Sammy's Blog

Unless you're trying to make your final guess to win the game, you shouldn't guess the same letter in the same place. You already tried that, so doing it again doesn't give you new information.

Your "guess" is guaranteed to be wrong, but you now rule out (or find!) another possible letter when you go to actually solve the puzzle. Lets see an example:

Suppose you have B - A - _ - E - S, all green. You just need to guess the last letter, but there are a lot of remaining options. Among letters you haven't guessed in that slot, D, K, N, R, S all work. You could guess every letter individually, but you most likely won't get it first try, and worst case it will take you five turns. Instead, if you guess D - R - I - N - K, a word that you know is wrong you "guess" every letter at once, so you're guaranteed to get it in 2 (you guess S if there are no yellows).

Just for a moment, think of worlde a little bit like binary search. Your goal is to learn as much information as possible with every guess. If your guess splits the problem space in half (i.e. you eliminate half of possible words if it shows up green, and half of words if it shows up yellow), you learn (on average) the most possible information with every guess.

Now – you only get to guess a letter in one position, so either it's in the one specific position you chose, or it's in any of the other possible four positions. If you want these two outcomes to be roughly equally likely (or as close to equally likely as possible), then that one position you chose had better be really likely to make up for 4 other slots.

You learn (on average) way more about the letter 'Y' with a guess like R - A - I - N - Y, than you do with a guess like Y - E - A - R - N.

Basically the same logic as above. It's either one of the 5 specific letters you guessed, or it's one of the 21 other letters. You want to guess the 5 that most closely split the problem in half.

Going a step further, once you have a few lines guessed, you want to guess the most common/most evenly dividing letters given the letters you already have. Q is a bad first guess, but if you already have a U down, then maybe…

Remember, your goal is to "divide in half" with every letter. If you have a sense of/random sample of the words in the space, it's easier to pick the letters/positions that divide that list the most precisely.

The thing is, that's a pretty big if. You can "prove" anything you want if you start with a false assumption. If we could print infinite money, and not cause inflation, that'd be pretty awesome, but is such a thing even possible? How did we get here, and why does anybody believe we can do this?

In theory, economics is based on supply and demand. If everyone wants apples, but there are no apples available, the price of apples goes up. If nobody wants apples, but every citizen has a stockpile of 100 apples, the price (and the implied value of apples) goes down.

In the same way, if everyone in the United States magically had 12 million dollars, they'd all be competing to use that money to buy the same limited supply of things. Many people want 3-bedroom houses, but there aren't magically more of them. It's the same people competing with each other to buy the same house. In order to outbid someone with 12 million dollars for something they really want, you also need to spend millions of dollars.

Fundamentally, people want money so that they can use it to buy goods and services. On a global scale, if every government printed more money, but didn't also increase the global amount of available goods and services, you're not increasing everybody's real buying power, because everyone is still competing to buy the same limited number of goods and services. You only increase real wealth if the number of goods and services produced also increases.

So if America went out tommorrow, and started printing tons of money, and taking on tons of debt, we'd expect the cost of everything to go way up. We'd expect government bonds to be much less valuable, right? Right?

Well it turns out that during the 2008 financial crisis, the U.S. did print a lot of money, and did take on a lot of extra debt, and everybody expected inflation to happen, but somehow it just… didn't. Markets are hard to reason about, and nobody really understands why it happened, but people have thrown around some theories:

• The United States is considered a trustworthy institution, and people need a safe place to put their money.
• The world financial system is already so invested in the U.S. dollar that the U.S. can do whatever it wants.
• The stimulus bill spurred so much economic growth that it offset inflation.

Ok, so, we took on a lot of debt before, and it was fine. We printed a truly wild amount of money, and people still trusted us as a stable, reliable institution. Everyone believed that the U.S. government would pay them back, and would pay them back in dollars that held value.

Even in a crisis caused by the U.S. economy, the U.S. looked like a safe place to put your money because the U.S. always had been so responsible, and so reliable in the past.

So – if we suddenly started being irresponsible, like, racking up huge debts and printing money to pay them back, people will keep lending to us forever, right? Right?? If we don't produce anything, we can just keep printing money forever, and people will just give us stuff, right?

There's this idea that because we're borrowing in U.S. dollars, and that U.S. dollars are the de-facto currency of the world, we're never in trouble, because we can just print more money to cover our losses. But do you think people will keep lending to us if, in terms of real physical goods, we're not offering anything meaningful in return? Do you think people will continue to use USD as their default currency if the U.S. government buys all your stuff, but gives you paper, and no items in return?

We could technically pay off our debts by printing a shit ton of money, but from an investing perspective, it would be essentially the same as default. We made a promise, and in terms of goods and services, we're not providing any real value to fulfill that promise.

Defaulting on a loan is so dangerous because it destroys your credit. If you go bankrupt, it's super hard to get another loan because people don't trust you anymore.

In the same way, even if the U.S. doesn't technically default on its debt, if it covers up by printing more money, it's essentially going to have the same effect because people won't trust us anymore.

We can "cash in" on our current trust and influence, but once we break that trust we can't rely on it as strongly anymore.

The argument goes something like this:

Wealthy people have money, and poor people don't have money. So, if we print some extra money, and give it to poor people, it lowers the value of the rich people's money, effectively taking buying power from rich people and redistributing it to poor people.

It accomplishes a goal people were already after, in a way that's clean and simple.

The thing is – rich people don't own wealth in dollars. The very rich know that dollars aren't necessarily stable, and they own houses, stock in businesses, and even precious art. When you inflate the values of dollars, it doesn't really affect a lot of the rich people, but it does hurt others.

The people that it does hurt are the ones governed by a fixed $15 (or less) minimum wage. The people it does hurt are the lower-middle class people that don't know much about investing, and just keep all their money in a savings account. It helps people who are in debt, and might have some other positive effects, but for many it's more a destabilizing element than it is helpful.

Ok so there's a real argument here. The idea is – it's ok to print money because we can generate more goods and services. If we spend it wisely – build bridges, improve broadband, we can create jobs for people who were previously out of work. What's more, that new infrastructure and spending will spur even further economic growth.

If for every dollar we spend, it generates $N dollars of economic activity (how is it even possible to reliably calculate these things?), then we're not just printing money, we're printing value.

This is one of those arguments that I like because it's logically consistent. If we produce more goods and services, then even though there's more dollars in circulation, there's also more stuff to buy with those dollars. If it really creates that much growth, then it works.

The challenge here is it's extremely optimistic. Is your government so smart and well organized that it's going to create 10 trillion dollars worth of value? It might. We've had our shining moments, and I'm hopeful that we'll make it count, but most of the time it doesn't work out that way.

I knew that, due to the pandemic, I was pretty much cut off from normal social events for a few months to a year, so it didn't matter too much if I carried a big heavy DSLR around. I also didn't want to be the guy that had a million different cameras falling out of his pockets for different situations. The key here is it's ok to take your selfies with a cellphone. You can have a nice camera, but every photo doesn't need to be the ultimate in high resolution image quality. If you just want a nice memory of making pancakes for dinner it matters more that you don't interrupt the memory that you're trying to capture. Maybe if I bought a million cameras, I would get one really tiny one, but it's not what I need right now, and phones are a pretty solid replacement for non-photography photos. I'm also a little wary of fixed-length prime cameras, because once you start cropping, you lose all the benefits in image quality.

I wanted to try all the cameras out in person, but also due to the pandemic, I wasn't really able to visit a camera store. I could get sample images online, but it's always hard to tell how much editing has been done, and how much is due to the scene's lighting and the skill of the photographer.

With that in mind, only looking at big, high-performing interchangable lens cameras, I narrowed down my search. The Nikon Z and A7R cameras were out of contention as I considered them surpassed by the Canon R5. The 5DMark4 was also out of contention, considered surpassed by the D850. That left the remaining options as: The Canon R5, The Nikon D850, and the Fujifilm GFX 100s.

The R5 has excellent RF glass, is a well rounded camera, has a flippy screen, and the benefit of very functional face and eye detect. Plus canon are known for making nice, easy-to-use camers. The thing is, in terms of lenses, Tamron's glass is much cheaper, and very high performing (especially the 35/1.4!), and the face-detect in live view on the D610 is actually very accurate and usable, albeit too slow for fast-moving subjects. The colors straight out of camera are also thought to be a little flatter than it's DSLR counterpart. The thing that I'd really miss most from the R5 is actually the flippy screen, but I figure if we need to take a group photo that badly, we can just ask someone to take our picture. Compared to the D850, it's also missing tons of buttons and the optical viewfinder experience.

The GFX 100S is the camera I gave the most thought to. Paired with the 45 f/2.8 or the 110 f/2, it gives the very best image quality of any practical camera, and it feels good to know that you have the very best. If your image doesn't look as good as the stock photo you find online, it feels good to know that it's not because you took the wrong camera. In programming, we think about debugging as "finding the source of error that broke your software", and having the very best makes your system simpler because there's one less source of error that you have to check. You don't have to go back to the same place and try it with a different camera, because you know that it wasn't the camera's fault. It lets you stop thinking about gear and focus on other factors that make something into a good image.

Although competitive with the R5, the D850 is also a 4 year old camera. With the way technology progresses, it's fortunate to have a camera that lasts 10 years before obsolesence, and it's already mid-way through it's lifespan. By comparison the GFX 100s is not just new, but groundbreaking, a big leap forward in technology that seems likely to stand for a long time. You're buying into a system that's big, and new and rapidly growing, compared to one that's slowly being phased out of existence. It's also on it's fourth iteration, and it's really getting the attention to detail that forms it into a full fledged product. It lacks a vertical grip, but for the most part it's very flushed out, and doesn't have anything major that's still clunky or missing.

Between the D850 and the GFX 100s, the decision was the hardest because the GFX 100s is just such a compelling option.

But ultimately….

I went with the D850. The big thing for me is I loved using the D610, and not just that, I trusted it. I didn't know if the GFX 100s would be fun to use, or if it would render images the way I liked, but I knew the D850 would, because it was just the same as the D610. I remember before I bought the Z6 two years ago, some reviewers told me that it rendered nice and had usable autofocus, but in my mind, they couldn't be more wrong.

Lack of available lenses on the GFX system was also a huge deal for me. If you shoot at 35mm, and then crop it down to 85mm, you're not getting any of the image quality of a medium format sensor. If you shoot the GFX system, you're stuck with a paltry 2x zoom range, meaning that you're not going to get the shot unless the composition lines up exactly with the one lens you happen to have.

Some of the fuji lenses are great, don't get me wrong, but not all of the lenses are perfect, and if something I need is missing, I just can't get it. The 45mm, 110mm, and 32-64mm are considered by most reviewers (and tech charts) to be near perfect, but the same isn't true for other focal lengths. What if I want an ultra-high performing 35-150? What if I really need the long end of my 24-70 f/2.8? Not only are you stuck buying expensive fuji glass, but you're unable to make choices about which lenses best suit your use case.

Even for the same focal length, choices matter. Fuji only has one real pancake lens, but it's not what I want it for. I want a 28mm pancake, and a larger/higher performing 50mm, but fuji doesn't offer that. Not only that, some of the lenses might not render the way I like. Tamron and Sigma both make excellent 35 1.4s, but I like the look of the Tamron, and I don't want to give that up to move to the Fuji system.

I know I said at the beginning that I was willing to switch systems (I definitely would have if only the Z6 were available), but it is nice not having to trade in for new lenses, and more importantly, I've already done my research, and I know which lenses I like, and which lenses are good for the things I need them for.

My D850 arrived in the mail a few weeks ago, and it's exactly what I wanted. It's just like the D610, except the focus is snappier and the resolution is higher (the images even look a little crispier too). As a work of engineering, it's just so well thought out, and so well designed. It's also built like a tank and looks like it could survive anything. The only things I really miss from the D610 are more granular temperature adjustments inside of auto-white balance, a dedicated retouch button inside of playback mode, and a built-in flash. I also prefer having the white-balance button on the side of the camera, rather than at the top by the command dial, even though it's placement on the D850 is still very logical. You get a little grain sometimes along with the higher sensor resolution, but I think it still outperforms the D610 when binned down to a fair comparison.

But the thing that really blew me away, and the thing I didn't expect, is how well the D850 files perform when you try to edit them. If you push a D610 file by 2 stops, it looks washed out and you have to bump the exposure and contrast to compensate, but on the D850 I experienced no such thing. They're mostly comprable SOOC, but once you try to edit them, the colors from the D850 just look better, and are so much easier to get right.

In terms of image quality, I feel like I bought the D610, but even better. I'm getting the same look that's both exactly what I wanted, but even nicer looking than it was before. It works perfectly with the lenses I know and am already very happy with. I love shooting through the optical viewfinder.

It's a 4-year-old camera, but, weirdly I don't think it's going away for a really long time. The latest-and-greatest from canon and sony offer almost no improvement in image quality (I actually like the Nikon better), and I don't even find them significantly more easy/enjoyable to shoot with. I don't think Sony will obsolete it's brand new Alpha One any time soon, and the Tamron 35/1.4 is on par with the very best of mirrorless glass. It is a 4 year old camera, but it's my favorite, and I think it will remain competitive for a very long time.

Most pro photographers carry two zoom lenses, one 24-70 f/2.8 and one 70-200 f/2.8. But for portraits, neither of these gets you entirely what you want. 85mm is widely considered the "standard" portrait length, but 50mm and even 35mm are also common. The problem is, the range of focal lengths used for portraits is like a normal distribution centered around 70mm. In order to get the right photo, you'd need to constantly swap between the two lenses. I've used a 24-70 for portraits, and I found myself constantly near the long end of the zoom range, often wishing I had just a little more.

The Tamron 35-150 is perfect because the center of it's zoom range is also the center of the range I use for portraits. It has a little more zoom (5x vs 3x) than the standard 24-70, but it's not one of these ultra super zooms that sacrifices on image quality. Most of the lab tests rate it similarly to some of the older 70-200 f/2.8 lenses, so you're not losing much over one of the more standard zooms.

In addition, it's quite fast. It's variable aperture, so you lose some of that speed at the long end of the zoom range, but 2.8 at 35mm is just as fast as a standard 24-70. This means if you find yourself indoors without a flash, it's still sometimes usable.

There isn't quite an everything and the kitchen sink lens, but for me this is as close as it gets. I'll often use it if I'm going on a day trip somewhere unsure of what I'm going to be shooting. The downsides are it's very large (especially with an FTZ adapter), it focuses a little slower and less reliably than some of the native Z lenses, and it's a little less sharp and less fast than a good prime lens.

Ok, well, I'm currently looking to upgrade my 50mm to a different lens of the same type, either the 50mm f/1.8 Z or the 50mm f/1.4 Sigma Art. I bought it because it was cheap, and did something none of my other lenses had. It's not even sharper than my zoom lenses at it's only focal length of 50mm, but it does have one thing those zoom lenses do not: a maximum aperature of f/1.8. If it's dark, and you need light, a fast prime is your only option. Once you're already cranking your camera's ISO the extra stop over an f/2.8 makes a huge difference. A fixed length prime is the least flexible, but it's important when you need it. Also, most fixed length lenses are sharper than their zoomy counterparts, but not this one :(.

I'm gonna be honest, the only reason why I own this lens is it was half off when it came with my camera. Don't get me wrong, it's still a good lens, but I probably wouldn't have gone out and purchased it on my own. What I like about this lens is that it's super reliable. It's a native Z mount lens on a Z body camera, and the autofocus just works better than any of the other lenses on the same camera. The image quality is also consistently good at f/4 throughout the zoom range, so much so that I don't have to think about it. If I'm going out for the day with casual people, this is the lens that I take. Most people don't want to wait while you fiddle with your settings, and most group photos don't care about artistic framing. The people care that you got the shot, the one where everyoen was smiling, and it didn't come out weird. If it's blurry that's really bad and you likely don't have that many do-overs. It's also super small on the Z body, and feels nicely balanced. Most travel photos I take are wide-angle anyway, because I want to capture the environment, and you're often in those situations where you have to pull the shot quickly and not mess it up. The lack of light can be inconvenient sometimes, but so far it hasn't been worth it to me to shell out for the much better (and much more expensive) 24-70mm f/2.8 S lens.

Ever wonder why Biden seems so unpopular with so many voters, yet forecasts frequently predict him to win the election? Biden's best state's, according to 538: Alabama, Mississippi ,Delaware ,South Carolina, North Carolina, and Louisiana, are ALL low Democratic voter turnout states. Biden isn't actually that popular with the Democratic party overall, but it doesn't matter because he's disporportionately popular among the subsets of people that have the most voting power.

By contrast, take a look at the best states for Bernie Sanders: Vermont, Utah, Washington, California, Colorado, New Hampshire, all heavily Democratic states. Because he's appealing to more liberal states, and because his message resonates with certain groups of people, he's being disproportionately hurt by the electoral college relative to his popularity.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/biden-is-the-front-runner-but-there-is-no-clear-favorite/

On November 8, 2016 Democrats were absolutely stunned. Despite all the polls from trustworthy sources like the New York Times*, an unthinkable candidate had won the election. There had to have been a mistake. There had to have been something deeply wrong, Democrats everywhere searched for an explanation.

Not believing that such a candidate could have won fairly, they blamed James Comey for unfairly reporting on Hillary's e-mails just days before the election. They blamed misleading polls discouraging Democrats from voting in an already "certain" election. And finally, they blamed Russia for interfering in our Democratic process, certain that for this to happen, rules must have been deeply and influentially broken.

There was a lot of evidence suggesting wrongdoing. Trump always seemed to have a soft spot when he spoke of Russia. There were the meetings in Trump tower. And Trump seemed to be doing everything in his power to kill the investigation.

The first weeks of Trump's administration were hectic to say the least. Trump picked fights with anyone and everyone. He struggled to assemble a cabinet and wound up leaving many key government positions unfilled. He seemed hell-bent on ignoring all rules and structure, as much as he possibly could. And finally, in a move that shocked many, he fired the person investigating him, FBI director James Comey.

Things moved quickly. Deputy Attorney Rod Rosenstien appointed a special counsel to replace Comey in the Russia investigation. Mueller seemed like just the man for the job, and over the coming weeks, his team gained momentum. Democrats saw not only mountains of evidence piling up, but real criminal offenses, with Mueller and his team reaching indictment after indictment. And Trump, although powerless to fire Mueller seemed to be doing everything in his power to kill the investigation.

The Democrats saw the way the investigation was going, and they saw the indictments lining up, and they made a crucial tactical error. Instead of zeroing in on the firing of Comey, the offense they knew he had committed, they threw all their efforts behind the Russia investigation, doing everything possible to stoke public excitement for a dramatic Mueller testimony.

They had a precedent from the Nixon investigation, one of the few issues on which Trump lacked positive sentiment within the Republican party, and what looked to be an undeniable act of treason. They thought the Mueller report was going to be a bombshell. That they were going to catch Trump red-handed, and that it would suddenly and dramatically sway public opinion. They were expecting something so severe that it would be impossible to claim impeachment was a purely partisan investigation. Even many Republicans were holding their words, waiting to see what the report described.

A week before the report's release, the Democrats made another tactical error. Instead of demanding Mueller first testify to the public directly, they allowed his report to pass, largely unquestioned, through Trump's justice department, and Attorney General William Barr. I don't know if they could have stopped Barr from publishing his letter, but they could have kept the tension, pushing people to wait for the bombshell that was the final report. Instead, they let the singular news story, the one they were building up for months, be not Mueller's report itself, but Barr's report on Mueller's report.

On March 24, 2019, Barr issued his letter to Congress. The verdict was "no collusion", i.e. the investigation did not establish coordination between Trump and the Russian government. Importantly, despite all the evidence in the report, Barr himself decided that Trump had not committed obstruction of justice, and attached his own findings, instead of the report's in his letter. Mueller himself described Barr's letter as a mischaracterization of his report, and in another mistake, Mueller expressed his discontent privately instead of immediately going to the public.

It was only after the full report was released, nearly a month later, that people began to realize what happened. Most neutral media organizations and fact checkers described Barr's letter to be intentionally misleading. Instead of "totally exhonerating" the president, Mueller had carefully layed out the case for obstruction of justice, and seemed only to not reach a verdict because it was not in the mandate for his report. In addition, instead of finding no evidence of direct collusion, he did suggest there was questionable behavior towards Russia.

By this point the moment had long since passed. Democrats had been hyping up a jarring news story, and what they got was a drawn out fizzle. There was a lot of dirt in the Mueller report, but Democrats didn't get the conclusive proof they claimed was lurking. They tried to pivot and push further, but having failed the first time, it looks like they were just grasping at ways to accuse the president.

If they had focused in on obstruction of justice, they would have gotten the president on an act they knew he had committed, and bad news from the Russia investigation wouldn't have broken their momentum. On the other hand, if they had spent months arguing that Trump had broken rules by firing Comey, and real evidence was found from the Russia investigation it still would have been the bombshell they needed to sway public sentiment and press further. This is again an instance where Democratic leadership was too confident and failed to plan effectively to minimize their downside.

In the months after the Barr's letter, the Democrats were frustrated and disorganized. They sensed Trump was doing something wrong still, and pushing the boundries, but they lacked a single rallying cry. If they had done so from the beginning, their strongest play would have been to rally around the firing of James Comey, but by now years had passed, and it would be hard to pick back up again.

Despite the lack of a central rallying cry Democratic voters were angry, and they were growing more angry with each new presidential offense. More and more moderate Democrats, long evasive, now publically voiced their support for impeachment. As primary season rolled in, all eyes turned to the candidates, who felt rising pressure from the left-most wing of the party. Unable to avoid the question in debate after debate, the candidates all lined up in support of impeachment. Only Nancy Pelosi and her closest allies held their breath.

Finally, in September, news broke that President Trump asked the Ukranian government to investigate Hunter Biden the son of his chief political rival. Abuse of power to investigate a political oponent drew such a parallel to Watergate that it immediately set off alarm bells in politician's minds. Not only did they have more evidence of wrongdoing, but their anger had a central focus once again. Pelosi, sensing a shift in momentum, announced that she would begin the impeachment process. After an announcement from their extremely cautious, yet trusted leader, the rest of the Democratic party followed suit.

Why was Pelosi cautious for so long? I think it's because you only get one shot to announce articles of impeachment (or at least, if your first attempt fails, it makes your second attempt harder). I think she was saving it, waiting for a news story like this one to break, so that when something like this did come out, she could investigate it and apply pressure on it. Starting an impeachment proceding draws national news coverage, and she wanted an event that the American people would see as definitely wrong, something that was worth spending her news coverage on.

The impeachment process also makes it easier for the Democrats to carry out a formal investigation. This means that the democrats got to learn about the Ukraine scandal in more detail, and potentially uncover even more damaging information. In addition, waiting for so long gave some kind of additional credibility to the investigation. It sends the message that Pelosi feels "we don't want to do this, and we won't unless we really have to, but as it turns out we really have to."

In addition, Pelosi learned from the mistakes of the Russia investigation. Despite gaining such a powerful rallying cry, she didn't make the impeachment entirely reliant on proving coordination with Ukraine. She included an article "Obstruction of Congress", about Trump's efforts to block investigation, which relies almost entirely on publically available knowledge. As such, it can't be easily disproven, so Democrats can keep pushing in that direction no matter what other information comes out.

Despite all this, Nancy Pelosi is stuck. One of the reasons why she stalled on starting the impeachment process for so long is she knew that she wouldn't be able to carry it through to completion. At least not through the Reupblican controlled Senate, where Mitch McConnel has promised a speedy acquittal. And yet, she still wanted to start the impeachment process so that she could draw public attention and promote an investigation. So, she drafted the articles of impeachment, got them passed in the house, and then, did the only thing that she could do. She stalled. Hearing Mitch McConnel's vow, she refused to send the articles of impeachment to the senate. This means that Mitch can't kill the impeachment, and she gets to keep up the pressure until the tide turns in her favor.

What gives? Trump is an unpopular president. Just a month after he took office, over 50% of people disapproved of his presidency, according to polling tracked by 538. As of this moment, more Americans support impeaching Trump than those who are against it. Congressional votes are largely determined by the opinions of their voter-base. So why can't Pelosi get the votes she needs?

Well, impeachment is very popular among Democratic voters, but as you might have guessed, it's not very popular among Republican voters. And the thing is, it's Republican senators that need to vote for impeachment for the thing to pass. 50% of people might want Trump impeached, but that breaks down to like 80% of Democrats and only 10% of Republicans. Republican senators likely won't support impeachment unless a majority of their own party supports it. That means Trump has to be really unpopular.

Given the unwavering support of his base, it's not clear what it would take to move the needle on impeachment. Polls show an uptick in support for impeachment after news of the Ukraine scandal broke, but only a small uptick, and one that still gives impeachment less than 10% support among Republicans. If anything, the history behind the impeachment proceedings, and the haphazard way in which it all went down made it much harder to impeach Trump because it gave wiggle room for his most ferverent supporters to believe it was all just a partisan mess. I don't think it'll go anywhere in the near future, because if Pelosi is smart, she'll hold her cards and continue to prevent a Senate vote, and if Trump doesn't make any big mistakes, he likely won't lose enough popular support to be impeached.

I think going forward, the stalemate will continue. Pelosi doesn't have the votes, and shouldn't risk a clean shot at impeaching the president. Senate Republicans might try to entice her with the promise of additional testimony in the house trial, but I think Pelosi would be stupid to take it. I think Pelosi is going to wait for the next big bombshell, and then pull the trigger whenever the momentum swings.