Howdy, folks! Today’s roundup is mostly a bunch of follow-ups to posts I wrote before. It’s very hard to decide when to post about a particular topic, and it often happens that some relevant news story or piece of data comes out a little bit later. These roundups are a good way of cleaning up those loose ends.

Today we start with a truly wacky policy proposal by the esteemed Thomas Piketty…

1. What on Earth is Thomas Piketty talking about?

Unlike many people, I never pretended to have read Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. I simply didn’t read it. I did read a number of the papers that the book was based on, which is often a better and quicker way of getting the key points of a book like that. I thought those papers were a good and important addition to the economics literature, even if the messy reality of inequality didn’t always fit the simple story Piketty told, and the data he relied on was less reliable than we might want.

Despite the limitations of Piketty’s work, it sparked a long-overdue and generally healthy debate about inequality. And Piketty’s basic policy solution — tax rich people more — was pretty reasonable, even if his proposed numbers were too extreme. I did roll my eyes when Piketty stood on a stage at an academic convention and accused Greg Mankiw of being in the pocket of rich people.1 But overall his work seemed pretty serious and often reasonable.

However, after years of relative silence, Piketty has burst back onto the scene with some work that seems very unreasonable. He and his team at the World Inequality Lab — which includes his longtime co-authors Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman — have come out with a grand plan for fixing the world. And for the most part, it’s total nonsense.

Piketty described the new plan in a thread on X. Its main focus, perhaps surprisingly, is not inequality — it’s climate change!

First of all, Piketty’s baseline climate change scenarios appear based on a very outdated model — the RCP8.5 scenario, an extreme projection that essentially all serious climate scientists have now rejected. This choice of baseline suggests that Piketty et al. were trying to find ways to justify maximal policy intervention, instead of starting from the science.

Piketty’s preferred solution to climate change is degrowth. He envisions detailed central planning to achieve deliberate impoverishment of large portions of the world’s population — mandated reductions in the consumption of various specific goods, including food.

In addition to the dubious morality of deliberately impoverishing untold millions of human beings based on scientific models that have already been rejected, this kind of scheme is just utterly unworkable. Back in 2021, when I wrote about why degrowth is a political nonstarter, I declared that “implementing the kind of reallocation schemes that degrowthers throw around with abandon would require global economic planning that would put Gosplan to shame.” Piketty knows this, and thinks it’s a good thing.

Even more ridiculously, Piketty envisions a global fiscal authority to carry out this insane plan via global taxation:

Let’s set aside the obvious fact that countries are just not going to agree to give up their spending and taxation power — even the EU refuses to have a fiscal union, and it’s rather insane to imagine Indians and Chinese people agreeing to let themselves be taxed by Tanzania and Nigeria — and just point out how this proposal ignores the basic economics of climate change.

Climate change is a global negative externality — the reason countries don’t all just impose their own local carbon taxes and solve the problem is that there’s an incentive to free ride and let other countries handle it. That exact same free rider problem applies to the global fiscal authority that Piketty envisions. There’s a clear incentive for any country to simply drop out of the fund and let other countries fix climate change for them.

It’s obvious that Piketty et al. are just looking for a reason to levy high taxes on the global rich. This is the “World Inequality Lab” we’re talking about here. And it probably made sense to try to ally with other factions of the progressive movement — degrowthers, “decolonial” leftists, and so on — in order to get support for their desired policies.

But the result here is not going to be a good one for Piketty, Saez, Zucman, and their team. No country is actually going to embrace the idea of a global fiscal authority to fight climate change. In calling for this sort of thing, Piketty et al. simply make themselves look less like serious economists and more like opportunistic activists on the fringe of a “green” movement that’s already in steep decline.

2. Tokenmaxxing, cont.

In a post this week, I noted that “tokenmaxxing” — simply using as much AI coding output as you can and hoping that it pops out something valuable — is hitting its limits:

Well, here’s a follow-up. John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times recently made this nice chart, using data from the Demirer et al. (2026) paper that I discussed in my post:

The number of apps with significant usage is actually going down in the age of AI, even as people are releasing floods of new apps into the world. Meanwhile, Bob Elliott notes that since generative AI was created, there has been a rapid acceleration in many measures of text output, even though the economy hasn’t accelerated much:

And Sam Altman is now warning of a significant pullback on AI spending — the first such pullback since generative AI appeared.

This doesn’t look like a simple story of “bottlenecks” and “weak links” — if it were that, we wouldn’t see so many new apps and e-books hitting the market. The deeper story here may be that demand for many of the things that generative AI produces might be a lot more inelastic than we thought. The things we really want a lot more of may not actually be the things that generative AI is yet equipped to provide. As the AI industry advances, of course, that will probably change.

3. Western militaries are obsolete, and Trump is making it worse

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about how all militaries not based around large masses of cheap drones are now functionally obsolete:

This includes America’s military, which is based around a few big expensive “platforms” like fighter jets, aircraft carriers, and tanks. I’m not saying those weapons will all be useless in future wars, but if that’s all you have, and you don’t have masses of cheap drones, you will lose wars to countries that do have masses of cheap drones — such as China, if they ever get serious about turning their mighty industrial base toward making billions of weaponized drones.

The Lowy Institute has a good report explaining why Western militaries seem incapable of learning to use the essential weapons of modern warfare. They write:

Western military institutions…are failing to energetically learn from modern wars. Despite four years of unprecedented visibility into Ukrainian battlefield innovations, and the recent war in Iran, Western forces have not institutionalised key lessons into doctrine, force structure, or procurement priorities…The recent war in Iran has confirmed and amplified many of Ukraine’s lessons, particularly on the centrality of drone warfare, the inadequacy of Western counter-drone capabilities, [and] the effectiveness of cheaper long-range strike systems…And yet the response of Western institutions…has been characterised by rigidity, inertia, and what can be called a humility deficit: an unwillingness to genuinely confront the implications of what is being demonstrated in real time on real battlefields.

The U.S. military could, of course, learn from Ukraine — currently the #1 best country in the world in drone warfare. But the unrelenting hostility and disdain toward Ukraine from Donald Trump and the MAGA movement has prevented America from taking advantage of Ukraine’s expertise:

The Trump administration’s hesitancy in signing a major drone deal with Ukraine is slowing the U.S. military down in an area where it’s already trying to play catch-up…[T]he U.S. has so far refused to embrace Kyiv as a partner in its drone development…

[E]ven with senior Pentagon officials — including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Army Secretary Dan Driscoll — lauding Kyiv’s drone abilities, the Trump administration is still biding its time on taking full advantage of the Ukrainian capabilities, a delay that experts say is potentially kneecapping the U.S. military…

“I don’t know what the hang-up would be in denying ourselves the ability to take advantage of that. I don’t think there’s any good reason,” Rebeccah Heinrichs, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute think tank, said of Ukraine’s drone capabilities…One former official [called] the hold-up “lethargy” on the part of the Trump administration and “a certain amount of hostility towards Ukraine coming from the very top.”

MAGA basically created a fantasy world where Russia is a defender of Western values, Ukraine is somehow an arm of global wokeism, Ukraine is part of Russia’s legitimate “sphere of influence”, and Russia is a mighty superpower with a manly martial culture that would eventually be able to grind the Ukrainians down and inevitably triumph.

The problem with this fantasy was that it was fantasy, and if you believe in fantasy too long, reality tends to intercede. By allowing themselves to believe their own anti-Ukraine mythology, Trump and his followers are cutting themselves — and the U.S. Military — off from access to crucial modern military technology.

4. Tariffs on China are helping poor countries grow

In my last post, I argued that Europe should put tariffs and other trade barriers on Chinese imports, in order to protect its own strategic defense-related industries. But this is actually a lot harder than it sounds. Even if Europe blocks final goods from China, China can still export intermediate goods to “third countries” that assemble those goods for final export to Europe. In fact, China has done this in response to American tariffs, reducing (though not eliminating) the decoupling effect.

But if that happens, it’ll be very good for the “third countries”! Assembly work isn’t the most valuable part of the supply chain, but it does create value, and it does create lots of jobs, and it does create local companies that then have the potential to climb up the value chain someday and start making their own components. In fact, this is exactly what China did! Back in the 2000s, China did a lot of the low-value assembly work for components made in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan; now, most of that has been onshored, but it was still important for China to go through that initial phase of learning to slap together iPhones and computers and cars.

So if putting tariffs and other trade barriers on Chinese-made goods just ends up shifting assembly to poor countries…well, that’s not the worst outcome in the world. It’ll help counteract Chinese companies’ home bias — their natural tendency to want to build factories in China instead of overseas.

In fact, as the WSJ reports, this is already happening:

“Made in China” is becoming “made by China”—all over the world…Faced with higher Western tariffs and weak demand at home, many Chinese factories are moving abroad, making everything from appliances to automobiles everywhere from North and South America to Eastern Europe…In Mexico, Chinese investment in industries such as the automobile sector generated more than 100,000 jobs from 2020 to 2023, according to one analysis…In 2024, Chery Automobile, China’s top car exporter, helped to rescue a small factory in Barcelona that struggling Japanese automaker Nissan no longer wanted…

Jeep maker Stellantis this month said it planned to build EVs with two separate Chinese companies in Spain and France. Ford and Geely are in discussions about a potentially similar deal in Spain, and have also discussed whether the collaboration might extend to the U.S…Midea, the home appliance maker…opened a roughly $100 million factory in Brazil making refrigerators and washing machines in 2024. Its subsidiary, Welling Auto Parts, opened its first overseas manufacturing facility in Mexico last year.

In order to get around EU tariffs, Chinese companies are fueling a Moroccan manufacturing boom:

This has helped accelerate Morocco’s growth to 5%. That’s in the range where growth starts meaningfully transforming a country.

So even in the worst-case scenario where trade barriers don’t reduce dependence on Chinese supply chains, they can help spread the blessings and bounty of industrialization to a bunch of poor countries who need the factories more than China does. The flying geese must fly!

5. Is India’s growth under Modi impressive, or disappointing?

I recently came across this chart, showing various aspects of India’s infrastructure boom:

This is all pretty incredible. India’s poor infrastructure has long been regarded as a bottleneck to urbanization, manufacturing, and economic growth in general. Whatever else you think of the government of Narendra Modi, it has built a lot of infrastructure.

But over that same period, overall growth has been slower than we’d like to see. Anand, Felman, and Subramanian have a recent paper in which they argue that India’s GDP growth rate from 2011 to 2023 was overstated by somewhere between a quarter and a third:

India’s annual economic growth during the boom years between 2005 and 2011 may have been underestimated by about 1–1½ percentage points on average, and subsequent growth between 2012 and 2023 may have been overestimated by about 1½-2 percentage points…The first methodological issue leading to the misestimation is that the economy’s formal sector has been used as a proxy for the vast informal sector, even though the latter was disproportionately hit after 2015 by demonetization, the introduction of the goods and services tax, and the COVID-19 pandemic…The second methodological issue…is that the deflators for many sectors have been based on commodity prices, which have moved sharply relative to others. [emphasis mine]

If Anand et al.’s estimates are right — and they marshal a huge amount of supporting evidence — then it suggests that Modi’s tenure in office has been mixed. A couple of big policy missteps — demonetization and a botched tax rollout — hurt the informal sector of the Indian economy, while massive infrastructure investments have helped.

The implication here is that Modi and his successors should lean into what works. They should focus more on marshaling national resources and applying those resources toward rapid growth — two things that China did very well in the 1990s and 2000s.

6. Friends don’t let friends cite George Borjas

I’ve been writing over the years about how the right’s favorite immigration economist does shoddy, subpar work. Despite having a job at Harvard, George Borjas — whose analyses miraculously always seem to find that immigration is much worse than all the other economists think it is — consistently uses both poor data and flawed methodology. In another roundup back in February, I pointed out how Jianxin He and Adam Ozimek had found yet another example of Borjas doing subpar economics:

Borjas’s February 2026 working paper attempted to answer whether H-1B workers earn less than comparable native-born workers…[His] findings result from substantial data errors.…The most significant mistake is a…mismatch between his H-1B and native-born samples: the H-1B applications span 2020-2023, while the ACS data covers just 2023…[Accounting for this discrepancy cuts] the wage gap roughly in half…

The second error stems from controlling for geographic wage drivers using each worker’s PUMA (public use microdata area)…The problem is that Dr. Borjas uses the PUMA where visa holders work alongside the PUMA where native workers live. Consider a native-born software developer working at Google in Mountain View who resides in a cheaper area like Fremont. If residential areas have lower average wages than business districts, this mismatch systematically inflates the apparent native wage and negatively biases the H-1B wage gap.

Again and again and again, economists catch Borjas at it. It seems pretty obvious that Borjas simply wants to conclude that immigration is bad, and doesn’t much care about methodological errors as long as they reach his desired conclusion.

In order to fight back against this accusation, Borjas decided to accuse his critics of ideologically-driven research instead. In a paper with Nate Breznau, he wrote:

Our study exploits an opportunity to observe 158 researchers working…during an experiment. After being asked their position on immigration policy, they used the same data to answer the same empirical question: Does immigration affect public support for social welfare programs? The researchers estimated 1253 alternative regression models, and the estimated impacts ranged from strongly negative to strongly positive. We find that teams composed of pro-immigration researchers estimated more positive impacts of immigration on public support for social programs, while anti-immigration teams estimated more negative impacts. The differences arise because different teams adopted different model specifications. The underlying research design decisions are the mechanism through which ideology enters the process of producing parameter estimates.

The idea here seems to be to turn one researcher’s clear pattern of errors into a he-said/she-said sort of situation. If all researchers just engineer results based on their ideology, then why should we selectively get mad at Borjas for doing what everyone else does too?

But — surprise! — it turned out that this Borjas paper also contained critical errors that invalidated the whole result! Katrin Auspurg and Josef Brüderl pointed out in a comment paper that if you fix one simple coding error in Borjas’s analysis, his entire result about ideologically-driven research just vanishes into thin air:

Borjas and Breznau…recently reported that researchers’ ideology influences their empirical findings. Although we were able to reproduce B&B’s numerical results, our reanalysis shows that the reported association is not robust. Specifically, the association hinges on a coding error. Data from four teams that contradict the ideology hypothesis were excluded from the analysis due to idiosyncratic variable coding. Correcting this error renders the ideology effect no longer statistically significant. Also, B&B employed a different outcome variable and weighting scheme to that used in a previous paper based on the same data. These two analytical decisions further contribute to the observed ideology effect. Correcting the coding error or using the same specification as in the previous paper renders the ideology effect indistinguishable from zero. Therefore, we conclude that B&B do not provide robust evidence of ideological bias in this context. Instead, the reported association appears to be a statistical artefact resulting from questionable modelling decisions. [emphasis mine]

How does this just keep happening again and again, and why is it always Borjas?

In any case, I think the implication here is pretty clear: Friends don’t let friends cite George Borjas.

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Up and to my office a while, and thence by coach with Sir J. Minnes to St. James’s to the Duke, where Mr. Coventry and us two did discourse with the Duke a little about our office business, which saved our coming in the afternoon, and so to rights home again and to dinner. After dinner my wife and I had a little jangling, in which she did give me the lie, which vexed me, so that finding my talking did but make her worse, and that her spirit is lately come to be other than it used to be, and now depends upon her having Ashwell by her, before whom she thinks I shall not say nor do anything of force to her, which vexes me and makes me wish that I had better considered all that I have of late done concerning my bringing my wife to this condition of heat, I went up vexed to my chamber and there fell examining my new concordance, that I have bought, with Newman’s, the best that ever was out before, and I find mine altogether as copious as that and something larger, though the order in some respects not so good, that a man may think a place is missing, when it is only put in another place.

Up by and by my wife comes and good friends again, and to walk in the garden and so anon to supper and to bed. My cozen John Angier the son, of Cambridge coming to me late to see me, and I find his business is that he would be sent to sea, but I dissuaded him from it, for I will not have to do with it without his friends’ consent.

Read the annotations

Links for you. Science:

Russell Vought is going destroy American Science: Summary of Key Changes in OMB’s Proposed Federal Financial Assistance Rule
Strict Monitoring Could Delay Homecoming of Hantavirus Ship Passengers. Trump administration officials want local health authorities to constantly monitor the 18 passengers for another three weeks, a requirement that far exceeds typical protocols. (Bhattacharya’s hypocrisy on display again…)
Misinformation Masterclass: A Wall Street Journal editor packs a pandemic’s worth of confusion into just 102 words
Trump admin shutting key US researchers out of global virus response talks, documents and sources reveal
Language Models Need Sleep
Ebola at the World Cup? Here’s what we should actually worry about
AI general models and the future (?) of bioinformatics research

Other:

Why so much election analysis is basically useless
Blood Money: The Slave Fortune Behind Mayes Middleton’s AG Campaign. Six generations. One unbroken transfer of wealth. From a Louisiana slave plantation to the Republican nomination for Texas Attorney General. (excellent, must-read)
What Exactly Should a Project 2029 Be?
My Wife Disappeared Into El Salvador’s Prison System. When Will She Come Home?
The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech
Republican Rep. Bryan Steil Takes Credit For Funding He Voted Against
Fox News insists on being the villain in another superhero’s story
Pentagon recruiting troops to watch White House UFC fights, memos show
Trump Clears Way for Corporate Tax Dodge Hidden in the Fine Print
Texas School Police Pepper-Sprayed, Tackled and Tasered Students
Two “progressive” super PACs linked to House GOP
How Prediction Markets and Crypto Firms Steamrolled a Watchdog Agency
We Found 430 ICE Street Arrests in the New York Area. More Than 93% Targeted Latinos.
Proposed bill would tax New Yorkers who tap ‘anti-weaponization’ fund at 100%
‘It’s the Jews’: San Diego mosque shooters decried ‘the universal enemy’ in hate-filled manifesto
The Death of the Texas Political Machine That Bush Built
Retired Judges Call Out Trump’s “Unprecedentedly Fraudulent Scheme”
Anti-ICE Protesters Found Guilty in Case That Guts Free Speech Rights
Keystone Kash Sends Agents to Election Officials’ Homes in Key Swing State (but the Trump administration isn’t fascist something something)
DOJ subpoenas Reddit in effort to unmask Trump critics
Why The Filibuster Absolutely Has to Go
Project 2029 sure doesn’t look like an answer to Project 2025
The answer to rightwing sadism is the liberal Christian tradition. It’s why Mike Lee compared James Talarico to Moloch.
The Death of Political Machines: Is Adriano Espaillat the next Joe Crowley?
Trump’s Texas Senate Primary Win Is Going to Backfire Spectacularly
A Colorado UFO watchtower has been waiting for the government to catch up
Tom Steyer Is Prepared to Take On the AI Billionaires
In author’s debut novel, D.C.’s gritty music scene is a main character
Jim Crow Just Suffered a Temporary Setback—in Alabama
This big university system is embracing AI. Students and faculty aren’t all on board

I realize with everything going on, including the fascist takeover of the U.S., complaining about Trump attending game 3 of the NBA Finals tonight is small change. But it’s really annoying me. It’s going to be bad for some of the fans (the fans who can’t get in traditionally gather outside to watch the game on a big screen–and the Secret Service has banned that). But tonight is likely going to be a great, intense game: it’s essentially do or die for the Spurs, and the first game of the series to be played in front of the rabid New York Knicks fans.

And that fucking guy has to show up. We can’t even get three hours of good basketball without seeing his ugly mug. I’m guessing they’re going to go out of their way to keep Trump’s image off of the Madison Garden screens, otherwise the boos are going to rain down (Mayor Mamdani also plans to attend, and while this would never happen, it would be hilarious if they alternated screens between Mamdani and Trump, leading to the ensuing alternating cheers and boos).

Narcissists gonna narcissist, I guess. Though it would be kind of funny if It happened during the game…

Update: Mamdani just announced there will be a watch party in Bryant Park tonight.

Meet the Press today aired an interview host Kristen Welker taped Friday with President Donald J. Trump. It showed Trump losing control and walking out of the interview when Welker challenged his insistence that the 2020 presidential election and the recent California election were rigged.

Weirdly, he kept referring to the U.S. as “your” country when he was speaking to Welker, and to “your” elections. It was almost as if he was a foreign observer offering criticism of the U.S.

As Welker repeatedly pointed out that he has never produced any evidence for his assertions, he got madder and madder, calling the media—NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN—one-sided and crooked. He insisted “there’s more evidence than ever presented.” When she asked again if he had evidence, he said: “All I have to do is look.” When she continued to ask for evidence, he said: “You’re either crooked or you’re stupid.”

Finally, he got up, pulled off his mic, and left, telling her: “Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough. Thank you darling. Have a good time.”

One of the things Trump spat at Welker was that “[a] country can never be great with a dishonest press.” With this statement directed at the legacy media, once again, Trump illustrated that he was accusing his opponents of what he, himself, is doing, a classic authoritarian technique to muddy the waters so people stop trying to figure out what is real and cease to believe anything.

Scott Pelley, who was fired last week from 60 Minutes after thirty-seven years as a CBS correspondent, spoke with Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the New York Times in an interview that appeared today. Pelley explained that CBS News director Bari Weiss, appointed after Trump loyalist David Ellison took over the network, asked for changes to a story about the anti-ICE and Border Patrol protests in Minneapolis over the winter.

Hours before airing, he explained, after the story had been approved, Weiss sent an email to Pelley’s boss asking them to make the protesters look more violent and to say that before an officer shot her, Renee Good was driving toward him.

But she wasn’t. Pelley continued: “On the video, you see the officer standing slightly off the front of the car. And you clearly see Ms. Good’s wheels turned completely as far as they will go, away from the officer. But he shoots her in the head, kills her, and says something about her that I can’t repeat in polite company.

“We have gone out of our way in our plan from the very beginning to show the protesters for the responsibility that they had. We had already scrubbed the video archives, looking for those scenes. Somehow that wasn’t enough for Ms. Weiss. The video showed that the officer wasn’t standing in front of the car and she wasn’t driving toward him, but that’s what the president said about that, and that’s the way she wanted it described.”

Pelley said: “There was a thumb on the scale for the president’s version of events that I felt was a level of political influence that I had never seen in 37 years at CBS News.”

In her interview, Welker challenged Trump over more than his election denial. He didn’t appear to like questions about the economy or his war on Iran, either.

Meeting with Trump in Wisconsin, at his team’s request, Welker asked Trump about the economy, noting that “Gas is up. Diesel is up.” Trump answered: “It’s all coming down as soon as the war’s over.” Welker continued: “Seventy percent of farmers say they can’t afford fertilizer.” Trump responded: “The farmers are doing very well.” He added: “All of them support me because there’s nobody been better to farmers.” He continued: “You know I had a great first term. I had the greatest economy ever. And you know what? This one’s blowing it away.”

As for Iran, Trump denied to Welker that he had ever promised to stay out of foreign wars, although Jane C. Timm of NBC News reminded readers that he told Pennsylvania voters in 2024: “I will not send you to fight and die in stupid foreign wars that never end. I will not send our sons and daughters to go fight for a war in a country that you’ve never heard of. We’re not going to do it. We’re going to bring our troops home, and we’re going to focus on America First.”

In the interview, Trump pushed back on the idea that he needs to settle the Iran crisis quickly despite his promises to end it fast. He compared his Iran adventure, which so far has lasted just over three months, to the Vietnam War at nineteen years, the Korean War, and World War II. Here, too, he used that odd “you,” as if he were looking at the U.S. from outside. He suggested that the loss of thirteen U.S. military personnel in Iran is light compared to the losses of those other wars.

Despite his administration’s insistence that he doesn’t need congressional approval for his war on Iran because it’s not a war, Trump repeatedly referred to it as a war.

Trump also told Welker he hopes to revive the $1.776 billion slush fund his acting attorney general Todd Blanche said was dead.

Trump increasingly looks like a loser, and as he does so, more and more people appear willing to challenge him.

They are following in the footsteps of CNN’s Daniel Dale, who has fact-checked Trump for years now. Dale reported yesterday that a statistic about Black employment Trump cited in a speech in Wisconsin on Friday was so obviously false even Trump questioned it.

“And we’ve also had huge drops in—and I’ll tell you, this is something that’s amazing: African American unemployment is now doing better than it’s ever done,” Trump said. “And I don’t know where that stat came from, but I’ll take it,” he said. “I don’t know where the hell that stat come—but we’ll take it.”

Yesterday, Susan Douglas and Paul Romano, a political organizer and a Vietnam War veteran respectively, represented by the Public Integrity Project, filed a federal lawsuit to stop the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) cage fights at the White House on Trump’s birthday, a week from today. Fighters are expected to “conduct the ceremonial weigh-ins and face-offs at the Lincoln Memorial, make pre-fight walkouts from the Oval Office, and do combat in a massive structure now under construction just steps from the Executive Residence.”

“This plan is deeply corrupt,” the lawsuit alleges. It is being organized by the UFC, “whose chief executive, Dana White, is a close friend and ally of the President. The President is giving White and his company what none have enjoyed before: unfettered access to the White House and Lincoln Memorial to stage a private, for-profit sports event, with all the promotional and branding opportunities that accompany such access.” One executive recently called the event “the greatest earned-marketing tool of all time.”

The lawsuit notes that “[f]ederal law tightly restricts private use of the national capital’s most sacred monumental spaces” and that Trump and the administration appear to be using the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence to relax those rules. But, it notes, the UFC fight is tied to Trump’s 80th birthday rather than the nation’s 250th, and is being organized not by the congressional planning body for the 250th, but by UFC.

The suit lists the many ways in which the UFC fight is a money-making venture for the company and for Trump, including the fact that he bought between $15,000 and $50,000 of stock in the parent company of UFC, TKO Holding Group.

Trump has announced he will attend Game 3 of the NBA Finals between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs at Madison Square Garden tomorrow night, forcing street closures and Secret Service perimeters for the event. Today, fans expressed their fury at the news that they would have to arrive at least two hours early and that he was “ruining the vibe” of the New York moment.

—

Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/07/magazine/scott-pelley-interview.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/fact-checking-trump-interview-meet-press-june-2026-rcna348518

https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/06/politics/fact-check-trump-black-unemployment

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.293217/gov.uscourts.dcd.293217.1.0.pdf

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/07/us/politics/lawsuit-ufc-fight-white-house.html

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-weaponization-fund-jan-6-payouts-b2991324.html

https://apnews.com/article/nba-finals-trump-knicks-security-249fcd4e50d3bfa064dabd11246feda3

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/jun/07/trump-knicks-spurs-nba-finals-game-3-security

youTube:

watch?v=SIIHnYzDZ98

Bluesky:

atrupar.com/post/3mnpg4dswvs2w

atrupar.com/post/3mnpetnwk3s2w

atrupar.com/post/3mnpdk2dyyc25

petrichorist.bsky.social/post/3mnpp4scta22a

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So based on the latest totals, it appears Katrina Foley, the incumbent county supervisor, will march on toward the general election, where she will (yet again) face off against Republican Diane Dixon.

And, based upon voting trends and tendencies, odds are strong Foley pulls out the November win and remains on the job.

However …

In the course of her campaign, I was struck by a few things that someone should probably let Foley in on. And I don’t say this to be jerky, but because this is a local political website, and shit matters to me …

First, never, ever, ever, ever, ever talk like this again.

Never, ever, ever …

Why? Multiple reasons. To begin with, it comes off as waaaaaaay too cocky and self-assured. But even more important, the best way to drive supporters to the polls is to stress the exact opposite of confidence: You’re nervous. Diane Dixon has a wildly smooth apparatus working for her. The hard right is throwing millions of dollars into the race. It’s gonna be super tight. I need all of you to not only vote, but tell your friends to vote.

Second, present better.

Foley is, by all accounts, tremendous at her job. She’s a no-brainer, especially against a bougie lightweight like Dixon. But, man, she isn’t the easiest sell. I attended a Katrina Foley event, oh, seven months ago. A lot of people there. Multiple candidates. And after one Democratic colleague wrapped his remarks by encouraging people to donate to his campaign, Foley stressed that her race was more financially pressing and urgent. It was painfully awkward and inappropriate, but sorta Katrina-esque. You don’t walk away from her thinking, “Man, it’d be great to hang.” You walk away thinking, “I mean, I guess so.”

And, to reiterate: Katrina Foley is great at her job. But she’s not smooth, or warm and cuddly. Which you sorta need to be, especially in local races. Hell, you at least need to fake it a bit. Dixon sucks, but she comes off grandmotherly. People love grandmothers.

Third, knives out.

When we get past this crazy season, it’s time to bring out the butcher knives on Dixon. The woman is a warmed-over MAGA puppet; a Will O’Neill fever dream. She’s unaccomplished, hoity, out of touch, lame. One can coast through a primary with, “Hey, I’m grandma! Want a candy?” But now shit gets real.

Now, we have to take it to Diane Dixon.

Katrina Foley—take it to her.

So if you read this site, you likely know of the passing of Jerry Rocha, the comedian/Orange County resident/Truth OC contributor who battled cancer like a champ.

Jerry was a great guy, and equally wonderful is his fiance Andrea, who was by his side every … single … step … of the way.

Anyhow, a Go Fund Me was recently set up by one of Jerry’s close friends. It’s 100-percent legit and warmly intended. This is what he wrote …

The world recently lost one of its most brilliant souls, Jerry Rocha. Jerry passed away on June 3, 2026 after a 5 year battle with stage 4 Colorectal cancer. Jerry waged an epic battle deserving of recognition in the halls of Valhalla or worthy of recognition in the archives of the Jedi Order. The tales of his bravery in the face of an unrelenting enemy will echo through Hyrule, across The Great Sea and live in The Lorule Kingdom for eternity. If you got any of those nerdy references then you truly loved Jerry and the light he brought to this sometimes dark world.

On June 3rd I not only lost my best friend and brother, but more importantly Andrea Lassen lost the love of her life. Andrea over the last 5 years has been Jerry’s real life Guardian Angel. Extending his life countless times by making him go to the doctor instead of brushing off a blocked colon as gas or a blood clot in his neck as a pulled muscle. Without Andrea’s love and care we wouldn’t have had Jerry for as long as we did. Now it’s time to return that favor. Andrea this past January had to leave her job to become a full-time caregiver after Jerry’s health took a turn. With these last 4 months of lost wages, mounting medical bills and after death costs Andrea could really use some Guardian Angels herself.

So I’m asking you to please, if you can, give whatever you can or at least light the Beacons of Gondor and spread the word (if you got that reference then you really got Jerry). I know times are tough and everything costs more, but if you can spare anything it would mean the world to me and help Andrea in this time of need. Also, to quote my late, great best friend, “Don’t Make a Fuck Outta Me” (IYKYK)

If you feel compelled, here’s the link.

No pressure, obviously.

Thanks.

— Jeff Pearlman

Alberto Romero:

AI is like religion. Either you believe it changes everything, or you don’t believe at all. There is no moderate position; nobody believes in AGI “more or less,” just like nobody is “casually religious.” If God exists, the only coherent response is to reorganize your entire life around that fact, as priests do. If you pray sometimes, then you are just an atheist who’s also fearful. When tech companies spend hundreds of billions on capital expenditures to add sparkly AI features to Office, Gmail, and Instagram, I only see fearful atheists — guys who don’t believe in AI but pretend just in case.

In 2026, the four largest cloud and AI infrastructure providers — Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft — committed to spending $670 billion on CapEx. Apple, in contrast, spent $12.7 billion on capex last fiscal year and projects $14 billion for 2026, 2% of what its peers are spending. The conventional reading in Silicon Valley is, naturally, that Apple is losing. Siri has been a punchline for years — an internal executive called the delays ugly and embarrassing — and critics say that Apple has not been the same without Steve Jobs. It is falling behind, they say, and moving way too slowly for AI.

I disagree with this portrayal: Apple is the most powerful tech company in the world right now because it’s acting according to what it believes.

Some of you, I bet, will object to Romero’s notion that no one is “casually religious”. Almost everyone I know is casually religious, you might be thinking. But read the whole piece. What he’s saying is that if you’re “casually religious” those are just words. You’re not living your life according to your professed beliefs (casual or not). And that’s how most of Apple’s peer companies seem to be approaching AI.

I’m not sure he’s right, but he might be, and I think his take is at least closer to right than wrong. Apple is making an enormous bet on AI — but their bet is that they don’t need to spend hundreds of billions per year on AI infrastructure (most of it fattening Nvidia’s bottom line) to reap the benefits. If Apple’s right we should start seeing it come together tomorrow.

(Arguably we’ve already seen it coming together — demand for Apple’s products and services has gone up, not down, so far in the AI era. Entrenched leaders often grow during the initial stages of extinctive disruptions — BlackBerry’s biggest year for sales (revenue) and investor confidence (market cap) was 2011, four years after the iPhone debuted — but the disruptors are there. There’s not yet a single threat on the market to the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, or AirPods — nor to Apple’s services revenue.)

Paulo Andrade, last month, “Using SwiftUI to Build a Mac-Assed App in 2026”:

I recently launched the macOS version of Shopie, an app I first released on the iOS App Store late last year. Shopie helps you keep track of products you’re interested in by letting you create wishlists and notifying you whenever a product’s price, availability, and other details change.

Unlike my other apps, where I typically blend AppKit (or UIKit) with SwiftUI, Shopie is built entirely in SwiftUI. I wanted to keep it that way to maximize code reuse across iOS, iPadOS, and now macOS. This post explores how far SwiftUI can take you on the Mac in 2026, especially if your goal is to build an app that feels truly native to the platform. It’s not meant to be an exhaustive review of SwiftUI on macOS. It’s simply a collection of recipes and issues I ran into while porting Shopie, a fairly small app, and keeping it 100% SwiftUI.

Andrade’s examples are copious. His conclusion is damning:

Apple dropped the ball here. AppKit was ahead of its time and UIKit was a more polished version of AppKit. A serious cross-platform framework that unified the two should have happened long before SwiftUI. Instead, Apple left AppKit to fossilize and then tried to leapfrog the problem.

You can see the result everywhere. SwiftUI is productive, modern, and often delightful, right up until you try to make a really good Mac app. Then suddenly you’re fighting the framework for things the Mac solved 20 years ago.

There’s something really wrong with SwiftUI. Amongst the apps I use, the best example is Apple Journal. Basic stuff that’s worked reliably for decades — some things that heretofore had worked forever — are dangerously broken. If you’re running MacOS 26 Tahoe, open Journal and make a new dummy entry. Type something like “The quick brown fox.” Then double-click on the word “brown” and delete it. Now invoke Undo.

What you expect is for the word “brown” to reappear. What happens is ... the whole sentence disappears. Gone. Invoke Redo and you only get back to “The quick fox.” The word “brown” is just gone forever. It’s nowhere in the Undo stack. That’s just profoundly fucked up. I’ve never seen anything like this with an AppKit app, ever. (I’ve never seen it with a UIKit app either — and the same thing happens on iOS with Journal. It’s just that you notice it less often because we don’t invoke Undo and Redo nearly as often there.)

I actually use the Journal app and I’ve lost entire sentences of text to this incompetent implementation of Undo. Editing text in Journal is dangerous because SwiftUI is so bad at something as fundamental as text editing. AppKit has had this solved since 1989 or so, a decade before Apple reunified with NeXT. And my example here is just one of many. Andrade documents a whole bunch more in his post. Shopie is a good modern Mac app — you can practically see from reading his post that Andrade’s hands are scarred from dozens of paper cuts.

So while the world is largely focused on Apple’s AI-related announcements at WWDC tomorrow, I’ve got SwiftUI (on all platforms) and Mac-assed Mac development high on my list. Apple’s developer message used to be that it was not just easy to develop apps for their platforms, but that it was easy to develop good idiomatically native apps. You got the correct complex behavior — for things like Undo/Redo — out of the box. That’s still true for AppKit and UIKit, but it’s never been true for SwiftUI, and SwiftUI is now seven years old. That’s too long for any excuses to hold water.

Luxembourg’s OQ Technology plans to test direct-to-smartphone satellite connectivity next year in Germany using a local telco’s cellular spectrum, setting up a challenge to U.S.-led services in the emerging market.

The post OQ Technology plans direct-to-smartphone demo with cellular spectrum appeared first on SpaceNews.

Quantum Space, a company led by a former NASA administrator developing highly maneuverable spacecraft for national security missions, will go public by merging with a special purpose acquisition company.

The post Quantum Space to go public in SPAC deal appeared first on SpaceNews.

For anyone who wasn’t sure whether China was in it to win the space race and dominate the rapidly growing space economy, its filings in December for 200,000 more satellites […]

The post WRC-27: the next arena for U.S.-China space competition appeared first on SpaceNews.

Axiom Space unveiled the design of another element of the lunar spacesuit it is developing for NASA in partnership with luxury designer Prada.

The post Axiom and Prada advance design of spacesuit appeared first on SpaceNews.

Across Europe, border environments are becoming increasingly dynamic and complex. Activity can shift within hours—vehicles reposition, staging areas disperse, small watercraft alter routes, and nodes of activity appear and disappear […]

The post Speed as a Strategic Advantage in Border Monitoring appeared first on SpaceNews.

SAN FRANCISCO – NewOrbit Space, a UK startup developing satellites for very low Earth orbit (VLEO), has raised $18.5 million in a Series A investment round. With the funding, announced […]

The post UK startup NewOrbit raises $18.5 million in Series A round appeared first on SpaceNews.

Amazon no longer faces a July 30 cutoff for deploying half its planned 3,232 broadband satellites, but the reprieve comes with a temporary loss of spectrum priority that could give SpaceX and other rivals more leverage in orbit.

The post FCC lets Amazon Leo miss deployment deadline with temporary spectrum penalty appeared first on SpaceNews.

“America is at risk of high impact GPS jamming and spoofing from space” was the title of my SpaceNews opinion article in October 2024. Little did I know that its […]

The post Russia is jamming GPS from space  appeared first on SpaceNews.

Few challenges are more familiar to local sports teams than balancing growing expenses with limited budgets. Equipment costs, travel expenses, facility rentals, tournament fees, uniforms, and administrative needs continue to rise, placing pressure on organizations that want to remain accessible to players and families.

The easiest solution is often increasing participation fees, but that approach can create new problems. Higher costs may discourage involvement and place additional strain on families already managing multiple expenses. As a result, many successful teams focus on generating additional revenue in ways that strengthen the organization without making participation more expensive.

Building Stronger Community Partnerships

Local businesses are often looking for opportunities to increase visibility while supporting community initiatives. Sports teams provide a natural way to create those connections.

Partnerships can take many forms, from sponsorships and event support to donations and promotional collaborations. Businesses frequently appreciate opportunities to associate their name with positive community activities, particularly when those activities involve youth development and local engagement.

The strongest partnerships tend to create value for both sides rather than functioning as simple financial transactions.

Selling Merchandise People Actually Want to Wear

Many teams offer merchandise, but not all merchandise generates the same results. Products that feel generic or low quality often produce limited interest.

Successful fundraising merchandise usually focuses on items people genuinely enjoy wearing outside of games and practices. Parents, supporters, alumni, and community members are more likely to purchase products they would choose to wear regardless of the fundraising aspect. For some organizations, items such as custom carhartt hats  become attractive options because practical apparel tends to remain useful long after a season has ended.

When merchandise provides real value, fundraising becomes much easier.

Turning Events Into Community Gatherings

Many teams already organize games, tournaments, and seasonal activities. Expanding these events into broader community experiences can create additional fundraising opportunities.

Food vendors, raffles, family activities, sponsorship displays, and community involvement often increase attendance and engagement. The goal is not simply generating revenue but creating events that people genuinely enjoy attending.

A well-organized event can strengthen community support while simultaneously helping the organization meet financial goals.

Encouraging Small Contributions From More People

Fundraising efforts sometimes focus heavily on securing a small number of large donations. While major contributions are valuable, broad participation can be equally important.

Small recurring contributions from a larger group of supporters often create a more stable source of funding. Alumni, parents, former players, local supporters, and community members may all be willing to contribute when given simple opportunities to do so.

The cumulative effect of many small contributions can become surprisingly significant over time.

Making It Easier for Supporters to Stay Involved

One reason fundraising campaigns struggle is that supporters lose connection with the organization between seasons. Teams that maintain communication throughout the year often find it easier to generate ongoing support.

Updates, community involvement, social media engagement, and volunteer opportunities help strengthen relationships with supporters. People are generally more willing to contribute when they feel connected to the team’s mission and progress.

Fundraising becomes easier when support is built on relationships rather than occasional requests for money.

Protecting Valuable Equipment and Resources

Raising money is important, but managing resources effectively is equally valuable. Teams that reduce waste, extend the life of equipment, and protect existing investments often improve financial stability without generating additional revenue.

Storage and organization can play an important role in this process. Equipment, uniforms, promotional materials, and seasonal supplies often represent significant investments. Solutions from Wheekeep  fit naturally into conversations about organization and storage because preserving equipment properly can reduce replacement costs and help teams make better use of the resources they already have. Saving money can sometimes be just as valuable as raising it.

Sustainable Fundraising Creates Long-Term Success

The most effective fundraising strategies are rarely the most aggressive. Instead, they are the ones that can be repeated successfully year after year without creating fatigue among players, families, or supporters.

Community partnerships, useful merchandise, engaging events, broad participation, and responsible resource management all contribute to stronger financial foundations. Individually, each strategy may produce modest results. Together, they can significantly reduce the pressure to increase participation fees.

Teams that approach fundraising as an ongoing part of community building often discover that financial support becomes easier to maintain because people feel invested in the organization’s success. Ultimately, the goal is not simply raising more money. It is creating a stronger and more sustainable program for everyone involved.

CLICK HERE TO DONATE IN SUPPORT OF DCREPORT’S NONPROFIT MISSION

The post The Best Ways Local Sports Teams Can Raise More Money Without Raising appeared first on DCReport.org.

Release: datasette-agent-edit 0.1a0

I'm planning several plugins for Datasette Agent which can make edits to existing pieces of text - things like collaborative Markdown editing, updating large SQL queries, and editing SVG files.

Agentic editing of text is a little tricky to get right. My favorite published design for this is for the Claude text editor, which implements the following tools:

• view - view sections of a file, with line numbers added to every line.
• str_replace - find an exact old_str and replace it with new_str - fail if the original string is not unique
• insert - insert the specified text after the specified line number

Rather than recreate these patterns for every plugin that needs them I decided to create this base plugin, datasette-agent-edit, which implements the core tools in a way that allows them to be adapted for other plugins.

Tags: ai, datasette, generative-ai, llms, llm-tool-use, datasette-agent

If you’re a user—owner?—of this cryptocurrency, this is important:

On May 29, the security researcher Taylor Hornby found a critical vulnerability in Zcash Orchard privacy pool using Claude Opus 4.8. The Zcash team hired Hornby specifically to look for this kind of issue. He found one fast enough to be embarrassing.

The Orchard pool is the newest and most advanced shielded transaction system in the cryptocurrency Zcash. Introduced in 2022, it allows users to send and receive ZEC while keeping transaction details private. It uses zero-knowledge proofs to validate transactions without revealing amounts or participants. The bug: a specific check that was supposed to validate transaction inputs wasn’t actually enforcing the rules it appeared to enforce. An attacker could have exploited the flaw to feed false inputs into that check and generate ZEC from nothing, with the zero-knowledge proof system blessing the fraudulent transaction as valid.

It’s fixed; that’s the good news. The bad news is that there’s no way of knowing if anyone exploited the vulnerability to steal money. And this fragility is the fundamental problem that makes blockchain such a bad idea.

In April, Anthropic initated Project Glasswing. The idea was to let companies use their new model to find and fix vulnerabilities in their own software. It was a fantastic PR move, and so many press outlets have uncritically parroted Anthropic’s claims that it’s now common wisdom that Mythos is better at finding software vulnerabilities than other models. Which is just not true.

In any case, Anthropic has published a Project Glasswing status report. It’s finding a lot of vulnerabilities in software—yay! Some of them are even dangerous. But almost none of them has been patched. It’s weird. There’s something fishy about the data that I don’t understand. That Anthropic refuses to release details—that it just says “trust us”—is a big problem here.

1. It seems Piketty has become a degrowther.  And other views.  Maybe it is rude to say this, but some of our best-known economists basically have a negative-valued understanding of how the world works.  And a bit more.

2. Claims about soil (speculative).  Here is GPT Pro analysis.

3. Stepping up.

4. An interactive feature for AI and economic growth.

5. The strange allure of the single-sentence novel.  From Totei.

6. Where is the Indian diaspora population?

7. Not in France you don’t!

8. The Pope in Spain cites Salamanca and liberty.

9. “We’re hiring two Research Fellows to study the future of scientific discovery.“

The post Monday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Came home yesterday, and giving myself a break after travel.

From TPM Reader JO …

There are a few local data points your Platner piece doesn’t mention that may become important.

1. Mills is still on the ballot, and she’s been making a point of saying so since the first article about the sexts came out. Her lawn signs, which had largely disappeared, are springing back up all over town with reminders about that. She sees an opening, she’s trying to exploit it, and she has a receptive audience.

2.  This is just the view from one local Dem club, but it’s no more obvious now that Platner is the candidate than it was that Biden was the candidate in ’24 — and Biden’s name is coming up a lot. People know that if Platner ultimately can’t weather the latest news (or if more is coming), we can’t afford to wait to coalesce behind Mills. (I’d prefer Costello, but know he’d lose to Collins).

3. Ranked choice is a wild card. There are a lot of ways to strategize about ranking Mills #1 or #2, but a lot of people who a couple of weeks ago had no reason to think about it are now trying to suss out what ranking on Tuesday will give us the best shot in November.

4. At least in my local Dem club, the latest news is landing much differently than the sexting stuff, the tattoo, the social media posts, etc. A couple of months ago, we were really split between the two candidates, but everyone agreed we’d work hard for whoever won the primary. When Mills suspended campaigning, we were all on board for Platner. Not so now. No one is voting for Collins, but some are saying they just can’t vote for Platner anymore. I think that’s going to cost Platner some critical votes (and volunteers) in a very close race in November.

5. Property taxes have surged in Maine since the last time Collins ran (partly a function of lots of people moving to Maine and property values rising). A lot of Dems are finding themselves trapped in homes they can’t afford. That’s creating a lot of energy on the right and having a big effect in local races across the state. As much as progressives like Platner and dislike Mills, the calculus of where to find the votes to beat Collins seems to be shifting.

A lot of people (including me) agree with you that the first and only priority is to beat Collins. But for a lot of us, how to do that has become a much tougher call. 

2 Min Read

NASA’s INCUS Satellites Progress Toward Launch

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NASA’s INCUS Satellites Progress Toward Launch

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One of the three satellites that make up NASA’s INCUS (Investigation of Convective Updrafts) mission sits on a fixture at the facilities of Blue Canyon Technologies in Lafayette, Colorado. The satellite completed testing in preparation for launch in late May 2026. The mission will make the first space-based survey of the dynamics of tropical convective storms.

The three nearly identical satellites will fly in tight coordination in low Earth orbit, with the first and second satellites separated by 30 seconds, and the second and third satellite separated by 90 seconds. 

Each satellites carries a radar designed to observe the vertical motion of air and water — known as convective mass flux — as storms develop and evolve. The middle satellite will also carry a microwave radiometer.

The INCUS mission is set to launch in 2027 from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

Funded through the Earth Venture Mission-3 acquisition under NASA’s Earth System Science Pathfinder Program and led by principal investigator Sue van den Heever at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, INCUS is one of several missions fulfilling the clouds, convection, and precipitation requirements of NASA’s Earth System Observatory, a set of interconnected missions set to study our home planet’s dynamic natural systems and how they interact. The mission is also part of FALCON (Fleet for the Atmosphere Linking Commercial Observations with NASA), a fleet of atmosphere-observing satellites that will combine hardware contributions from NASA centers, universities, and commercial partners.

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The post NASA’s INCUS Satellites Progress Toward Launch appeared first on NASA Science.

Everyday Abundance it is called, self-recommending…sponsored by the Abundance Institute.

The post Virginia Postrel and Charles C. Mann have a new podcast appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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• Last I checked, I am not a boy. I am also not especially well ... by Virginia Postrel
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 Here's a paper that points to the increasingly common practice of law grads taking multiple consecutive clerkships.

George, Tracey E. and Yoon, Albert and Gulati, Mitu, Stacking the Deck (May 29, 2026). Virginia Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper No. 2026-33, Virginia Law and Economics Research Paper No. 2026-10, Vanderbilt Law Research Paper, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6850719 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6850719 

Abstract
A federal judicial clerkship is a government-funded Golden Ticket that opens doors otherwise closed to most. This ticket grants entry to a one-year apprenticeship-an exclusive glimpse behind the judiciary's gates that functions as a mentorship-rich fourth year of law school. Historically, a second passage through those gates was exceedingly rare, typically reserved for those en route to the Supreme Court. That norm has fractured. Increasingly, graduates make repeated passes through the gates, taking two, three, or even four clerkships in succession-a practice now known as "stacking." Each additional passage comes at a cost: it reduces the number of clerkship opportunities available to others and delays the clerk's entry into the legal profession. Drawing on roughly 130 interviews with judges, we examine both the rise of stacking and the forces driving it. Our central argument is that stacking is not an irrational pathology but a rational market response to a structural information failure-and that well-intentioned reform efforts have, perversely, made the problem worse. Judges agree that certain forms of stacking are troubling. Yet few see ready solutions. The problem, as they describe it, is not a lack of awareness but a structure of incentives that makes restraint individually irrational, even if the collective outcome is seen as suboptimal. This Essay diagnoses those structural failures and evaluates the most promising paths forward. 

In economics, Marx is relegated to the history of thought as his ideas were an economic dead end and a political disaster. Yet Marx-influenced literary criticism is a dominant mode of analysis in nearly every English department in the country. It’s not that the English professors are all Marxists, it’s that even the non-Marxists reach for Marxian concepts–class, ideology, alienation, material conditions, commodification–when analyzing texts. These concepts may be useful for analyzing a Victorian novel of the landed classes but they have become a default economics for all of literature. That default is odd. Class analysis predates Marx and society can be divided into more than one set of classes; material conditions do not supersede all artistic agency; and capitalism contains figures—entrepreneurs, speculators, intermediaries, innovators, discoverers—who are great subjects for art yet fit poorly into the Marxist moral geometry. Not surprisingly, Marxism handles capitalism’s protagonists badly.

Is Marxian economics the only economic lens one can apply to literature? What would a Hayekian literary criticism look like? The place to start is the great Paul Cantor’s pioneering essay on Thomas Mann’s “Disorder and Early Sorrow,” a slight-seeming story set in Weimar Germany during the hyperinflation. Cantor shows that when one reads the novella through Hayek and Mises rather than Marx, the story opens up.

Start with inflationary psychology and its ramifications. Inflation shortens time horizons. When money loses value by the hour, saving is foolish and the rational move is to spend as fast as you earn—Mises’s “flight into real goods.” Prudence, discipline, and respect for the past become maladaptive. Speed, improvisation, risk-taking, and a certain youthful irresponsibility become survival traits.

Thus, Cantor/Mann tell us that inflation changes psychology and inverts the authority of age over youth. The old are set in their ways and often living on fixed incomes that inflation has wiped out; they cannot adapt. The young have known nothing but instability and go with the inflationary flow effortlessly. So the conservative virtues that once commanded respect are in decline while youthful recklessness starts to look like competence. Thus, Mann’s world has “gone mad in the worship of youth”: the children call their father by his first name, the teenagers are “the big folk,” and Professor Cornelius literally crouches down to his children’s height as the hierarchy collapses around him.

Money is a society’s primary measure of value, so Cantor/Mann argue that when you shake a people’s faith in their money, you shake their other faiths. Thus Cantor ties the conviction-less skepticism of Cornelius—and the broader Weimar nihilism and disequilibrium that helped feed the rise of Nazism—to monetary disequilibrium.

In short, inflation converts economic disorder into moral, social, psychological, and finally ontological disorder. Prices become unstable, then values, then identities, then reality. The modern feeling of absurdity and inauthenticity that critics reflexively pin on capitalism, Cantor/Mann argue is due to government-created inflation and paper money.

A Marxist could read the same story and find the inevitable contradictions of capitalism. Cantor reads it and finds the consequences of the state debasing the currency. Both are economic readings of literature. Only one of them has the economics correct.

Cantor is the place to begin but a Hayekian literary criticism could go much further. Atavism, the impossibility of social justice, products of human action but not of human design, spontaneous order, the fatal conceit, subjectivism, the sensory order–there is a lot of Hayekian ideas that literary interpretation could draw upon.

A Hayekian criticism would ask questions like how do characters acquire and process knowledge? Which institutions transmit information successfully, and which corrupt it? How do money, law, language, and custom function as social coordination mechanisms? Why do some attempts at rational redesign end in disaster? Read War and Peace as a critique of the great-man theory of history, Brazil and The Lives of Others as the fatal conceit degenerating into ignorance, fear, and absurdity. The Wire as a Hayekian epic of spontaneous order that demonstrates the illusion of social justice. Cantor’s essay on Mann shows the method, the broader project remains underdeveloped.

Hat tip: Hollis Robbins for discussion.

Addendum: Don’t forget my earlier WSJ piece, Capitalism: Hollywood’s Miscast Villain which gives an economic, one might even say Marxist, explanation for why film directors in particular disdain capitalists.

The post Hayekian Literary Criticism appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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The U.S. general fertility rate has fallen by 22% since 2007, a sustained decline not readily explained by economic conditions, contraceptive use, housing or childcare costs, or other commonly cited factors. We assess the potential role of a different shock: the diffusion of the smartphone. The U.S. rollout of the iPhone, the first modern smartphone, provides a natural experiment: from June 2007 through February 2011, the device was sold only on AT&T, allowing us to identify its effect from variation in AT&T’s mobile broadband coverage. Entropy-balanced Poisson and synthetic difference-in-differences event studies imply that access to the iPhone reduced births by 4.5–8.0% at ages 15–19 and 3.2–6.6% at ages 20–24, with statistically significant but smaller declines among older cohorts. Placebo analyses applied to Verizon and Sprint’s pre-2011 coverage footprint are null. Taken together, these cohort effects imply that the diffusion of the iPhone deepened the decline in births among women under 30 while suppressing the rise in births among older women. Overall, the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33–52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15–44. National-survey evidence on time use and sexual behavior is consistent with the iPhone reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use, and reducing sexual frequency.

That is from Caitlin K. Myers & Ezekiel Hooper.  An interesting and difficult to discuss question is how much we actually want teen fertility rates to decline, and to what extent we should consider such declines a good thing.

Note also that as this study is set up it does not discriminate against the ” the iPhone effect on fertility is mainly a thing of timing” hypothesis.  And a Paul Novosad comment.

The post New paper on the iPhone and fertility appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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From Clifford Sosin:

I loved your talk about AI and wanted to bounce an idea off you.

I think AI may be bad for corporate profit margins.

A lot of companies make money because their customers can’t be bothered to monitor them more closely, or to insource something. Customers let the company make some money in exchange for doing a decent-enough job and making the problem go away.

Bank of America has $2 trillion of deposits, not a penny of which is optimized. Most enterprise software vendors could be switched out far more often, or displaced by home-built software, but it’s too much of a pain. I could run a 12-party RFP for an Uber ride or a pair of socks, but I don’t.

In a sense, many professionals are an extension of the same idea. I could research my own real estate law, or my own insurance, whether business or personal, but I don’t because it would be too hard.

Google Search might be the biggest example. It makes money because advertisers know they need to be at the top of the results to be found. But my agent will happily search all the results across multiple search engines.

AI agents should change all this. By acting as incredibly rational and vigilant sourcing agents, CFOs, and experts for their users, they will take rents previously collected by these toll-takers and redistribute them to consumers.

And I don’t think the AI stack itself necessarily makes much profit. Commodity and open-weight models are hot on the heels of the major model companies, and competition in GPUs should intensify. Indeed, making a GPU is in some ways similar to making software, so perhaps it can commoditize substantially. Chip manufacturing may remain high-margin, but there are now plenty of entrants drawn in by the shortage who could make TSMC’s market more competitive over time.

Some companies will win. Low-cost providers may gain share as customers switch more often. Richer consumers may consume more high-end goods. Companies with genuinely advantaged business models and limited competition will be able to become more efficient. But my overriding sense is that the equilibrium outcome is lower margins for companies.

Of course, people will build new businesses, and maybe they will use AI to generate very high margins in ways I haven’t considered. That would prove me wrong.

But if this lower-margin hypothesis is true, the knock-on effects are probably positive for AI adoption, since it will make the models more popular with consumers.

And if your view is that AI drives GDP growth to be only 5–10% higher over the next decade, it’s possible that a 100–200 bp decline in corporate margins from roughly 12% would mean companies in aggregate don’t see much benefit — or in fact lose — even as consumers are better off.

The post Might AI hurt corporate profits? (from my email) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Imagine for a moment you are lying back, gazing up at the red-orange celestial clouds in today’s Picture of the Week. What shapes do you see? A chicken pecking seeds on the ground, the head of a dragon, or something else entirely?

These pareidolia-inducing clouds are a pair of nebulae — collections of dust and gas in interstellar space — called Gum 10 and Gum 11. Visible mostly from the southern hemisphere, they are part of a larger complex, in which stars are born. Gum 10 is the brightest cloud that occupies most of the image, whereas Gum 11 is the fainter, detached cloud to the bottom-left. Their bright glow comes from a special interaction between hydrogen and the hot massive stars in each nebula. These stars emit ultraviolet light, which has enough energy to tear electrons away from their atoms, forming ions. These electrons eventually recombine with hydrogen ions, which causes the emission of the specific shade of red light seen in this image. The black lines in the nebula come from dust that blocks the light behind it.

This image was taken with the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), which celebrates the 15th anniversary of its first light today! The VST project was a joint venture between ESO and the Capodimonte Astronomical Observatory (OAC), part of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF). Today the VST is solely managed by INAF and is hosted by ESO at its Paranal Observatory in Chile. The data behind this picture comes from a project called VPHAS+, which uses the VST to scan across the plane of our Milky Way galaxy, intended to better understand the lifecycle of stars.

About an hour’s drive east of Dubai’s gleaming towers and artificial islands, a quieter, more natural landscape takes shape. At the far northern edge of the Rub’ al Khali, a saffron-colored sand sea laps against the Al-Hajar Mountains. A series of pale ridges rises finlike from the desert plain, with the largest—Jabal al Fāyah—standing 412 meters (1,352 feet) above sea level.  

The Landsat 8 satellite captured this image of the ridges cutting across the Emirate of Sharjah in the northern part of the United Arab Emirates on October 23, 2025. To geologists, the limestone ridges are a reminder of the region’s watery past, signs that this land lay underwater tens of millions of years ago when the sedimentary rock layers were deposited.

Jabal al Fāyah functions as a barrier, trapping windblown sand in dune fields to its west. The weathering of iron-bearing minerals in the sand grains gives the dune fields their orange hue. To the east, the branching channels of overlapping alluvial fans extending from the Al-Hajar Mountains carry gravels and eroded sediments from basalts and other dark mafic rocks. 

The dark rocks to the east—part of the Samail Ophiolite—are known to geologists for being among the world’s largest, best-preserved, and most accessible exposures of ancient oceanic lithosphere, the rigid outer layer of Earth that includes both the crust and upper mantle. Oceanic lithosphere like this is normally subducted and recycled back into the mantle when tectonic plates collide. But in this area, a large section from beneath the Tethys Sea was scraped off and thrust onto the Arabian plate in a process called obduction.  

The Jabal al Fāyah ridges themselves are made up of marine limestone that was deposited on top of the ophiolite over tens of millions of years spanning the late Cretaceous through the early to mid-Paleocene. Limestone typically forms along continental margins in warm, shallow oceans, often in lagoons and coral reefs, out of the calcium carbonate found in the shells and skeletons of marine life. In many parts of the ridges, coral fragments and marine invertebrate fossils are visible embedded in the rock. A feature called Fossil Rock sits a few kilometers north of Jabal al Fāyah and adjacent to the limestone ridge Jabal Mulayḩah. It contains an abundance of snail, clam, and sea urchin remains. 

For archaeologists, the ridges are at the center of a much more recent tale of human adaptation and survival that has played out in just the past few hundred thousand years. The ridges and parts of the surrounding landscape—inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2025—are dotted with dozens of archaeological sites that trace human occupation on the Arabian Peninsula back to between 210,000 and 120,000 years ago, to the Middle Paleolithic. That was a period when waves of anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) migrated out of Africa and shared the planet with other groups such as Neanderthals.   

Many of the sites contain stone flakes, blades, scrapers, hand axes, and other stone tools. The archaeological treasure trove offers early evidence of modern humans surviving in a harsh desert environment and raises questions about the routes modern Homo sapiens may have taken on their journey out of Africa.  

Geological evidence indicates that lakes periodically formed on the east side of the ridge, providing critical food and water resources that would have supported early inhabitants in this unforgiving climate. Rocky overhangs along the ridge would have provided shelter from the heat and wind. Some of the sites show evidence of intermittent occupation beginning as early as 210,000 years ago, making this one of the earliest signs of human habitation on the Arabian Peninsula.   

NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.

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October 23, 2025

JPEG (3.89 MB)

References & Resources

• Armitage, S., et al. (2011) The Southern Route “Out of Africa”: Evidence for an Early Expansion of Modern Humans into Arabia. Science, 331(6016), 453-456.
• Bretzke, K., et al. (2025) Archaeology, chronology, and sedimentological context of the youngest Middle Palaeolithic assemblage from Jebel Faya, United Arab Emirates. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 17(60). 
• Bretzke, K., et al. (2022) Multiple phases of human occupation in Southeast Arabia between 210,000 and 120,000 years ago. Scientific Reports, 12, 1600. 
• Bretzke, K., et al. (2013) The environmental context of Paleolithic settlement at Jebel Faya, Emirate Sharjah, UAE. Quaternary International, 300, 83-93. 
• Condé Nast Traveller (2025, July 15) This new UNESCO World Heritage site in the UAE preserves the Middle East’s earliest evidence of modern humans. Accessed June 4, 2026. 
• Kamran, K., via Substack (2025, February 18) The Stone Blades of Jebel Faya: Rewriting the Story of Early Humans in Arabia. Accessed June 4, 2026. 
• Phys.org (2022, February 1) Early human settlement on the Arabian Peninsula less influenced by climate than previously thought. Accessed June 4, 2026. 
• Smithsonian (2025) What does it mean to be human? Accessed June 4, 2026. 
• UNESCO (2025) Faya Palaeolandscape. Accessed June 4, 2026.  
• Visit Sharjah (2025) Fossil Rock. Accessed June 4, 2026. 

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(Lord’s day). Whit Sunday. Lay long talking with my wife, sometimes angry and ended pleased and hope to bring our matters to a better posture in a little time, which God send. So up and to church, where Mr. Mills preached, but, I know not how, I slept most of the sermon. Thence home, and dined with my wife and Ashwell and after dinner discoursed very pleasantly, and so I to church again in the afternoon, and, the Scot preaching, again slept all the afternoon, and so home, and by and by to Sir W. Batten’s, to talk about business, where my Lady Batten inveighed mightily against the German Princess, and I as high in the defence of her wit and spirit, and glad that she is cleared at the sessions.

Thence to Sir W. Pen, who I found ill again of the gout, he tells me that now Mr. Castle and Mrs. Martha Batten do own themselves to be married, and have been this fortnight. Much good may it do him, for I do not envy him his wife. So home, and there my wife and I had an angry word or two upon discourse of our boy, compared with Sir W. Pen’s boy that he has now, whom I say is much prettier than ours and she the contrary. It troubles me to see that every small thing is enough now-a-days to bring a difference between us.

So to my office and there did a little business, and then home to supper and to bed. Mrs. Turner, who is often at Court, do tell me to-day that for certain the Queen hath much changed her humour, and is become very pleasant and sociable as any; and they say is with child, or believed to be so.

Read the annotations

Links for you. Science:

‘We’re not ready’: US lags on pandemic preparedness after Covid, experts say
An invisible smoke is spreading across US cities – and making people more violent
MIT researchers develop a low-cost technique to get lithium out of rocks
Outdoor lights may be making mosquito season longer
The Long, Sad, And Totally Fucked-Up Tale Of Timmy The Whale’s Trip To Germany
Presidentialist Governance is Incompatible with the American Science Superpower
Suit Says Black Infants Were Subjected to Experimental Vaccine Without Consent. The babies were part of a vaccine trial for a respiratory virus in the 1960s and died shortly after. Their families said they had been unaware of the trial until recently.

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The White House Intervened to Get a $620 Million Deal for a Company Tied to Donald Trump Jr.
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James Talarico for Senate: Texans deserve better than Ken Paxton’s moral rot
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Bad news for three of the biggest IPOs in history. Customers are waking up to the recognition that tokens are getting “burned for millions of dollars without any real significant ROI to show for it”
Residents are going to war with D.C.’s mosquitoes. Here’s how you can join them
Trump’s 250-foot arch could snarl D.C. region’s traffic, lawmaker says
The way Metro is going after bus fare evaders may be a nationwide first
See where diesel-powered data center generators are polluting Virginia
Trump’s illegal boat bombings did nothing to stop drug trafficking
Many artists drop out of D.C. concert series for America’s 250th anniversary shortly after lineup announced
Company accidentally spent $500 million on Claude AI in one month after forgetting usage limits
ICE detained over 1,000 people in D.C. last summer. Here is one man’s story
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Trump is spiraling

In the wee hours of Friday morning, Senate Republicans passed a measure to provide about $70 billion in additional funding to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the parent agency for Border Patrol. They did so without meeting any of the demands Democrats had made to reform ICE and Border Patrol in the wake of the violent sweeps that led to the deaths of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

While Republicans tried to insist that Democrats who demanded reforms were starving immigration enforcement, in fact, the budget reconciliation measure the Republicans passed in July of last year—they one they call the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA)—provided an astonishing $191 billion to fund the Department of Homeland Security, with about $75 billion for ICE and $65 billion for CBP. According to Dominik Lett of the libertarian Cato Institute, those numbers were seven times ICE’s previous annual budget and four times the typical annual budget of CBP, and were designed to last through September 30, 2029.

Putting more billions behind ICE and CBP now will mean those agencies are funded through the rest of Trump’s term. Even if Democrats take control of Congress after the midterms, the funding will be in place, preventing Democrats from using funding to demand reforms.

How those tax dollars are being spent is a question. In February, twenty-one Democratic senators wrote to the Congressional Budget Office to note that there had been no public accounting of how that money was being spent. Adriel Orozco of the American Immigration Council reports that while the OBBBA gave ICE $45 billion for detention through September 2029, former Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem decided to use $38 billion of it to buy warehouses and convert them to detention centers.

On May 29, Julia Ainsley and Laura Strickler of NBC News reported that the new secretary of DHS, Markwayne Mullin, is considering selling a number of the warehouses. If he does so, Ainsley and Strikler report, there may well be scrutiny of the initial purchases. An Atlanta suburb has filed a lawsuit alleging that ICE paid more than five times the assessed value of a warehouse there.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office noted that funding for ICE and CBP has historically been made under annual appropriations bills, and the Republicans’ new policy of giving them a huge pot of money for years makes it hard to estimate the pace of spending.

Democrats had demanded reforms to ICE and Border Patrol actions, so to pass the measure, Senate Republicans used the budget reconciliation process. Not usually used for appropriations, budget reconciliation prevented a Democratic filibuster and enabled Republicans to pass the measure with a simple majority.

But anyone can amend a budget reconciliation measure, and Democrats used amendments to cause an 18-hour debate that forced Republicans to vote against a number of measures that are popular with the American people, showing how Republicans really stand.

Republicans blocked Democratic proposals to stop Trump from establishing the $1.776 billion slush fund with the complicity of the men he has appointed to the Department of Justice and to prevent any such fund from giving payouts to people convicted of assaulting law enforcement officers during the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Republicans blocked a Democratic proposal to bar the use of federal funds or private donations for Trump’s ballroom unless Congress explicitly approved.

Republicans blocked a Democratic proposal to bar William Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing and Finance Agency, from serving as the director of national intelligence by providing that no one could direct the Office of National Intelligence while heading a different agency. Trump has announced that Pulte will be the acting director of national intelligence, putting him in place through the midterm elections with the evident plan that he will weaponize intelligence against the president’s political opponents.

The Senate passage of ICE and CBP funding demonstrates a Republican worldview. In January 2024, then-candidate Trump convinced Republicans to abandon a strong bipartisan border bill to fix immigration issues because he wanted to keep the issue of immigration open as a way to win in 2024. Now it is clear that the assault on immigrants was a tool to enforce a right-wing vision of the country on the American people, much of which is happening under cover of darkness.

Yesterday Meryl Kornfield of the Washington Post noted a report from former senior executive at the Social Security Administration Jeremiah Schofield, who is now a whistleblower. Schofield says that officials from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) hatched a plan to make immigrants self-deport by declaring 2.7 million of them dead. Some of those people on the list were U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents.

Being listed on the Death Master File cuts off people’s access to wages, banks and other financial systems, and other services. The idea appears to have been that such an erasure would force people either to leave the country or to go to a Social Security office where they could be arrested. While they ultimately did not implement the larger plan, officials did move 6,100 mostly Latino immigrants into that database.

On Thursday, Douglas MacMillan of the Washington Post reported that ICE is abandoning a policy begun under the Biden administration in 2021 that required ICE to report to Congress and investigate the deaths of detainees who died within 30 days of their release. The policy was designed to make sure ICE could not pass off deaths caused by conditions in the detention centers simply by releasing severely ill people.

At least 18 people incarcerated in detainment facilities have died in the first five months of 2026. At least 30 died last year, the highest number in 20 years. MacMillan notes that a number of those deaths happened after detainees were taken to the hospital.

Today Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) went back to Delaney Hall, the ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey, to talk with detainees. Despite the established congressional duty of oversight, “ICE refused to let me talk to any detainees,” he said. “They restricted my ability to do my job.”

Kim reported that as he went through the women’s unit, “the women were trying to get my attention and flagging for me, waving their hands, and they were pointing into one of the beds. And I looked over, and I saw a woman curled up in a fetal position, clearly in some pain and agony. ICE and GEO Group [the private prison company that runs Delaney Hall on a federal contract] told me that they cannot share with me what is happening. I’m very concerned about that woman…. They have only one full-time doctor in this facility that has hundreds and hundreds of detainees.”

“The American people deserve to know what is happening,” Kim said. “We deserve to be able to hear directly from the detainees. They are doing whatever they can to impede congressional oversight and oversight from the American people.”

Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA) notes that the $70 billion in tax money Republicans just gave to ICE and Border Patrol could provide free childcare for 1.3 million children through September 2028, cover the annual cost of groceries for about 10.7 million U.S. households, provide a year of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to 31 million Americans, expand the Affordable Care Act premium tax credits for at least a year, cancel about 31.5% of Americans’ medical debt, and end homelessness for about eight years.

But in France today, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth rejected the belief on which the United States of America was founded: that the government should act to “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

Instead, he perverted a commemoration of D-Day, when American soldiers fought with their Allies to defend democracy against fascism, into a call for the racial ideology on which fascism was based. Embracing the Great Replacement theory that says the culture of white Europeans and Americans is being undermined by people of color from Africa and Asia, he flipped the Allied and Nazi positions.

“Sadly, today,” he said in reference to the beaches of Normandy the Allies stormed in 1944, “different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies. Beaches in Spain and Italy and Greece and Bulgaria. Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion? Or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not.”

More to the point on the anniversary of D-Day 2026, is the speech by of Prime Minister Winston Churchill on June 4, 1940, promising that those who cared about freedom and human self-determination would never stop fighting the Nazis:

“We shall fight on the beaches,” he said. “[W]e shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

—

Notes:

https://aboutbgov.com/bk1w

https://www.cato.org/blog/heres-how-administration-plans-spend-largest-immigration-enforcement-funding-surge-history

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2026/06/04/ice-stop-reporting-deaths-newly-released-detainees-internal-memo-says/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/be2cb05c-b27b-4be4-9226-0ef8991a3888.pdf?itid=lk_inline_manual_9

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/06/05/doge-planned-falsely-mark-27-million-people-dead-whistleblower-says/

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/62413

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/ice-eyes-selling-mega-warehouses-purchased-mass-detention-rcna347592

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/atlanta-social-circle-georgia-sues-dhs-planned-ice-facility-rcna345354

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/04/us/politics/trump-fund-immigration-bill-republicans-vote.html

https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/senate-pushes-70-billion-funding-ice-cbp-accountability-measures/

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5908116-mullen-noem-homeland-security-contract-review/

https://www.warnock.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/what-70b-could-do-for-the-american-people-instead-of-more-money-for-ice-and-cbp/

https://www.nationalchurchillmuseum.org/we-shall-fight-on-the-beaches.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/10/self-deportation-immigrants-social-security-dead/

Bluesky:

kim.senate.gov/post/3mnnb4xcwk22o

atrupar.com/post/3mnmq7obbpc25

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Ebola Death Toll Climbs While U.S. Steps Back From Global Response

Ebola deaths are reaching 300 this week in the Congo, as global public health experts outside of the U.S. worry about containing the disease.

In Washington, the public health position seems to be just keeping any travelers – including Americans – from stepping foot on U.S. soil. It is a remarkable abdication of U.S. leadership in understanding and combatting contagious disease and follows the Trump principles of withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO) over differences in Covid.

Our government is saying clearly that Ebola is not our problem.

From reports, there seem to be more than 20 Ebola outbreaks of different variety, seemingly all spread through fluids rather than airborne, and already several cases have migrated from central Congo to Uganda, with medical personnel investigating cases from travelers arriving in Italy and Brazil.  WHO says these outbreaks of disease persisted undetected for weeks, creating a struggle to get it under control. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has called for more international support ​to stop the disease’s spread and is experimenting with emergency treatments.

Of course, U.S. researchers who traditionally have been at the front of disease control efforts now find themselves cut off from the discussion altogether. Even American doctors in the Congo who had contact were routed instead to Europe for treatment. Reports that the Trump administration plans to send the exposed Americans to Kenya, are sparking pushback from doctors and career diplomats.

Medically, health experts are counting on early detection to aid recoveries – there have been a handful reported already – but the outbreak is exposing how quickly health threats in a single location can become global concerns.

Making It Worse

Amplifying the medical story of contagion is the diplomatic mess served up by the Trump administration’s early dissolution of foreign aid for health and humanitarian purposes. Whatever the arguments for stopping payments of aid to faraway places, the reality that disease does not stay put in the place where it may launch is becoming evident.

A Washington Post op-ed piece by science writer Donald McNeil outlines the history of how contagion can travel quickly.  When faced with Covid, the first Trump administration also tried to bar noncitizens from arriving by plane. Current policies require screening – though possibly by untrained ICE volunteers — and possible quarantine for open-ended time periods.

With a World Cup competition looming, fans will come from wider points than even during non-sports times.

The withdrawal of U.S. aid workers in the Congo has helped to increase disinformation as well as withhold treatment, quickly zooming the spread to more than 1,000 cases. The State Department told NPR that the U.S. sped medical help to the Congo within 24 hours of the first reports of Ebola, but it seemed a statement meant to blunt criticism rather than take responsibility for leading anti-contagion programs.

Robert F. Kennedy, Secretary of Health and Human Services, has said that only a few Americans are affected and that Ebola, like hantavirus concerns a month ago, are “under control.” The White House keeps stressing that no one with Ebola is being allowed into the country. Once again, we are using law enforcement techniques for all problems, including contagious disease.

Of course, it is Kennedy who is actively undermining vaccine research programs, insisting that the goals of Making America Healthy Again focus on individuals’ healthy eating and exercise trumps any organized research for drugs to fight disease. He has variously eliminated and sought to rehire personnel at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention whose jobs have been to identify, trace, track and address public contagions.

We keep being told to sit and stay silent as Trump takes care of everything. Ebola is a threat that is real and non-partisan, calling for more than social media posts from our government.

“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.

The post The Tragic Growth of Ebola appeared first on DCReport.org.

Update June 8, 7:36 a.m. EDT (1136 UTC): SpaceX confirmed deployment of the Starlink satellites.

SpaceX continued to push its Falcon 9 rocket fleet to the next level by flying its flight leader, tail number B1067, on a record-breaking 35th flight Monday morning. It launched SpaceX’s latest batch of Starlink satellites from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station shortly before sunrise.

The Starlink 10-35 mission added another 29 broadband internet satellites to the low Earth orbit constellation. It consists of more than 10,500 spacecraft currently.

Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 40 happened at 6:13:50 a.m. EDT (1013:50 UTC). The rocket flew on a north-easterly trajectory upon liftoff.

The 45th Weather Squadron forecast a 90 percent chance for favorable weather at the opening of the window, which was forecast to drop to 75 percent favorability as the morning went on. Meteorologists were watching for the potential impact from thick clouds in the area of the Cape.

“High pressure at the surface and aloft and abundant dry air will keep quiet conditions across the Spaceport to end the weekend,” launch weather officers wrote. “The pattern changes early in the week as the upper ridge breaks over the Florida Peninsula, with a passing upper-level disturbance bringing more upper-level moisture.

“This will lead to a thickening of the mid and upper-level cloud deck across the primary window early Monday morning, with the threat for associated Thick Cloud Layers Rule violations also seeing a modest increase with time across the window.”

Falcon 9 booster 1067, making a record-breaking 35th flight, fires three of its nine Merlin 1D engines to slow its descent as it plunges through the atmosphere to make a landing on a drone ship stationed in the Atlantic Ocean. @ABernNYC pic.twitter.com/h1sO4dsfeH

— Spaceflight Now (@SpaceflightNow) June 8, 2026

The launch of SpaceX’s flight-leading booster, B1067, continued the company’s push to demonstrate it’s rocket’s ability to fly up to 40 times each, a feat that’s unmatched in the world of commercial spaceflight.

“Although our Falcon 9 boosters have been engineered and demonstrated to support up to 40 flights, we have established a maximum accounting useful life of 25 flights as an estimate based on forecasted utilization,” SpaceX wrote in its prospectus, a document filed to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

“This estimate reflects: (i) our strategic transition to Starship, which is expected to materially reduce future Falcon 9 flight demand; and (ii) restrictions under certain government contracts that prohibit the use of boosters flown more than five times on their missions,” SpaceX added. “These useful life estimates are periodically reassessed based on engineering qualification data, post-flight inspections, recovery success rates, actual fleet performance, cost sensitivity analyses, and the long-range launch manifest.”

As of June 8, SpaceX has seven Falcon boosters that have flown more than 25 times:

• B1063 – 32
• B1067 – 35
• B1069 – 31
• B1071 – 33
• B1077 – 28
• B1078 – 28
• B1080 – 26

In documents published prior to the company’s initial public offering, scheduled for Friday, June 12, SpaceX noted out of the 165 Falcon 9 launches in 2025, only eight used a Falcon booster making its first flight.

Ben Sandofsky, writing on the Lux Camera blog:

After decades of shooting digital, I returned to analog photography in 2023. I thought it would be challenging, given the limited selection of film stocks, only to be surprised by how freeing it felt. It felt so much better to have a handful of amazing choices rather than photo-editor with thousands of presets. We owe that to film engineers who spent years developing versatile film stocks that work in a variety of situations.

Inspired by “Less, but better,” we partnered with the renowned Hollywood colorist Cullen Kelly to develop a succinct set of gorgeous, physically accurate processes exclusive to Halide. Each look was engineered with a specific intent. We verified every look thousands of times on real-world reference photos.

Put another way: every look is a banger.

Halide has always been a great — maybe the great — iPhone camera app for shooting RAW, with the intention of developing your images by hand in post. It’s a great camera technically and a great app UI-wise. Mark II introduced Process Zero, which, in their own description, “uses zero AI and zero computational photography to produce beautiful, film-like natural photos”. Process Zero was the first step toward the new built-in “looks” in Halide Mark III. I’ve been shooting with Mark III for a few weeks now, and they are, indeed, all bangers. And I really like that there aren’t that many of them. I wanted more looks than just Process Zero (which remains available, of course), but I feel a bit overwhelmed when faced with a dozen (or worse, dozens) of choices for processing. I feel conflicted enough having to choose between a handful of really good third-party camera apps with which to shoot in the first place — it’s worse when I have to make too many choices within the camera app itself.

What I want is to just point and shoot and be able to instantly share images with the look I want already applied. I’m picky but I’m also really lazy, and don’t want to do any editing in post on most of the shots I keep. But I do want to be able to edit in post if I want to, including changing the look losslessly. This mixture of point-and-shoot ease and pro-level control didn’t use to be possible. Now, though, it is, with apps like Not Boring Camera, Analogue, and, now, Halide Mark III.

It’s been a turbulent couple of months for Lux (to say the least), so I’m glad to see Sandofsky and team get Mark III out the door. If you, like me, had previously been impressed by Halide but didn’t use it because it required too much work in post, you should check out Mark III.

NASA plans to find a new headquarters building by the end of this year while remaining in the Washington area.

The post NASA to select new headquarters building by end of year appeared first on SpaceNews.

Once rare beasts, billion-dollar startups are multiplying across new orbital markets.

The post Rounding up the space unicorns appeared first on SpaceNews.

As NASA prepares an attempt to reboost an astronomy spacecraft in a decaying orbit, it is open to doing something similar for Hubble, if its operating costs can be reduced.

The post NASA interested in Hubble reboost if costs can be reduced appeared first on SpaceNews.

1. The Hyman Rickover corpus.

2. Redux of a 2009 essay by me on poverty and a documentary film.

3. Shruti on AI and copyright law.

4. Will the number of lawyers go up or down?

5. One view on where Somalia stands right now.

6. Alan Riding, RIP (NYT).  His Distant Neighbors remains a great book on Mexico.

The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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AI is certainly not a passing fad. However, nobody knows how it will affect the economy. In the short run, there’s much room for debate about whether the rush to build datacenters and AI-ify everything is a bubble. And in the long run, there’s even more scope for argument about the impacts on productivity, employment and wages.

So many people, myself included, are looking for historical examples that may provide guidance on how AI will affect the economy. Granted, quizzing history for insight into the effects of a radical innovation is somewhat odd: By definition, a transformative new technology has never before been actualized. So how can the past teach us about its effects? Still, as a motto often (but without evidence) attributed to Mark Twain puts it, history may not repeat itself, but it rhymes. While AI is something entirely new, over the past two centuries there have been many introductions of radical new technologies. So an investigation of these episodes may provide valuable insights for the future.

When one uses history to make sense of the present, however, it’s important to have a wide view. A number of smart observers, including Azeem Azhar and John Burn-Murdoch, have been leaning hard on a classic example of radical technological change that took a long time to fully bear fruit: electrification in the late 19^th and early 20^th century. That’s a good choice, because studying that example helped economists understand and predict the delayed payoff to the rise of modern information technology (IT).

Yet there are other episodes that I believe deserve to be given equal weight: The great postwar productivity boom, which is notable because it wasn’t driven by radical new technologies, as well as the disappointingly early petering out of the IT-driven productivity boom of the 1990s and 2000s.

Today’s primer will be the first of what I expect to be a multi-part series on the economics of AI. Today I will focus on the history of productivity, while reserving extended discussion of AI’s future, fears of technological unemployment, effects on income distribution and more for subsequent posts.

Beyond the paywall I will address the following:

1. How economists measure the impact of technology

2. The mystery of the great Post-war boom

3. The Solow paradox: Why was the payoff to IT so slow to arrive?

4. The IT disappointment: Only 10 years of productivity payoff?

5. AI: Preliminary questions

Read more

This paper estimates the regional economic impact of high-skill immigration restrictions by analyzing the 2017 “Buy American, Hire American” (BAHA) policy as a quasi-experimental policy shock. By significantly tightening H-1B visa adjudication, BAHA caused new employment petition denial rates to double from 7% to 17%, while STEM-specific rejections tripled to 31%. Using a difference-indifferences framework, this study finds that states highly dependent on H-1B talent experienced a statistically significant 2.8% relative decline in value-added output. This implied a productivity loss totaling roughly $218 billion across the most affected regions. While concurrent tax cuts and deregulation likely offset the impact on employment and wages, the loss of specialized STEM expertise adversely impacted total factor productivity. These findings suggest that policies based on conventional employment metrics may overlook the “hidden damage” to productivity and innovation that drives the broader economy, thereby underestimating the true economic cost of immigration restrictions.

That is by Caroline Y. Su of McLean High School.  Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

The post How High-Skill Immigration Restrictions Eroded Regional Productivity: Evidence from the 2017 BAHA Executive Order appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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A cooler, damper, but mostly better week.

§ We had three men come and replace three radiators with larger ones (the men were also different sizes). This (the radiators) should mean the future heat pump can heat all the rooms despite its lower water temperature.

§ It seems we’ve reached peak birds-hitting-the-windows season. I assume it’s young birds who haven’t yet learned to look out for conservatory windows. Every day a few will hit the windows. Most either bounce and fly away, or else hit the ground and sit there, looking dazed for a while before taking off. Every couple of days one doesn’t make it, dying where it lands.

§ Pippa the cat loves the warm conservatory this time of year and presumably does not understand why she wasn’t allowed in the warm window place over the winter. She likes sitting or sleeping on the windowsill but has been stepping over the corrugated cardboard scratching pad I put there, which I thought she’d like, seeing as she liked the one in the lounge during the colder months.

This week, all of a sudden, it’s become her favourite spot, its curves making it look somewhat chaise longue-like.

§ One of the piles of papers I scanned a couple of weeks ago was all the records of gym workouts I’ve kept over the past almost-thirty-years. Once they were all PDF’d it was a bit easier to look through them so I made a few graphs to see how much progress I’d made on various weight exercises I’ve been doing for a while.

Unfortunately the answer is mostly “not much”. I’ve always been cautious about increasing weights – better to avoid injury than really push things – but I’ve been more cautious than I thought. It’s always easy to think, “Oof, I can do these sets but it’s tough… I’ll increase weight next time,” but then think exactly the same next time. Especially when my gym-going was put on pause for a few years by Covid, and then has been more sporadic than ideal for the past couple of years.

Anyway, here’s one of the charts to give you some idea, one that at least shows some progress, unlike some others. (Weight in kg.)

§ On Friday I spent another 45 minutes sledgehammering away at the broken pond’s concrete. Good progress and I’m guessing there’s about an hour more left. It’s very satisfying, and my sledgehammering has improved, but it’s knackering.

Even so, it was an ideal day to be outside – a bit of sun, not too hot – so I set to work on the next project: making a gravel border around part of the house where the grass fails to grow properly, leaving a rough, messy, edge.

So: dig out the turf/earth, put some wood along the edge of the lawn, lay down some weed-preventing fabric, cover in gravel.

The biggest hurdle in the process was always going to be buying the materials, which would involve speaking to people at hardware stores. After I’d dug out the turf it took me an hour or two of procrastinating on other things before I worked up the courage to drive to our local builders’ merchants to buy some timber etc., armed only with the knowledge of one YouTube video.

Thankfully the guy I drew in the customer service lucky dip was very helpful (if a little surly ofc) and I’ll pick up my timber (cut to fit in our car) this week.

Later I tempted the DIY Gods by putting up a shelf on a plasterboard wall and – pending future disaster – that also went well. Hashtag blessed.

§ This week I finished reading Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café and it was as good as I hoped. I did think there might be a lot of overlap with the also excellent Left Bank but they’re different enough. The latter is focused on Paris in the 1940s while the former, despite its title and cover illustration, isn’t solely about Sartre, Beauvoir, etc. in Parisian cafés. It’s more of an overview of the major existentialist philosophers throughout the century, from Husserl and Heidegger, on through Paris. Like Bakewell’s book about Montaigne it’s very readable, a good balance of explaining sometimes tricky things in a manageable way.

§ Often I see a movie trailer and think, “the trailer’s told me the entire story”. Usually I’m wrong and if I see the film there is, of course, a lot more to it. But sometimes I think, “the trailer’s told me the entire story,” and I see the film and think, “the trailer did tell me the entire story”. American Fiction (2023, Cord Jefferson) definitely falls into the latter camp. It’s an entertaining enough joke/point but I’d already seen the trailer.

Read comments or post one

What happens to a comet as it leaves our inner Solar System?

Kate and I discussed the ongoing Graham Platner controversies on last week’s episode the podcast. As I explained, having never fallen hard for Platner as so many did, I come at the matter from a different perspective. I was basically a soft skeptic. Not against him, but also not wowed. Because of that, I wasn’t really let down by any of the scandals because I wasn’t up in the first place. As I half-jokingly put it, as long as he agrees not to be a Nazi going forward and stays off any dating apps until November, I’m basically fine with this candidacy.

More seriously, you judge candidates by their candidacies. He pulverized the sitting governor and establishment-backed candidate and he’s weathered something like ten candidacy-ending scandals. Polls also suggest he’s highly competitive against Susan Collins. To me those facts make him definitionally a strong candidate, regardless of what I might think of him personally or whatever I can tell about his ideology. It’s also the case, even if it surprises me, that he remains a strong candidate. Until that changes, he’s the candidate. He strikes me as a pretty strong one. I’m skeptical the latest scandal is really going to hurt him in Maine, whatever it may be doing with opinion writers and influencers. Maybe he’s toast. But it’s him or Susan Collins and that, to me, makes it a simple question.

What’s more interesting to me than the latest scandal itself is the way that Platner’s candidacy has become a staging ground or perhaps a kind of Rorschach test for factional disagreement in the broad Democratic or center-left coalition.

I’ve seen what I guess I’d call members of the dissident, horse-shoeing former Democrat crowd — Matt Stoller, Zaid Jilani — calling the whole brouhaha an instance of “Dem HR Lady” politics. It’s basically a customized and on-brandly denigrating version of the anti-identity politics/wokeism grumbling both have been pushing for the last six or seven years. Others portray Platner as a violent sociopath who has abused women his whole life or simply an epic sleazeball whose rise and persistence demonstrate the entrenched misogyny of Democratic politics. If Democrats keep backing Platner, all their support for gender equality is a sham.

Meanwhile, a whole other group of online Democrats are not only upset about Platner’s tattoo and appearances with right-wing podcasters but see Democratic acceptance of him as a candidate in some basic way discrediting decades of Democratic opposition to right-wing extremism, white supremacy, etc. For others, Platner is an indictment of the progressive operatives who are running his operation and also helped Zohran Mamdani and other progressives get elected. Then there are all the progressive influencers who attack anyone who doesn’t regard Platner as some kind of salt-of-the-earth progressive hero (Grim, Sirota, et al.). I’ve even seen one identifiable line of critique blaming Platner on Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand — I guess because they held out so long for Janet Mills that they basically kept any other normalish candidates from getting into the race and stuck the party with Graham Platner. (Yes, this argument really exists.) Then of course there is a very large contingent basically telling all these different groups to STFU, recognize that it’s Platner or Collins and that’s all that matters. For them all of this is the purity politics Democrats simply don’t have time for in an existential struggle with Donald Trump. Or it’s just Democrats getting pulled into second-guessing and hitting the fainting couch because of media narratives that don’t mean anything.

I’m probably closest to that last line of reasoning. But again, I’m not so much judging the other viewpoints as marveling at how almost everyone with a grievance in Democratic politics has managed to find a way for Platner to vindicate their views and demonstrate the badness or fecklessness of their intra-party enemies.

Just as I was writing this — literally, having the conversation while I was writing this — I got into a back and forth with someone whose instincts I really respect telling me that Platner is 100% toast, will be destroyed by Collins and that I must have brain damage not to realize this. I don’t have certainties about this. He’s the candidate, until something happens to change that. He seems to me like a strong (as evidenced by the record, not my subjective opinion) one. And it’s him or Collins, and that’s really all I need to know.

 More American women than men now attend college, and this has created a marriage squeeze for women who don't attend college, as the highest-income non-college men increasingly marry college-educated women.

Bachelors Without Bachelor's: Gender Gaps in Education and Declining Marriage Rates
Clara Chambers, Benjamin Goldman & Joseph Winkelmann
NBER Working Paper 35179 DOI 10.3386/w35179  May 2026

Abstract: Over the past half-century, U.S. four-year colleges have shifted from enrolling mostly men to enrolling mostly women, while the economic position of non-college men has weakened markedly. We examine how these changes correspond with the evolving structure of marriage markets across cohorts and places. As college men have become increasingly scarce, college women have maintained stable marriage rates by marrying high-earning non-college men. This shift—combined with the broader economic decline of non-college men—has sharply reduced the pool of economically stable partners available to non-college women: the share of non-college men who earn above the national median and are not married to college women has fallen by more than 50%. Cross-area evidence shows that education gaps in marriage are smaller where non-college men face lower rates of joblessness and incarceration. Taken together, the evidence suggests that deteriorating outcomes for men have primarily undermined the marriage prospects of non-college women. 

Following John Arnold, I posted earlier about how European laws often require wealthy people to give most of their wealth to their children. Here is an example:

Pierre-Edouard Sterin, founder of Smartbox and worth about €1.4 billion, told French senators he wants to disinherit his five children and donate everything to charity. French law, under the Napoleonic Code, mandates that with five children, three-quarters of his estate must go to them, leaving only one quarter freely disposable. Sterin argued for complete freedom to decide the fate of one’s assets, saying it is ‘a real freedom to start with nothing in life’.

The post Let Me Disinherit My Children, S’il vous plaît appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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This is anonymized, I can vouch that the person is very smart and has excellent taste:

Some thoughts [referring to my recent Free Press piece on marijuana]. My feeling is that you read quickly enough that I can dump words on you and it will not be an imposition. So I have not really edited this. I am writing more now

1. Drugs are fun.

2. They open new ways of perceiving, sometimes by adversely impacting other ways of perceiving, particularly by adjusting attention response, and particularly for perceiving experiences that are sensory (what experiences aren’t sensory, ridiculous, I know, but here of course I mean art primarily.

3. Since the experiences I am inadequately categorizing above are profoundly influential on people’s meaning-making, drugs can be as well, of course.

4. Most people are not going to be as economically viable as they are now as producers of goods or services, and many, if not most, are going to be economically viable only to the extent that they generate demand, and here I think specifically demand for pleasure. Drugs are important in this social equation. People will use many more drugs of increasing variety and quality. This train has left the station, or, rather, these trains have left their stations. You will not call them back.

5. People prefer not to work. Most folks are lazy. As you know. People usually only work because they have to, and this is a perpetual source of human misery, the having to work part. Rich people like to say things like: “work gives you purpose” but that really is only for work in which you can create meaning for yourself. Most people do not have this work, cannot get this work, and will never experience meaning-making through work in a positive way.

6. The other ways people derive meaning are becoming more expensive, and prohibitively so for many, and here I mean specifically children. It always puzzles me why folks like Musk and Thiel advocate for more reproduction when it should be clear to all that (many) fewer humans will be required to generate (radically) more economic activity. Generating and raising new humans is already much more expensive than it was in previous generations, and fewer people are able to achieve the kind of economic security that predicts good parenting outcomes.

7. Tesla is a company that makes cars like Netflix is a company that mails you DVDs. You know this, it’s obvious, and has been since he put AI in his cars. Tesla makes robots, his cars are robots, and he will soon have many many other kinds of robots. SpaceX will solve the electricity and cooling issues around AI rapidly. The bottom line here is that all economic pressure points to people working less, not more. They will do more drugs.

8. This confluence of pressures (human desire for rest and relaxation, declining access to traditional means of meaning making — through work, through children — and the powerful economic pressures to replace human labor with AI and robotics) and the rapid evolution of much much better drugs (my boyfriend knows as much about pot as I do about wine, and here in the PNW pot is extremely high quality, and gets better literally all the time — there is a new nano-emulsified tech for drinkable live rosin marijuana products now available in Oregon, and let me tell you, that stuff is great) means that drug use will continue to rise, continue to improve in terms of its absolute value as a substitute for other meaning making activities, and continue to be blended in with other medical chemical use.

9. Mental health is health. Drugs do help with anxiety and pleasure, which is why people use them. Better drugs will help with these better.

10. I have an anxiety disorder (I never mind sharing this, I am also a type 2 diabetic and don’t mind sharing that) and am, at my heart, a bohemian libertine. As I get richer and richer, I use drugs to carve out space to disconnect from others. I create space for myself and my internal thinking with drugs. My internal thinking space is generally far more interesting than others’, though, and generally far more interesting than conversation with all but a few others.

11. I play an outstanding video game that replicates for me the experience of being a child playing with legos, except I never have to clean up my room. Marijuana enhances my video game experience by creating a sense of stasis while my mind wanders and i engage other bits of my mental engine on creation. Some of my best ideas, including many that have made clients millions of dollars, have occurred to me in this state, and I know no other state in which I am so open to new ideas. Many are lousy, but I successfully monetize enough of them to be getting richer than I need to be.

12. I spend more on classical music, theater, and other live performing arts than most people. I often use drugs to enhance the experience. Before a recent Bruckner 8, I bought pot two blocks from the hall in a store selling it openly but illegally — this was in one of those states with a world-class orchestra and outdated cannabis laws. Sitting in prime seats, high as a kite, I lost myself completely in Bruckner’s profound torrent of cosmic meaning. What I am saying is even my most cherished experiences can be improved by drugs. Many reasonable people feel the same, including Elon Musk.

13. I strongly recommend taking marijuana while hiking through the Olympic National Park in the rain. You will never experience olfactory sensations like that in any other setting or mindstate.

14. So, almost everyone is already using drugs almost all of the time, deriving great value from them in private, public, artificial, natural, and introspective spaces. You cannot replace that value with nothing, other competing forms of value are becoming much more expensive or require high levels of discipline (I get great value from my personal trainer who helps me get high on endorphins twice a week, now that’s a GREAT drug, so much clarity) and so I just don’t think there is any future in which you will put this genie back in the bottle.

The post Why drugs are here to stay (from my email) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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