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At the time, Johnson said he could not swear in Grijalva during a pro forma session: "The House is not on the floor doing business this week, but we will do it immediately early next week as soon as everyone returns to town. We have to have everybody here and we'll swear her in."

Not including the special election in Arizona's 7th Congressional District, there have been three other special elections this year to fill vacancies in the 119th Congress (2025-2027). Johnson swore in the three winners—Randy Fine (R-Fla.), Jimmy Patronis (R-Fla.), and James Walkinshaw (D-Va.)—of those special elections the day after their respective elections. Both Fine and Patronis were sworn in during a pro forma session.

During the 113th through the 118th Congresses, three other special election winners—Reps. Tom Tiffany (R-Wisc.), Mike Garcia (R-Calif.), and Kweisi Mfume (D-Md.)—were sworn in during pro forma sessions. All three of those special elections were to fill vacancies in the 116th Congress (2019-2021).

Haha. I can’t wait for “Trump says Earth is flat. Wikipedia updates Earth article to agree.”

“The question is, why should the opinions of the largely impartial UN and human rights scholars be weighed equally to the obviously partisan opinions of commentators and governments?

“Wikipedia has never, ever treated all voices as equal, nor does policy demand we do. If we did, the Earth article would state that Earth’s shape is under debate. But we don’t do that because scholarly consensus is that Earth is roughly spherical. Instead, flat eartherism is presented as what it is: a fringe movement without scientific backing,” the editor wrote.

Experts including the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Amnesty International, B’Tselem, and a UN Human Rights Council commission led by former president of the Rwanda genocide international tribunal Navi Pillay, have all concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

Sounds like news websites need to hire a proper engineer. This isn’t common crawls problem to solve:

Common crawl doesn’t log in to the websites it scrapes, but its scraper is immune to some of the paywall mechanisms used by news publishers. For example, on many news websites, you can briefly see the full text of any article before your web browser executes the paywall code that checks whether you’re a subscriber and hides the content if you’re not. Common Crawl’s scraper never executes that code, so it gets the full articles.

On track to lose $8.5B/yr is good, right?

OpenAI generated around $4.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2025, about 16% more than it generated all of last year, The Information reported on Monday, citing financial disclosures to shareholders.

OpenAI said it burned $2.5 billion, in large part due to its research and development costs for developing artificial intelligence and for running ChatGPT, the report added. Research and development cost the ChatGPT maker $6.7 billion in the first half, the report said, adding that it had about $17.5 billion in cash and securities at the end of the period. OpenAI looks to meet its full-year revenue target of $13 billion and a cash-burn target of $8.5 billion, the report added.

I remember when Twitter was a place to find interesting content, and less a place to find shocking content. Now nuanced policy arguments have been been replaced with viral slogans. Good content is still out there, but it takes patience to find it and then more patience to relate something you're reading today with something you read last week or last month.

Bookmarks in browsers haven't kept up. They're easy to create, but hard to curate and harder to add insights on top of. Why did I bookmark that again?

The best insights and learning come when our ideas are challenged. So its important to be able to share our ideas and have others react to them in some way. Not for notability or comparing their popularity with others, but for others to challenge and enrich them.

There are other note taking applications for taking notes during your class or meeting. Ramblefeed isn't that. There are other places where people share links (but not many, and they're stagnant). There are other places where people share catchy "slogans" in a popularity context or for marketing.

Why is this going to be better? I'm not sure yet, but I believe it can be for some of us.

Healthcare spending is driven by utilization (the number of services used) and price (the amount charged per service). An increase in either of those factors can result in higher healthcare costs. Despite spending nearly twice as much on healthcare per capita, utilization rates for many services in the United States is lower than other wealthy OECD countries. Prices, therefore, appear to be the main driver of the cost difference between the United States and other wealthy countries.

"Private insurance companies in this country spend between 12 and 18 percent on administration costs," Sanders said on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sept. 17. "The cost of administering the Medicare program, a very popular program that works well for our seniors, is 2 percent. We can save approximately $500 billion a year just in administration costs."

Is the gap between private and public health insurance providers’ administrative costs really that high? Most experts agreed the numbers looked about right. But because of key differences between Medicare and private insurance, the trade-off isn’t as simple as Sanders suggests.

If "the numbers looked about right", then why is it "half truth"?

Experts told us we could safely assume private insurance costs, on the other hand, are much higher, though actual spending estimates vary.

Aah... So it's a "half truth" because Bernie understated how much cheaper medicare is than private insurance companies.

Historically, administrative expenses were much higher in the commercial market because insurers did a lot of underwriting, or using the health status of individuals or groups to determine their premiums. The Affordable Care Act was designed to curb that spending.

On top of that, experts explained that unlike Medicare, private insurers take on more responsibility than simply paying claims or occasionally going after fraud. Before a claim is even filed, they check its appropriateness, assess whether it is medically necessary, and whether it can be done in a cheaper way (outpatient versus inpatient care, for example).

"Medicare has been trying in fits and starts to look a little more closely at how it pays claims but generally speaking, it is passive in processing claims," Sabrina Corlette, a research professor at the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University.

And private companies, deny more claims, which makes it more expensive.

Health expenditures per person in the U.S. were $13,432 in 2023, which was over $3,700 more than any other high-income nation.

The conversations pulsing across these platforms are shaped not by civic values but by whatever proves to keep people scrolling: Nuanced opinions are compressed into viral slogans; attention collects around the loudest and most controversial voices; algorithms love conflict, inspiration, outrage and anger. Everything is always turned up to 11.

One worry I have about Democrats right now is that they do not want to confront how much of the country disagrees with them. Polls show that the percentage of voters saying the Democratic Party is too liberal increased sharply between 2012 and 2024. The percentage of voters saying the Republican Party is too conservative fell during that same period. Even the violence and corruption of Trump’s second administration have not fully closed the gap: A September poll from The Washington Post and Ipsos found that 54 percent of voters thought the Democratic Party was too liberal and 49 percent thought the Republican Party was too conservative.

But what happened over the past 15 years is that the Democratic Party has made room on its left and closed down on its right. For all the talk of what the Democratic Party should learn from Sanders and Mamdani, there should be at least as much talk of what they should learn from Manchin or Golden or Marie Gluesenkamp Perez or Sarah McBride. The party should be seeking more, not less, internal disagreement.

His primary win was a spectacular repudiation of the pollsters, who with glossy charts and graphs try to induce the public to consent to middle-of-the-road, incrementalist politicians who give up before the negotiations have even started. Meanwhile? The median age of first-time homebuyers has soared from 33 years old during the pandemic to 38 in 2024. If that’s pragmatism, is it any surprise that no one’s interested? “It’s not about money, it’s about will,” Mamdani told Stewart.

  • 90K volunteers on his campaign!

Politics is not something that you have, it's something that you do.

It's an opportunity to actually show that this whole campaign where we've talked about freezing the rent, making buses faster, free delivering universal childcare, these are not just slogans. These are commitments. And when we deliver them here in New York City, it will be also the delivery of a politics that can actually aspire for more than what you're living through. And for so many people across the city, politics has just become synonymous with an argument of celebrate the little you have or lose that.

It's not about money, it's about will.