subway stations have public restrooms).

#GoodUrbanism means extensive, numerous, clean and safe, public restrooms.

[Peter Harrell @petereharrell]

The two best statistics in the WSJ’s genuinely great article on North Korea’s economic boom:

Pyongyang built more housing last year than LA. (Says something about CA housing dysfunction).

North Korea assembled more cellphones than the USA.

(Assuming the #s are true!)

[Brad Setser @Brad_Setser]

Korea's won is incredibly weak (global financial crisis or Korean BoP crisis levels ... ) even though Korea's fundamentals are sound (BoP has a massive surplus, fiscal debt is modest, etc).

Will be interesting to see if the Koreans can mount a defense this week ...

1/

[yungtuccs @JustinYChoe]

I can fix them

[Old Internet @OldInternetFeel]

Battle Royale (2000)

[yungtuccs @JustinYChoe]

The aquatic Hakkas

[Lana the Bug 🪲💕 @lanabeesfw]

They’ve found that sperm whales have such complex language that its structurally comparable to Chinese. They use what are essentially vowels. They have different cultural identity markers for each clan of whales. Thats actually insane.

[Izabella Kaminska @izakaminska]

Not enough people are thinking about economic and tax incidence with respect to China competition and tariffs.

Right now, the world is bracing for a sharp rise in solar panel costs as the Chinese government moves to tackle overcapacity it can no longer afford to underwrite. Increasingly, policymakers see the sector as a prime example of “involution” — a phenomenon in which ever more investment, capacity and apparent productivity generate diminishing returns because resources continue to flow into activities that create progressively less value. At the core of this is a confusion between output and productivity: producing more efficiently is not the same thing as increasing welfare. [For example, criminals can be very efficient, but don’t actually add value because their core activity is value destroying.]

This has major implications for the tariff debate because it suggests that what appeared cheap may never have been cheap at all.

Economists call this bigger-picture issue “incidence”. Incidence is simply the question of who ultimately bears the cost of something and who ultimately receives the benefit. The person who appears to pay or benefit at first glance is not always the person who ends up carrying the burden once you trace the entire chain of effects through the economy.

The conventional argument for years was that the world benefited from cheap (subsidised) Chinese solar production, since consumers everywhere could buy solar panels at lower prices. Looking only at the price tag, that seems obviously true. A panel that costs $100 is better for consumers than one that costs $150.

But incidence asks a different question: where did the missing $50 come from?

Part of the answer is that Chinese households have helped pay for it because such a large share of national income is forcefully swept into investment and manufacturing rather than household consumption by the government. Households save heavily, often receive relatively low returns on those savings, and have fewer opportunities to consume imported goods in return. Thus, some of the subsidy embedded in the cheap solar panels is indirectly financed by Chinese households accepting lower living standards than they otherwise might enjoy.

But the story doesn’t end there!

China sells more goods to the rest of the world than it buys. Those export earnings don’t disappear. They have historically been recycled into Western financial assets, including U.S. government bonds. That means that while Westerners receive cheap goods today, the Chinese accumulate claims on future Western income that generate interest payments.

In a growing number of Western countries, the expense of financing such interest obligations increasingly rivals the largest areas of public expenditure. Today’s cheap solar panel becomes tomorrow’s higher tax bill.

In other words, the difference in cost is actually borne by a combination of Chinese households through suppressed consumption and Western taxpayers through the servicing of foreign-held claims. Also, by workers and communities because a lack of reciprocal purchases contributes to the loss of domestic industrial capacity, eroding national security.

In short: the low sticker price is misleading.

When people say “look how cheap the panels are,” they are looking only at the most visible part of the transaction. Incidence analysis asks where the costs were shifted.

This is why someone like Stephen Miran would argue that focusing exclusively on whether tariffs raise consumer prices misses the core issue.

The relevant question is not simply whether a tariff makes a panel more expensive today. The relevant question is whether the pre-tariff price was genuinely cheap once all the hidden transfers, subsidies, financial flows and future obligations required to produce that price are taken into account.

Based on the rising cost of Chinese panels now that involution is being addressed, the answer is probably no. [chart from the FT]

[John Frankensteiner @JFrankensteiner]

There are people who exist in the world unaware that this is the same guy

[Xiao Ma @maxiaoalex]

🚗🔋 Many think Beijing masterfully planned China's EV takeover. Fengming Lu (@ANUBellSchool ) and I spent 3 years and 60+ interviews finding out what actually happened in our latest article @TheChinaJournal. A thread 🧵

[太田記念美術館 Ota Memorial Museum of Art @ukiyoeota]

猫の銭湯。お風呂に入っている猫、気持ちよさそうな表情です。四代歌川国政の「当世商□づくし」の一部。原宿の太田記念美術館にて6/23より開催の「アニマル＆モンスター」展にて初公開します。