ryan cooper

@ryanlcooper

Senior editor at The American Prospect, cohost and producer of the @leftanchor.bsky.social podcast Newsletter:

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ryan cooper@ryanlcooper· Jul 7

Why would this be good? It’s critical to make the outcome of cases less predictable. At the moment, the right knows they’ve got five or six “sure thing” votes for basically anything they want that isn’t completely absurd on its face. Meanwhile, the corrupt justices know they are entirely insulated from any accountability. This uncertainty about who will hear a case reduces the incentive to game the process with concocted cases. More importantly, I think it creates an incentive for justices to render opinions which are at least facially reasonable and rooted in law and history. Otherwise a different panel might come back a year or two later and just undo your decision. Just as appellate judges don’t want to be overruled by the Supreme Court, I think this creates a similar incentive. If your decision is well-reasoned, responsive to Constitution and precedent, it’s more likely that future panels will at least operate within the structure of your decision even if they don’t simply rubber stamp it. On both fronts, these kind of randomly selected panels create a benign uncertainty and reduce the incentives for corrupt actions.

ryan cooper@ryanlcooper· Jul 6

correction on this post, Norway didn’t spend any GPFG money for the first 20 years of its existence, but they did tap it in 2016 for the first time, and repeatedly since then due to the pandemic and rearmament post-2022 www.ipe.com/norway-takes...

ryan cooper@ryanlcooper· Jun 26

hell yea brother. 52% hopepilled, that's about right

ryan cooper@ryanlcooper· Jun 26

I'm reminded of this old Pareene distinction between the rude press and the anti-P.C. press newrepublic.com/article/1556...

And even worse things have survived. Much as there is a parallel right-wing media that’s insulated from market forces by the ideological mission of its wealthy funders, there is another media that superficially resembles the endangered rude media, but effectively pursues the opposite agenda. It is the anti-P.C. media, where the audience’s vicarious thrill comes not from watching scrappy underdogs heckle their supposed betters, but from watching guys sitting comfortably atop social hierarchies belittle and dominate their lessers. The difference between a rude press and an anti-P.C. press is in each enterprise’s respective relationship to power. The anti-P.C. press certainly delights in titillating its audience, but it always, unfailingly, endorses a completely servile relationship to authority. The very idea of standing up to your boss is described as childish; the mature thing to do is accept domination and even abuse, unless and until you yourself manage to accrue some power over others. Mainly because the audience for this kind of posturing from a position of maximum privilege is male, and young, and probably has some money to throw around—and little to no interest in overthrowing existing power structures, even when they are victimized by them—the same corporate money that is terrified to be associated with a left-wing site that sometimes writes “Bitch McConnell” can only be deterred from sponsoring the anti-P.C. media by mass organized action.

ryan cooper@ryanlcooper· Jun 24

righteous paragraph. I don't think I'm alone in being sick to fuckin death of hearing about Donald Trump

For a year and a half, we have watched an 80-year-old demented, effluvient, affluenza patient stifle our economy, trample our constitution, terrorize our neighbors, insult our sacred traditions, threaten our allies, promise genocide, guarantee holocaust, and start (then promptly lose) an illegal war, the consequences of which we will be living with for a generation. They call him the “king of deals,” but he’s bankrupted six casinos. At every turn, we’re reminded why. We’ve watched as a talentless totem of meaningless celebrity gutted scientific research, pardoned traitors, paid off terrorists, tortured families, murdered innocents, and wrapped himself in the flag of freedom while demanding our gratitude for each humiliation. We see the rosy-cheeked marionette, Speaker Mike Johnson, stumble through some absurd denial of any knowledge of the day’s most significant event to avoid the risk of an octogenarian making a mean post about him. The Supreme Court scrapes and bows and invents new dogmas to crown him godking. The media stumbles around, drunk on the fumes of his power and attention, no matter how bitter the glass. Meanwhile, we are treated as if we cannot taste, read, or hear.

ryan cooper@ryanlcooper· Jun 17

curious that Trump is not getting the screaming hysterical condemnation from the media that Biden got when he faced facts and ended the Afghanistan occupation

ryan cooper@ryanlcooper· Jun 12

he put the work in there like few others. funny story about that www.nbcnews.com/think/opinio...

ryan cooper@ryanlcooper· Jun 12

Wall Street people will straight up say this. oh Elon has lied literally hundreds of times about what Teslas will be able to do for 15 years, you ask? well,

Bloomberg headline: 'I wouldn't bet against Elon Musk," Morgan Stanley CEO says

ryan cooper@ryanlcooper· Jun 10

TIL there are already somewhat obscure stock indices that use the kind of rules Elon Musk foisted on Nasdaq, and the result according to research is billions in losses for index fund investors prospect.org/2026/06/10/e...

It turns out we already have evidence for the consequences of fast-track rules. Two other index providers—the Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP) and Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI)—have already had five-day fast-tracking in place for years. The practice siphons money out of index investors’ pockets, according to a 2025 study by Harvard Business School researchers Marco Sammon and Chris Murray.

Sammon and Murray found IPOs fast-tracked by CRSP cost 15 percent more for funds tracking their indexes, including some of Vanguard’s largest. The price hike comes from hedge funds and other financial insiders—knowing large index funds would have no choice but to buy in the following days—picking up the stock in anticipation of the IPO’s listing on CRSP indexes. Once the IPO is listed, the demand from the index funds themselves gives the price a further bump. Insiders selling their shares to index funds on the day of inclusion make a hefty profit, a cost ultimately borne by the fund investors when the stock price reverts immediately following index inclusion and continues to underperform in the long run. This “shadow tax” for index investors totaled over $5.8 billion between 2017 and 2023.

ryan cooper@ryanlcooper· Jun 4

I have plainly seen it a million times, "mate." I grew up in Colorado ranch country

ryan cooper@ryanlcooper· Jun 3

aw man I sure hate it when operational decisions directly affecting combat on the ground are being influenced in real time by a foreign country. really feeling bad for the IDF guys here us18.campaign-archive.com/?e=2128a5bfb...

Meanwhile, senior IDF officers said on Wednesday that the military suspended planned attacks that required extensive preparation in Beirut and other major Lebanese cities at the last minute following direct orders from Trump.

Senior commanders expressed discomfort with the situation, with many saying they had never before operated under conditions in which operational decisions directly affecting combat on the ground were being influenced in real time by a foreign country. According to the officers, a situation in which authority over the use of force is not entirely in the hands of the Israeli government or the IDF general staff – but is instead influenced by decisions made by the White House – is unprecedented.

ryan cooper@ryanlcooper· Jun 3

yes, I got into that in the article! prospect.org/2026/06/03/a...

A third more ominous factor is that the world has been heavily drawing down existing stocks of oil and natural gas. Many people saw the Iran war coming, and filled up every oil tanker and storage facility they possibly could. A great deal of that has since been used up. The vast storage complex at Cushing, Oklahoma (regarded as a storage benchmark), has declined from 33 million barrels to 24.5 million—and they can’t be fully emptied. “You can’t draw them down to zero because there is gunk at the bottom of the tanks,” oil analyst Matt Smith told CNN.

European nations have about 640 million barrels of storage capacity; they are down to perhaps 500 million. The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve had about 415 million barrels before the war; it is down to 357 million, and being drawn down by another nine million per week. The Japanese reserve had about 350 million barrels; it is now down to about 270 million. China is undoubtedly tapping its own vast reserve, which is the largest in the world, but it does not publish official figures. (And what is true of the Cushing tanks is also true of these national reserves; the milkshake, as it were, cannot be fully drunk.) “We’re approaching unheard of inventory levels,” Exxon Senior Vice President Neil Chapman said at a recent conference. “Once you get to that point, then you’ll see price shoot up.”

ryan cooper@ryanlcooper· May 29

we need a clear regulatory line between bike-type devices and motorcycle-type devices. and a scooter this fast should probably not be legal at all. dude was wearing a full face helmet and he still died

The Blade GT II scooter is one of many high-speed devices that are illegal to operate on city streets or bike lanes, but it is easy to order one online and have it delivered to an city address.

“Zero to 53 in 3.9 seconds,” states the website for the $1,700 Blade scooter, made by Teverun.

In the wake of the crash, City Hall spokesman Jeremy Edwards said the Mamdani administration would continue to fight illegal vehicles.

ryan cooper@ryanlcooper· May 28

quite the resemblance!

ryan cooper@ryanlcooper· May 21

sensible conclusion here, particularly the point about BTR being a logical response to the underlying dynamics in the housing market rather than some dastardly corporate conspiracy

Second, it’s clear that many folks strongly believe that large-scale corporate ownership of rental housing (which would include BTR communities) is something that can have negative effects on the housing market. But I think it’s more useful to think of the popularity of rental housing as something that’s a product of the housing market: it’s a natural consequence of housing getting increasingly unaffordable thanks to high interest rates and skyrocketing housing prices. Shutting down BTR is a poor way to address that problem; what we need to do is build more housing and develop construction methods that let us construct buildings more cheaply.

ryan cooper@ryanlcooper· May 21

[swing voter voice] ah dang it, you're telling me that this Trump guy is the worst, dumbest, most sociopathic piece of shit in the country? and he's fucking literally everything up? dang it all to heck. wish I could have known about this secret wisdom ahead of time

Trump approval collapsing on every issue

ryan cooper@ryanlcooper· May 20

I'm not on board with the Good Aristocracy place he gets to at the end, but he's on to something here lol

What this reveals is that the wealthiest generation of human beings in the history of our species has become so frightened of being seen as a class so terrified of their position being legible that it has begun performing the lives of people who assemble iPhones in near-slavery conditions in Foxconn plants. Their motivation does not come from a place of solidarity with those workers. And it’s not a political conviction about the dignity of labor, the motivation is terror. The specific terror of being seen to have money and to enjoy it. The terror of the surplus being visible and not disguised as the product of equivalent suffering. The seven day work week is the Foxconn schedule, the sleeping in the office is the Foxconn dormitory, the cafe built inside is the Foxconn canteen, but there is no one forcing them to labor, no suicide nets.

We should find this considerably more disgusting than we do. When we impose these conditions on a person by necessity we call it what it is, exploitation and we call for its remedy. When they are performed voluntarily by people who could be doing literally anything else with their lives, anything, the whole range of human possibility available to them. Every library unbuilt, every garden untended, every beautiful thing in the world unfunded. We are witnessing a thing that looks like discipline, but is actually the most extravagant waste of economic surplus in the history of our civilization. We are watching people who have more freedom than the Medicis use that freedom to pretend they have less freedom than the line worker in Shenzhen, and we applaud it.

ryan cooper@ryanlcooper· May 20

if huge ass data centers are expensive and everyone hates them, what if you break them into a bunch of little household cabinets--and you don't even need to upgrade the grid because people are almost never using their full service? it's clean idea at the least

The company refers to XFRA as a “distributed data center.” It’s sort of like if you chopped up a full-scale data center into washing machine-sized boxes and plugged them into peoples’ homes; Span’s smart panel then acts as a conductor, orchestrating XFRA’s energy consumption to take advantage of unused power capacity without stepping on the home’s other energy needs. In exchange for hosting one of these XFRA “nodes,” Span will offer homeowners and tenants deeply discounted, if not free electricity and internet service.

The idea sounded audacious, verging on fantastical, until I watched the economics play out in real time at one of Span’s labs in a warehouse south of San Francisco. Ryan Harris, the company’s chief revenue officer, showed me an XFRA prototype — a metal box about the size of a freezer chest stuffed with Dell servers and Nvidia liquid-cooled GPUs. Span was renting out the processing power from this node and six others to AI users through an online marketplace. On a computer screen next to the unit, a dashboard showed the revenue flowing in from the fleet — $500 over the past 24 hours, and more than $21,000 in the previous three weeks. The numbers continued to tick up as I stood there.

ryan cooper@ryanlcooper· May 20

once again citing this piece jwmason.org/slackwire/po...

This compromise means that US political parties are strange institutions, quite unlike political parties in other democratic countries. It would be barely overstating the case to say that the US simply doesn’t have political parties. The two major US political parties are perhaps best viewed not as civil society organizations but as features of the US electoral system; in this interpretation, the US effectively has a two-stage “runoff” electoral system like the French presidential election system, where anyone can run in the first round and the top two vote-getters then run head to head. But unlike in France, the first stage of this runoff is organized on roughly ideological lines, where candidates who choose to label themselves as vaguely left-of-center run in a separate first-round election from candidates who choose to label themselves as vaguely right-of-center. In this analysis, becoming a “member” of a major party means no more than deciding which first-round election to vote in. The parties aren’t so much civil society organizations that have their major internal decisions shaped by electoral law, as features of the electoral law that for historical reasons are named after formerly significant institutions in civil society.

ryan cooper@ryanlcooper· May 18

just say you need more living space, this is taking forever

Today, the Nachala movement’s vision of turning Gaza into a thriving Jewish community is very much alive. And Palestinians do not exist anywhere in this version of a Jewish Gaza.

“The 2 million or whatever number of Arabs, Gazans, who live here will not live in Gaza,” Weiss said. “It can take a week, it can take maybe a few months. They will not live here.”

ryan cooper@ryanlcooper· May 15

like look at this family. five kids, including a tiny baby, just trying to live their lives, and the fucking Russians were going to massacre the lot for some supposed nanoscopic battlefield advantage. whole world full of stories like this today

ryan cooper@ryanlcooper· May 15

anyway there's basically a Wall Street conspiracy to force all the institutional investors, index funds etc to buy this turd by rigging the index rules. though of course "owning" a share gives you no control whatsoever over the company, Elon keeps that

However, the trio should benefit from the speedy inclusion into indices that will ensure flow into its shares. The Nasdaq 100, tracked by more than $600bn of investor money, was the first big index to change its rules, allowing the very largest newly listed companies to join in as little as 15 trading days after their IPO.
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A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket ascends into a clear sky, leaving a trail of exhaust and flame behind it.
“It will be impossible to not own them . . . This will be really helpful for demand,” said an adviser on the deal.
“The market is deep. Institutional investors have $270bn of dry powder on the sidelines,” added another adviser.
Bankers are also expected to allocate a large tranche of shares to retail investors through brokerages. Tesla has an unusually high proportion of retail shareholders for a $1.4tn public company at about 30 per cent.

ryan cooper@ryanlcooper· May 15

excuse me, that was old information. Elon wants it valued at *$1.75 trillion.* though I guess when you're talking about an infinity P/E ratio, who's really counting

Musk is targeting a listing next month to coincide with a rare alignment of planets, his 55th birthday on June 28 and ahead of the 250th anniversary of the US on July 4. While figures are still fluid, the rocketmaker has discussed raising about $75bn at a $1.75tn valuation.
“From a strict corporate finance perspective, the valuation makes no sense. But Elon is great at getting people to dream,” said a person advising on the deal. “Large asset managers are very keen on this IPO. There is a lot of demand and a lot of Elon fans.”

ryan cooper@ryanlcooper· May 15

I also did updated the famous Eisenhower speech about how damned expensive military hardware is. it turns out that fighter jets are on the order of 34 times more expensive in terms of wheat than they were in 1953 prospect.org/2026/05/15/a...

The fact that war is so incredibly expensive these days points toward a core truth of modern foreign policy: A wise statesman avoids it if at all possible. Another Republican president, who had commanded the largest amphibious invasion in history, knew this better than most. “The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population,” Dwight Eisenhower famously said in a 1953 speech. “It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half-million bushels of wheat.”

Today, a single F-35 fighter costs about $100 million, which at current prices is worth roughly 17 million bushels of wheat. But Trump is above such concerns. A reporter recently asked him about the war’s effect on ordinary people. “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation,” he said. “I don’t think about anybody.” That much is obvious.

ryan cooper@ryanlcooper· May 14

anyway here's my full view prospect.org/2022/07/11/t...

Under any government, there is always a danger of its power being abused. Democratically elected legislatures are not immune from this problem. It must be admitted that, should Republicans take control of Congress and the White House without any constraint from the Court, there’s a strong chance they’d pass all manner of abusive stuff. The Florida legislature, for example, recently passed a bigoted “don’t say gay” bill that blatantly violates the civil rights of LGBT teachers.

But the risk of theoretically unconstrained congressional majorities must be set against the current fact of the Court steadily stealing the powers of Congress, eroding the freedom of the people—and, of course, doing nothing to protect gay Florida teachers from a feral state legislature. It’s far from the first time American courts have ignored the Bill of Rights, and it won’t be the last.

The relevant question when it comes to constitutional design is what kinds of government institutions are most likely to abuse their power. Common sense and history teach us that elected representatives who must seek re-election at regular intervals are the least likely to abuse their power. Totally unaccountable courts where the judges can essentially pick their successors have much greater opportunity.

ryan cooper@ryanlcooper· May 13

John Kenneth Galbraith on conservatism. funny dude wist.info/galbraith-jo...

The modern conservative is not even especially modern. He is engaged, on the contrary, in one of man’s oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. It is an exercise which always involves a certain number of internal contradictions and even a few absurdities. The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character-building value of privation for the poor. The man who has struck it rich in minerals, oil, or other bounties of nature is found explaining the debilitating effect of unearned income from the state. The corporate executive who is a superlative success as an organization man weighs in on the evils of bureaucracy. Federal aid to education is feared by those who live in suburbs that could easily forgo this danger, and by people whose children are in public schools. Socialized medicine is condemned by men emerging from Walter Reed Hospital. Social Security is viewed with alarm by those who have the comfortable cushion of an inherited income. Those who are immediately threatened by public efforts to meet their needs — whether widows, small farmers, hospitalized veterans, or the unemployed — are almost always oblivious to the danger.

ryan cooper@ryanlcooper· May 13

also had a little fun imagining if civil rights activists behaved like modern Democratic political consultants prospect.org/2026/05/13/t...

More concretely, consider the Gallup poll of approval of interracial marriage. Back in 1954, it came in at just 4 percent. By 2021, that had risen to 94 percent. Why the change? Because generations of ordinary people, activists, and even some politicians—knowing full well they were charging headlong into a storm of public condemnation—argued that in a free country, people ought to be allowed to marry whoever they damn well want.

If civil rights activists had thought like today’s poll-sniffing political consultants, they would have carefully avoided any such hideously unpopular ideas. They would have yelled at Richard and Mildred Loving to avoid raising the dreaded salience of the issue by appealing their conviction for violating Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law to the Supreme Court, no matter how eerily apropos their surname might be. “What are you trying to do, elect more Dixiecrats?” consultants would have bellowed. And interracial marriage might still be illegal to this day.

ryan cooper@ryanlcooper· May 13

why Dems and the left need to keep making the case for climate policy: renewables and EVs are great, but not remotely enough to get where we need to be prospect.org/2026/05/13/t...

$It is true that you don’t have to talk about climate change specifically to justify a major climate package. Renewable energy is being deployed at scale, even in the U.S., and EVs are less expensive to run over time because of cheaper fueling and few maintenance requirements. Indeed, in a rapidly growing fraction of the world, EVs are cheaper to purchase up front, too. China is showing how to decarbonize trucking. But decarbonizing electricity production and transport is not enough. We also need to decarbonize industry and agriculture, and strategies for doing so are not all ready for deployment, particularly in the latter category. As I wrote back during the 2024 campaign, Joe Biden got us maybe halfway where we needed to be with the IRA. Now we don’t even have that foundation to build on. In short, an immense package of investment and research will be needed to reach the (literally) sunlit uplands where fossil fuels are not needed for anything, aside from maybe chemical production. Given the macroeconomic conditions likely to prevail in 2029—which might be a severe case of stagflation at the rate we’re going, if not a debt crisis—it will most probably be quite painful and disruptive. The American people must be convinced the price is worth it.$

ryan cooper@ryanlcooper· May 13

pop quiz, are these common personality changes suffered by stroke victims, or a neutral description of the characteristics of long term consumers of conservative media

Impulsiveness
Apathy
Pseudobulbar affect
Depression
Anxiety
Anger, irritability and aggression
Confusion
Forgetfulness
Fatigue

ryan cooper@ryanlcooper· May 12

turns out that you can drive up the birthrate with a baby bonus, you just need to crank it up to twice the per capita income www.nytimes.com/2026/05/07/o...