Tootfinder

Elon Musk’s team of Texas lobbyists during the 2025 legislative session did not rival those of huge energy and telecommunications companies,
which typically employ dozens of people to represent them.
⭐️But Musk and his companies still hired more lobbyists this year than any other since 2021, according to data from the Texas Ethics Commission.
❌Musk, the billionaire businessman behind carmaker Tesla and aerospace company SpaceX, influenced several new Texas laws this year. …

Elon Musk Hired a Dozen Texas Lobbyists This Year. State Law Keeps the Extent of Their Influence Under Wraps.
Musk, the billionaire businessman behind Tesla and SpaceX, influenced several new Texas laws this year. How his lobbyists came about these wins, however, is more of a mystery.

Even if the $180bn claim isn’t bullshit (I’m reasonably confident it’s bullshit), why aren't we acknowledging this makes Musk’s failure rate in government 91%?
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yg98rl717o

Trump 'disappointed' with Elon Musk's attacks on budget bill
In response, Musk accused the president of "Such ingratitude", adding: "Without me, Trump would have lost the election".

Paul Krugman's critique of Elon Musk at #DOGE:
"[A] zillionaire who knew nothing about government marched in claiming that he could cut $2 trillion from the $6 trillion federal budget by eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse. This was obvious nonsense […]."
"Seriously, would any of Musk’s tech-bro friends have invested in a venture run by someone with such a record of …

Trump Just Went Absolutely Nuclear in Screwing Over MAGA Voters (Greg Sargent/New Republic)
https://newrepublic.com/article/197600/trump-republican-budget-bill-screwing-maga-voters
http://www.memeorandum.com/250703/p127#a250703p127

You learn and learn and learn the language of a culture, then one day you read a news heading and understand them ->
Congress passes budget to expand mass deportations, cut social services, and stall clean energy
https://www.theverge.com/policy/697879/con

Congress passes budget to expand mass deportations, cut social services, and stall clean energy
Congress has passed a budget bill that will fund President Donald Trump’s push for mass deportations while cutting access to Medicaid and stalling clean energy.

This is a dangerous level of squinting at tea leaves, so •serious• grain of salt here, but:
The sudden re-plunge of Tesla’s stock price during this Musk / Trump spat suggests that maybe, maybe its utterly wild overvaluation had nothing to do with Tesla’s products, or its market position, or Musk’s phony brilliance, or even (the usual explanation) with investors getting hyped about a self-driving car future and magical robots.
Maybe it was investors expecting the company to be the beneficiary of kleptocratic pillaging of the US Federal budget. Which — unlike all the other explanations — would not be an irrational expectation.

Donald Trump’s budget bill is set to make ICE the single largest federal law enforcement agency in US history.
The mass deportations the far right fantasizes about will remain unrealistic,
-- but not for lack of funds.
https://jacobin.com/2025/07/ice-trump-

ICE Is About to Get More Money Than It Can Spend
Donald Trump’s budget bill is set to make ICE the single largest federal law enforcement agency in US history. The mass deportations the far right fantasizes about will remain unrealistic, but not for lack of funds.

AOC wrote on BlueSky, a good summary of the Trump budget bill adopted in Congress.
"I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE.
This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion - making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined.
It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing."
#usa

Bootstrapping periodic quantum systems
Zhijian Huang, Wenliang Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02386 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02386…

Bootstrapping periodic quantum systems
Periodic structures are ubiquitous in quantum many-body systems and quantum field theories, ranging from lattice models, compact spaces, to topological phenomena. However, previous bootstrap studies encountered technical challenges even for one-body periodic problems, such as a failure in determining the accurate dispersion relations for Bloch bands. In this work, we develop a new bootstrap procedure to resolve these issues, which does not make use of positivity constraints. We mainly consider …

FIRST − Susan Collins voted to bring Trump’s heartless budget to the Senate floor
NOW − Her Senate colleagues voted to ram the budget through the Senate – all thanks to her vote to advance the bill
I’m calling for 1,000 gifts in the next 90 minutes to make Sen. Collins rue the day that she put Trump ahead of Maine. Will you rush an emergency $15? >>
Hear me when I say this: The stakes have never been higher, and this win is in sight.
Susan Collins turned her bac…