Traffic Rants, Mexican Food, Portland Politics, Barbacoa Research, and the Blazers -- but not necessarily in that order. Reformed hacker. Restaurant consultant.

Portland, OR
Joined February 2009
If you're interested in travel to Mexico, what I've been cooking or eating, etc, check out my Instagram. I reserve twitter for traffic rants, Blazers fandom, retweets of interesting news items, and the occasional trolling these days and little else. instagram.com/nickzukin/
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Nicholas Zukin 🐑🔥🌮 retweeted
I have no idea if Lindsey Graham hired gay prostitutes, but I do know it's incredibly lame to release these allegations only after he can no longer defend himself. Cowardly. What is even the point of this?
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Nicholas Zukin 🐑🔥🌮 retweeted
The answer to bad industrial agriculture isn't non-industrial ag, it's better industrial ag. Yet the good-food movement has been all in on non-industrial, influenced by 2 people who are excellent writers & good men: Wendell Berry & Michael Pollan. wapo.st/47sistr
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Nicholas Zukin 🐑🔥🌮 retweeted
Gabriel Zucman @gabriel_zucman has now for the third time criticized our research on California’s proposed billionaire tax, claiming we have provided “no answer” to his criticisms. xitter.cf/gabriel_zucman/status/… We have actually already responded twice on this platform, but let’s address his arguments once more in detail, with the hope that third time’s the charm. 1/14
This Hoover Institution study, which has fueled the deluge of ads (more than $200 million spent by billionaires so far) to defeat the California billionaire tax, is spectacularly misleading. Let me explain its crucial flaw. 🧵
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Zucman argues that the tax will raise his projected revenue because billionaires who leave CA after 1/1/26 will be taxed anyway. At least $542B of net worth (Page, Brin, Thiel) departed the state by 12/31/25. The entire thread is a misleading denial of this fact. ft.com/content/d66976… nytimes.com/2026/04/27/us/… forbes.com/sites/forbeswe…
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Nicholas Zukin 🐑🔥🌮 retweeted
Zucman promising to never tax wealth again
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The founder of the Internet Archive explaining why their work is critical and news companies are wrong to fight against them. - Journalists rely on the Wayback Machine. It preserves histories so when people try to cover things up by changing a website, those histories are available - Pew found over a 10 year period, a FOURTH of websites they tracked disappeared. That's histories and knowledge lost, without Wayback. - I didn't realize, but IA isn't a fan of scraping for building AI, and the piece gets into why. I don't exactly agree, but it also makes sense why their tool is built more for human use for capacity reasons. But this is another good example of news orgs fighting the same tools their journalists use religiously @TheAtlantic
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Nicholas Zukin 🐑🔥🌮 retweeted
Whats happening right now is probably way worse than the Hugging Face incident. AI-powered attacks are hitting real organizations while major platforms disclose breaches and critical flaws. - Microsoft reports AI agents targeting hundreds of organizations, reaching privileged cloud access in under three hours in multiple cases. It attributes the ConnectWise compromise to the same group. - CrowdStrike documented four operators running successful AI-agent campaigns. One compromised at least 15 Argentine healthcare organizations. - PHP2Shell: AI helped turn longstanding PHP flaws into working exploits. Cloudflare’s CEO reports millions of exploitation attempts. Their AI involvement is unknown. - Railway disclosed possible access to customer secrets. LiteLLM shipped a backdoored release. Zeabur confirmed another breach and is shutting down. - GitLab patched a maximum-severity flaw affecting 12 years of releases. Node.js patched a serious code-execution vulnerability, with Vercel deploying firewall protections. Feels like a turningpoint.
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Nicholas Zukin 🐑🔥🌮 retweeted
In January 2025 my mom’s lung cancer spread to her brain. The drug with the best chance of helping her was approved in China but not here. A doctor told me, almost as an aside, that if she were Chinese she could buy it at a pharmacy. So I flew to Shanghai and came home with 26 boxes in my luggage. That was 19 months ago. My mom is still here, still working, and in her words has had an amazing three years. The drug was approved in China in 2023. The FDA approved it in July 2025. It still is not for sale here. I know of at least 30 Americans who have made the same trip. I have been scared to tell this story because I worried it could cost my mom access to the medicine keeping her alive. But the problem matters more than my silence. These drugs need to be developed and available here, and that means FDA reform. Art Allen at KFF Health News told our story this week. It also ran in The Washington Post. kffhealthnews.org/health-ind…
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Nicholas Zukin 🐑🔥🌮 retweeted
🧵In 2019, California billionaire tax crusader Gabriel Zucman made an astonishing claim to the NY Times: billionaires pay a lower avg tax rate than poor people in the US. I noticed something fishy though: Zucman's NYT chart did not match his own published data from a 2018 paper
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Nicholas Zukin 🐑🔥🌮 retweeted
LaMelo Ball really picked the ball up and started running with it like Bijan Robinson right in front of the ref 😭😭
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Nicholas Zukin 🐑🔥🌮 retweeted
When Mexican president @Claudiashein announced universal healthcare, applause from the (gullible, oblivious, willfully ignorant - pick your poison) international left was deafening. Problem is, as @JorgeGCastaneda writes here: it's a smokescreen. eluniversal.com.mx/opinion/j…
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Nicholas Zukin 🐑🔥🌮 retweeted
Republicans: We hate Indian-Americans Indian-Americans: We’re not going to vote for you then Republicans: See! See!
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Nicholas Zukin 🐑🔥🌮 retweeted
Socialism is when you destroy public services and the more public services you destroy the more socialism it is
Anonymous submission: Last week, a group of activists disabled the OMNY readers at the BQ Church Avenue station in Brooklyn with an automatic center punch and drill. They opened the gate so people can ride for free, and painted the cameras to protect themselves and fellow riders from surveillance. This was deliberate act of protest against unaffordable transit, hyper-surveillance in predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods, and the MTA's collaboration with the military industrial complex. YOU ARE BEING WATCHED. OMNY records when and where you travel, your photograph, name, DOB, billing address, and other personal details. This invasive tech creates a profile to track your life and travel patterns. OMNY’s privacy policy places no limits on the data it collects about you. EVERY TAP FUNDS A WAR PROFITEER. OMNY is operated by Cubic, a military equipment company making combat simulators. They sell the F-35 fighter jet training system to imperialist zionist entities like israel. The F-35 is a key weapon in israel's genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, and all of the US's imperialist wars, responsible for massacring millions of people. FIGHT BACK. The MTA and Cubic don't deserve your hard earned cash. Take action, smash a reader, jump the turnstile, hold the gate for others. If you must pay, use cash for OMNY cards, and tap yourself and fellow riders in. This makes you all less traceable. Cover your face and identifying features. Always check for police before evading the fare. Remember, contracted security guards have no authority to stop or detain passengers. RIDE FREE, FUCK THE NYPD, AND FREE PALESTINE!
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Nicholas Zukin 🐑🔥🌮 retweeted
You Can Eat Anything (by tommcgovern27 on IG)
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Nicholas Zukin 🐑🔥🌮 retweeted
Please point to the neoliberal austerity on the graph
A nice old building burns, and so the pearl-clutching begins. Where were these pearl clutchers when austerity was wrecking a generation? Why does one town hall grab their attention but millions of schools, hospitals, and homes dilapidated by neoliberalism are of no importance?
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
France's level of public social spending was third highest in the world at 30.6% of GDP in 2024. Excluding the pandemic, it is slightly down from its 31.9% high in 2014. Total public spending is 57.2%, second highest among large countries not at war and near all-time highs. ourworldindata.org/grapher/social… ourworldindata.org/grapher/histor…
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Nicholas Zukin 🐑🔥🌮 retweeted
The median annual wage for an American employed full-time who doesn't have a college degree is $51,688. The median annual wage for an American employed full-time who has a bachelor's degree or higher is $91,936. Does this fit in with your worldview?
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Nicholas Zukin 🐑🔥🌮 retweeted
“ Okay now lets make all the top teams lose so we can justify a 24 team playoff “
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No one can say the Ducks haven't had an exciting football season.
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Nicholas Zukin 🐑🔥🌮 retweeted
Anthropic is filled with amazing experts in computer programming, math, neuroscience, and linguistics who should not be taken seriously on any macroeconomic issues.
Surveyed Anthropic staff's answers imply 17.1% GDP growth in 2030
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New press secretary announced
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