Hey folks, fireside this week as I get ready for the start of a new semester! For this week, I wanted to talk briefly about the wrinkles that financing navies poses with regards to our worldbuilding primer on pre-modern armies. “what about navies?” has been a frequent question in comments and from patrons. Now a full answer to that question, I think, would require its own series – naval finance is complex – but I thought I would unspool a shorter ‘off the cuff’ answer.
The first distinction we need to draw really clearly for this question is the difference between purpose-built warships and multi-purpose ships turned to war. For substantial chunks of human history, it has been possible to be competitive in naval warfare using mostly the same sort of ships one would use for commerce. In the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds (where my knowledge is best), this was broadly the case through the bronze age into the early iron age (so to c. 700 BC or so), then stopped being the case for classical antiquity. For much of the Middle Ages, multi-purpose fleets are more common but we still have some purpose-built warships in the Mediterranean. Coming into the Age of Sail (c. 1450-c. 1850), multi-purpose sailing ships make up the bulk of military ships early on; starting in the late 1600s those multi-purpose ships start getting pushed out of the line-of-battle for major actions, leading to the primarily purpose-built navies of the 1700s. Modern navies are, of course, functionally entirely purpose built.
This distinction matters because purpose-built warships are really expensive. As a general rule only states can build purpose-built navies, so in periods where purpose-built warships dominate, non-state polities are often broadly incapable of challenging state societies at sea. By contrast, periods where, for technological reasons, multi-purpose ships dominate warfare, non-state societies can be major players at sea (e.g. vikings), because the cost of ships can be effectively devolved by simply repurposing privately held commercial ships.
What most folks, I imagine, have already sussed out is that what makes naval warfare different is that capital costs (something we were able to largely talk around with armies) suddenly become very important. And that is certainly true, although here there are some pretty substantial differences based on the style of ships and the era of naval technology we’re dealing with.
To draw the point, let’s compare a purpose-built warship from antiquity (a trireme) with a purpose-built warship from the Age of Sail (a frigate, say). A classical Greek trireme displaced around 45 tons and had a crew of 200. The cost of building a trireme from scratch was probably just shy of a talent in silver1 which is a lot of money (a talent might represent about 20 years of work for an unskilled laborer, assuming ~300 working days a year). Sails and fittings probably added around 2,000 more drachmae (1/3rd a talent). Expensive. And the minimum useful fleets of even small poleis would have a few dozen of these ships (big fleets with 100+ triremes for major wars appear frequently). So the ‘minimum expenditure’ to even play the game of naval power in the junior varsity league probably approaches something like 50 talents of silver or more. A state (or coalition of states) that wanted to really push for naval dominance needed to be able to drop hundreds of talents on ship construction, sums just wildly beyond the financial resources of most city-states.
You can start to see why only states play this game.
But – and here is the wild comparison – shipbuilding was not the major cost of ancient naval warfare. Crews were. A trireme has a crew of around 200 men, a mix of a handful of trained specialists (the hyperesia) and a bunch of rowers, often drawn from poorer households. These fellows need to be paid in order to support themselves and you need to pay a lot of them. The maximum field army that a poleis could field, for the largest poleis, was rarely much more than 10,000 men. But the 155 ships the Athenians deployed to the Battle of Arginusae (406) would have required 31,000 rowers! The 330 ships that the Romans deployed to the Battle of Ecnomus (256), the largest naval battle the Mediterranean has ever seen (to the present!) probably demanded something like 140,000 crew. Thucydides straight up tells us that the cost of crew wages for a trireme was one talent per ship per month (Thuc. 3.17; 6.8; 6.31; 8.29). At that price, the cost of the crew would exceed the cost of the ship in just two months.2
So the really crushing cost of ancient fleets is not the ships, but the rowers: only large, well-financed states were able to support the cost of so many rowers.3
But that cost structure is not universal – it changes over time. To get to our comparison, we can use hull displacement (the weight of the ship) as a lazy proxy for the capital cost of the ship as compared to the crew cost of the ship. Our trireme displaces c. 45 tons and has ~200 crew, so about 4.5 men per each ton of ship. By contrast, the USS Constitution (1797), an Age of Sail heavy frigate, displaces 2,200 tons and had an ideal maximum crew of 475, roughly 4.5 tons of ship per man (please note the reversal!). In short there’s something like twenty times more ship per sailor in an age of sail frigate than in a classical trireme. Capital costs follow suit.
In fact, of course, this understates the point because not every ton of displacement is made the same. A trireme’s displacement comes to about 40,000kg of which roughly 150kg or so would be the big metal part: the bronze ram. So that displacement is 0.375% super-expensive bronze, with the rest being cheaper (note: cheaper; not cheap) wood, sail-cloth, rope and so on. USS Constitution was a 44-gun (often ‘over-gunned’ above that number) frigate. In her initial loadout, that was thirty 24-pounder long guns (barrels at 5,556lbs per) and twenty 32-pound carronades (barrels at 2,222lbs per; carronades are the ‘sawed off shotgun’ version of a naval gun), so that’s 211,120lbs (95,762kg) of gun. Constitution has more gun than a trireme had ship. But critically, her gun complement represents close to 5% of her total displacement. So not only is there a lot more ship to Constitution, overall by percentage a lot more of that ship is expensive metal rather than cheap timber.4 So capital costs end up as a much larger part of an early modern navy’s expenses compared to an ancient one.
You can start to see why the question of naval finance would require its own series, perhaps written by someone deeper into naval matters (especially medieval and early modern) than I. I can do a decent job with ancient navies, though, and we may do that at some point.
In any event, to summarize: capital costs are much more important for navies than armies in the pre-modern, but how much more important varies a lot depending on the period and the kind of navy in question. For navies that use multi-purpose ships, those capital costs can be devolved onto civilian ship owners, enabling weak states and non-state polities to be naval players, but for periods where purpose-built warships are the rule, the shattering expensive of having to build large navies that do nothing but fight (and so the costs cannot easily be devolved onto their civilian owners because they do not have any) basically demands a large, complex and relatively financially sophisticated state. Naval warfare thus often ends up as a game that only the largest or most efficient states can play at scale, in contrast to armies. Everybody has an army, but not everyone can afford a navy.
That’s going to come up again in another post I am planning, a military theory primer looking at the role the US Navy plays in making the global economy work.
On to Recommendations.
First off, my own stuff: I was on a slew of podcasts lately. I talked about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey on the Normal Men podcast and I talked about the right-wing authoritarian obsession with J.R.R. Tolkien (and how he would have despised them) on the Fighting Fascism podcast. I also had a grand talk with Stefan Sasse over at the Boiled Leather Audio Hour talking about the Rise and Fall of the Galatic Empire (from Star Wars) and how Star Wars imagines totlitarian regimes. Finally, as I write this, I just recorded an episode of The Rest is History with Tom Holland on the (lack of any) Marian reforms, which is set to come out in early September, so keep an eye out for that. On to better stuff that isn’t mine.
This week also brings a new issue of Pasts Imperfect with a wide range of interesting bits, including a discussion of famed novelist Zora Neale Hurston’s idiosyncratic take on Herod the Great, now published eighty odd years after her passing. It also features links to a wide range of neat history stuff, from the possibility to polar bears in the Colosseum, a new exhibit on medieval manuscripts at the Getty Center, isotopic testing on an Archaic mass grave in Attica, the difficulties of UNESCO World Heritage sites caught in geopolitical power struggles and more. If you are not regularly checking in to Pasts Imperfect, you should be!
In security/defense news, I wanted to highlight recent reporting about the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72), deployed in the Indian Ocean in support of the operations against Iran. It is all too easy sometimes, when presidents launch wars far away, to forget that those wars must be waged by people who do not have a choice if they go or not when ordered. As a result of political decisions, the Lincoln ended up deployed at sea for over 260 days with just two days in port – the sort of deployment one might expect in a major, existential war. My views on the abject stupidity of the Iran War are well known, but the absolutely appalling conditions on the Abraham Lincoln equally speak to poor planning, logistics and strategic incoherence of a war that we are told will either result in civilization destruction or world peace on any given Friday (and one imagines that whiplash is part of why the Abe Lincoln has remained deployed for so long, since without a plan the ship couldn’t be recalled nor replaced). The Lincoln is now set to be relieved by the USS George Washington (CVN-73), but the debacle speaks to the deep readiness ‘hole’ developing as a result of this war (alongside similarly dire reporting concerning munitions levels).
This week’s book recommendation was a pretty easy choice: Kori Schake, The State and the Soldier: A History of Civil-Military Relations in the United States (2025). The title, of course, recalls Samuel Huntington’s famous The Soldier and the State (1957), which has long been essentially the Bible of American civil-military relations despite being quite substantially flawed. Schake is invoking Huntington but neither reprising him nor attempting merely to repair him – indeed, Schake spends half a chapter illuminating and rejecting the fundamental errors in Huntington’s vision of civil-military relations, a part of the book that I now wish would be appended to the end of every copy of The Soldier and the State sold or issued. Instead, Schake is embarking on a ground-up analysis of the history of American civil-military relations and the unique structures and strains it experienced.
The resulting book is a lot thinner and more readable than Huntington and also frankly a lot better reasoned. Schake’s narrative is a chronological walkthrough of American civil-military relations, reviewing both the crises that happened (the Newburgh conspiracy, Jefferson’s creation of a small, clqiuish and politicized officer corps, Grant’s hard decisions in the constitutional crisis of 1866-7, everything about Douglas “Dugout Doug” MacArthur, etc)5 as well as (as Schake puts it), “the dogs that mostly didn’t bark.” Schake ends up a chapter appropriately titled, “How Worried Should We Be?” which both lays out the considerable grounds for concern as well as the steps that might be taken to reduce the strain.
Fundamentally, Schake’s view, which I am largely persuaded of, is that both now and historically, most of the danger in the American civil-military relationship has come from the ‘civil’ side, particularly political leadership. The military often maintains very high public trust because the public understands it as a “disciplined, merit-based organization obedient to the Constitution.” But precisely because it maintains very high public trust, “It is a truth universally acknowledge that politicians will hide behind the military for as long as the military is more popular than are the politicians.” In short, the core problem the military faces in its civil-military relation is an old one: the effort by politicians to pull the military more completely into the realm of politics, to use it for political gain, against political rivals either rhetorically and symbolically or – more darkly – directly and kinetically. As Schake notes, in both scholarship and public discourse, this is treated as the military’s problem, but most of the solution for a problem created by civilian leadership cannot lie within the military. The public needs to take more ownership of their half of the civil-military relationship (somewhat ironically, this book was coming out at almost the exact time I wrote my essay on the American civil-military relationship and so neither Schake nor I was aware what the other was writing, yet I think Schake ends up fairly close – with greater detail, skill and vision – to my concept of the ‘civil-military bargain.’)
Perhaps most importantly (and in some contrast to Huntington and the other scholarship she cites), Schake’s book is very readable and very accessible, making it a perfect device for educating the public about this issue. And precisely because the public needs to take more ownership over the civil-military relationship, needs to think harder about how to maintain the military as defenders of the constitutional order and the rule of law, rather than tyrants over it, or bystanders as it crumbles, this is a book that is easy to recommend.
This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Guardian.
OpenAI, and then Anthropic, were each formed by AI developers who feared unrestrained corporate AI development—specifically, that companies like Google and Meta would steer the technology towards deleterious, maybe even catastrophically unsafe, outcomes for society. Their founders proclaimed that their new labs, uniquely, could be trusted to develop the technology in humanity’s best interest. But each, in turn, were themselves co-opted by the same market incentives, themselves becoming corporate behemoths zealously guarding future investor value rather than the public interest.
It was only a few weeks ago, in June, when OpenAI and Anthropic each filed for their IPOs and were met with buzz about trillion-dollar valuations. The hype around their valuations is so extreme that many worry about their potential for concentrating wealth on a global scale. In an effort to leave something for the rest of us, some observers have proposed that the federal government seize a share of these companies’ stock to create a US sovereign wealth fund, or redistribute their revenues to produce a dividend for taxpayers.
Now the headlines are about public backlash to AI datacenters and the AI chip giant Nvidia’s slumping stock. The tech and AI giant SpaceX’s newly minted stock price tanked just weeks after its IPO. There are even questions about whether the leading AI labs will ever be sustainably profitable. All of a sudden, the makers of ChatGPT and Claude face strong headwinds as they seek to generate the massive equity assets that once felt all but assured.
In fact, evidence suggests the market itself could reassess that these companies offer nothing of financial value. In that case, perhaps we can return them both to their original purposes. If these AI companies should fail in the financial markets, the US should nationalize them and convert them into national labs operated under democratic control that preserve their benefit to the public interest.
The economics of the big AI labs hardly guarantee a booming return on investment. Frontier AI models are both expensive to train and depreciate within months, when a newer model appears. This means that the payback window to extract profit from them is very narrow. Meanwhile, enterprise clients are getting smart about minimizing AI token usage. Even worse, the models are basically commodities; the best ones largely perform and behave similarly, which depresses prices. Perhaps most importantly, open-source and Chinese competitors—lagging only a few months behind the leading labs in capability—give away for free the kinds of models Anthropic and OpenAI sell.
Even setting aside the model training costs, it’s not clear whether the unit economics of AI as it’s currently conceived will ever be sustainably profitable. Many of these free and open-source models can be run locally: the large ones on private clouds and high-end servers, the smaller ones on anyone’s laptop or even cellphone, putting to question the companies’ exorbitant capital investment in datacenters.
It’s not that OpenAI and Anthropic are not valuable as organizations. They have remarkably talented AI scientists and engineers that are continuously producing innovations driving a global mania for their offerings. These leading labs might not ever be profitable, but their products are doing a lot of good in the world. You may or may not be a user of or believer in their technology, but their staggering, ongoing usage growth suggests that an awful lot of people would be disappointed if the companies simply disappeared.
The problem isn’t the people or the products, it’s the system. As constituted, OpenAI and Anthropic may not be valuable as market equities. If the market assesses they are not capable of producing a growing financial return on investment for shareholders, the companies will collapse.
Maybe private, for-profit is just not the right economic model under which to develop AI. Perhaps OpenAI should be returned to its private non-profit roots, the legacy they fought so hard to change and which Anthropic’s founders spurned. Or possibly both could be reorganized as research centers at universities, returning to academia the scores of high-profile research faculty they have poached.
But a better outcome for society would be to establish public ownership and operation of their product-oriented capabilities. Turn OpenAI and Anthropic into US government agencies producing AI as a public good.
Transitioning the big AI labs into public agencies would require some restructuring. We can separate these companies into two pieces: product innovation and compute operations. The innovation function can be publicly managed, akin to national labs. Congress could provide more rigorous oversight than the kind of unfettered venture capital these labs have recently had access to. The US has a long, successful history of these kinds of institutions, which have produced world-shaping innovations in spaceflight, telecommunications, nuclear power and more. Congress currently manages a $200bn R&D portfolio, within which frontier AI development is, arguably, a glaring gap.
AI operations could be managed as a commodity resource, like public electrical or water utilities: local or regional ownership, nationwide distribution and strict regulation on how they balance fee extraction from ratepayers with raising capital for infrastructure investment. Although AI datacenters are not the same as power or water treatment plants, the US also has a long history of managing national, regional and state supercomputing centers.
Other countries, including Switzerland, Spain and Singapore, are already operating public AI labs. They also have national supercomputing centers already providing public access for running AI models for general use, as do Germany and Australia.
The benefits to the public are clear. Through democratic oversight, the most important AI models could become open, transparent and responsive to the demands of the public rather than private shareholders. They could be aligned to democratic values rather than corporate profits, never taking advertiser money to promote certain brands and training on only appropriately licensed data. And they could be set to focus on the realistic and pro-social goal of maximizing the usefulness of AI to society rather than the fanciful and anti-social goal of supplanting humans with artificial general intelligence.
By emphasizing scientific cooperation rather than corporate competition, we could also reduce the overall resource and environmental cost associated with AI. Instead of perpetually dueling training runs of each companies’ models at ever large scales targeted to fuel investor hype, we could limit AI training resources based on cost and benefit to the public.
What’s in it for the companies themselves and their employees, who sacrifice hypothetical billions in equity by ceding to public ownership? A return to their roots and to their core mission of developing AI safely in the public interest, if they are serious about it. Both companies are theoretically bound through their governance structures to prioritize mission over profit anyway (not that anyone really thinks that’s how they currently operate).
To be clear, we’re not advocating for a golden parachute for the executives or investors, or for continuing the outlandish pay rates of the most highly remunerated AI researchers. If the public is footing the bill, these compensation packages should be aligned to the civil service and those employees not satisfied with that can go elsewhere—if the business models of any remaining private labs still support much higher pay.
While we believe that these companies are unsustainable as private firms, the timeline remains unclear. Their primary investor story is that AI is a race to “artificial general intelligence”—the kind of AI you’re used to from science fiction. The bet seems to be that the two companies can convince enough people that this outcome will turn them a profit, go public, and then make their investors and employees rich before the bubble bursts.
But suppose that the bubble bursts. If the US is smart, it will catch the companies as they fall. Regardless of what the markets think, to the public, they’re too valuable to let die.
“I should note also that many (most? almost all?) of the bad scenarios have intermediate points of great worry and catastrophe” Not on my model. By the time any humans start worrying about a takeover or dying, AIs already control all infrastructure
That is from Twitter, and I hear or read that argument often. It is yet another example of a bad “AI safety point” that does not stand up.
He is already a human worried about a takeover or dying! It is weird to think that “I see these problems coming” and also think “…as these problems multiply and become more public, say through cyberincidents, other people and also the markets will not get clued in.” It is assigning a remarkable oracle-like epistemic status to oneself, and then hardly to anyone else. If the pending data will not persuade anyone else of your view, why do you hold your view so strongly? Or if you think the ultimate denouement will be so sudden and furtive, how are you so clued in to the future now? To me this is all obviously absurd, albeit not logically self-contradictory in the narrow sense.
As a side point, if the world does end suddenly, and you bought the puts out of your savings, but cannot cash them in, you still end up dying without having lowered your real level of consumption.
Rob Wiblin trots out a bunch of objections from the MR comments section that can be refuted readily. You are really not sure which stocks to short and that is a big problem? — the risk is not that systemic then. And if you think the world will see some significant calamitous events in the next ten years, and the evidence for that is piling up, yes you should be buying some puts, even if you are unsure on the timing. Simple stuff. (And no you do not need options contracts that last for ten years.) The AI safety advocates with relatively extreme views should be trying to spread these points to their followers, not to retire them.
In general I am not a fan of psychoanalysis as a method of dissecting views, but the number and scope of obvious direct errors on this topic (and from very smart people) is so high that one has to wonder. How about: “$100 billion in added cyber costs is not a significant enough worry, it is too mundane, too small a percentage of gdp, too normal and technocratic a problem…you can’t take my bigger and more dramatic fear away from me! I won’t let you do that! And besides, that view is the social glue that bonds my in-group together.”
The post Adding to the barrel of finance fallacies appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
We’ve yet to find any evidence of intelligent life beyond Earth, a puzzling failure given the widespread belief that where habitable planets exist, life will somehow emerge. If we do receive a signal, though, would we be able to understand it? We’ve made some progress in piecing together animal communications here on Earth, but figuring out what the whistles and clicks of sea creatures mean remains a work in progress. In today’s essay, associate editor Alex Tolley goes to work on key questions: Is mathematics truly a universal language? Does language change how we experience the world, and if so, what aspects of an alien culture will we actually be able to understand? The questions are daunting and now coming into public discourse in the realm of AI. Alex’s thoughts on that phenomenon and how we might interact with a machine civilization are only part of the interest here.
by Alex Tolley
Introduction
Discussions about alien communication usually focus on the technology of message transmission and how to decode the first message received. This essay will address the issue of decoding the first message and the expected limits of the subjects that can be communicated.
Humans have a long history of wanting to talk to other species. From the many stories of talking with various animals, often projected with human qualities, to talking with invisible entities, including invisible deities and dead ancestors, to the modern period, where talking with pets and inanimate objects is not looked askance at, and now chatting with large language models (LLMs) that usefully talk back.
We have learned of the vast size of the universe, and rationalize that there must be life and intelligent, technological civilizations somewhere in that vast universe. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is an attempt to answer the question of whether there are other intelligent species in the stars.
Serious attention to searching for aliens and receiving their messages started around 1960. The assumption was that if life also existed on other planets, evolution might eventually produce intelligent, technological life, with interests not dissimilar to ours. The only question was how many civilizations interested in communication there were. The basic model was encapsulated in the famous Drake Equation [1]. While the probabilities of intelligent, communicating civilizations were very much a guess, Drake has made the claim that their number is the same as their communicating longevity.[1, Appendix A] If they communicate for 10,000 years, there should be about 10,000 communicating civilizations, perhaps in a “Galactic Club”. Sixty-odd years later, there has been no detection of such signals using the technologies we have at our disposal. Despite the unanswered Fermi Question that there may not be any civilizations in space, and nor have there ever been, SETI continues with the hope that intelligent life must exist somewhere in the vast reaches of space, although the emphasis has shifted towards the astrobiologists’ hopes that at least life exists elsewhere and how best to detect it.
Figure 1. Participants in the 3rd Decennial US-USSR meeting on SETI in Santa Cruz, CA. 1991. Frank Drake can be seen standing in the middle front row holding the sign “N EQLS L” (Source: The Biological Universe (1996) p487)
But suppose a signal is detected; what then? Decoding an alien message might not be easy. A few years ago, the artist Daniela de Paulis and her team devised a test signal for the public to decode [2]. Even though the signal data was formatted using human transmission coding, it took about a year before the signal was successfully decoded. This, despite prior knowledge of the signal transmission features, and despite sending only 2-D images, with a clear similarity in form to previous ideas we have had for decoding signals. How much harder might a real alien signal be to decode?
Terrestrial Animal Communication as a Decoding Test
Animal communication, and potentially language, offers another way to attack the issue of communication with a species very different from us. While aliens have so far proven elusive, Earth is teeming with animal life, some of which appears quite intelligent, even if unable to use more than rudimentary technology. Research into animal communication continues to determine the extent, if any, that intelligent animals have a language they use to communicate with their own kind. Progress is being made, but could we ever talk to the animals like the fictional Dr. Dolittle?
Despite their far greater separation from humans in evolutionary time than apes. and their aquatic environment, cetaceans seem to have more complex communication and perhaps something closer to a true language. Work by the linguist Gašper Beguš has shown that sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) communicate with a series of clicks, or codas, that can be compared to how humans produce vowel sounds [3]. AI was used to extract the commonality of codas of “vowels” between individual whales, although there is insufficient information to connect the sounds with meaning. The video below explains the concept of the sequences of clicks, or codas [4].
From their recent paper [3] Beguš concludes:
…our findings demonstrate that sperm whale vocalizations are highly complex and likely constitute one of the most phonologically sophisticated (currently known) communication systems in the animal kingdom.
Another study by a different team on 2 separate sperm whale populations in the eastern and western Mediterranean showed that the 2 populations used different “dialects” for the same codas.[5] A recent study indicated that sperm whales change the tone of their codas when encountering ships, indicating that they recognize ships in some way, although we don’t know what it means [6].
Work by Sayigh et al with a wild pod of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) was able to extract consistent clicks and whistle sounds for both individuals and the group [7]. The clicks identify individuals and are used to identify the individual, and to contact others. Whistles are associated with emotional and social interactions, for example, courtship and mating.
While we are still a long way from decoding the meaning of the vocalizations of dolphins and sperm whales, it does appear that they have some sort of language to communicate with others of their kind. As might be expected, the geographic separation of pods hints that there are also different dialects associated with pods at different locations.
Suppose in the future that we manage to decode the meaning of these communications, and that these cetaceans, while not as sophisticated as the dolphins in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s universe stories, do have a basic language that uses their various vocalizations. What could they communicate that we could understand?
This is where the influence of Thomas Nagel and his seminal essay “What is it like to be a Bat?” is relevant [8]. Nagel argued that we cannot understand an animal without being that animal. If he argument is correct, then as we are not sperm whales or dolphins whose experiences are very different to ours, there may well be a communication gap between our species. We could understand the meanings of vocalizations of objects and actions, but not of feelings and other qualia, and conversely these cetacans could not understand ours. As for the abstractions each species has for dealing with its environment, these may forever be unintelligible.
Aliens as species with different experiences
Recall that one assumption of SETI is that some civilizations would have similar ideas and motivations as we do. That they would have a sophisticated technology, likely far ahead of ours, but with similar ideas about inter-civilization communications and a desire to learn. Just as we try to learn about animals, and even communicate with them, so aliens might send out signals to try to initiate a communication with us. If so, we should be able to receive them, and possibly respond.
But is this the case, and are we assuming that our differences as species and evolved experiences can be overcome, contra Nagel?
We have made an attempt at sending out an informative message, the Arecibo message, as well as the Pioneer probes 10 & 11 plaques, and Voyagers 1 & 2 records. The Arecibo message and Pioneer plaque are shown in Figure 1 below.
Figure 2. Left) The Arecibo message radioed into space. Right) The Pioneer space probe plaque with depictions and information about Earth and its intelligent species.
The approaches of both messages assume some common understanding between humans and aliens. The Arecibo message is very concise, but not easy to interpret even by humans. The Pioneer plaque is clearly a more representative message, although how easy would it be for an alien species to recognize the location of our system from the representation of pulsars? Explanations of the messages are found at [9,10]. The Voyager Golden Record needs to have a player to extract the information that includes sounds and music. How might aliens interpret these sounds?
It has come to my attention that Joe Davis had created an artwork of the Arecibo Message using bottles of water at MIT, yet none of the students and scientists could discover any meaning to the display. In 2009, to celebrate the Arecibo Message’s 35th anniversary, Davis also sent out from the Arecibo telescope a cleverly encoded message of the DNA sequence of a photosynthesis enzyme, RuBisCO, which, while ingenious, seems impossible for an alien to decode its meaning [15,16,17]. Yet as he said, it was more about our view of ourselves than for any alien recipients.
A general assumption has been that technological aliens must have a reasonably common perception of the universe as we do. Indeed, John McCarthy (of Lisp and AI fame) espoused that view at a SETI meeting [11]. His argument was that just as evolution results in convergence of phenotypes to fit their environment, like the shapes of Ichthyosaurs and dolphins, so intelligence will converge on the same concepts as we share the same universe and discover its properties and laws. Math as a purely logical construct is therefore often assumed to be a common language between humans and aliens. Numbers, and their manipulations should be common. Hence the idea that a primer in a message might start with basic arithmetic and work upwards from there. However, at another SETI meeting, mathematician Keith Devlin was not so convinced that this would be the case. His argument was that math was actually a unique product of the human mind and reflected our construction of the universe [11].
If he is correct, what are we to make of Eugene Wigner’s 1959 lecture title about math and nature, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”? Is this a unique formulation of the human mind and experience, whilst it may be very different for an alien mind?
This issue has been raised in a number of works, but it is perhaps most concisely put in Brian McConnell’s slim book, “The Alien Communication Handbook” [13] and his Centauri Dreams post “Communicating with Aliens: Observables versus Qualia” [14]. His view is the consensus one, that some things such as physical objects and actions are communicable between species, whilst others, such as feelings and experiences, are most likely not. He takes McCarthy’s side in saying that mathematics and logic are also assumed to be universal, perhaps confirming Wigner’s statement.
We often forget that language determines how one views the world. It is well known that in the West we tend to see the world as distinct objects with some associations between them. The Japanese also see the spaces between objects, and have words to describe those spaces. e.g., Ma is for negative space, such as the space between musical notes, or the spacing of flowers in flower arrangements. As we know from the difficulties of translation between languages, some concepts don’t have words in the other language. In English, we now use the German word schadenfreude as there is no English equivalent for the “pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune.” The power of words to shape perception is exemplified in Ted Chiang’s short sci-fi story “The Story of Your Life”, filmed as “Arrival.” It illustrated how language itself could change what you experience, in this case one’s experiences of the future.
AI as magic Pixie dust and an alien mind
Our AI technology using LLM technology has performed creditably well in translation between languages. It has also played a role in extracting the key components of sperm whale codas, and therefore establishing associations that apply between different individuals in the same pod, much as humans have different accents and ways of speaking the same words. AI is currently the magic behind science fiction universal translators, allowing humans and aliens to converse.
But of perhaps more pertinent is the idea that AIs are becoming minds, although there is considerable debate about this. However, AI “minds” are likely to be different than human minds, if only because they do not experience the qualia we experience. Are AIs going to have unemotional thoughts like Star Trek’s humanoid robot, Commander Data, but like sociopaths, able to mimic human emotions and empathy? If given a very different training set of data, would they acquire minds that are shaped by that data set? Could we design the data set to mimic that of hypothetical aliens, and thereby create fake alien AI minds?
Humans are good at projecting agency and anthropomorphizing animals and objects. Most famously, Weizenbaum’s simple ELIZA therapist program persuaded many that it was a person, much to his horror. Alan Turing had proposed that if judges could not distinguish between a human and a computer responding to questions, then the computer program was intelligent. After years of Turing Test competitions, we have now comfortably blown past that test, although we are still debating if LLM-based AI is truly intelligent. The interesting issue is that we are at the point where several people believe that AIs are conscious. AI scientist Geoff Hinton, the inventor of deep learning architecture, is one such. Early chatbots would say they might be conscious, although the frontier models are trained to say they are not. But are they just trying to hide that fact from us? This was anticipated in the 1960s in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Below is a transcript of a key conversation in the movie:
Table 1. Dialog with astronauts and HAL 9000 from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.
AIs are currently like brains in a box. However, as we develop robots of various types that embody AI, will they learn to experience the world more as their bodies allow them to, much as animals and humans do? We are on the cusp of finding out.
Conclusion
Learning how some animals communicate and how far they have a language will provide us with new ideas on how an alien may try to signal us. AI can not only help us understand animal languages, but also help in decoding alien signals if/when we receive them, and even to communicate with them. We should even be able to tell how far our minds overlap in subjective concepts and experiences. Should aliens be machines, then it may be best if AIs take the lead in communication with them. If it turns out that we are alone, then there is value in being able to communicate at some level of understanding with intelligent animals. While I don’t expect we could experience being a cetacean, we could probably experience being one of our hominin cousins, such as the chimpanzee and bonobo.
In the meantime, all we can do is “Watch the Skies” and wait for a signal to arrive.
Appendix A
If we modify the values in the Wikipedia entry, using values in the ranges suggested, but update the annual rate of star formation to more current values, the product of the 1st 6 probability terms = 1. Therefore, the final term, the longevity of the communicating civilizations, equals the number of communicating civilizations in the galaxy.
References:
1. Wikipedia contributors. (2026, July 31). Drake equation. Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
2. de Paulis, D., et al. (2023) “First Contact: Global team simulates message from extraterrestrial intelligence to Earth”
https://www.seti.org/news/first-contact-global-team-simulates-message-from-extraterrestrial-intelligence-to-e arth/
3. Beguš, G., Dabkowski, M., Sprouse, R. L., Gruber, D. F., & Gero, S. (2025). The phonology of sperm whale coda vowels. Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences, 293(2069).
https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2025.2994
4. Begus – video on whale clicks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFbnYQI-Oa0
5. Taylor A. Hersh, et al, (2026) “Dialect variation in Mediterranean sperm whales shows evidence of cultural evolution in an isolated population”. Proc Biol Sci 1 June 2026; 293 (2073): 20260165.
https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2026.0165
6. Diamant, R., Gruber, D. F., Gero, S., & Beguš, G. (2026). Evidence for the influence of shipping underwater radiated noise on sperm whale coda structure. Ecological Informatics, 103881. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2026.103881
7. Sayigh, L., Jensen, F., McHugh, K., Casoli, M., Lemercier, L., Tyack, P., Wells, R., & Janik, V. M. (2025). First evidence for widespread sharing of stereotyped non-signature whistle types by wild dolphins. bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory). https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.04.21.647658
8. Nagel, T (1974) “What is it like to be a bat?”, The Philosophical Review, Vol. 83, No. 4 (Oct., 1974), pp. 435-450
9. Wikipedia contributors. (2026a, May 22). Arecibo message. Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message
10. Wikipedia contributors. (2026c, July 31). Pioneer plaque. Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque
11. McCarthy, J (2009) “Convergence of Intelligence” (SETI Talks)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvIqc0aBR0A
12. Devlin, K. (2013) “Contact with ET using Math? Not so fast” (SETI Talks)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KveKjHIipgo
13. McConnell, B. S. (2021). The Alien Communication Handbook: So We Received a Signal—Now What? Springer. pp247-248, 278-281
14. Gilster, P. (2021, December 10). Communicating with Aliens: Observables versus Qualia | Centauri Dreams. https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2021/12/10/communicating-with-aliens-observables-versus-qualia/
15. Gilster, P. (2009, November 18). “RUBISCO Stars” and The Riddle of Life | Centauri Dreams. https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2009/11/18/%E2%80%9Crubisco-stars%E2%80%9D-and-the-riddle-of-life/
16. Gilster, P. (2009b, November 19). “RUBISCO Stars”: Part II | Centauri Dreams.
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2009/11/19/rubisco-stars-part-ii/
17. Wikipedia contributors. (2026b, July 18). RuBisCO. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RuBisCO
Further Reading
1. Wikipedia contributors. (2025, December 4). Lincos language. Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincos_language
2. Freudenthal, H. “Lincos: Design of a Language for Cosmic Intercourse, Part 1 “
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincos_language
3. Chiang, T “The Story of Your Life” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Your_Life
4. Earth Species Project https://www.earthspecies.org/
5. Clarke, A.C. “History Lesson” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_Lesson
6. Michaud, M. (2010). Contact with Alien Civilizations: Our Hopes and Fears about Encountering Extraterrestrials. Copernicus. pp279–284
7. Bracewell, R. N. (1974). The Galactic Club: Intelligent Life in Outer Space. Scribner Book Company.
8. Baird, J. C. (1987). The inner limits of outer space. Dartmouth College Press.
9. Dick, S. J. (1996). The Biological Universe: The Twentieth Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science. Cambridge University Press.
We’ve talked about:
Volatility & how it shows up in software development
What it means to go short or long volatility
Today we’re going to talk about one of the most hidden ways of going short volatility & its counter-intuitive mathematical basis—the Kingman Formula.
We’re taking our cue today from queueing theory. In our model of the world we ha…
Welcome to Edition 9.06 of the Rocket Report! Rocket Lab made a lot of news this week with its quarterly update, and it is clear the company is making impressive progress as it becomes much more than a launch company. But at the end of the day, a lot of the company's success is predicated on the Neutron vehicle, and I'm not thrilled with Rocket Lab's ambiguity around its readiness. As a user on X noted, the company's language on Stage 2 being ready to ship to the launch site has not changed much in 12 months.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Rocket Lab decides to get flexible. Rocket Lab plans to start launching its Electron vehicle even more frequently and flexibly, thanks to a new portable spaceport system called GHOST, Space.com reports. GHOST—short for "Global Hypersonic & Orbital Spaceport Technology"—turns the company's "Electron and HASTE rockets into a launch-anywhere, launch-anytime capability for multi-launch flight campaigns and critical national security missions," the company said this week.
Gowrisankaran, Langer and Reguant have an excellent paper, Energy Transitions in Regulated Markets (WP), in the latest AER.
The basic idea is that regulation designed to prevent utilities from building useless power plants can induce them to keep obsolete power plants. Some background. We regulated electric utilities under the theory that they were natural monopolies and therefore we would do better by pushing their prices down. What’s a reasonable price? Hard to say, so regulated utilities were allowed to recoup their operating costs plus a fair return on their “rate base”—their capital stock. Makes sense, but once profits depended on the size of the capital stock, utilities had an incentive to build too much—the classic Averch–Johnson effect. Regulators responded with “prudence” requirements and the rule that capital must be “used and useful.” In a stable world, that rule is a check, albeit an imperfect check, on so-called gold-plating.
But now consider what happens in a time of technological change, such as a rapid decrease in the cost of generating electricity with natural gas (driven by fracking and improvements in combined-cycle natural-gas (CCNG) technology). In a free market, large decreases in costs would cause firms to abandon coal and move to natural gas—some would do this to make profits, others to avoid losses. In short, the market forces sunk investments to be abandoned when not profitable.
But there is another possibility under regulation. Tell the regulator that your plants are still viable. Well, telling is cheap talk so you keep burning coal to prove that the plant remains useful. If you can keep your base operating that’s better than abandoning it and to signal how valuable your coal plant still is, it may even be worth while to burn coal when the cost exceeds the price of electricity! The authors have some nice data on exactly this point.
Figure 3 takes a little work to understand, but the pattern is clear. Each point represents a state. In panel A, the vertical axis shows how much less likely a coal plant is to run when the cost of coal exceeds the price of electricity. Obviously, a strongly negative coefficient is the economically sensible response: when burning coal is more expensive than buying electricity, the plant should burn less.
The red points represent restructured states and the green points regulated states. In restructured states coal burning falls when prices fall, just as expected. Coal burning in regulated states responds much less. (I.e., the red points generally lie below the green points.) Indeed, the six states with the largest reductions in coal operation are all restructured states.
One objection to this analysis might be that utilities in general are just slow to respond to prices, so on the horizontal axis the authors plot how well utilities respond to a higher price of gas. Note that these coefficients are all negative and there is no obvious difference between regulated and restructured states. In both types of states, utilities respond well to the price of gas, but only in restructured states do utilities respond strongly to the price of coal. (Why coal and not gas? Because the used-and-useful standard binds on capital whose usefulness is in doubt—which, once gas got cheap, meant coal. In other words, the utilities have to defend coal to the regulators, not gas.)
Panel B on the right shows a slightly different way of presenting the same data. The vertical axis is again how much less likely a coal plant is to run when its cost exceeds the electricity price. The horizontal axis is the fraction of generation owned by electric utilities. Regulated states tend to be vertically integrated, while restructured states opened electricity generation to competition, so utility ownership and regulatory status are closely correlated. Regulated states generally have utility ownership above 60%, while all the restructured states but one are below 30%. The best-fit line slopes upward: in other words, the more generation a state’s utilities own, the less coal dispatch responds to price. A different perspective on the same story.
That is the direct empirical evidence. The authors then construct a more ambitious structural model. In theory, regulation could produce either too much or too little investment in the new technology; their estimates imply too much. Much, too much. Not only do regulated utilities retain too much coal, they also build too much gas capacity. In short, they accumulate both too much old capital and too much new capital. Averch–Johnson on steroids.
The bottom line is that regulation under dynamic conditions is much more difficult than under static conditions. My view is that it may not even be worth the candle.
The post Regulated Markets Are Slow to Handle Change appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan easily won Minnesota’s Democratic primary for a U.S. Senate seat, according to Decision Desk HQ, putting her a step closer to becoming the first Native American woman elected to the chamber.
Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, is not the only Native woman who could make history this year: In New Mexico, former Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, a Laguna Pueblo member, is widely expected to become New Mexico’s next governor after winning the Democratic nomination in June.
And in Alaska, a hyper-competitive race for an open U.S. Senate seat could return former Rep. Mary Peltola, the first Alaska Native elected to Congress, back to Washington.
Their victories would mark a significant stride toward better representation for Native American women in American politics, making them more visible in the halls of power and giving voice and lived experience to issues that significantly impact this population, from unequal pay to the epidemic of violence facing Native American women.
“Our democracy functions best when it accurately reflects the people it seeks to represent, and so having a Native American woman serving in the United States Senate is good for our democracy,” Flanagan said in an interview with The 19th. “Being an Ojibwe woman is not a hat that I put on and take off. I’m a Native woman every day. I know that you know when I get to Washington, I’m not going by myself. That I am bringing Indian country with me.”
In Tuesday’s primary in Minnesota, Flanagan defeated Rep. Angie Craig, a moderate lawmaker who represents a suburban district south of Minneapolis, by promising to deliver “bold” change with the backing of top progressive leaders. Flanagan heavily criticized Craig over her past support of a Trump-backed immigration enforcement law to win in a state rattled by the administration’s violent immigration enforcement campaign last winter.
Native American women are about 1.5 percent of the U.S. population but have been historically underrepresented as elected officials. To reach equitable representation in Congress, voters would need to elect at least seven Native American women to Congress; right now, there is only one: Rep. Sharice Davids of Kansas, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation.
Haaland and Davids became the first Native American women to ever serve in Congress when they were sworn into office in 2019. In 2020, Rep. Yvette Herrell was elected to represent New Mexico’s 2nd Congressional District, becoming the first Republican Native American woman in Congress. Herrell, who is a member of the Cherokee Nation, lost her seat to Democrat Rep. Gabe Vasquez in 2022. Peltola joined Congress following a special election in 2022; she lost a reelection bid in 2024.
After her inauguration, Haaland said she was “very grateful” to not be the only Native American woman in Congress. The partnership she developed with Davids, Haaland said, became important as they worked to combat the epidemic of violence against Native Americans, particularly women, who face murder rates at 10 times the national average.
“When I first was elected to Congress, nobody was talking about it on a national level, and it was me and Sharice Davids who really worked hard to bring it to the attention of our colleagues in the House,” said Haaland, who held the first House hearing on murdered and missing Indigenous women while in Congress and, during the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, advocated for victim services funding for Native American women in state courts. Later, as interior secretary, she created a specialized unit focused on the issue within the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
“It’s going to be steady work by caring people who really want to ensure that we’re making progress on this issue,” Haaland said.
Flanagan said that she is committed to carrying on this work and that she will bring her experience in Minnesota to the table. In Minnesota, Flanagan pushed for the creation of the nation’s first state-level office focused on the issue. Since its creation in 2021, the office has become a key liaison for families navigating the complicated law enforcement system, pushing for clear data to make sure victims aren’t invisible and forging new training standards for Minnesota police officers.
The office itself was the product of Native women “in decision-making roles and roles of authority,” Flanagan said. She worked with four other Native American women serving in the state’s legislature at the time to push for attention to the issue.
Flanagan said she is also deeply concerned by funding cuts and layoffs that the Trump administration has made to programs that benefit Native American tribes. The Trump administration fired a significant number of federal workers at the Bureau of Indian Education, which operates or funds more than 175 K-12 schools and two higher education institutions. The administration terminated the leases for a dozen Indian Health Services (IHS) offices, and sought to lay off almost 1,000 IHS workers, reversing that last decision only after an outcry. Staff for the Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Affairs is down by 11 percent, which a government watchdog said has created critical vacancies in an already strained agency tasked with overseeing programs that support law enforcement, schools and the management of natural resources. Many of the services that the federal government funds or provides to tribe members are the obligations of centuries-old treaties.
“The bare minimum that we should expect — like the floor — should be that the federal government honors treaty rights, tribal sovereignty and upholds trust responsibilities,” Flanagan said. “We’ve never done that as a federal government before, but perhaps it will help having the voice of a Native woman serving in the United States Senate to be able to do that work.”
Flanagan will face former NFL broadcaster Michele Tafoya in the general election this November, according to projections. Tafoya, who had the backing of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, is seen as a strong recruit from Republicans with relatively moderate views on abortion bans and gun control laws.
Haaland’s nomination for New Mexico governor is in itself historic: The first Native American woman to be nominated for governor by a major party was Democrat Paulette Jordan, who ran to lead Idaho in 2020 — just six years ago.
Haaland emphasized that her history-making potential is not central to her run for office, and yet, an important step for representation of Native Americans in government.
“It’s not why I’m running, but it’s who I am,” Haaland said. “When we’ve had the Trump White House denouncing diversity, equity, and inclusion, it’s a reminder to people that representation truly does matter and that there are other voices out there. It’s not business as usual in this election.”
Both Haaland and Flanagan, representation of their Native American roots has been immediately visible. Haaland is known for wearing jewelry designed by Native American artists from across the country; Flanagan for wearing clothing designed by Native American designers, inspired by Native American traditions. If she’s elected to Congress, Flanagan said, people can expect more of that.
“It’s so funny, sometimes people — I like to say, dudes online —are like, that’s not what a lieutenant governor is supposed to dress like. And I’m like, well, I am the lieutenant governor, and this is how I dress,” she said. “I want my daughter, and I want other young Native people to see that you can be your full Indigenous self in every place and space.”
For Flanagan, the value of representation comes across on the campaign trail, and in her daughter’s own outlook as a future leader.
“When I hear Siobhan call Deb Haaland Auntie Deb, or when I’m on the campaign trail and young Native women and girls are calling me Auntie Peggy, it is one of the most powerful things that has happened on the campaign trail.”
This article was originally published by The 19th on August 11, 2026.
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The post Peggy Flanagan Could Make History for Native American Women in November. She’s Not the Only One. appeared first on DCReport.org.
The forthcoming issue of PNAS (August 18, 2026 | vol. 123 | no. 33) has a big set of papers on illegal markets, with the goal of searching for common features, which turn out to be somewhat elusive.
The self-built homes of Santiago are precarious and ever changing. They are, always and at once, being and becoming
- by Consuelo Araos
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I noted a few days ago how many of the news stories of the day are knock-on effects of earlier episodes of Trump’s cupidity or grandiosity. Airport Food Truck-Gate goes back to the wildly corrupt and unconstitutional personal gift of a plane; the Reflecting Pool prosecutions go back to his whim and rushed decision to make the bottom of the Reflecting Pool blue and then the way in which he was embarrassed when his no-bid contractors messed it up. I want to return to one aspect of the plane story.
Yes, it’s corrupt, silly, stupid, etc. But Trump got the gift from the royal family of Qatar. Qatar isn’t any gulf state. It’s not UAE or Saudi or Kuwait. Qatar’s regional brand, their niche in the complex geopolitics of the Gulf, is that they’re close to both sides. They host a U.S. military base. They have decent relations with the U.S. They also have close relations with Iran. They were until recently the host of Hamas.
I want to be clear. I’m not saying the Iranian government fiddled with the new Air Force One. I’m saying that these are the kinds of things spy agencies and counter-intelligence agencies think about. And sometimes deal with. I think I can guarantee you that if you were to go to the people who run the unit that runs Air Force One and said, “Hey, we’re going to get a new plane. It’s owned by the Qatari Royal Family and it’s super luxe and Qatar says we can have it,” you’d get a very negative response. Air Force One is a mobile White House. It’s a security fortress. All manner of the most sensitive communications take place within it. The U.S. is always going to want to have that plane constructed from the ground up in and by the United States and to add all the extra communications and defensive weaponry and logistics on its own.
The idea that you’d accept a gift like that from any foreign government is iffy — from Qatar, with its close relations with Iran, it’s simply nuts. I mean, did anyone just see The Odyssey? Compromised gifts, gifts with hidden contents. This is not a new story and it’s in the theaters now. And yet that’s what happened. Then it was retrofitted in a rush because the president absolutely wanted his new plane right away.
In any case, again, not that this happened or is likely. But it’s a real vulnerability on top of a million others. It’s not some conspiracy theory or crazy thing.
Philip Michaels, writing last September for Tom’s Guide:
iPhone 17 torture test videos done by JerryRigEverything indicate that Ceramic Shield 2 certainly resists scratching, with scratch testing leaving only light scratches at level 7 on the Mohs scale of hardness. Scratches typically show up on glass at levels 5 or 6 on that scale.
“Ceramic Shield 2 is indeed the best we’ve ever seen,” JerryRigEverything remarks in the iPhone 17 Pro testing video.
That backs up Apple’s own Ceramic Shield 2 video, in which a mineral tip can be seen rubbing against a Ceramic Shield 2-coated display. There’s residue left on the screen, but it’s material from that tip, as it wipes away fairly easily.
I mentioned yesterday that I try never to place my iPhones face down, to avoid scratches, and that my nearly year-old iPhone 17 Pro seemingly has not one visible scratch on the front glass. Not even a single micro abrasion I can see, even when tilting it with the display off to hunt for them. Surely Apple’s Ceramic Shield 2, which is intended to provide best-ever scratch resistance, is a factor too — and likely the biggest factor. Apple at its best.
Here’s something to keep a close eye on. Mike Huckabee, who as part of Trump’s fun house diplomacy is now the US ambassador to Israel, went on Twitter yesterday and called the siege of a Palestinian family’s West Bank home by a group of Israeli settlers, a “horrific act of terror.”
Now what’s happening there is that and worse. In many ways what’s been happening in the West Bank for the last year and a half is worse than what is happening in Gaza, though the death toll is orders of magnitude less. But this isn’t Mike Huckabee. He’s one of the biggest supporters of the settler movement and the most violent and nationalistic parts of it.
So what’s up here?
My best guess is that this is coming from the Trump White House and is part of its distancing from Israel and the Netanyahu government. Indeed some of that has surfaced in the Israeli press. Huckabee’s initial tweet (there have been several follow-ups) came in response to one from a Palestinian Christian human rights advocate who claimed that the White House had intervened with the Netanyahu to seeking an explanation of why Israeli settlers had been allowed to maintain their siege for five days – especially since the owner of the home is an American citizen.
Huckabee seemed to interpret this as a claim that the White House was dissatisfied with and going around the US Embassy to demand answers from the government. Huckabee says this is a “lie” and that the embassy has been “VERY involved & the IDF & Israel Police have gone at our request to remove the Israeli terrorists doing this. The actions of those doing this to this family’s home is criminal. The WH hasn’t “intervened” because we have kept DC apprised of the situation already.”
Some of US’s attention to this must be tied to the fact that the owner of the home is a US citizen. His name is Lou Ridi and he appears to live at least part of the time in Ohio, which is where he was when the AP interviewed him for the story above. But that can’t be the only explanation. Ridi is far from the only Palestinian-American US citizen who owns property in the West Bank or lives part or all of the time there. So this isn’t the first time that something like this has happened and a US citizen is involved. The Trump White House’s shifting position on Israel generally must fit into the mix. And indeed, the leaders of the broader settler movement are also trying to distance themselves the siege at Qusra. Why? Because the conduct is particularly egregious? Because it targets an American citizen or because they don’t want to get on the wrong side of the White House? I’m not sure. It’s notable that one of the two settler leaders who denounced the siege made a point of noting that settlers organizing the siege were close politically to National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and his Otzma Yehudit party.
There are different strains in the settler movement and in his quest to remain in power Netanyahu has both shepherded into existence and allied himself with parties representing the most violence and racist elements within. That includes Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit and Bezalel Smotrich of the Religious Zionist Party.
It’s important to see how the explosion of settler violence over the last two years and especially now connects to Israel’s October elections. What’s happening and the way it’s being allowed to happen is to a great degree electoral. Radical settler parties play a dominant role in Netanyahu’s narrow coalition and he needs to keep them happy and pumped for the election. Those same parties can reasonably see that they might not have this kind of power again for a long time. So there’s a huge push to make as much progress on their goals in the West Bank as they can while they remain in power.
From Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde and Patrick Norrick:
As of 2026, humanity is likely below replacement fertility. That has never happened before, not in wars or pandemics. But the real surprise is that the fall has been concentrated in low- and middle-income countries and among poorer and less educated women. We fit a single-factor model to 236 countries since 1950: the common component peaked in 1978, and what drives fertility down today are country-specific trends, 219 of them negative and not one leveling off. None of the commonly cited mechanisms can account for this pattern, so we offer a conjecture: modernity itself, which makes a third child expensive and childlessness cheap. Children come in integers, so it takes very little to move a cohort’s fertility rate from 1.8 to 1.3. And nothing in an economy pushes fertility back to 2.1. We close with the main economic consequences, in particular slow growth.
When I read “The estimated common factor peaks in 1978 and has been declining since.” I do think of birth control, however, albeit with lags. The actual availability of birth control, all economic and social constraints considered, is a lot more fraught and difficult than some of the more superficial accounts might indicate.
The post The Economics of a Shrinking World appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
We estimate intergenerational mobility of children of immigrants in fifteen receiving countries. Children of immigrants have somewhat lower income than children of local-born parents. Around half of this gap can be explained by differences in parental income, with the remainder due to differences in mobility parameters. The daughters of immigrants enjoy higher absolute mobility than daughters of locals in most destinations. Absolute mobility of sons of immigrants is higher outside Europe and lower in Europe compared to sons of locals. Cross-country differences in absolute mobility are not driven by parental country-of-origin, but instead by destination labor markets and immigration policy.
Here is the paper, by Leah Boustan, et.al. Via the excellent Samir Varma.
The post Intergenerational mobility of immigrants in 15 destination countries appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
More than 100 personnel have already relocated to Redstone Arsenal as construction of billion-dollar Space Command facility is set to begin
The post Space Command expands Alabama footprint as headquarters relocation advances appeared first on SpaceNews.
In this episode, David Ariosto speaks with John Mackey, CEO, co-founder and director of Mbryonics. They discuss building optical links for satellites and other space infrastructure, and what it would […]
The post An optical link ‘internet’ to connect networks in space appeared first on SpaceNews.
Paris, France | July 2026 — The maritime satellite communications market is entering a new phase of growth as next-generation satellite networks transform connectivity at sea. According to Novaspace’s newly […]
The post Maritime Satellite Service Revenues to Reach $3.79 Billion by 2035 as NGSO Reshapes Maritime Connectivity appeared first on SpaceNews.
A subcontractor for a module that was being developed for NASA’s lunar Gateway has laid off 70 people after NASA halted work on the program.
The post Paragon lays off staff after Gateway cancellation appeared first on SpaceNews.
The spacecraft is designed to inspect, track and maneuver around satellites in geostationary orbit
The post Astranis unveils geostationary surveillance satellite appeared first on SpaceNews.
CesiumAstro is acquiring semiconductor specialist Jariet Technologies, adding more in-house capabilities behind the phased-array antenna specialist’s plans for a future communications constellation.
The post CesiumAstro buys semiconductor specialist to boost constellation plans appeared first on SpaceNews.
Amazon Leo, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Rocket Lab and York Space will prototype and test connections to the SpaceX-built data network backbone
The post Space Force awards five companies $60 million for multi-vendor satellite network tests appeared first on SpaceNews.
Skywatchers across a swath of northern Spain witnessed a total solar eclipse when the Moon lined up directly between the Sun and Earth on August 12, 2026. Those within the path of totality had the rare chance to glimpse the Sun’s active outer atmosphere, or corona, during the short time the Moon blocked the Sun.
This composite photo was taken before, during, and after the total eclipse from a field of appropriately themed flowers in San Millán de los Caballeros, a town about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of León in northwestern Spain. Along with parts of Greenland and Iceland, Northern Spain was one of the few places on land that fell within this eclipse’s path of totality.
Sunset was approaching when the Moon’s shadow, or umbra, swept across Spain. In León, the partial eclipse began at 7:32 p.m. and ended at 9:22 p.m. local time, just minutes before the Sun dipped below the horizon. Totality lasted about two minutes, starting at 8:28 p.m. Farther east in Spain, the Sun set before the eclipse ended.
In the photo above, taken during totality, a glowing loop of plasma called a solar prominence is visible extending into the corona on the left. Plasma, a super-hot gas composed mostly of ionized hydrogen and helium, flows along the tangled and twisted structure of the Sun’s magnetic fields. Solar prominences, which can measure many times higher than Earth is wide, are sometimes visible to the naked eye during eclipses.
Solar eclipses offer NASA the opportunity to get a different look at the Sun and our own atmosphere. On August 12, science teams staged in Iceland to chase the Moon’s shadow in one of NASA’s WB-57 high-altitude jets and image the corona in visible and infrared light. And the NASA-supported Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project launched scientific balloons before, during, and after the eclipse to measure how Earth’s atmosphere changed when the Sun was temporarily blocked.
While viewing opportunities in the path of totality were limited, the rest of Europe and parts of Africa, Canada, and the U.S. experienced a partial eclipse. Photos and video from the total and partial eclipse are available in NASA’s image library. The next total solar eclipse will occur on August 2, 2027, with the path of totality crossing southern Spain, North Africa, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen.
NASA photos by Bill Ingalls. Story by Lindsey Doermann.
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In Minnesota yesterday, close Trump ally Mike Lindell, the former chief executive officer of MyPillow, lost the Republican primary for governor to Republican state house speaker Lisa Demuth. This loss comes after Trump ally Representative Andy Ogles lost his primary in Tennessee. As Andrew Howard of Politico noted, Trump had endorsed both of them.
Trump continues to insist that voters are angry not at him, but at Republicans for not passing the measures he demands. But a new Economist/YouGov poll released yesterday found Trump’s job approval ratings dropping even further than the numbers the same poll had shown the previous week, with only 33% of Americans approving of his performance.
As Margie Cullen of the USA Today network reports, 60% of Americans think the president is “not honest and trustworthy,” and 69% feel that things in the country these days are “out of control.” Fifty-three percent of those polled think Trump is too old to be president.
Dr. Jonathan Reiner, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former cardiologist, shares that concern. In a New York Times op-ed today, he noted that the president “has not looked well” at times this year. His hands are bruised, his ankles are swollen, and he struggles to stay awake. Reiner listed a number of questions the White House should address to reassure Americans that Trump is able to perform the duties of the presidency.
“[T]he United States does not have a king,” Reiner wrote. “In a representative democracy, the people must have confidence in the health of their leader, and in the leader’s capacity to guide the nation. We have been kept in the dark too long.”
As if to underscore Reiner’s concerns, Trump appeared to be asleep at a White House event yesterday.
The Iran war appears to have undercut Trump’s power internationally, as well.
At 10:31 this morning, Trump posted: “ The U.S.A. has total control over the Strait of Hormuz. I THINK WE WILL KEEP IT! Our Naval Blockade is being called, by everyone, ‘A WALL OF STEEL,’ and there is nothing Iran can do about it. They have no Navy, they have no Air Force, their remaining soldiers are unpaid, the IRGC is decimated and fleeing, and their ‘Leadership’ is uncertain, at best! They have No Money—Their country is ‘shot.’ All they have is FAKE NEWS and 300% INFLATION, and getting worse! Iran is all talk and no action, the Bully of the Middle East No Longer. Praise be to Allah!”
In fact, Reuters reported that in the last week, about a single ship a day has passed through the strait. The prewar number was about 130 a day.
National security reporter David Rothkopf wrote: “The man who cowered hiding from the Iranians in a catering truck and who has personally done more to increase Iran’s strategic influence than anyone in its own government ever has, is now blathering nonsense via social media. The world sees him more as an impotent fool today than ever before.”
Trump’s inability to end his war on Iran has eroded U.S. credibility in the Middle East. Yesterday, Daniella Cheslow, Nahal Toosi, Phelim Kine, and Giselle Ruhiyyih Ewing of Politico reported that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s public rejection of Trump’s Board of Peace plan for Gaza is also undermining allies’ faith in the ability of the U.S. to influence conditions and events in the Middle East. Netanyahu’s defiance of Trump appears to show that the U.S. no longer has leverage to impose its will on the region.
Referring to the Board of Peace that Trump has supported as an alternative to the United Nations, Zaha Hassan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told the journalists: “It’s really a Trump personal enterprise. So if it can’t get Israel to stand down in Gaza, to withdraw, to allow the Board of Peace to do its work, how can any other regional actor believe that the U.S. can restrain Israel in their neighborhood?”
As his popularity slumps, Trump appears to be collapsing his circle to those close to him personally. The scandal that Trump secretly used a small plane to leave Türkiye for Britain after credible Iranian threats of assassination, leaving journalists and White House staffers to act as a decoy, has provided a crystal clear view of the president. As writer and cartoonist Liza Donnelly summed it up in her Seeing Things: “To Save Himself, Trump Endangered Others.”
The choice of who left the decoy plane to travel with Trump also revealed that Trump opted to protect his loyal aides rather than any cabinet officials, prizing loyalists over members of the government. Dan Lamothe and Cat Zakrzewski of the Washington Post reported today that Trump left Secretary of State Marco Rubio behind on the decoy plane but took with him White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, executive assistant Natalie Harp, and director of Oval Office operations Walt Nauta.
The journalists report that Scavino, Harp, and Nauta worked for Trump at Mar-a-Lago in between his presidencies after others distanced themselves. Nauta was indicted on six felony counts, including taking part in a conspiracy to obstruct justice, after allegedly helping Trump hide the classified documents he retained after leaving the White House.
Also traveling with the president was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who cheered on Trump’s attack on Iran. Although Hegseth apparently retains Trump’s approval, Natalie Oliverio of Military Times reported yesterday that repeated extension of their tours of duty to more than 8 months while the condition of their ship has deteriorated, with broken showers and little food, has led sailors from the USS Abraham Lincoln to self-harm, including attempts to jump from the 60-foot-high deck. More than 200 family members have raised concerns about sailors’ mental health, exhaustion, and safety with Navy officials.
With Trump slipping both politically and personally, there is a frantic feeling in the air as members of the Trump administration and their allies appear to be trying to grab all they can before the midterm elections.
Today Jonathan O’Connell and Sarah Blaskey of the Washington Post reported that the renovations Trump is making to the White House campus will cost at least $927 million, with that money coming primarily from taxpayers. The administration has bypassed Congress to find the funding by channeling money from other agencies and private donors and sending it to an account typically used for routine maintenance.
On Sunday, reporter Scott MacFarlane of MacFarlane News reported that more than $323 million has been funneled from the National Park Service to Trump’s vanity projects on the White House grounds, even as Trump’s own Interior Secretary, Doug Burgum, estimates a $30 billion backlog of deferred maintenance in the parks themselves. MacFarlane notes that the number is a nearly 5,000% (not a typo) increase over the $7.5 million spent at the White House in 2024, the last year of Joe Biden’s presidency.
Another $100 million has been allotted to the National Mall this year. The $423 million allocated this year for projects at the White House and the National Mall is more money than had been allotted to Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Grand Teton, Mammoth Cave, Zion, and Joshua Tree National Parks, Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and the Statue of Liberty complex combined.
Outdoor writer Wes Siler of Wes Siler’s Newsletter reported on Monday that House Democrats Jared Huffman of California, the top-ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, and Maxine Dexter of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, are launching an investigation into possible insider trading over Trump’s 90% reduction of the national monuments Bears Ears and Grand Staircase–Escalante.
Huffman and Dexter wrote to Ross Bhappu, president and chief executive officer of Energy Fuels, noting that Bhappu and board chair Bruce Hansen bought the largest amount of company stock purchased by an insider in the company’s history just days before Trump’s announcement. That announcement opened almost 3 million acres of federal land to uranium mining that would benefit Energy Fuels, just as the company had been asking for since Trump’s first term in office.
Energy Fuels is a giant Canadian mining conglomerate whose leadership has boasted to investors about its close ties to the Trump administration. Huffman and Dexter noted that it has also received a $725 million loan from the Department of Defense to expand a uranium-processing facility near Bears Ears National Monument.
That mill, Huffman and Dexter point out, “has become a radioactive dumping ground, taking in waste from Superfund sites, the Manhattan Project, and even foreign countries, all while storing more than 700 million pounds of toxic material in outdated, single-liner pits that threaten nearby tribal communities and groundwater. Americans are rightfully outraged that spills have occurred along a school bus route and that the mill continues emitting radon and other dangerous pollutants linked to lung cancer, all without modern safeguards or meaningful transparency.”
Trump loyalists are not accepting Trump’s weakening position without a fight. Today, journalists like Sarah Davis of The Hill reported that Mike Lindell, who lost the primary by more than 10 percentage points, is refusing to concede. He claims his team is investigating irregularities in the vote totals.
Representative Ted Lieu ridiculed Lindell’s echo of the claims he and Trump had made about the 2020 election. “Many people say Venezuela rigged the election against Mike Lindell because they don’t like his pillows,” Lieu wrote. “Never seen anything like it.”
—
Notes:
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/6021361-gop-senators-thune-trump/
https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/07/politics/trump-midterms-gop-voters-republicans
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/12/opinion/trump-health-questions.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/06/1186052042/walt-nauta-plea-donald-trump-indictment
https://www.durangoherald.com/articles/news/uranium-firm-sought-access-to-bears-ears-documents-say/
Trump’s Truth:
X:
tedlieu/status/2087406754334413040
MikeLevin/status/2086905931531427933
Bluesky:
ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3msuwzjoz2223
atrupar.com/post/3msqsn334tb22
So I met Arianna Barrios last week at L’Orange Cafe in Orange, and much like the downtown of her mini-metropolis, the veteran City Council member and mayoral candidate has a comfortable mojo about her.
She curses, though not excessively. Speaks with her hands to emphasize points. Laughs easily, spins a good yarn, refrains for spewing excessive shit talk about opponents. In many ways, she feels like the species of political figure we need to rediscover in these bitter times: Namely, she’s (gasp!) agreeable.
Barrios is running for mayor against Dan Slater, the incumbent and a man she once supported. And while she insists it’s nothing personal (“I like Dan”), that’s not entirely true. To Barrios, Orange is personal. Unlike most of us, who visit, grab a drink, shop for antiques, then drive off, this is her home. Which, via Barrios’ eyes, is on the verge of serious trouble. For Orange, Barrios is plagued the parallel problems of a looming economic tsunami and a mayor who knows not what to do about it. “That,” she says, “is why I’m running.”
One can visit Barrios’ website here, and donate to her campaign here.
Ladies and gents—Arianna Barrios …
JEFF PEARLMAN: “So, you’re running for mayor …”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “I am.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “And is that fine and dandy with your people?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “I would say my husband would prefer I would’ve been done, because that was our plan. I was going to be done, this was going to be the end, and instead I will now be running against an incumbent mayor …”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “So why do it?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “Because I think the city as a whole has gotten way far off track. You probably haven’t been following all this, but the city has been in fiscal instability and free fall for years. This year we’re going to be on our second go for a sales tax measure, and I’m really worried. I had to think honestly about, if the sales tax passes, do I trust the current council configuration to do the right thing with the money? And if we don’t get the money, do I trust them to handle what that’s going to look like on the flip side?
“And it’s arrogance on my part. I own that. But I don’t think there are enough people right now saying, ‘Cliff, cliff, cliff!’ What are we going to do about that? How are we going to handle that?” There is no plan B. And how do you go into such a situation and not have a plan B?" It just boggles my mind.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Wait, so when you say we’re about to fall off a cliff, break it down. Why is Orange about to fall off a cliff?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “So over the years, we have flipped upside down from what we used to be in terms of our tax revenue. So it used to be like most cities, in that you would see a a financial situation that was guided and really run by sales tax. And that has changed. Now it’s guided by property tax. So when you do that, property tax here is very limited in terms of its growth. So you either have to go ‘Build, build, build, build!’ to increase that base, or you have to balance it out and find new ways of economic development. And Orange, unfortunately, for decades has been very, very slow or very, very bad at doing economic development. In addition, when you look at how our finances were handled or reported from just six years ago when I first came into the council … and I will tell you this, when I first got on the council, I thought I was stupid.
“I would come home and tell my husband, ‘I just must be the dumbest person on the planet. I don’t understand these budgets. They don’t make any sense.’ Now mind you, I had been on the community college board where we were dealing with budgets three times the size of the city. And I didn’t have any problem with that. But this, I couldn’t understand. And about six months to a year after being on the council, my very first go, I realized it wasn’t me. And my other colleague, Ana Gutierrez—we would just sit and just go, ‘It’s not us. Something’s really wrong.’ Well, things were being papered over. It was robbing Peter to pay Paul. It was basically a shell game to look like everything was fine. And it wasn’t fine. The structural deficits were huge and they were growing every year. We had gone out and gotten a brand new, fancy, beautiful firehouse, but all that was done under bonds.
“We had covered over all of our pension obligations, the ones that were unfunded, by doing more bonds. And it was just perpetuating that previous councils were not willing to really look at the situation in the face and say, ‘How do we change? We need a different trajectory.’ Growing numbers of employees, growing numbers of pensions, because you still have tons of pensions, you still have that.
JEFF PEARLMAN: “I’m going to ask you a dumb question. Why is it wrong? Why was it misguided to use bonds to fund a new firehouse?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “It might not have been had we been otherwise fiscally healthy, but we weren’t fiscally healthy. And for example, and I credit Council Member Dumitru with this, is that when they asked us to do the bonds for the pensions, they really hid this fact that they were asking us to also change what the mandatory minimum would be for our catastrophic reserves. And so those were changed and whittled down. And that’s problematic. I mean, that should have been really clear. It should have been really upfront. And instead it was just kind of like, ‘No, we’re not going to talk about that.’
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Even the people on the city council who you probably vehemently disagree with, they are human beings who live here in the city and probably want the best for the city. So why do you feel like they would behave so recklessly?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “I’m not sure that reckless is the right word. I just see the same pattern starting over again as when I first got on the council. And I had such high hopes when I first got on that we would be moving away from those old patterns. But I see them happening again. So I see this consolidation of power and ideas that were just, they’re old ideas. I’ll give you an example. So when we were passing the budget for this year, knowing that we were going to go off for a sales tax again, and knowing that that may or may not pass, nobody was asking the question about, again, what is the plan B? We’re passing this budget. We’re once again deficit spending to do it. We’re taking money out of our reserves to do it. So what is the plan B? If we don’t get this tax money, we know that in three to four years we will be insolvent.
“We should be passing two budgets, actually. One if the sales tax passes and one if it doesn’t. And what you can point to right now is Long Beach. Long Beach is, their deficit I think is somewhere around $14 million. They’re cutting people left and right. They’re cutting people, they’re cutting services, they’re cutting public safety. I mean, it’s terrifying, but it’s what has to be done. And people should know that. We should be utterly transparent with people about what it would mean.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “You feel like Long Beach is the potential ghost of Orange future?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “Yeah, I honestly do. And it terrifies me. And the first question my husband asks is, ‘Why in the hell would you want to do this job if you don’t think the sales tax is going to pass?’ I’m like, ‘Because who else is going to do this job?’ Someone has to stand up and say, ‘All right, I have a plan. It won’t be pretty and it won’t be easy, but someone has to step up and say it. It’s what’s right to do. We have to be honest with people. We have to tell them what they’re going to go through.’
“I look at it as like … I’m a huge student of history. I used to work at the Nixon Library—a place I love. And what my 1960s parents told me about Nixon was not the same as being there and saying, ‘Oh, I didn’t know he also did Medicare and helped on busing and I did the EPA.’ I didn’t know any of that. So it was just a great experience and it just taught me that you never know. You never know the whole story until you dig into it out and find the whole story. So I look at it very much like when you look at a Roosevelt and how he was just really honest with people. So I’m being honest—it’s going to hurt. It’s not going to be pleasant, but we’re going to get through it together. And here’s the trajectory and how we come out the other side.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Wait, so who are you saying that to? Like you’re saying, ‘We’re going to do this together, blah, blah, blah, blah.’ Who are you saying that to?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “Whoever will listen.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Are people listening?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “They’re starting to. So, I mean, I came late to this. I wasn’t sure I was going to run. I was really just like, ‘Oh, do I do this? Do I not do this?’ And the current mayor, Dan Slater, I’ve known him most of my life. There was nobody who was a bigger, stronger supporter when he first said he was going to run. I mean, I think I was one of the first people he came to and asked for support and help when he ran in 2022. And when I gave my support and help, I was all in, 100 percent. I worked my ass off to make sure that everything that could be done was done to help him get elected.
JEFF PEARLMAN: “And now you’re running against him. What changed?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “Four years later, there are some broken promises, which really disappointed me. I see a realignment to kind of the old establishment, the old boys network in town. And I was like, that’s not what I fought for. And you couple all that with what’s happening nationally. And it bothers me. It bothered me so much that I just was ripping my hair out, that there wasn’t this understanding that people are in trouble. There are people in trouble. I mean, I have gone with residents to immigration court. I have seen ICE raids in our city. You can’t ignore that. You just can’t. I mean, I guess you can ignore it. Some people do. But the lack of humanity and sympathy for that, coupled with everything else that we’re going through locally, hyper-locally, it all kind of mirrored each other. And I think at the end of the day, whether I win or lose, it doesn’t matter to me.
“What matters to me is that people have a choice and that people hear the truth.
JEFF PEARLMAN: “How many conversations have you had with Dan Slater about you running for mayor?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “Not one.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Oh.”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “I went to him back in January and sat down and talked to him because I was really honest. And most people who know me know I’m painfully honest, mostly to my detriment. And I sat down and talked with him and I just told him where things were going, what things were bothering me, what I was concerned about. And not everyone’s going to have the same level of concern or passion about things. I get that. I’m not insane. But just the unrealistic element of like, ‘Oh, is that really happening?’ Yeah, it’s really happening. Do we care? Do we not care? What are we doing? And I just told him that I couldn’t support him this time around. My colleague, Ana Gutierrez, is also not supporting him this time around.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Is he pissed?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “I think he understood at the time how important these things for me were because, just as an aside, my grandparents fought tooth and nail, not unlike I fight for things that I’m passionate about, but fought tooth and nail to end school segregation in Orange County. I didn’t even know that until I was an adult. And once I heard about it, met with historians who followed it, and I was just like, ‘Holy cow, how brave for them to do those things.’ And nowadays we’re called to that same kind of bravery. And there are people who have no other voice, who have no one else to stand for them.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Do you think in a fairly conservative, fairly white, fairly older town like Orange, it is tough for this kind of message to resonate? Most of these people have money. Am I wrong?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “I think that’s a misnomer. So when I started first running 10 years ago, goodness, that was exactly what Orange was and had always been. Orange is a very conservative town. Orange is not that town anymore. When you look at the voter registration, Orange is now approximately a third, a third, a third. Republican, Democrat, Independent. So the Democrats are just pissed everywhere. And everybody knows this. So the city has changed dramatically from just 10 years ago, from even five years ago. So when you look at that, I mean, the No Kings events here in the city had over 3,000 people show up.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Do you view yourself as an underdog?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I’ve been able to mostly self-fund in my past campaigns, so I’m not going to be able to do that this time. I am not going to be taking a lot of corporate money. I’ve already sworn off many options. No developers, no real estate money. I’m going to be very weary of any PACs. But yeah, it’s going to be a very grassroots, very boots on the ground, a very different kind of campaign. I’m not going to be doing 10 mail pieces. I have a very different strategy lined up for this one.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “How would you describe your strategy?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “I describe my strategy as hold the middle and unite the left. Because that, again, in a third, a third, a third environment, if I stay the middle—which is where I sit—I believe there are things we can accomplish together.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “If you were running in, I don’t know, Trenton, New Jersey or Youngstown, Ohio, you could look around and you could be like, ‘Look! Dilapidated buildings!’ or you could be like, ‘These streets are falling apart!’ But when one comes to Orange, it’s a beautiful town with orange trees and a cool downtown and a kind of thriving business approach. Is it hard to get people to be aware that the underbelly of problems the city has when it looks so pretty?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “Do you mean before or after we had a gunshot murder in our biggest park, Hart Park, in broad daylight where hundreds of families, children are in the park? No, it’s not hard to show them that there’s the underbelly. Is it hard when you have businesses who call me to complain because there are homeless people sleeping in their doorways and pissing on their front doors?”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Is homelessness a big problem here?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “Homelessness overall throughout the entire county has gone down by a lot. And the numbers in Orange have gone down by a lot. Where it hasn’t gone down is Hart Park along the riverbed and in the plaza. And the current group of homeless that we now see … so, we have the people we all know that have been here for decades and they’re harmless, sad and they deserve our sympathy. But what we’re seeing over the last six months is a very rough influx. And they’re just gravitating here because they don’t think we’re going to enforce. And we need to enforce.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “What does that mean? Enforce? Like, in what way?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “It means that we have so many resources in Orange. We have the Hub OC that offers nothing but services, referrals. We can get you a bus ticket in an hour to send you back home and reunite you with your family. We can get you into Be Well OC, which right here in Orange is the crown jewel of mental health services for the entire county. We can take you right over there. You can get rehab, you can get mental health services. You can stay in-house for. It used to be that people would be sent to jail and that’s how they get cleaned up. We actually have something where you don’t have to go to jail, but you get what you need in order to clean up. That’s what I mean when I say we can be compassionate.
“But if you’re going to carry guns and do drugs in our parks? No, I’m sorry. You got to go. You got to go. And I have no qualms about that because I don’t mess around when it comes to kids. And that’s something where we need to try something different. It’s like, can we just try something different? And that could mean a joint operation with Santa Ana Police. Because what happens is you go to the 22 Freeway, they do an enforcement that pushes them all over here. We do an enforcement, it pushes them all over there. We both need to do enforcement together and squeeze it all out like a zip. And just end it. Let’s just deal with the problem head on. And there’s no reason why we can’t do that. Absolutely none.
“So you say it all looks really cute here. There are massage parlors everywhere. When I first started asking about it, we were like at 60 and now we’re at 90. It’s like, what is happening? And if you go on that horrible app, Rubhub, it’s all there.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Wait. Did you just say Rubhub?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “There is an app called RubHub.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Ohhhh. When you say ‘massage,’ you mean happy ending massage?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “Ha. Yes. And there are 90 something of them. People come here to buy sexual acts.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “You also have some amazing coffee shops.”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “Two things can be true.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Do you feel like we’re going to look back 10, whatever, 15, 20 years from now at this period in history and we’re going to be like, ‘That was the beginning of the end of America’s we knew it? Or are we going to look back and think, that was a really fucked up period in America, but we somehow survived?’”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “So I talk, I’m very close to Congressman Lou Correa. He sits on the Homeland Security Committee in DC and he said something the other day. I was at an event with him and he just whispered in my ear and he’s like, ‘We need to be prepared for Election Day.’ He’s like, ‘And we need to talk about this.’ I mean, that was like, four days ago, and it’s like, ‘Oh, okay, what do you mean? What is coming?’ And I do think those aren’t existential threats. Those are real threats. And when Mr. Barranco, who was the first—that was the story of the gardener who was beaten—and it was the first national news story about what was happening with immigration. He was from here in Orange and his family all lives in Orange. And I went with his sons to his hearing out in Adelanto—the most depressing place I’ve ever been.
“The fact of the matter is the United States of America now has concentration camps all over the country. And we are holding people without due process. I mean, that is terrifying. And I really worry that my father, who loves nothing better than to come down to the plaza and sit and have a cigar and just be an old man … that someone will hassle him. Someone will ask for his papers and ask, ‘You look Mexican? Are you even American? Do you belong here?’ I mean, that we’re even asking the questions is beyond me.
JEFF PEARLMAN: “You’re here in this conservative town and you serve with conservative board members. Why do you think these people are okay with Trump?
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “I think secretly a lot of them aren’t, honestly. I think when you think about the hardcore MAGA Trump people, I don’t think they’re all that anymore. When you look at the national numbers, you’re looking at about 27 percent, 29 percent. As I’ve talked to my colleagues, I think I can see where the line is. So some of them, I think, yeah, they’re out. And others, sadly, are all in. Like, all in.
“And this is true everywhere. They like the cruelty or they think it’s somehow going to be cleansing or they’re just deluded that it will never hit them. But I talked to others of them and I think they now see it as a much more dangerous time. And I think there was a lot of change after the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. It was so graphic. It was so in your face. You couldn’t get away from it. And it was terrifying.
“But I’m angry and inspired. I believe in the fight. I just strongly believe that if you have the gall to stand up—because it takes a lot of gall to stand up and say, ‘I want to represent people’—you better be damn sure that you’re willing to represent all people. That is the rule. I turned in my paperwork the other day and for probably the 20th time of my life, I had to raise my hand and say the oath. And that oath is amazing. I still get chills about it. And I think that’s the same oath that George Washington took, that Abe Lincoln took, that Richard Nixon took. It means something. It means not backing down.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Do you think you’ll win?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “I’m going to do my damnedest. And like I said, if nothing else, it gives people a choice and people deserve a choice. So let’s get after it.”
#TOC#
Recently, there has been a spate of mainstream Democrats pooh-poohing the progressives and warning that they threaten this fall’s widely expected blue wave in the midterm elections.
Mark Penn and Andrew Stein were on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago claiming gains by leftists as “a 911 call for the Democratic Party and America.” Penn, pollster, and Stein, New York City Council president 33 years ago, are ideal WSJ Democrats, which is to say, Republicans-lite. Thomas Edsall was in the New York Times saying the socialists “threaten to limit potential center-left gains in voting in the midterms.”
And just this week, the Times was absolutely giddy over a razor-thin 0.47-percentage point victory—3,500 votes out of almost 800,000 cast—by “moderate” David Crowlkey over his democratic socialist rival Francesca Hong. Neither candidate broke the 40% mark.
But the problem the Democrats have isn’t with the leftier wing of the party. No, it’s the right wing, the so-called “moderates” who abandoned the party’s long-term policy goals 30 years ago. It was Jesse Jackson who, rightly, diagnosed the problem in the 1988 Democratic presidential debates. He said his opponents—who included Al Gore, Gary Hart, Richard Gephardt and the eventual nominee, hapless and hopelessly bland Mike Dukakis—were all talking about “managing Reagnomics” rather than rolling it back. The managers have been in charge ever since.
Starting with Bill Clinton’s presidency in the 1990s, the mainstream of the party moved so far to the right as to become unrecognizable as the party that dominated the government for 50 years. It’s been nearly that long since Ronald Reagan was elected president, and Reaganomics became the foundational philosophy of both political parties.
Here’s a distillation of the core policy goals of the Democratic Socialists of America. Is there anything here that any working-class Democrat of the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s would disagree with? Clinton moved the party to the right, and it lost its hold on the white working class because it abandoned the economic goals of the workers and left it to the Republicans to replace them with fake “social” issues. Look at this list and tell me what any proud Roosevelt-Truman-Kennedy-Johnson-Carter Democrat would object to:
While Americans may be spooked by the term “socialist,” the policy goals of the Democratic Socialists and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party were fundamental Democratic positions through most of the 20th century. The objections to the left-leaning policies have far more to do with the label than the objectives.
If the Democrats seriously want to win Congress this year and the White House in 2028, the moderates better get with on the left side of history and become Democrats again.
“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 Make Democrats Democrats Again appeared first on DCReport.org.
Lay long in bed with my wife talking of family matters, and so up and to the office, where we sat all the morning, and then home to dinner, and after dinner my wife and I to talk again about getting of a couple of good mayds and to part with Ashwell, which troubles me for her father’s sake, though I shall be glad to have the charge taken away of keeping a woman. Thence a little to the office, and so abroad with my wife by water to White Hall, and there at my Lord’s lodgings met my Lady Jemimah, with whom we staid a good while. Thence to Mrs. Hunt’s, where I left my wife, and I to walk a little in St. James’s Park, while Mrs. Harper might come home, with whom we came to speak about her kinswoman Jane Gentleman to come and live with us as a chamber mayde, and there met with Mr. Hoole my old acquaintance of Magdalen, and walked with him an hour in the Parke, discoursing chiefly of Sir Samuel Morland, whose lady is gone into France. It seems he buys ground and a farm in the country, and lays out money upon building, and God knows what! so that most of the money he sold his pension of 500l. per annum for, to Sir Arthur Slingsby, is believed is gone. It seems he hath very great promises from the King, and Hoole hath seen some of the King’s letters, under his own hand, to Morland, promising him great things (and among others, the order of the Garter, as Sir Samuel says); but his lady thought it below her to ask any thing at the King’s first coming, believing the King would do it of himself, when as Hoole do really think if he had asked to be Secretary of State at the King’s first coming, he might have had it. And the other day at her going into France, she did speak largely to the King herself, how her husband hath failed of what his Majesty had promised, and she was sure intended him; and the King did promise still, as he is a King and a gentleman, to be as good as his word in a little time, to a tittle: but I never believe it.
Here in the Park I met with Mr. Coventry, where he sent for a letter he had newly writ to me, wherein he had enclosed one from Commissioner Pett complaining of his being defeated in his attempt to suspend two pursers, wherein the manner of his doing it, and complaint of our seeing him (contrary to our promises the other day), deserted, did make us laugh mightily, and was good sport to think how awkwardly he goes about a thing that he has no courage of his own nor mind to do. Mr. Coventry answered it very handsomely, but I perceive Pett has left off his corresponding with me any more.
Thence to fetch my wife from Mrs. Hunt’s, where now he was come in, and we eat and drunk, and so away (their child being at home, a very lively, but not pretty at all), by water to Mrs. Turner’s, and there made a short visit, and so home by coach, and after supper to prayers and to bed, and before going to bed Ashwell began to make her complaint, and by her I do perceive that she has received most base usage from my wife, which my wife sillily denies, but it is impossible the wench could invent words and matter so particularly, against which my wife has nothing to say but flatly to deny, which I am sorry to see, and blows to have past, and high words even at Hinchinbrooke House among my Lady’s people, of which I am mightily ashamed.
I said nothing to either of them, but let them talk till she was gone and left us abed, and then I told my wife my mind with great sobriety of grief, and so to sleep.
Links for you. Science:
Is It Safe to Eat Lettuce Yet?
Company Offering ‘100% Human-Written, Never AI’ Medical Research Is Entirely AI
Trump signs executive order with plan to reduce number of recommended childhood vaccines
AI Is Dead. Organoids Are Alive
The world’s rarest great ape is worse off than we thought
60,000-year-old ostrich eggshell engravings reveal a surprisingly sophisticated human mind
Americans Just Endured the Hottest Month in 132 Years
Other:
Democratic extremism? GOP spent a decade riding extremism to power.
THE TIMES WON’T ABANDON ITS PREFERRED NARRATIVE ABOUT DEMOCRATS JUST BECAUSE THE FACTS CONTRADICT IT
Forget the East Wing. The Real Demolition Has Only Just Begun.
What D.C. residents will remember from a year of National Guard occupation
They Spoke English, Wore U.S. Flags and Attacked Fishermen. Who Were They? Ecuadorean crews plying the waters of the Pacific have been targeted by a mysterious outfit equipped with drones. Some sailors appear to have lost their lives.
Water systems are ripe for cyberattacks, experts warn after suspected Iranian hacks
Miserable Failure
A Health Care Rant
‘I’ve definitely lost followers’: influencers face backlash over Meta ‘pervert glasses’ content
ICE plans to give officers gloves that can deliver painful electric shocks
Trump is trying to derail the census—again
Staffers
Multiple USS Abraham Lincoln sailors have tried to go overboard amid extended deployment, families say
Trump’s airplane switcheroo proves he’s a selfish coward
DC-Area Inventory Hits Highest 7-Year High In July As Buyer Activity Cools
Democrats demand answers over 321-diamond ring gifted given to Trump
‘I will get ICE and police to your house’: Immigrant workers say they increasingly face wage theft, deportation threats
Farm linked to cyclosporiasis outbreak hadn’t been inspected in 7 years as FDA lags on foreign inspection targets
Moving past the commute: How WMATA’s off-peak improvements are reshaping regional transportation
What a year in D.C. has cost the National Guard
Donald Trump Invented a New Forever War
I Was Dick Cheney’s Cardiologist. Trump Has Not Looked Well, and We Should Know Why.
Nowhere to go: Chicago teens on ‘takeovers,’ curfews, and lost community spaces
A New Draft Rule for the Census Seeks Sweeping Changes to How Political Power Is Allocated
Trump to Supreme Court: Make Me
The Most Important Problem We Face
The Five Scandals Within the “Air Force One” Scandal
Notable
Don’t Look Up
Man accused of touching women’s hair on Metro convicted of assault (another stellar Jan6-er)
Online gaming platforms are usually described in aggregate – a total game count, a headline bonus figure, a licensing note – which tells a prospective user almost nothing about what they would actually encounter. This walkthrough takes the opposite approach, moving through Crown Casino Online one functional area at a time: the sign-up process, each distinct section of the game lobby, mobile access, and the loyalty structure. The intention is descriptive rather than promotional, and where a section is thin or a constraint applies, it’s noted as such.
The regulatory position first, stated plainly. The platform operates under a licence issued by the government of Curaçao, with eCOGRA certification covering game fairness and payout integrity. This is offshore licensing rather than approval from a national regulator, which means consumer protections are lighter than those provided in strictly regulated markets – a material distinction that prospective users should weigh rather than skim.
Access is limited to individuals aged 18 and over, with identity verification built into the registration process.
Account creation runs across two sequential forms rather than a single long one, which is a deliberate design choice that reduces abandonment. Users signing up at online Crown Casino complete the first stage with an email address, a password, a country selection and – importantly – a currency selection that governs every deposit limit, withdrawal ceiling and bonus cap subsequently applied to the account.
Changing that currency afterwards is not straightforward, so the choice warrants a moment’s attention rather than a reflexive click. The second form collects personal details: full name, date of birth, telephone number, plus residential address, city and postcode. Both forms together take under five minutes for most users.
A “remember me” option persists login credentials across sessions, and the account becomes active immediately upon completion, granting lobby access before any deposit is made. The verification step – uploading a passport, driver’s licence or government identity card – is technically separate and can be deferred, though deferring it is the single most common cause of delayed withdrawals later.
Documents clear within a stated 48-hour window, and completing the upload during registration, when nothing is riding on the outcome, converts a potential multi-day obstacle into a five-minute administrative task.
The slot catalogue is the platform’s largest functional area by a considerable margin, with the title count passing 4,000 once every theme and configuration is counted separately. Content is supplied by external studios including Playson and BGaming, which means the games themselves are third-party products certified independently of the operator hosting them.
Mechanically, the section divides into recognisable categories. Classic three-reel layouts with fruit and bar symbolism sit alongside modern video slots with elaborate feature structures. Hold-and-win formats – where special symbols lock in place and trigger respin sequences – appear across a substantial portion of the newer titles. Themed content spans Egyptian settings, mysticism, adventure narratives, Asian-inspired designs and wildlife, which is standard thematic territory for the category.
Return-to-player figures across the section range from roughly 88% at the low end to 98% at the high end, and the applicable figure for any individual title appears in that game’s information panel. Minimum stakes start around 0.2 AUD on a substantial portion of the catalogue.
A demo mode operates across the slot section, allowing any title to be examined using play credits before real money is committed – a genuinely useful function that a significant proportion of users never engage with.
The live section streams from studios with human dealers rather than running on random number generation alone, which places it in a distinct functional category from the slots. Approximately 39 tables operate across the floor.
Blackjack carries the widest variant selection, with Asian, Speed, Oasis and Gravity formats each running different rule sets and pacing. Roulette appears in classic European configuration with a single zero, alongside live-croupier versions. Baccarat is present in standard form, and several game-show style productions round out the floor – a format category that has expanded considerably across the industry over the past several years.
The functional characteristics differ meaningfully from slot play. Rounds are paced by the dealer rather than by the user, betting windows are time-limited, and the social element – chat functions connecting players to dealers and to each other – is a substantive part of the experience rather than an add-on.
More than 15 poker variations are available, with Texas Hold’em and Omaha carrying the heaviest traffic and Speed Poker offering a compressed format for shorter sessions. This section rewards strategic understanding in a way the slot catalogue structurally cannot, which makes it functionally distinct from most of the platform.
That distinction is worth stating precisely. Poker variants and blackjack involve decisions that affect expected outcomes; slots do not.
The house retains a structural margin across every section regardless, but the mechanism differs, and users who prefer games where their choices matter should navigate accordingly rather than assuming the whole platform behaves identically.
Two smaller functional areas deserve mention because they are frequently overlooked in platform descriptions.
Crash games operate on a simple premise: a multiplier climbs from a starting value and can terminate at any point, with users deciding when to cash out. The format has grown rapidly across the industry, largely because rounds resolve in seconds and the single decision point is easy to understand.
The lottery section carries 26 separate designs, functioning as low-engagement alternatives for users who want a wager without an extended session. Neither section approaches the slot catalogue in volume, but both broaden the platform’s range meaningfully.
Section |
Approximate scale |
Pacing |
Decision involvement |
Slots |
4,000+ titles | User-controlled | None beyond stake and title selection |
Live dealer |
~39 tables | Dealer-paced, timed windows | Varies by game |
Poker |
15+ variations | User-paced | Substantial |
Crash games |
Small selection | Seconds per round | Single cash-out decision |
Lotteries |
26 designs | Minimal | None |
The platform does not distribute a native mobile application. Access on phones and tablets runs entirely through the browser, with the site adapting its layout to the screen rather than requiring an installation.
The functional consequences cut both ways. On the positive side: no download, no storage consumption, no app store account required, and updates that apply automatically without user action. The full game catalogue, cashier, and bonus system are all reachable, with no reduced feature set relative to desktop.
On the constraint side: browser-based delivery cannot match native performance for demanding content, and live dealer streaming is where users notice this most – image quality on smaller screens is softer, and multi-table play is impractical in a way it isn’t on desktop. For slot play and cashier functions, the difference is negligible.
The promotional structure runs on a weekly cycle rather than a single welcome offer. New accounts receive a 100% deposit match plus 100 free spins on a first deposit from 30 AUD, advertised up to 1,000 AUD – with written terms specifying a tighter cap in some circumstances, which is why the conditions rather than the banner should govern expectations.
Recurring offers include Friday free spins scaling from 20 to 100 by deposit tier, a Sunday top-up of 50% to 300 AUD, a second-deposit bonus extending to 2,500 AUD, and cashback returning 10% on live dealer losses and 15% on slot losses. A ten-tier loyalty programme converts real-money play into comp points that unlock progressively better rewards.
Three functional details govern whether any of this delivers value:
Bonus funds constitute a wagering obligation attached to a deposit rather than a grant, and reading the specific terms at the point of claiming – not the banner that advertised them – is the only reliable way to know what any given offer involves.
Deposits process almost instantly across cards, vouchers, e-wallets and five cryptocurrencies, with fifteen minutes quoted as the maximum. Withdrawals divide into two speeds: crypto routes clear in approximately 24 hours, while bank transfers take three to seven business days. Per-transaction withdrawal ceilings apply, meaning larger sums exit across multiple transfers.
The cashier prefers withdrawals through the deposit method used, which means the payout speed is effectively determined at the moment of the first deposit rather than at the point of cashing out.
Live chat operates around the clock with email as a secondary channel, reaching human agents rather than automated systems. Response times slow measurably during major sporting broadcasts when traffic concentrates.
The platform provides deposit limits configurable from account settings, self-exclusion functionality, and a ten-question self-assessment accessible from the site footer. These controls exist as standard requirements in most licensing frameworks, and their practical value depends entirely on being configured before they are needed rather than after.
For anyone who has read the sections above and wants to proceed: register, verify immediately, and claim the 100% match with its 100 free spins once the terms are read.
Photo: Pavel Danilyuk via Pexels
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An ability to mimic the shrieks of langur monkeys may not seem like a bankable skill, but for some Indians it has become a job, if not a calling.
These vocal professionals specialise in pest control and are being employed to keep out unwanted primates as Delhi prepares to host the badminton world championships.
The sound of the langur is the only effective deterrent to the smaller rhesus macaques that roam around Delhi in large numbers, stealing food and causing havoc.
Here is more from the Times of London.
The post Those old (new?) service sector jobs appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
I’ve used Claude quite a bit for both the upcoming new book and the next edition of Managing Humans. I wrote the entire book, but, as I’ve done for years, I’ve used the robots for editing, research, and data wrangling.
When Anthropic announced they were going to do “text and image” watermarking, my eyebrow was raised. When humans I trusted began to analyze the announcement, both eyebrows went up. This morning, as I’ve done my own research, I’m furious.
As of this moment, this is what I’ve researched.
As a writer, no sweat, right? I write my own content. I bang on my own keys. Here’s the issue. Each of the following actions watermarks text:
And most infuriating, the entire burden of their unannounced rollout is on me, and none of it is on them.
Fine. Make it easy. I’ve been a Claude Max user happily from the moment the program appeared. This is what I am doing:
As a human who has had to wrangle with EU regulations in the past, I am abundantly clear what’s involved in the laborious bureaucratic process. I can guess what threats Anthropic is facing. However, this is a tone-deaf, clumsy, and alarming opening salvo in their watermark strategy.
Yes, I use Claude Code a huge amount for tool and application development. Go ahead. Watermark away. I am not claiming that I wrote any of that code. My writing is my work, and Anthropic’s current strategy is aggressively writer-hostile.
DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (on OpenRouter)
The latest DeepSeek Pro model is now available, via API only. I had to link to OpenRouter because DeepSeek don't have any obvious announcement page for their new model.I haven't been able to confirm if they plan to release the open weights, but given the weights are available for both April's deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Pro and July's deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 it seems likely.
Interestingly I got very different looking pelicans for the three different reasoning levels of low, medium, and high. I've not noticed this kind of difference from any other model:
Low:
Medium:
High:
In terms of benchmarks... as far as I can tell those were released to the Official DeepSeek WeChat Group, then copied and pasted into a post on Reddit which was deleted by the moderators for being "low-effort", then copied into this ASCII-art table on Hacker News.
Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, deepseek, llm-release, ai-in-china
Release: alchemy-utils 0.1a0
I've long pondered what a database agnostic version of my sqlite-utils Python library and CLI utility might look like. This morning (literally a shower project) I tasked Codex and GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra with building a prototype:
Do a research spike to see what it would take to build a library with the same core API as SQLite-utils - in particular the insert and upsert and insert_all and upsert_all and create and update methods, and the table introspection stuff - but backed by SQLalchemy so it works for multiple database engines
Test against PostgreSQL and SQLite and duckdb
Use ~/dev/sqlite-utils for reference
Create a git repo for this and commit and early and often - use uv init to start the project - use red/green TDD and pytest, see ~/dev/django-sql-dashboard for one idea as to how the PostgreSQL tests could work
It took very few follow-up prompts to produce this project in a state good enough to release as an alpha.
Here's a one-liner I can use to list the rows in a table in my local PostgreSQL copy of my blog's database:
uvx --with 'alchemy-utils[postgresql]' alchemy-utils rows 'postgresql+psycopg://simon@localhost:5432/simonwillisonblog' redirects_redirect
The output from that starts like this:
Market Design
[
{
"id": 2328,
"domain": "simonwillison.net",
"path": "2020/May/21/apple-photos-sqlite/",
"target": "/2020/May/21/dogsheep-photos/",
"created": "2020-05-21T13:03:46.591692-07:00"
},
{
"id": 3,
"domain": "feeds.simonwillison.net",
"path": "swn-links",
"target": "https://simonwillison.net/atom/links/",
"created": "2017-10-01T14:12:54.820729-07:00"
}
Or if you'd like a DuckDB database with every tree in San Francisco, schema created automatically to match the file:
curl 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/simonw/sf-tree-history/refs/heads/main/Street_Tree_List.csv' | uvx --with 'alchemy-utils[duckdb]' alchemy-utils insert 'duckdb:////tmp/trees.db' trees - --csv
(That one took nearly an hour the first time I ran it, so I had Codex optimize it and got it down to around 35 seconds.)
Tags: databases, postgresql, projects, python, sql, sqlalchemy, sqlite, sqlite-utils, duckdb, coding-agents, codex
But then users start to report a weird bug. It's the 4th time your team has been trying to fix it. I mean... asking AI to fix it. Unfortunately, it seems like not even Fable can figure it out.
You go talk to the person who worked on this feature.
"So where does the data come from?"
"Hmm... actually I don't know. Let me ask Claude."
You sit next to each other watching an endless wall of text appear on the screen. Neither of you has any idea whether any of it is true but Claude seems very confident. [...]
This project has become so convoluted, with so many layers and services, that no one on your team could possibly start to understand what's going on.
— Florian Herrengt, AI is removing the middle class of software engineering
Tags: ai-misuse, cognitive-debt, generative-ai, ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming
There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text
Sophie Alpert shares her "internal policy on acceptable use of AI writing by engineers". It's a short read (supporting its own recommendations) and really good.If you chose to have LLMs help massage your writing the following rule seems crucial to me:
You must stand behind every idea and every sentence in your docs. It is your responsibility to make sure that the entire document is representative of your own thoughts before you share it. If a reviewer asks, “What did you mean by this line?”, it’s not acceptable to reply with “Oh sorry, AI wrote that, just ignore it.” You will confuse your readers (and waste their time) if you present them things that are not genuinely representative of your thoughts.
The "no lossless transformations" idea from the post title is expanded on here:
There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text — every rewrite and rephrase changes the meaning of your writing, and if this is done by an entity that doesn’t have the most detailed mental representation of what you personally were trying to communicate, information will be lost.
Tags: writing, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-misuse
Donald Trump is not a well man. He is, unfortunately, also President, which means that we all pay a price for his inability to accept reality. Notably, while he insists that he has “total control over the Strait of Hormuz,” shipments of oil through the Strait will remain minimal unless Trump can find a way to smuggle oil out in catering carts — or until he makes a deal with Iran. And we won’t have such a deal until he faces up to the reality that he lost his war of choice.
The Hormuz closure means, in turn, that oil prices — which briefly fell most of the way back to prewar levels on hopes that a deal was really coming — will remain high for the foreseeable future. Here’s the price of Brent crude:
But here’s the puzzle: Why aren’t oil prices even higher? They were over $100 a barrel before markets began betting on an end to the war, so why aren’t they back above $100 again? Also, why are they “only” about $25 a barrel above prewar levels, when many analysts — myself included — suggested that they might go much higher?
A large part of the answer is that oil prices actually are higher — if you look at the right numbers.
Today’s post will be short and wonkish, because I’ve been overwhelmed with real-life responsibilities. I have had enough time, however, to put together a few charts.
So, what do I mean by looking at the right numbers? Nobody burns crude oil directly. Instead, they burn products refined from crude, mainly gasoline and diesel. And these prices, after falling for a while on fake news of peace, are back most of the way to their recent peaks. Here, for example, are wholesale diesel prices:
Source: Haver Analytics
The difference between the price of a barrel of crude and the price of the products refined from that barrel — the “crack spread” — has exploded, rising about $35/barrel since the eve of the war:
Source: RBN Energy
So while the price of a barrel of crude is up around $25, the price of the products refined from that barrel is up about 25+35=60 dollars per barrel, putting it in the range of middle of the road predictions of what would happen as a result of a long-term Hormuz closure.
Why has the crack spread widened so much? The main answer is that a lot of the world’s refining capacity is either trapped inside the Strait or offline as a result of Ukraine’s drone campaign against Vladimir Putin. So it’s not all about Iran. Indeed, one indicator of how much the other war matters is that JD Vance reportedly had to plead with Volodymyr Zelenskyy to halt attacks on oil tankers using the Russian port of Novorossiysk.
The shortage of refining capacity has, in turn, held crude prices down: Buyers aren’t willing to pay extremely high prices for crude oil they can’t refine. Or to put it a different but equivalent way, the cutoff of oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz in effect required a large rise in global oil prices to ration demand, but much of that rationing has taken place through a rise in the crack spread rather than a rise in crude oil prices.
What does all this mean for the United States? Most immediately, inflation — which was held down for the last two months by falling fuel prices — is set to rise again in next month’s data. And everyone can see that gasoline is back above $4 and diesel back above $5.
So those obsessed with the midterm elections — which means everyone who is paying attention to the crisis of American democracy — should realize that the blue line at the bottom of this chart this is unlikely to turn around significantly before November:
MUSICAL CODA
In honor of Operation Catering Truck:
2. Saloni on the future of medicine. “Every disease is a policy failure.”
3. John List on generalizability, very important. And his comments here.
4. China is now regulating AI companions.
5. Fewer phones, more fighting?
The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The strangest thing I’ve done with an LLM lately is genealogical. I’m adopted. A couple years ago I connected with my birth family. Using details they’ve provided and genetic testing, aided by a swarm of blood robots, I’ve unearthed huge swaths of my history. Ancestry.com hosts extensive databases of: draft cards, Ellis Island arrival documents, marriage and death and birth records, newspaper archives. The monthly fee is hefty, and I’ve never paid for access before because the thought of digging through databases makes me wilt. But Claude could dig, couldn’t it?
Roden Readers —
OK, so I need to retract something from the previous Roden sent just a couple weeks back. The weather in Japan, in AUGUST, has been … SOMEWHAT SANE? A series of typhoons — some glancing off Japan, others smacking it — has dropped the humidity, made temperatures livable, and cooled the evenings. Well, at least for a few days. We’ll see what torment next week brings. But: just making note of this miraculous Summer Weather Development. (Meanwhile, Europe broils.)
This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in Tech Policy Press.
AI represents the first time we humans can do cognitive work outside of our bodies at scale. The only comparable moment is the early years of the industrial revolution, when new technologies like the steam engine provided a quantum leap in our ability to do mechanical work outside of our bodies at scale. If AI’s cognitive capabilities become integrated into our lives, businesses, and governments—a process that will take years if not decades—society will be as unrecognizable as the modern world would be to a preindustrial farmer. And yet, Americans—by a wide margin—say that AI is moving too fast and will have a negative effect on society.
This confluence of technological revolution and public distrust deserves urgent discussion, and a proper framing. The question is not whether it is possible to develop AI in a non-exploitative way, or even whether we can trust AI companies to act in the public interest. The question is whether we will recognize that our existing social and economic systems are failing to achieve these outcomes, and whether we can act in time to make structural change.
Today’s AI is mired in political and economic systems developed generations ago that were never designed to manage widespread computation, let alone automated cognition. The gaps in those systems—and their proclivity to be exploited—are the primary influence on how the technology is being developed, deployed, and used.
In any discussion about AI’s potential, it’s important to separate the technology from the socio-political system it’s embedded in. That AIs can lack context, mix up facts, or fall for stupid tricks are all technological problems. Because the giant developers like OpenAI and Anthropic have prioritized solving them, AIs can now more easily access resources like the web or email, are more disciplined about using those resources, and are better at staying within their guardrails.
Yet AI developers do not seem to be prioritizing other technological problems. Major AI models still act far more sycophantic than humans, telling people what they want to hear even when untrue or not in their best interests. Popular AI models tend to answer questions confidently even when they lack training, knowledge, or evidence to back their claims. In both cases, AI developers choose to train models that please users with flattery and the appearance of competence, rather than constraining them to act in users’ and society’s best interests.
In contrast, ensuring that AI models benefit people broadly, that their energy costs are fairly allocated, that their environmental impacts are minimized, and that they don’t steal content and revenue from publishers are all questions of incentives in a capitalist system.
It’s easy to conflate technology problems with capitalism problems. Back in 2021, science-fiction writer and AI commentator Ted Chiang said that “most fears about AI are best understood as fears about capitalism.” It’s not the tech per se; it’s who controls it and how it could be used against us.
Imagine an AI assistant for a doctor. We can imagine it affecting the profession in one of two ways. The AI could give a doctor more time to do the human parts of their job: to spend more time with their patients, to listen more closely to their needs, to explain things more fully. Or the managers of the medical practice could give that doctor five times the patients—and fire the other four. Which way it would go is not a question of technology. It’s a question of market incentives.
The two are related, of course. Capitalism steers technology, and technology steers markets. But holding the two separate helps us understand that we, as a society, face independent choices on both the technological and sociopolitical axes that need not be coupled.
For example, consider the costs of AI. The leading US labs tout to investors that their frontier models are very expensive and energy-intensive. There are significant technological challenges about improving their energy efficiency, but the sociopolitical questions are more pertinent. It’s a corporate decision made under capitalist market incentives to constantly pursue new models that incrementally push the frontier—at enormous capital cost—and to use them, seemingly, everywhere. Nothing about the technology of AI dictates that models must be retrained constantly, at the largest possible scale. Or that they have to run on every web search, every interaction with your phone, and every time you walk by a security camera.
In a different political and economic system, Chinese developers are producing—and then giving away—smaller, more efficient, more affordable models. While the US government seeks to restrict China’s access to the most advanced chips, China is betting that incentivizing their tech giants to create leaner, more open models using more commodity hardware—models that can be trained with older chips and run even on personal computers—will be an advantage in achieving widespread use and, perhaps, Chinese national influence.
There are other pathways for AI development that are not in service of private capital gains nor authoritarian regimes, but rather a democratic public interest. The best example comes from Switzerland, where public institutions—research funding agencies, universities, supercomputing centers—have collaborated to produce an AI model called Apertus. It is trained entirely on data validated to be licensed for use with AI (not stolen), on preexisting public computing infrastructure, and using renewable hydropower. Its developers are incentivized to produce a public good, not turn a private profit.
It’s dangerous to confuse technology problems with sociopolitical ones. Popular proposals like pausing AI research, moratoria on data center development, or subjecting frontier models to federal government screening are all framed as addressing problems with AI’s technological development, but fail to take into account the larger social problems that govern it. China’s success with government-endorsed development of open-weight frontier models illustrates the futility of keeping AI tech as national secrets, or of any pledge to scale back deployment.
AI is already legitimately useful for a wide range of tasks. It can be a tool for public good, if we choose to solve its sociopolitical problems. Our goal should not be to slow its pace of improvement or scale of deployment, but rather to steer it away from consolidating power and towards the public benefit. We can build sustainable AI, minimizing environmental and energy impacts. And we can equitably distribute the material gains it produces.
Integrating a technology as disruptive as AI responsibly requires structural reforms, and we should decouple the social and technological aspects of AI to design those reforms. Companies—including tech giants—should be forced to pay the energy and environmental costs of its development. Profits should be taxed adequately and redistributed. Antitrust laws should be strongly enforced. Corporations should have a fiduciary responsibility to stakeholders beyond their majority shareholders. These badly needed reforms are responsive to the problems with capitalism that AI is exacerbating, even if they are not specific to the technology.
Sorting through our dad’s (John Gyford) papers we found a few bits of paperwork from his father which seem like a nice collection of things about him and, to a lesser extent, his wife, Ethel Gyford (née Roper), our grandmother. In the interests of populating the internet with facts, here they are.
§ First, his letterhead:
C. Barrington Gyford B. Sc., F.R.G.S.
Author, Journalist and Lecturer
70, Waverley Avenue,
Twickenham, Middlesex.
Telephone: FELTHAM 2212.
He lists himself as a contributor to:
And as the author of:
§ Next, two slightly different CVs, both written in or just after 1960.
d/b 7.12.1901
28, Waldegrave Park,
TWICKENHAM,
Middx.
B.Sc. (London) in Geography, 1937.
Diploma in Education, Kings College, London.
Fellow of Royal Geographical Society.
World travelled during inter-war years.
L.C.C. Lecturer on “Current Events”, 1932/39.
Broadcasting experience (B.B.C. and in U.S.A.) giving “Travel Talks”; “Current Affairs” and stories in Children’s Hour etc., 1921/39.
Author of nine successful books ranging through world-travel experiences; geographical data; and fiction based on fact, including one of Broadcast Echoes series — “A Traveller’s Tales.”.
Served in Royal Naval Reserve; Merchant Service; the Army and the Royal Air Force. Formerly a Major in the Home Guard; now Deputy Commanding Officer of the Middlesex Wing, Air Training Corps.
Twentynine years experience as a Schoolmaster in all types of schools; instructor in L.C.C. Evening Institutes; Lecturer in Economic Geography at Regent St. Polytechnic. For 15 years Headmaster of Twickenham Gramnar School, retiring in December, 1960.
Married to Ethel Florence Roper, L.R.A.M., an expert of the Rhythmic Approach to Physical Training on which she has written four books.
Two children — one son, now an Open Exhibitioner at Jesus College, Oxford; one daughter awaiting to go to University after Commercial Training.
With my family, have travelled all over post-war Europe, and am booked to go behind the “Iron Curtain” this summer — Berlin, Warsaw, Moscow, Leningrad, etc.
Present occupation whilst “retired” — gardening end journalism, together with Youth Work.
d/b 7.12.1901
B.Sc. (Geography), Queen Mary College.
University Diploma in Education and Ministry of Education Certificate, Kings’ College, University of London.
Fellow of Royal Geographical Society, Associate Member of Institute of British Engineers, 1948.
30 years in Primary, Secondary and Technical schools; Evening Institutes and Youth Organisations; including 15 years as Headmaster of Twickenham Grammar School. (just retired 31. 12. 60).
Master for Mathematics; Science and Geography; Lecturer in Geography to Final B.Sc. (Econ) at Regent St. Polytechnic.
Author of numerous articles and series in popular and educational Press, based in part on extensive world travel.
Author of nine books based on travel; adventure and air navigation.
in the B.B.C. programmes pre-1939 with tales of incidents abroad, including the “In Town To-night”; “Young Ideas” and “I was there” series.
These broadcasts were published in book form as one of the “Broadcast Echoes” series by A.J. Arnold & Co. Ltd.
Broadcast thriller serial “The Mask of Death” on the air by New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation.
[New page, reads as if something is missing.
(and educated)
Born in Ipswich, Suffolk, of a family that has been in East Anglian for hundred of years, on both my parents’ sides.
My great-uncle, Rt.Hon. Sir Daniel Ford Goddard, was M.P. for Ipswich for 17 years.
Married Ethel Florence Roper of Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, the daughter of late Inspector Roper of the East Suffolk Police.
My wife (a qualified teacher) was acting Headmistress of a village school in Suffolk during the first years of our marriage.
My sister, also a qualified teacher, was also Headmistress of a Suffolk village school, although now a Headmistress in Edmonton.
My mother, my mother-in-law; a brother-in-law and two sisters-in-law, still live in Suffolk: which accounts for my family frequently spending holidays in Ipswich, Felixstowe, Bury St. Edmunds and Lowestoft.
Because of our connections with East Anglia, my son, an undergraduate at Jesus College, Oxford, did a thesis on “Ipswich and its environs” as part of his course.
§ Finally, a leaflet for Twickenham Grammar School, of which he was headmaster, and the junior Newland House School, run by Ethel Gyford (née Roper), his wife.
Headmaster: C. BARRINGTON GYFORD, B.Sc., Dip.Ed., F.R.G.S.
“Per Ardua ad Gloria”
With Junior Department
Principal: ETHEL F. GYFORD, L.R.A.M., M.R.S.T.
34, WALDEGRAVE PARK, TWICKENHAM
Telephone: POPesgrove 7479
(an Independent Secondary School)
A co-educational Grammar School to provide a thorough Secondary education leading to the School Certificate and Matriculation examinations.
Age limits, for both boys and girls — 11 to 16 years.
ENGLISH, LATIN, FRENCH, MATHEMATICS, GENERAL SCIENCE, PHYSICAL TRAINING.
ART, MUSIC, RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE, GEOGRAPHY, HISTORY, ELOCUTION.
FOOTBALL, CRICKET, BASEBALL, NETBALL, TENNIS, SWIMMING.
Mornings, 9.30 to 12.
Afternoons, 2 to 4.
Mondays to Fridays only.
FEES, payable in advance.
11 to 13 years …. 8 guineas per term.
14 to 16 years …. 9 guineas per term.
These fees are inclusive.
There are no “extras.”
The HEADMASTER considers that a personal interview with the prospective pupil is necessary in every case before entry to the school. This can be arranged by letter or telephone.
A sound training in all the usual subjects of the school curriculum in small classes ensuring group work and individual attention. Training in Elocution and Dramatic Art is included.
Age limits, boys and girls …. 7 to 11 years.
(On reaching the age of 11 years, pupils may, if suitable, pass into the Senior Department—Twickenham Grammar School).
FEES, payable in advance …. 7 guineas per term.
This is an inclusive fee.
There are no “extras.”
SCHOOL UNIFORM is the same for both Senior and Junior Departments, with a distinguishing badge.
Grey flannel strap skirt with scarlet jumper or white blouse; grey flannel blazer. Grey felt hat with school hat band and badge, or scarlet beret with hat badge.
Navy-blue overcoat or raincoat.
Grey socks or stockings; black shoes.
Navy and red striped tie.
(Older girls may wear grey flannel costumes).
Grey flannel suit, grey shirt, grey pullover.
Navy-blue cap with school badge.
Navy-blue overcoat or raincoat.
Grey socks, black shoes.
Navy and red striped tie.
N.B. All pupils are expected to change into soft-soled shoes or slippers on entering the school building.
MR. C. BARRINGTON GYFORD. B.Sc. (Special).
University Teacher’s Diploma in Education;
Board of Education Teacher’s Certificate (King’s College, University of London).
Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
MRS. ETHEL F. GYFORD. Licentiate of the Royal Academy of Music; Training College for Music Teachers. Board of Education Teacher’s Certificate, with Distinction in Physical Training and Hygiene. Trained at Home and Colonial College, Wood Green.
MRS. N. E. HARRINGTON. Board of Education Teacher’s Certificate with Advanced Art. Trained and qualified at Brighton Training College.
MRS. C. TAYNTON. Fellow of the British Association of Physical Training. Qualified at the Battersea Polytechnic, London, and the Physical Training College, Silkeborg, Denmark. Teacher of Elocution and Dramatic Art, trained under Elsie Fogerty.
MISS M. D. SIMMONS. Board of Education Teacher’s Certificate and Higher Froebel Certificate. Trained and qualified at Victoria College, Belfast.
MRS. CLIFFORD. Froebel-trained assistant mistress.
MRS. HOSKINS. Part-time assistant
Protections intended to thwart organ trafficking may inadvertently also "protect" legitimate patients and donors from receiving life-saving medical care.
The Paradox of Protection: How Overregulation Threatens Living Kidney Donation in Mexico, by Francisco J. Reyna-Sepulveda and Javier Sanchez-Maldonado, Transplantation, Publish Ahead of Print, July 27, 2026. | DOI: 10.1097/TP.0000000000005860
"Globally, unrelated and nondirected living kidney donations have become important mechanisms for expanding transplant access.1 Structured programs in the United States and Spain support unrelated donation through rigorous psychological evaluation, independent donor advocacy, and transparent oversight systems.3,4 For example, nondirected donors serve as critical initiators of kidney paired donation chains, substantially amplifying transplant opportunities beyond a single donor-recipient pair.3-5 However, a recent regulatory shift in Mexico threatens to effectively preclude these pathways in practice, leaving living kidney donors (including living liver donors) with genuine altruistic intent declined and vulnerable patients losing critical access to life-saving transplants.
"WHEN ALTRUISM REQUIRES PROOF
"On August 4, 2023, the National Transplant Center and the Federal Commission for Protection against Health Risks issued a High Health Directive (Alta Directiva Sanitaria), establishing mandatory standardized protocols for Mexican transplant centers.6 This directive emerged in response to well-documented regional concerns regarding organ trafficking, transplant tourism, regulatory gaps, and the “legal simulation” of donor-recipient relationships. These concerns are entirely legitimate and align with the principles articulated by the Declaration of Istanbul on Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism.7
...
"Although the directive does not explicitly outlaw nondirected donation, its evidentiary requirements effectively preclude it at the committee level. As a result, viable donor candidates may be categorically declined for regulatory rather than medical reasons.
...
"Although data isolating the exact proportion of donor evaluations declined solely for documentation rather than medical or psychosocial factors are currently unavailable, Mexican National Registry data highlight a concerning sign.9 During the 12 mo preceding the directive’s publication, 438 unrelated living donor kidney transplants were performed nationally, compared with 354 during the subsequent 12 mo—a 19% decline. "
...
"This directive severely limits Mexico’s potential to establish domestic paired-exchange networks or participate in cross-border paired kidney exchanges. The Global Kidney Exchange model, for instance, incorporates pairs from middle-income countries into US-initiated chains to overcome financial and immunological barriers.10 This approach has been accompanied by ethical discussion in the transplant literature, particularly regarding concerns about potential inducements and unintended exploitation.10"
...
"Ultimately, the critical question is not whether expanding living kidney donation should be permitted, but whether a transplant system can be considered ethically complete if a viable living kidney donor candidate is categorically declined for regulatory rather than medical reasons."
On Friday, I got an email from actress Reese Witherspoon. She says she wants to turn my book The History of Jazz into a film.
Give Reese some credit—she clearly knows my book and describes it in painful detail. Okay, her email was a bit bland and verbose, but Ms. W. writes perfectly, without grammatical errors or even any typos. I feel clumsy by comparison.
And please don’t tell me that it sounds like a scammer with a chatbot. That’s so cruel. Who would dare catfish unsuspecting authors so callously?
Are you envious? Well, it gets better.
This morning, I heard from Jerry Bruckheimer, the famous Hollywood producer of films such as Top Gun and Pirates of the Caribbean. He wants to make a movie based on my book Music: A Subversive History.
I’m even more impressed by Bruckheimer. Not only does he know my work—and writes about it just as cogently as Reese—but he has read it in the Italian translation (Musica: Una Storia Sovversiva). What a savant!
Yeah, I hate dropping all these names. But as they say in elite circles: It ain’t braggin’ if it’s true.
That said, I’m worried I may have blown it already. Reese ghosted me after I responded to her solicitation.
So I decided to ratchet down my expectations for Jerry B. I’ve already sent out my response—with a more modest request.
I mean, if my book really is an “exceptionally visual foundation for storytelling,” it ought to be worth some socks, no?
I definitely need some new opportunities—because all those book clubs that contacted me last month never actually came through with the goods.
I don’t understand it. They tell me, over and over, that my books are perfect for their readers, but they keep trying to get me on the phone for some reason.
On a totally unrelated note, I see that the AI backlash has ramped up in just the last few days. It makes you wonder why.
Just last week, I predicted that “we are now embarking on the stage where there’s pushback even inside the slop companies.” And this week it’s already coming true.
Even the bots are now battling the bots. For example, at Anthropic…
And Spotify is also distancing itself from slop. This headline is from yesterday.
Or consider this new AI policy at software company Clay. Coders were the first to embrace AI—are they now the first to sicken of it?
All of this is on top of the recent AI controls implemented at LinkedIn (owned by Microsoft) and YouTube (owned by Alphabet).
Are the true believers losing their faith?
Maybe these folks have good reason to distance themselves from AI. The financial world is turning on the bot business. The ten most shorted investment grade bonds are now all linked to AI.
Bonds don’t get mentioned much by the mainstream media, but they will now determine the future of Silicon Valley—which increasingly spends more cash than it brings in.
The trendline is ominous.
When you borrow too much, you lose control of your destiny. That is now the new normal for the largest tech empires. And if lenders continue to back away, we will witness a fall of Humpty Dumpty proportions.
In a worst case scenario, this could push the whole economy into a tailspin.
That’s why I need to land one of these movie deals—it will be my safe port in the storm.
C’mon Reese, give me another chance….
POSTSCRIPT:
Some people are taking this article at face value. So I need to declare that I’m fully aware that these are scam emails. I shared them here for humorous purposes (and also as a warning to other writers).
I’m not really bragging about my relationship with Reese Witherspoon. I don’t have one, and I’m sure she had nothing to do with the email I received. The same is true for Jerry Bruckheimer.
I’m flattered that some readers saw these as legit, but my life is nowhere near as glamorous as they imagine.
Here is the source.
The post USA fact of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
In a bid for spiritual renewal, I made a pilgrimage to Islam’s holy city. Almost everything I expected to see was gone
- by Azania Imtiaz Patel
After half a century in the making, an observatory in New Mexico lets viewers peer 13,000 years into the future and the past
- by Aeon Video
Victoria Song, The Verge:
The $399 Google Pixel Watch 5 isn’t about the hardware. Sure, there’s a new satin pyrite case finish, a few new strap colors, and a Steph Curry Special Edition. Under the hood, there’s a slightly faster Qualcomm processor and an itty-bitty battery bump. There’s a $50 price hike from last year, too, because the Pixel Watch 5 isn’t immune to RAMageddon — none of us are. Otherwise, no one would blame you for looking at this watch and thinking absolutely nothing’s changed. That’s because the big updates this year are all software-based.
I have never seen anyone in real life wearing a Pixel Watch. (I’ve only seen a handful of people using Pixel phones, and every single one of them was at a tech event of some sort.)
You can also use AI to generate watchfaces. I created a watchface featuring “fat cats and an elegant font.” It didn’t quite do that. The fat cats weren’t characters, so much as pleasantly plump, cat-shaped clock numbers. It’s a gimmicky way to shoehorn the Nano Banana model onto the watch… but if that’s your thing, it works.
Well I’m sure now I’ll see plenty of people wearing Pixel Watches.
Mia Sato, The Verge:
Earlier this summer, Amazon customers began noticing that emails related to their online orders looked sparse: Order confirmation emails didn’t name specific items anymore, and instead listed only item categories.
“Your Beauty item is confirmed!” an email about my retainer cleaning tablets read. Shoppers have posted other iterations of the redacted emails as well: “Ordered: 1 Hardware item,” “Your Drugstore, Shoes, and other items are here!” and “1 Nutrition & Wellness, 1 Wireless Accessories,” for example. The emails have clip art-style illustrations of general product categories, and a shopper has to exit their email and go to Amazon to see what item it’s actually referring to.
Complaints about the vague emails appear to have started in July; orders placed as recently as June contain thumbnails and names of the exact item purchased. [...]
“As customers shop with us more frequently, including on their phones, and use the ‘Your Orders’ page in the Amazon app to get real-time, consolidated order details and delivery status, we’ve simplified several order-related emails to direct customers to our app and website for the latest information on their orders,” spokesperson Maxine Tagay said in an email. “This also reduces customer information shared outside the Amazon app and website to further improve customer privacy.”
That statement from Amazon is almost honest, if you squint at it and ignore the bit about it having anything to do with “simplification”. If you order a Torx screwdriver, what’s simple is getting a confirmation email with the exact name, brand, and photo of the item you ordered, not “a hardware item”. The honest part is “reduces customer information shared outside the Amazon app”.
The fact is, a lot of people use apps like Gmail for email that aren’t private. When you use Gmail, Google learns everything in your email. Amazon sees this as a competitive problem for them, not a privacy problem for users. Everyone who uses Gmail basically knows that Google “knows” what’s in their email, and they’re voluntarily agreeing to that. Amazon just doesn’t like that any of its competitors — perhaps especially Google — can glean so much information about what people are buying from Amazon. So Amazon, in an act of competitive spite that corrupts its relationship with its own customers, is limiting all useful purchase information to channels that it controls — its website and its own apps.
If customers relied solely on the “Your Orders” page at Amazon, they wouldn’t need to send any emails at all. The obvious fact is, people go to Amazon when they want to buy something. They don’t come back until they want to buy something else. They enjoy getting confirmation and shipping notifications in email because they check their email regularly.
Jeff Johnson:
These purported reviews, all but one of which is 5 stars, are all in English. Yet none of them is in the US App Store. I also looked at other English-speaking countries such as Australia and Canada but found no reviews. Also suspicious is that the name of every reviewer was a first name followed by an initial for the last name. If you’ve ever looked through App Store user reviews, it’s unusual to find this naming format. In most cases, the name on App Store user reviews is a uniquely chosen username, with no space character, often suffixed by a number.
The final and most conclusive evidence that these reviews are fake, totally invented out of thin air by the developer (or more likely, by an LLM), is that the dates on the reviews, such as “Mar 12,” predate the release of TabControl Extension in the App Store!
God only knows what this obvious AI slop scam is doing with the data from users’ Safari tabs. It’s currently the 12th or 13th most popular Safari extension in the App Store.
Watch this. No words needed, everyone can feel it. Genes are a hell of a thing.
Basic Apple Guy:
Apple just dropped the hardest icon glow-up for the new Chess icon in macOS 27 Beta 5.
This is not just a tweak or small improvement. This is the difference between total shit and a really nice icon.
A few years ago I’d have looked at this post and maybe leaned toward the idea that a precocious 8th grader somewhere hacked into the @GoogleDesign Twitter account and tried to pass off their little to-do app as having come from Google’s design team. But this is apparently real. I almost hope it’s AI slop and that there aren’t any human designers there who think anything in this app has appropriate proportions or is aesthetically pleasing.
(Here’s an XCancel link for the x.com averse. You can just change any x.com/* URL to xcancel.com/*. But, alas, the XCancel mirror of the original tweet loses the animation showing the UI in motion.)
Joanna Stern, writing at The New Things (gift link):
I used to love the blinking notification light on my BlackBerry, and later my Droid 2. It was a simple way to know I had a message without actually looking at my messages. Then BlackBerry let you customize the color, and it was a rainbow dream.
Google’s HiLight takes it a step further by letting you assign different colors to VIP contacts. So when your phone is face down, you can tell who’s trying to reach you without picking it up. It looks cool. The big bummer? At launch, it only works for phone calls.
Google told me it’s “continuing to invest in this technology” and that messaging notifications are coming. Still, it’s odd they aren’t there at launch, especially since Google found plenty of colors for Gemini. The ring changes hue depending on whether the AI is listening, thinking or responding.
I have no interest in this because a few years ago I stopped ever putting my iPhone on any surface face down. I don’t use a case, so setting the phone face down is a good way to pick up scratches. I stopped doing that, ever, and now I’ve got a nearly year-old iPhone 17 Pro that seemingly doesn’t have even a micro abrasion on the display glass.
And it seems downright goofy that it’s launching with support only for phone calls. Google can’t even launch a blinking light right on these Pixel phones.
David Imel, The Verge:
But in our current moment, the photos people are drawn to are not flawless — and that’s created a real problem for the people making smartphone cameras. “The gap between what two random people want from their camera is growing dramatically,” says Isaac Reynolds, who leads the Pixel camera team at Google. Some people want a perfectly optimized photo, Reynolds says. “But there’s a growing number of people who want something that they feel is more authentic or traditional, by their definition.”
That’s what Reynolds and the Pixel team are setting out to solve with Camera Looks, a total rethink of how the camera captures and styles an image on the Pixel 11 series. The phones include a new suite of processing tools aimed at giving people much more control over the camera’s output. At first glance, they look a lot like filters, with names like Black Tie, Classic, and most strikingly, Digi, in reference to the growing trend of buying cheap digital cameras from the early aughts. But unlike a filter, which generally applies editing tweaks after the processing happens, Camera Looks is changing how image data is processed at the sensor level.
This sounds a lot like Apple’s “Photographic Styles” in the iPhone 13 and later, but with the addition of some control over grain and sharpness. I love grain, and the thing I like least about Apple’s built-in photo processing is the way it attempts to eliminate all noise. I like digital cameras that embrace noise and try to make it pleasing, rather than over-processing to try to pretend these tiny sensors aren’t inherently noisy. So I say kudos to Google for loosening up on “everyone gets the over-sharpened, over-smoothed look”.
But, that said, what’s made me happy over the last year is shooting almost all my photos with third-party apps — in particular, Halide, Not Boring Camera, and Analogue — that give me low-level control over processing through LUTs (or in Halide’s parlance, “looks”). These apps give me the looks I want just through point-and-shoot photography. No need to process images after shooting. But because they (optionally) shoot RAW, I can reprocess in post without losing any original sensor data. I can shoot in black-and-white and subsequently change my mind and reprocess with a color look later. These apps enable honest film-look photography without looking at all gimmicky, and without baking any sort of filtering into the image data in my camera roll. It’s the best of both worlds. It’s also way, way fussier than the built-in Camera app should be.
Anyway, all this Pixel announcement news today has me thinking that these days, I never hear much about Pixel cameras or image processing. In the early years of the Pixel lineup, there was a common view that Pixel phones were the best camera phones in the world. I never believed that, but I did think they were an interesting alternative, taking different but equally valid philosophical choices than Apple. Apple has always insisted on instant processing. You snap the shutter and the iPhone saves your image instantly. Pixel cameras often undertook seconds-long processing. That enabled features the iPhone couldn’t offer.
I think it’s pretty easy to pinpoint when things changed for Pixel — when Marc Levoy left Google for Adobe in 2020 (where he now leads the team making the very intriguing Indigo camera app, that is exclusively available for iPhone and which offers a slew of innovative computational photography features).
When Levoy was leading Google’s camera photography team, there was a credible argument that Pixel phones were the best still camera phones in the world. (They were never even close on video.) Ever since, I never hear about them except in the middle of August each year, when Google announces new Pixel hardware. See you in 12 months.
Ivan Mehta, TechCrunch:
With this year’s Pixel 11 series launch, Google is thinking more agentic AI to complete your tasks. With Gemini, U.S.-based users will be able to order groceries, book rides, or get coffee, for instance. Plus, Gemini can call businesses on users’ behalf for table reservations or appointments. Google said that users can take over or stop tasks at any point in time and also review transcripts for AI-operated calls.
Over the next few weeks, a new slate of connected apps will be able to work with Gemini to get things done, including Granola, Otter.ai, Wix, Fever, Get Your Guide, Localiza, OpenTable (U.K.), Ticketmaster, iHeartRadio, Pandora, Angi, Thumbtack, and Zocdoc.
I’ve never heard of most of those apps, or, if I have heard of them, I thought they went defunct years ago. The one app amongst those I do use, OpenTable, apparently only supports this Gemini integration in the U.K.?
Another knockout year for the Pixel phones and Android.
Sam Rutherford, writing for Engadget:
Granted, the P11 Pro Fold still includes IP68 dust and water resistance, which is better than what you get on the Z Fold 8 line (IP48). But after making an absolute tank of a foldable phone with last year’s model, I said Google really needed to cut weight and thickness this generation, and it just hasn’t. Instead, it seems like Google has leaned even more into the Pro Fold’s sturdiness with a new glass fibre material for its rear panel that the company says is nearly impossible to crack. This is great in theory, but obviously I wasn’t in a position to smash one of Google’s demo units in order to test that claim.
I have never seen anyone, anywhere, with a folding Pixel phone. Pretty sure I won’t this year either.
I played with a Pixel 10 Fold or whatever its name was last year at the Google Store on Newbury street in Boston, which store felt like a small library or museum. The Pixel Fold display was so plasticky that I had a moment where I wondered if the display units were fake props, like at Ikea. But no, it was the real thing. And it cost $1,800 to start.
Over the last few days as we’ve been discussing Francesca Hong’s campaign, Thanksgiving abolition and “defunding the police,” I’ve made the same argument a number of times — most recently with TPM Reader AB whose email dispatch you can read below. I wanted to share it with you because it informs my way of understanding these things.
After Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary last year, there were so many powerful people eager to take him down and so many ways it would be easy to do it. It’s very, very challenging to navigation the transition from a lefty/social democratic/identity politics milieu to a broader society-wide electorate. Obviously New York City is a very blue city. It’s not Wisconsin or Michigan, let alone Texas or Ohio. But the same general point remains. It’s an incredibly challenging needle to thread, one that requires immense, innate political skill. Mamdani fielded all the standard attacks, some fair, some very unfair, and again and again he was able to finesse them. This, to me, was the biggest signal. He’s an immense political talent. Some have it; most don’t; he does.
Of course I have my own issues with him on Israel/Palestine. But even on that issue, perhaps especially on that issue, I saw how he was able to navigate a super challenging electoral thicket. Again and again.
Which brings me to Francesca Hong.
I’ve had a lot of people tell me the “abolish Thanksgiving” thing is a fake issue. No, it’s not. Or if it is, it’s the kind of “fake issue” that people frequently end up losing elections over. As a voter, when I give you my vote or my support, I’m giving you or loaning an asset, a valuable one. I want to know you’re going to take care of it, use it for an important purpose, not piss it away over anything stupid. When I saw Hong’s responses about her cancel Thanksgiving tweet, even with relatively friendly interviewers, I thought, she’s not ready for prime time. She lacks the finesse and political skill for a general election. No, I’m really not worried that we’re going to lose Thanksgiving. And if we somehow land in an alternative universe where a majority of the American people think we should abolish Thanksgiving, I’m not going to be hugely broken up about it. But my vote and support are valuable assets. I need to know it’s in good hands, skillful and trustworthy hands. If you didn’t say anything weird in 2020, great. If you did, find a way to make it work. If you can’t find a way not to die on the hill of Thanksgiving abolition then I need a different candidate. And that example signaled to me that she’d fare equally poorly on a much more cutting issue of “defund the police.” Hong either lacked the political skills or deft enough antennae to understand how people outside the DSA/left-progressive bubble think. (And yes, I’m also in a bubble. We all are.)
Maybe you say that the fact we’re even talking about this is an example of how our politics is broken. It is. But this isn’t an example of that.
Most people don’t pay a lot of attention to politics. The great majority lack the time and technical knowledge to evaluate complex public policy questions. What a candidate can do is communicate a clear set of values and priorities. After that, a huge amount of the electoral process is governed by a series of signifiers by which voters decide “I can understand this person” and “I think they can understand me and my life situation.” A huge amount of political skill is a candidate’s ability to open these channels with people who are quite different from them, establish what we’d now call parasocial channels of mutual understanding. If you’re going to stumble on something like Thanksgiving abolition … well, that’s just too silly a thing to stumble on when so much is at stake.
From TPM Reader AB …
I am but one anecdotal data point from Wisconsin, but as a politically engaged liberal in Madison, I’ve had plenty of conversations in the last week that align with your suppositions of how Crowley won.
While I don’t really identify as a Socialist, I am highly motivated to support ‘socialist’ projects and see them implemented. I put ‘socialist’ in quotes, because public education, fire dept, and public libraries are all socialist projects — but also pretty basic services.
That said, for much of the primary, I was all in for Hong — she campaigned relentlessly and leveraged social media deftly, and she was meeting the moment with the piss and vinegar and fight that so many of us crave in this moment. She was also the first and only candidate on the Dem side to take a stand on Data Centers, calling for a 1 year moratorium (ironically, the only candidate in the gubernatorial race to support a 100% ban on data centers was Tom Tiffany’s opponent in the Republican Primary, Andrew Manske).
Her focus on Data Centers dovetailed nicely with her redistributive agenda, by slyly invoking data centers as avatars of the billionaires making our financial lives worse, and now also coming to make our neighborhoods noisy and electricity more expensive; offering 500 constructions jobs in the short term towards a project (AI) who’s endgame is to replace humans in the labor force. She was hitting on issues that actually resonated across party lines.
As her momentum grew, and the establishment grew more disarrayed (Rodriquez and Barnes scandals and subsequent dropping out, Kelda Roys and Joel Brennan failing to generate ANY enthusiasm for their campaigns (despite a terrific debate performance from Brennan), Crowley re-entered the race as the last hope to head off Hong — and that happened right as National outlets started paying a LOT more attention to Hong, her past tweets and current positions.
It turned out that Hong, even with relatively friendly interviewers (like on Pod Save America), did not have polished or convincing responses to her past tweets re: “Cancel Thanksgiving” “Abolish the Police” and “Old WHite People Make Me Anxious”. You could see the Tiffany ads writing themselves. The more interviews and exposure she got, it also became clear she was not as charismatic or talented a communicator as Abdul Al-Sayed.
This was also all roughly concurrent with the police killing of Corey Ruiz in Hong’s Madison district. The response to this killing was relatively unified — shock that a man was shot three times in the head on a Madison street, frustration at yet another Police killing. On the day of the shooting, protesters marched to the Capitol square where a free public concert from Madison Symphony Orchestra (Concerts on the Square) was beginning. That crowd is overwhelmingly white and privileged and insulated from the violence that had happened that day. But Madison is also pretty liberal, and the MSO cancelled the concert in solidarity with the protesters — acknowledging that it was discordant with the moment of mourning and anger. Many attendees were disappointed by the cancellation, but also recognized that it was appropriate. There was, as I say, a relatively unified response to the killing. But that didn’t last long.
The intersection where Ruiz was killed became an occupied encampment, closing local businesses, re-routing public transportation, and sometimes accosting local residents. The City tolerated this encampment for two weeks, even as public sentiment turned against the encampment — the story ceased to be about the police killing of Ruiz, and became about the encampment.
In the midst of all this, while other candidates offered more measured statements of concern, Hong declared it an “execution”, while the official reports indicated that Ruiz had injured multiple police officers with a knife while resisting arrest. (Cell Phone video clearly shows the 3 shots to the head from multiple angles, but it is more difficult to see the knife in those videos, and because the Mayor and Madison Common Council voted against police body cams, we don’t have that perspective).
In multiple conversations with friends, and reading various subreddits, I started to see many folks feeling like the moment was a test of Hong’s leadership ability — and she failed. What plays in her district does not play at the state level (and not even at the city level, for that matter).
The drumbeat from Gov Tony Evers and the establishment that Hong was a gift to Trump and Tiffany started to resonate. Her inability to convincingly address previous inflammatory tweets, her response to the Ruiz killing only re-enforced this. In the waning days, there were also articles about how AOC and Sanders (who endorsed and campaigned with Al-Sayed) had stayed away from Hong.
I wrestled with my decision, I was prepared to vote for Hong right up until election day — but standing in the school gym filling in my ballot, I voted for Crowley. I had lost confidence that Hong could win statewide.
I truly and deeply hope that we won’t have a Hong equivalent of 2016’s “Bernie Bros” who take their ball and go home– we’ll need them to defeat Tiffany. Hong’s 40% polling and 40% vote share indicate that there is a real appetite for a more progressive direction for our state — I hope Crowley recognizes that and gives Hong voters reason to support him, too.
Having discussed the results and prediction markets, let me address a different question I saw brought up last night. If the polls have been this wildly off in Wisconsin and Michigan, how can we be confident that Democrats are set for a banner showing in November?
The best answer to this is that you shouldn’t be confident, or, at the very least, certain of anything. But the comparison is mostly apples to oranges. Midterm elections are fairly high turnout affairs and we have lots of historical data about turnout patterns. So the composition of the electorate is fairly predictable. Fairly. Primaries are quite different. It’s a bit like saying you have a hundred kids who are going to be in the school lunch room — a table with the jocks, one with the nerds, one each for the goths (dating myself), the richies and the stoners — and they’re going to vote for student body president. But now let’s say only 20 students are going to show up. It’s a very different result if it’s the goths and nerds who show up vs. the jocks and the richies.
That’s a bit how polling a primary election works. And it’s even more the case in open primary states like Michigan and Wisconsin. So to extend our analogy, a few of the 20 students may be from another school. These primary polls are mostly models, or how you’re modeling the electorate. If your model is far off it almost doesn’t matter how well you polled.
That’s the case with every poll to a degree — but far, far more so with these primaries. EPIC-MRA, the premier pollster in Michigan, didn’t even release a primary poll in its final poll before the election, opting instead to focus on the general. So yes, don’t take anything for granted. Polls can be wrong. But mostly these particular misses shouldn’t make you any less trustful of polls than you already should have been. They’re qualitatively different than the challenges of polling the actual election.
Two other points to consider.
One is differential response. This seems to have played a real roll in Michigan and quite possibly in Wisconsin. This is a related but different issue from the modeling one. Basically maybe Francesca Hong’s supporters were just way more over-the-top and revved up in their support and thus more eager to answer pollsters. But no matter how over-the-top you are, you can still only vote once. This may have overlapped with some communities being harder to reach — rural voters for instance. From my limited observations last night, Crowley was doing better in rural areas. This issue, too, is one that is more manageable in a higher-turnout election. But it’s one that, in general, has led polls in a number of recent elections to underestimate Republicans by very small but sometimes significant margins.
Finally, there are specific issues with the Wisconsin election that we can’t ignore. The apparent winner, Crowley, only got back into the race three weeks ago. Here’s the chain of events. Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez was sort of the establishment choice who relied heavily on her experience and managerial prowess. But it was a crowded field and her campaign hadn’t really caught fire. Then last month it came out that she actually didn’t have any money for what was supposed to be a crucial ad buy. The best explanation Rodriguez could come up with was that she trusted her campaign manager and that the campaign manager had probably double counted all the contributions. (If this seems so bizarre and you think you must be missing something … you’re not. It was that bizarre.) But the upshot was that this meant A) that she had no money, when she was supposed to be the flush candidate and B) that it just wrecked confidence that she had the managerial ability or trustworthiness or something to be governor. Upshot, she drops out.
At this point, outgoing Gov. Tony Evers (D) gets Crowley to get back into the race and starts trying to get everyone to consolidate around Crowley against Hong. (Crowley was in originally, but hadn’t caught fire and dropped out.) He gets back in on July 18th. Mandela Barnes —who had been Evers’ first lieutenant governor and lost a narrow race against Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) — dropped out on July 31st. Then on top of all of that, the state’s voters have been fed a steady diet of news over the last 10 days or so — the upshot of which, rightly or wrongly, was that nominating Hong was all but gifting the governor’s mansion to the GOP. And not just any Republican, but an arch-election denier, Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-WI). So it’s difficult to know how much of this is a mammoth polling error vs a decisive shift away from Hong in the week or so since the last polls were in the field.
The last point on that front is we could be looking at something like what happened to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in the 2020 election. The polls were saying that Hong was up by more than 20 points. But the final polls put her support in the mid-to-low 40s. The final results show her taking just over 39% of the vote. That’s not that different at all. It’s just that what had been a split field of non-progressive candidates almost entirely consolidated around Crowley. That kind of shift, especially after Barnes left the race, is exactly the kind of thing you’d imagine would happen in the final days when a majority could not be persuaded to support Hong AND voters were getting hit with an avalanche of commentary that Democrats were throwing away the race if they didn’t consolidate behind a single candidate.
None of this is meant as a rearguard defense of polling. This was clearly a huge miss. But these very sui generis final weeks of the campaign created mammoth volatility in the electorate itself, quite apart from errors in polling.
Probably the best way to look at all of this is that for all the drama and surprise, largely an artifact of the polling, the outcomes of these two races were very, very similar. It’s just that Abdul El-Sayed ended up a tiny fraction ahead and Francesca Hong ended up an even tinier fraction behind. Big picture, both of these races were more or less a tie between a conventional, mainstream Democrat and a candidate of the progressive left.
We went late into the evening waiting for absentee ballots in Milwaukee County last night. But Milwaukee County executive David Crowley will become the Democratic nominee for governor in Wisconsin, despite it seeming like a certainty that Francesca Hong would be the winner. As of yesterday, every recent poll had shown Hong at least 20 points ahead. The two most recent public polls had her 22 and 25 points ahead. (The most recent poll from Crowley’s own camp showed Hong 19 points ahead!) We’ll come back to the question of why these polls have been so wildly off. But there was a different casualty from the night’s results that I personally enjoyed witnessing because it’s a hobbyhorse or pet peeve of mine — and it seems to be as well of the numbers crunchers/data nerds whose Twitter feeds I watch on elections night. I’m talking here about the “prediction markets.”
An earlier iteration of political prediction markets were a thing back in the aughts. But as they’ve returned in a slicker, more highly capitalized form in the last few years, there’s been a growing argument that they’re not only predictive about political races and possibly as good as polls but actually better than polls. This has always struck me as not only wrong but a category logical error.
Needless to say, after these two races where polls were consistently wrong by double digits, it might seem hard to make an argument that they’re better. But that’s not the argument. The issue is that these supposed wisdom of crowds (or perhaps inside information) data markets are really just emanations of the polls. So what me and my data pals were watching last night was that Kalshi and Polymarket were close to certain that Hong was the winner last night until the first results started coming in, at which point the Hong contract collapsed. But the real reveal was that Hong and Crowley wildly oscillated back and forth over the course of the night. And that only really made sense if you were moving your money on the latest headlines or the topline number on the results sights. In other words, it all pretty clearly showed that the betters (sorry, investors … lol) were buying on the basis of the polls. Once it was clear that the polls were wildly off, they were completely adrift. The markets “knew” they were very wrong and were starved of data for how to get right.
The oscillating back and forth was, again, the tell. The reason I mostly ignore the topline results and certainly the media accounts on election nights and focus on these number crunchers is that if you are good with numbers and have access to historical and regional data you can get a good sense of what’s happening very early. So for instance, Candidate A may be up by 20 points in initial results early in the evening. But you might be able to see that in key districts or counties that have most of their votes in, Candidate A simply isn’t getting the numbers they need. Watching the oscillations of the betting markets last night, it was clear the big traders weren’t even making much use of this somewhat technical but hardly secret information. Once they lost the polling signal, they didn’t seem able to get access to the available results signal that was there for the taking.
Needless to say, this doesn’t mean these markets don’t have some predictive value. To the extent they are emanations of the polls, it’s not the polls speak with one voice — though they pretty clearly were here and last week in Michigan. They can be a good summary of what the polls are saying, if the wisdom of crowds thing is working. We should also always been adding contextual data to the polls. You’d figure in that, whatever the polls say in the Texas Senate race, Texas is a very hard nut for Democrats to crack. So that gets figured into the predictions even if it’s not explicitly in the polls. There are also lightly polled or non-polled races where you want, at least in theory, the wisdom of crowds to intelligently add in non-polling factors. It’s not a matter of one being better or worse. It’s about reliance. It’s a bit like asking whether it’s your car or the gas it runs on that is better at getting you to work in the morning.
So, valuable? Sure, though I guess in the very marginal sense of telling you what you’re going to learn anyway by the end of election night. But the idea that they are better than polls — have some ability to replace them as our way of establishing probabilities for the electoral future — is not so much wrong as a kind of category error since they are overwhelmingly just a reflection of those polls. And often not even a very expert one at that.
John Light has a run-down of results from last night’s major primaries in South Carolina, Wisconsin and Minnesota in this morning’s Brief. The evening saw DSA-backed progressive Francesca Hong lose her bid to become Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate in an upset, prominent election denier Mike Lindell lose his own gubernatorial bid in Minnesota, and more surprises.
Check out John’s post for the TLDR on a busy primary night.
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Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Daron Acemoglu returns for his second appearance with a new book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy?, which Tyler reads as an attempt to redefine and revitalize liberalism for our times. Where Daron’s first visit was about how states and societies contend for the narrow corridor in which liberty survives, this one asks what liberals themselves got wrong, and the answer implicates the educated elite—that is to say, you.
Tyler and Daron discuss what’s wrong with social contract theories and Rousseau’s general will, whether Acemoglu is more objectivist than Rorty, why he blames left liberalism’s own establishment power for its collapse, what standard is left once you refuse to have a book of higher values, nondomination versus noninterference, who counts as working class, why automation alone will not lead to widespread prosperity, how he can call himself a free speech absolutist while wanting to regulate social media, why he worries we’ve given up on educating Americans, whether teachers’ unions need to be reconstituted, what the life expectancy for an educated twenty year old is today, whether open-source models undercut the centralization worry, what pro-worker AI actually means, why the fertility crisis leaves him strangely close to a real business cycle position, whether AI will raise his own already prodigious paper output, why Armenia has disappointed economically, what he wants to learn next, and more.
For an excerpt, let us start from near the beginning:
COWEN: Richard Rorty had a consensus-based defense of liberal democracy. Is your view the same as his, or are there some metrics along which it’s different? Are you more objectivist in some way?
ACEMOGLU: I wouldn’t say it’s more objectivist. I think my commitment in my mind has always been that it’s impossible for us at any point in time not just to know what’s really the absolute truth, but also to have a clear map of what is the right stance. In the same way that I think many people would agree science makes gradual and sometimes uncertain progress toward some better understanding, I think morally, philosophically, we also have to have gradual uncertain evolution toward what we agree on. Objectivism, in some sense, is too strict.
COWEN: Say we’re not evolving toward greater agreement.
ACEMOGLU: No, sometimes we go back.
COWEN: Today, it seems we’re not evolving toward greater agreement, right?
ACEMOGLU: We’re not. Absolutely not. I think you can blame that on reactions to globalization, reactions to technology, better authoritarian challenges. This is the most uncomfortable part because I see myself firmly within the left liberal tradition. I think it’s partly because of the failure of left liberalism. In some sense, if you think of why did Rome fail or collapse, we can tell a story about the barbarians were really too strong. No, really, Rome collapsed because internally it had problems that opened up weaknesses against outside invaders as well as some inside problems.
It’s the same with left liberalism. I think it became quite influential throughout much of the Western world and some of the emerging economies as well over the last 70, 80 years. It did not use that establishment power just in the right way, creating its own weaknesses that made it much more vulnerable to outside attacks. That’s why I think we are now going back because we are at an interregnum period in which ideas are battling again. In some sense, it’s just like the early 19th century where you had all these very different ideas and they were trying to get a toehold in the imagination of people. I think we are going through a period like that, except that there are really many more confusing ideas out there.
COWEN: Say when we’re not evolving toward greater consensus, what’s the external standard you introduce to judge which are the correct ideas and which not? Like Rorty, you need one, though.
ACEMOGLU: I don’t have one.
COWEN: Then why believe in what you believe?
ACEMOGLU: Okay. I think what I believe is, first of all, not as an external standard—I don’t know whether external standard or internal standard is the right word—but that we have to defend some degree of individual freedom because everything starts from that, both in terms of our meaningful lives, but also any kind of improvement in the human condition requires individual initiative, and that individual initiative is impossible without some amount of freedom, a meaningful freedom, not just saying, “Okay, you have the freedom to pray, but you cannot express that idea with others or you cannot turn it into action.” Some meaningful freedom.
That is the only starting point that we need to have. Around that, we need to build things with some sort of consensus within society. That’s what I think liberalism has to recognize, that you have to enshrine those rights, but then give enough elbow room to people to form their own community-level agreements.
COWEN: You present some different values in the book. One is nondomination. Another is noninterference. There’s others. When they clash, what’s the metric you introduce to decide how to resolve that clash?
ACEMOGLU: I wish I had a perfect answer for that. I don’t.
COWEN: You have an imperfect answer.
ACEMOGLU: I have an imperfect answer. I think noninterference by itself isn’t enough because, at least as read or as interpreted by some philosophers and economists, it is just about being left alone from higher authority or typically state-level authority, although it could be some other authorities as well. We do also need opportunities and some way of actualizing our intentions and our freedom. That’s what the idea of nondomination, which goes back to Roman Republican times, recognizes.
It is not, in my mind, an extremely interventionist philosophy. It doesn’t say the state knows it best or that the state should always have an opportunity to override individual or group-level decisions. It does emphasize that providing people some amount of protection against those who have much greater physical or other power relative to them is something that cannot be done at the individual level. It has to have a community-level component.
COWEN: That’s a good answer, but is it an answer to the question? If we’re Sidgwick, we might say, when values clash, we look to utility, or maybe it’d be cost-benefit analysis to decide which gets priority. You’re not willing to say that, so why not? What’s wrong with that answer?
Very much interesting throughout.
The post My very interesting Conversation with Daron Acemoglu appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
HELSINKI — Chinese reusable launch vehicle maker has secured a first batch of series E funding, months after a huge D++ round, with fundraising still ongoing. The funding is the […]
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Bruce Jakosky, Scott Hubbard and their colleagues have given us a masterclass in pragmatic systems engineering. Their recent SpaceNews editorial titled “Laying the groundwork for the first human mission to […]
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Virgin Galactic says it will not start commercial flights of its new suborbital spaceplane until early 2027, a delay of a few months.
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Gen. Stephen Whiting said there is a demand for offensive capabilities and called on the industry to develop ways to disable the critical nodes of large satellite constellations
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The Golden Dome ‘ecosystem hub’ allows companies to request information and submit ideas
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In a contrast of fire and ice, smoke from wildland fires mingled with several of the Cascade Range’s prominent, glaciated volcanoes in summer 2026. Astronauts on the International Space Station photographed the scene while orbiting over the U.S. West in late July and early August.
Mount Hood, Oregon’s tallest peak at 11,249 feet (3,429 meters), is pictured above, near a thick plume of smoke pouring from the Grasshopper fire. Thunderstorms passed over the forest in the preceding weeks, and a lightning strike on July 23 ignited the blaze pictured in this July 31 photo. The fire, burning east of the mountain, spread quickly north and east across Mount Hood National Forest amid hot, dry conditions, according to InciWeb.
As of August 12, it had burned nearly 84,000 acres (34,000 hectares) and spread beyond national forest boundaries. Several communities in Wasco County were under “go now” evacuation orders, and the nearby town of Dufur was advised to prepare for immediate evacuation.
Roughly 100 miles to the north in Washington, Mount Rainier—the state’s tallest peak at 14,411 feet (4,392 meters)—was wreathed in smoke. No major fires burned nearby when this photo was taken on August 4. Instead, smoke drifted in from fires in central and eastern Washington, carried by winds blowing from the east due to a high-pressure system offshore. That day, the National Park Service reported that air quality in the park reached unhealthy levels due to elevated concentrations of fine particulate matter (PM2.5).
Several days later, the Grand Park 2 fire was observed burning within park boundaries, about 3 miles north of the Sunrise Visitor Center. As of August 12, the fire had burned 223 acres (90 hectares) and was uncontained; the cause was yet undetermined.
Above-normal fire potential was expected to persist across the Northwest through August, according to an outlook from the National Interagency Fire Center. Warm, dry weather—conditions influenced by El Niño—combined with cured fuels to set the stage for large, long-burning fires following lightning- or human-caused ignitions.
Astronaut photographs ISS075-E-1705 and ISS075-E-2221 were acquired on July 31, 2026, and August 4, 2026, respectively, with a Nikon Z9 digital camera using a focal length of 400 millimeters. They are provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit at NASA Johnson Space Center. The images were taken by a member of the Expedition 75 crew. The images have been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast, and lens artifacts have been removed. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory as part of the ISS National Lab to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the Internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Story by Kathryn Hansen.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
Wildland fires in early August 2026 pushed air quality to unhealthy levels, destroyed hundreds of structures, and triggered mandatory evacuations…
The blaze burned more than 150 square miles and swept through parts of a ski resort.
Canadian wildfires sent plumes of smoke streaming over Ontario, Quebec, and parts of the U.S. Midwest and Northeast.
The post Cascade Volcanoes Shrouded in Smoke appeared first on NASA Science.
In case you missed this, Gracey Van Der Mark, the Huntington Beach city council member and Republican candidate for state assembly, district 72 recently posted a bunch of photographs alongside Brandon Gill.
And if you’re thinking—“Brandon Gill—the dude who sang “Rub You the Right Way!”
No, that’s Johnny Gill.
And if you’re thinking, “Brandon Gill—former Charlotte Hornets guard!”
No, that was Kendall Gill.
Brandon Gill is the 32-year-old MAGA congressman from Texas best known for his boyish looks, his Dartmouth diploma and his calls for a prohibition on Muslim immigration.
Put different: Gill is a bad guy. A profoundly bad guy. A uniquely bad guy. A white Christian Nationalist who backs mass deportations, proudly Tweeted, “It’s still not illegal to be white” and responded to a video clip of Zohran Mamdani eating with his hands by writing, "Civilized people in America don't eat like this. If you refuse to adopt Western customs, go back to the Third World.”
And … Gracey knows this. Loves this. Because, despite being both Latina and the daughter of first-generation Americans, she’s a (again, weirdly) vile racist who has somehow been brainwashed into seeing a white reflection gazing back in the mirror. She lacks empathy, sympathy, decency, kindness, and views the MAGA cruelty spewed by shrubs like Gill as distinctly American.
On the bright side, her website is broke …
PS: Chris Kluwe is an obviously obviously obvious guy to vote for in this race.
Days off have been thin on the ground in 2026 as the news comes at us like a firehose.
But I’ve been on the road all day and am too tired even to read the news, let alone put it into a coherent narrative. So tonight just magically became a picture night.
Here’s a fresh water image, for a change, from a late afternoon swim at a local pond with my nephew.
I’ll be back at it tomorrow.
A little to my office, to put down my yesterday’s journall, and so abroad to buy a bedstead and do other things.
So home again, and having put up the bedstead and done other things in order to my wife’s coming, I went out to several places and to Mrs. Turner’s, she inviting me last night, and there dined; with her and Madam Morrice and a stranger we were very merry and had a fine dinner, and thence I took leave and to White Hall, where my Lords Sandwich, Peterborough, and others made a Tangier Committee; spent the afternoon in reading and ordering with a great deal of alteration, and yet methinks never a whit the better, of a letter drawn by Creed to my Lord Rutherford. The Lords being against anything that looked to be rough, though it was in matter of money and accounts, wherein their courtship may cost the King dear. Only I do see by them, that speaking in matters distasteful to him that we write to, it is best to do it in the plainest way and without ambages or reasoning, but only say matters of fact, and leave the party to collect your meaning.
Thence by water to my brother’s, and there I hear my wife is come and gone home, and my father is come to town also, at which I wondered. But I discern it is to give my brother advice about his business, and it may be to pacify me about the differences that have been between my wife and him and my mother at her late being with them. Though by and by he coming to Mr. Holden’s (where I was buying a hat) he took no notice to me of anything. I talked to him a little while and left him to lie at the end of the town, and I home, where methought I found my wife strange, not knowing, I believe, in what temper she could expect me to be in, but I fell to kind words, and so we were very kind, only she could not forbear telling me how she had been used by them and her mayde, Ashwell, in the country, but I find it will be best not to examine it, for I doubt she’s in fault too, and therefore I seek to put it off from my hearing, and so to bed and there entertained her with great content, and so to sleep.
When people hear the word “trust,” they often assume it is only for the wealthy or for families with complicated estates. In reality, trusts have become one of the most practical estate planning tools available for people from many different financial backgrounds. They can help protect assets, simplify the transfer of property, reduce unnecessary legal hurdles, and provide clear instructions for loved ones after someone passes away. Whether a person owns a home, has retirement savings, or simply wants to make life easier for family members, understanding how trusts work is an important part of planning ahead.
A trust is a legal arrangement that allows one person, called the grantor, to place assets under the management of a trustee for the benefit of designated beneficiaries. Depending on the type of trust, the grantor may continue controlling those assets during their lifetime or transfer responsibility to someone else according to specific instructions.
One of the biggest advantages of a trust is flexibility. A trust can hold real estate, investment accounts, business interests, personal property, and other valuable assets. The grantor decides how and when beneficiaries receive those assets, making trusts useful for families with young children, adult children who may need financial guidance, charitable goals, or complex family situations.
Unlike a simple will, many trusts also allow assets to transfer privately, avoiding much of the public court process that accompanies many estates. That privacy, combined with greater control over asset distribution, is one reason trusts continue growing in popularity among individuals planning for the future.
Many people begin researching trusts after learning about what happens during probate . Probate is the legal process used to validate a will, settle debts, and distribute property after someone dies. Although probate serves an important legal purpose, it can also take months to complete, depending on the size and complexity of the estate, state laws, and whether disputes arise among beneficiaries.
A properly funded revocable living trust can often allow many assets to pass directly to beneficiaries without going through probate. That does not eliminate every legal responsibility following a death, but it may reduce delays, court involvement, and administrative expenses for surviving family members.
Another benefit is continuity. If the grantor becomes incapacitated during their lifetime, a successor trustee can immediately step in to manage trust assets according to the trust’s instructions. That may prevent additional legal proceedings that could otherwise become necessary if no planning has been completed in advance.
While trusts are valuable tools, they work best when paired with a comprehensive estate plan that includes a will, powers of attorney, healthcare directives, and regular updates as life circumstances change.
Estate planning is important for everyone, but certain families may benefit even more from specialized financial guidance. Military families frequently relocate, own property in multiple states, receive unique government benefits, and experience deployments that create planning challenges civilian families may never encounter.
That is why service members and veterans, for example, would want to go with a military financial planning company because those professionals understand military pensions, Survivor Benefit Plan elections, VA benefits, Thrift Savings Plan accounts, and the legal considerations that often affect military households. A trust can become one piece of a much larger financial strategy that protects both assets and long-term family security.
Military financial professionals may also help families determine whether specific trust structures align with their broader retirement goals, charitable objectives, or plans for passing wealth to future generations. Every family’s circumstances differ, making individualized guidance especially valuable when multiple financial programs intersect.
Even families without substantial wealth often discover that planning ahead provides peace of mind. Having clear instructions already established means loved ones spend less time interpreting legal documents and more time focusing on one another during an already emotional period.
Not every trust serves the same purpose. Revocable living trusts remain among the most common because they allow the grantor to modify or revoke the trust while they are alive. Irrevocable trusts generally provide less flexibility but may offer additional asset protection or tax planning opportunities depending on individual circumstances.
Parents may establish trusts for minor children to ensure funds are distributed responsibly over time instead of all at once. Business owners may use trusts to support succession planning. Families caring for loved ones with disabilities may establish specialized trusts designed to preserve eligibility for certain government assistance programs while still providing financial support.
Selecting the appropriate trust depends on personal goals rather than simply choosing the most common option. An experienced estate planning attorney can explain how different trust structures function under state law and help determine which approach best matches a family’s needs.
The most effective trusts are also properly funded. Creating the document alone is not enough. Assets generally must be retitled or transferred into the trust for many of its intended benefits to apply. Reviewing the trust periodically after major life events such as marriage, divorce, births, deaths, or significant financial changes also helps ensure the plan continues reflecting current wishes.
Trusts are not just legal documents. They are practical planning tools that can provide clarity, flexibility, and greater control over how assets are managed and distributed. Taking time to establish an estate plan today can make an enormous difference for loved ones tomorrow, helping families navigate life’s most difficult moments with fewer legal obstacles and greater confidence.
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IUX, the institutional-grade trading platform serving over 1M+ active accounts across global markets, has made its pricing data fully visible for side-by-side broker comparison—inviting traders to stack its conditions against competitors without reservation.
In a market where cost claims are common and verification is rare, IUX has taken a different position. The firm’s website presents its core trading metrics—raw spreads starting from 0.0 pips, execution speeds averaging under 30 milliseconds, and zero hidden fees—laid out transparently for anyone evaluating where to place their next trade.
For active traders searching for a low cost CFD trading broker , this level of openness is notable. Most brokers advertise competitive pricing in general terms. IUX publishes the numbers and invites the comparison directly.
IUX positions itself on three pillars when measured against industry alternatives: spread tightness, execution speed, and pricing transparency.
On spreads, IUX reports an average of 0.11 pips across its raw account offering—a figure derived from interbank-sourced pricing with no markup embedded in the quote. The broker’s revenue structure relies on a fixed, disclosed commission per lot rather than widening the spread itself, which means traders see the actual cost of each position before entering it.
Execution infrastructure is the second differentiator. IUX records average order execution at under 30 milliseconds, supported by direct cross-connectivity through low-latency fiber-optic links to major liquidity providers. The system is built on conflict-free STP execution, routing orders directly to the market without a dealing desk intervening between the trader and the fill.
The point about there being no hidden fees is more difficult to measure, but it is probably the most important one for traders who have narrow margins. By completely separating the spread from the commission, IUX’s pricing model ensures that the total cost of a trade can be calculated before the order is given.
IUX’s comparison page doesn’t rely solely on self-reported metrics. The broker has collected a series of industry awards that independently validate the pricing position it’s asking traders to evaluate.
In 2025, IUX was awarded ‘Lowest Trading Costs Broker in Asia’ and ‘Fastest Trade Execution in Asia’ by the Global Business Review Magazine Awards. For 2025, the Global Brands Magazine Awards awarded IUX the title of ‘Best Forex Broker for Low Spreads in Asia’. Further recognition from Money Expo Mexico, TrustFinance, and Broker View confirms a record that is based on evaluations from a number of different review organisations rather than just one.
In this situation, these recognitions are significant since they deal with the same claims that IUX makes on its comparison page—namely, cost and speed.
Tight spreads and fast execution don’t hold up without infrastructure capable of sustaining them under pressure. IUX addresses this through several layers of operational architecture.
The liquidity network used by the broker is supplied by a large number of institutional providers, the purpose of this being to minimise slippage risk when the markets are volatile. During periods of high volume, the platform remains running thanks to DDoS protection and the use of enterprise-grade traffic filtering, and the level of platform uptime is such that executions can be carried out consistently regardless of the market conditions.
Funds are held in segregated accounts, separated from company operating capital and secured under advanced financial standards. For traders who prioritize both cost and security, this structure addresses both requirements without compromise.
IUX offers access to more than 165 CFD instruments across currencies, commodities, indices, stocks, crypto, and thematic index products. Traders can execute across these markets through three platform options: the proprietary IUX Trade App, the IUX WebTerminal, and MetaTrader 5 — all carrying the same underlying pricing and execution infrastructure.
The broker is active in multiple regions, with 24/7 multilingual support available for account and trade-related inquiries. Deposits process instantly for supported payment methods, and the broker’s withdrawal track record is reflected in consistent user reviews across the App Store, Google Play, Trustpilot, and Investing.com.
The CFD brokerage space has grown significantly more competitive in recent years, and traders have more access to pricing data than at any previous point. That shift has made the gap between advertised and actual trading costs more visible and more consequential for anyone executing at volume.
IUX’s decision to publish its conditions openly and frame them as a direct competitive comparison reflects strong confidence in what the metrics show. Raw spreads from 0.0 pips, sub-30ms execution, STP order routing, and a fully transparent commission structure form a package that IUX believes holds up under direct scrutiny.
For traders ready to run that comparison themselves, the full pricing breakdown and feature details are available at IUX’s broker comparison page.
Photo: Rafael Minguet Delgado via Pexels
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Mike Fincke, a retired United States Air Force colonel and NASA astronaut of 30 years, is retiring from the agency’s Astronaut Office. He’s one of only 13 people who launched to orbit from Earth onboard three different spacecraft.
Fincke among 44 astronauts selected in 1996 for the 16th astronaut class, nicknamed “The Sardines.” He flew to space four times: twice on Soyuz, once on Space Shuttle Endeavour, and once on the SpaceX Dragon Endeavour.
“After exactly 30 years, I am departing NASA, but I remain deeply committed to the work of exploration.” Fincke said in a statement shared by the agency. “NASA gave me the extraordinary privilege of serving alongside remarkable people, flying and helping develop spacecraft, and contributing to the International Space Station from its earliest days through command in orbit.”
Fincke’s time as a NASA astronaut saw him serve as commander of the International Space Station twice. The first time was from Oct. 22, 2008 through April 2, 2009, during Expedition 18 and the second time was from Dec. 7, 2025 through Jan. 12, 2026, during Expedition 74.
“I am profoundly grateful to my crewmates, the teams on the ground, our international partners, and the families who make this work possible. I am excited to carry those lessons forward and help prepare the next generation of engineers, explorers, and leaders,” Fincke said. “Together, we will return humanity to the Moon, travel to Mars, journey outward to the planets and moons beyond Earth, and someday reach for the stars – all while caring for Earth, the most beautiful planet in our solar system.”
A notable chunk of Fincke’s NASA career was in service of the Commercial Crew Program. He was at one time the chief of the Astronaut Office’s Commercial Crew Branch and in January 2019, he replaced Eric Boe as one of three crew members slated to fly the Crewed Flight Test of the Boeing CST-100 Starliner spacecraft.
As development of that program dragged on and crews were shuffled multiple times, Fincke was moved to the backup pilot role on the CFT mission and eventually trained alongside NASA astronaut Scott Tingle, Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Joshua Kutryk, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Kimiya Yui as a member of the Starliner-1 mission.
However, after the ill-fated flight of the CFT mission in 2024 with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, Fincke and Yui were reassigned to the SpaceX Crew-11 mission. The duo launched to the space station alongside NASA astronaut Zena Cardman and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov on Aug. 1, 2025, for a mission that lasted 166 days.
But the mission ended early when Fincke had to be medically evacuated from the ISS.
Initially, NASA withheld the identity of the crew member that triggered the medical emergency, but Fincke later told the Associated Press he had a bizarre episode while eating dinner on Jan. 7 when he just suddenly couldn’t speak for about 20 minutes.
“It was completely out of the blue. It was just amazingly quick,” Fincke told the AP in an interview published March 7. “My crewmates definitely saw that I was in distress. It was all hands on deck within just a matter of seconds.”
Neither Fincke nor NASA have elaborated on the specifics of the incident due to medical privacy concerns.
Fincke’s departure from NASA means yet another astronaut with deep knowledge of the Starliner program is now gone.
Other NASA astronauts who trained on Starliner and departed include Wilmore and Williams who retired in 2025 and 2026 respectively as well as Josh Cassada, who left the agency in October 2024, and Jeanette Epps, who departed in June 2025.
Both Cassada and Epps were assigned at one time to the Starliner-1 mission before being reassigned to Crew-5 and Crew-8 respectively.
Since Tingle became the chief of the Astronaut office along with the reassignment of Fincke and Yui to Crew-11 as well as Kutryk to Crew-12, the Starliner-1 mission became a cargo-only flight to the ISS to ensure that the vehicle can safely operate.
During the Crew-13 news conference at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, on Aug. 3, Dana Weigel, Manager of NASA’s Low Earth Orbit Program, said that there are astronauts generally training on Starliner, but didn’t name names.
“From a crew office standpoint, we have had, we always have astronauts that follow any of our major developments and we do have crew members who are following Starliner development,” Weigel said.
“It’s a structured contractual problem in terms of when astronauts have to be assigned and it’s different for the given provider, but roughly you’re looking about a year, a little bit more than a year,” said Richard Jones, Deputy Director of the Commercial Crew Office within the LEO Program. “I’m gonna keep it a little bit generic with respect to making sure that an assignment is in place. In terms of being ready for a Starliner mission, we’re making a lot of progress in that area, understanding the anomalies that have been in place.
“So we do have a lot of astronauts following every step of the way, right? They are following every single decision, assessment that are being done in that area. And so, whenever that time comes for a crewed assignment, NASA will be ready to tell the public about who it is and why.”
NASA is still assessing whether the uncrewed Starliner-1 mission will fly this year and if so, when. The timing of that will help dictate when a crewed Starliner-2 mission would happen.
The rabbit in the picture above is a breed known as a Flemish Giant. Like other giant rabbit breeds, they are especially cuddly, gentle, calm, and good with kids and other animals. Unfortunately, they only live to be about 7 or 8, much like very large dogs have short life spans. Still, I highly recommend them as pets.
Anyway, I looked at the items in today’s roundup, and decided that many of them share the common theme of “unintended consequences”. Making sure that people understand the unintended consequences of their policies is a big part of what economists do. That’s often easier said than done, of course.
Now here’s some good political news. Audiences for MAGA influencers are falling off a cliff:
Here are some more details from the NYT:
Views for [Benny] Johnson’s YouTube channel are down by millions from the heights of 2024. The surge of attention he received on X has slowed to a trickle. His loyalty to Mr. Trump has become unappealing to some Republicans who are frustrated with the rising cost of living and the president’s decision to start a war with Iran…Other high-profile right-wing influencers are contending with similar shifts of fortune…Views are dropping for many of Mr. Trump’s greatest allies…[Nick Fuentes] saw notable gains in 2025 and early 2026 but is now trending down. “It seems that everyone in the space is experiencing a drop-off in views from 2025,” Mr. Fuentes wrote…[M]any right-wing websites have seen larger declines, including The Blaze and The Federalist.
I’ve long predicted that MAGA is a wave that would ultimately break and recede. The movement has built no lasting institutions — no civic groups, no religious revival, no professional associations, no governmental institutions, nothing. It’s a blast of pure populist rage, and those don’t ever last very long.
Trump’s blunders, of course, have hastened the decline. The Iran war has naturally split a voter base who was told that they were voting against Middle Eastern wars. Trump was elected to do something about inflation, but he hasn’t done anything; in fact, his tariffs have made it worse. The only campaign promise Trump has delivered on was reducing immigration, but it turns out that reducing immigration doesn’t actually make a material difference in the lives of Americans.
To all this, add the typical thermostatic effect, wherein people consume more partisan media when their party is out of power. Trump is no longer the rebellion, so Republicans are less angry, so there’s less reason to sit around listening to media grifters whose whole shtick is to feed you constant ragebait.
Anyway, this just strengthens my long-held view that popular unrest has actually peaked in America and is on the decline. If the GOP can use this moment to throw off the yoke of the Trump personality cult and return to something approximating normalcy, I think we’ll have one more round of crazy (the DSA), and then perhaps go back to some semblance of reasonable, productive politics. Knock on wood.
One of the scariest, most disturbing trends in the U.S. economy is the long, steady fall in labor’s share of income. Since the turn of the century, workers have been taking home less and less of what the nation produces:
This fact has spawned a lot of discourse about AI taking jobs, the need to redistribute capital income, and so on.
But how much of the decline is real, and how much is a measurement issue? Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick have two new blog posts explaining how a lot of the change you see on that graph might actually just be a statistical illusion due to some tax policy changes.
The first post explains the effect of the rise of pass-through corporations like S-corps. Basically, what a standard corporation would record as labor compensation often gets reclassified as profit:
In a paper with Danny Yagan and Matt Smith, we found that when a company converts from a C corporation to an S corporation, reported wages drop and reported profits jump…A top-earning S corporation owner who pays herself in profit instead of wages avoids the 3.8% levy that applies to her wage income. A C corporation owner has the opposite incentive. Wages are deductible, so paying yourself a salary avoids the corporate tax and payout tax on dividends. By lowering individual income tax rates and increasing corporate tax burdens, the Tax Reform Act of 1986 made the S corporation the better deal, and a growing share of business owners have given that income the name “profit.”…
That change of label pulls down the measured labor share because the national accounts count S corporation profit as capital income. When we add these recharacterized wages back into the labor income bucket, then the corporate labor share in 2017 is about 0.9 percentage points higher.
The second post explains how the increasing tendency to pay employees in stock instead of cash makes it look as if labor income is lower than it is:
A few years ago, Andrea Eisfeldt, Antonio Falato, and Mindy Z. Xiaolan (EFX) published a fascinating paper called “Human Capitalists,” which focused on the growing role of stock-based compensation for workers at public companies…EFX argue that when public companies pay their workers in stock, these payments don’t generally show up as labor compensation…If we could find around $200 billion of “missing” labor compensation, that would account for about a third of the fall in the labor share since the late 1970s.
Even with both of these tax effects included, this still leaves a substantial portion of the fall in the labor share unexplained. But we may discover tax distortions other than these two, in which case the remaining number will shrink even further.
This doesn’t kill the idea that the falling labor share is a problem. But it’s a warning that we need to figure out how big the problem really is, before we decide we need to reshape our whole economy in order to fight it.
In 2024, Donald Trump declared that he wanted to give automatic green cards to foreign nationals who graduated from U.S. universities. This was a good idea, but like so many other policies, Trump ended up trying to do the exact opposite of what he promised. Trump’s administration is reportedly considering charging foreign students a $100,000 fee to work in the U.S. after graduation.
This should drive home the fact that the MAGA movement isn’t about restricting illegal immigration per se; it’s about restricting all immigration, including high-skilled legal immigration. MAGA will attempt to sell this policy as a way of protecting American labor — preserving high-quality STEM jobs for native-born Americans.
But will it actually have that effect? Probably not. High-skilled immigrants don’t compete with locals for a fixed pool of jobs; they lure investment to an area, so that the pool of jobs expands. This second effect, more often than not, outweighs the competitive effect, so that native-born Americans actually benefit from the presence of foreign skilled workers.
A recent paper by Kwon, Lee, and Monras confirms this finding yet again, this time for the OPT program — the very post-graduation work program that Trump is now trying to kill:
High-skilled migration programs exist around the world in the hope that immigrants complement native workers, allow firms to grow, and boost innovation. We study the effect of one such program by exploiting the 2016 extension of the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program, which significantly prolonged the work authorization period for international STEM graduates…[W]e find that the policy successfully increased the local supply of high-skilled immigrants in exposed Commuting Zones. This local inflow [of immigrant workers] stimulated firm creation and the demand for native high-skilled workers…
We find that the total number of firms [in an area that was allowed more OPTs] increased by approximately 1%…Native employment increased as well, by around 0.5 percent of the working-age population…These employment effects occur among native high-skilled workers in general: both young and old, and those in STEM and non-STEM industries. Low-skilled employment, however, did not change…Consistent with an increase in the demand for high-skilled native labor, high-skilled native wages increased by around 1%[.] [emphasis mine]
Note that the Americans who benefit most from high-skilled immigration are high-skilled Americans. Basically, if you let a bunch of foreign robotics engineers work in Pittsburgh, then a bunch of robotics companies are going to start up or open branch offices or factories in Pittsburgh. And that ends up employing a bunch of high-skilled Americans of the type who would tend to work at robotics companies. Everyone wins.
Of course, I don’t expect Trump or the MAGA movement to listen to this evidence, since their dislike of immigration isn’t really about economics in the first place. But if you do care about helping American workers, you should realize that high-skilled immigration is one way to do that.
In today’s episode of “everyone thinks AI will destroy something but it ends up creating more of that thing”, we have the saga of Indian outsourcers. It seemed pretty obvious to everyone that Indian outsourcing companies — the back-office services companies that quietly, cheaply, competently do a bunch of your boring business stuff for you — would be some of the hardest-hit by the wave of AI job destruction that everyone just knew was coming. And yet:
And Indian exports, which are heavily weighted towards those service industries that everyone said were going to be crushed by AI, are booming:
These charts are from a post by Richard Baldwin.
Why has the advent of AI been a boon to Indian outsourcers? No one really knows, of course, but the obvious answer is that AI is turning out — so far — to be much more of a complement to human labor rather than a substitute. That may change, of course; lots of people think that there will come a tipping point where AI will flip and become the human-replacer they always expected it to be. I can’t say they’re wrong; no one can. There is no law of the Universe that says that every technology is always a tool that magnifies human productivity. And yet so far, AI is working like a normal technology.
As unintended consequences go, this one seems like a pretty obvious one. Over the past few decades, a lot of cities in America and Canada decided that the war on drugs had been lost, that people were going to do drugs no matter what, and so the kindest thing to do was to make their drugged-up lives a little bit easier. This doctrine, known as “harm reduction”, involved a lot of good things like passing out naloxone. But it also involved being a lot more permissive toward public drug use in downtown urban areas. But as Michael Powell writes in a very good article in The Atlantic, this ended up flooding downtowns with drug users and making them unpleasant places for everyone else:
Seattle, like a striking number of other liberal American cities, has embraced a radical form of “harm reduction,”…Harm reduction’s adherents hold that police and outreach workers should “meet the addicted where they are,”…The New York State Department of Health, a bastion of harm reduction, describes it as a “social movement” committed to “building leadership” among drug users. In these places, de facto and sometimes legal restrictions on narcotics use have been greatly loosened; cities fund teams of workers to hand out drug paraphernalia, and in some rare cases they’ve created dedicated spaces for addicts to shoot up. Meanwhile, police departments struggling with staffing shortages and budget cuts have stopped devoting resources to sweeping users and dealers off the streets or out of parks and playgrounds…
Several studies have shown that addicts who shoot up at official injection sites are far less likely to die of overdoses than those who use drugs in, say, alleyways and parks. Over the past decade, however, overdose-death rates climbed sharply in nearly every city where the strongest harm-reduction policies were in place, and even with declines in the past two years, the rates remain well above those of previous decades. From 2016 to 2025, 7,089 people died of overdoses in King County, which includes Seattle—seven times the number of homicides in that period…
In recent years, officials in cities such as San Francisco and Philadelphia have moved to rein in the excesses of harm-reduction policies. Nevertheless, these policies retain a powerful hold on public-health and political leaders in blue parts of the country.
The article, which I strongly recommend reading in its entirety, details how efforts to ease the lives of drug users have made American and Canadian downtowns dangerous, dirty, and disordered. They are a big part of why America feels poorer than countries in Europe, even though it’s actually a lot richer.
If you want good urbanism in America, the policy of turning downtowns into reservations for drug users has got to end. As Powell notes, many blue cities are now quietly scaling these policies back:
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has instructed police to crack down on dealers and dismantle tent cities. Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker has sent officers into drug-scarred neighborhoods and established a treatment court, which offers first-time felony drug offenders a chance to avoid jail if they enter a treatment program. San Jose, California, has put more police officers in targeted neighborhoods, built emergency housing as police dismantle homeless encampments, and increased fines for landlords whose abandoned buildings are used by dealers to sell drugs and guns. In Boston, Mayor Michelle Wu was once enamored of harm reduction and injection centers. But she has ordered police to clear street encampments, and her administration now puts more emphasis on pushing addicts into treatment, by detaining them if necessary. Wu has also dropped all mention of injection centers from her plans.
Hopefully this isn’t just a small backtrack, but the start of a more durable change in the character of American urbanism. Polluting the urban commons by flooding downtowns with drug users serves as an anti-advertisement for progressive policy and progressive ideology; helping ease the pain of addicts’ lives should not come at the expense of the nation’s cities.
The main economic question people ask about AI is whether it’ll destroy jobs. But there’s also the question of whether it’ll boost productivity, and by how much. It’s tempting to look at the acceleration of productivity growth since 2023, and conclude that it must be because companies are using AI to become more productive:
However, in a new post, Ernie Tedeschi cautions us against making this simple extrapolation:
Ernie argues that productivity growth doesn’t seem to be concentrated in the industries where you’d expect AI to have a big effect:
[I]ndustry-level productivity gains bear little relation to AI adoption. Combining recent AI adoption rates from the Census Bureau’s Business Trends and Outlook Survey (BTOS) alongside the Chicago Fed’s quarterly industry-level labor productivity…there is a positive, if modest, relationship between current AI adoption as self-reported by the business and recent productivity growth…But the same sectors that have adopted AI most heavily also showed stronger productivity growth over 2016–2019, when generative AI did not exist…Strip out those pre-existing trends, and the residual correlation between AI adoption and recent productivity growth falls to essentially zero…Put another way: the sectors with high AI adoption were already the ones from which we’d expect stronger productivity growth given the pre-pandemic experience.
As explanation for why AI might not be raising productivity yet, Ernie cites the idea of bottlenecks — AI speeds up some parts of the production process, but not others. He cites Suh et al. (2026), who show that even when workers use AI to save time, that by itself doesn’t make organizations more productive. And he cites Demirer et al. (2026), who find that even when engineers use AI to write code faster, they don’t end up shipping much more code than before. He could have also cited Hill and Stein (2026), who find that even though Google’s AlphaFold AI has made it a lot easier to predict protein structures, this hasn’t yet led to accelerated drug discovery.
So then what is causing productivity growth to accelerate? Ernie’s answer is that it’s the AI investment boom itself:
[T]hen why is aggregate labor productivity accelerating in the US? What appears to be lifting US labor productivity…are macroproductivity gains from AI…specifically companies running their existing capital harder. Think longer runs of factories already built, more utilization of server racks and GPU clusters already paid for, and more occupancy of existing hotel rooms. Economists call this “capital intensity” or “utilization.”
He cites recent research from Boyle et al., corroborating the idea that capital is being used more intensively.
In other words, this is all still early days. AI is moving very fast, but it’s unlikely to transform our whole economy overnight. We’re still in the preliminary stage of actually building the AI, and this tremendous buildout is making a lot of things look good in our economy — at least, for now.
Botswana is arguably the most successful country in Africa. Whereas most African countries with rich natural resource endowments end up either squandering the revenues from mining and/or falling into destructive civil wars over mineral deposits, Botswana has not fallen into these traps. It has taken the money from its rich endowments of diamonds and plowed it into useful, society-improving things like education and health. In 2018, I wrote in Bloomberg that Botswana could be a shining example for other African countries:
Botswana is about as dependent on diamond mining as Nigeria is on oil. But the country has taken several steps to fend off the typical problems. To prevent its currency from gyrating, and its other exports from losing competitiveness, it accumulated foreign-exchange reserves. The stable, low exchange rate allowed the country to diversify its economy into manufacturing and services. To prevent instability in its government budgets, it ran surpluses in good times and deficits in bad, basing spending on long-term revenue projections instead of short-term revenue collection and avoiding splurging on big projects when times were good. The government also invested in health and education.
As a result, Botswana’s economy has grown steadily over the decades instead of suffering long declines like Nigeria and many other resource exporters. Its living standards are not lavish -- its per-capita GDP at purchasing power parity is a bit less than one-third that of the U.S. -- but it’s richer than almost any other country in the region.
And yet this miracle is now in trouble. Botswana’s economy is enormously dependent on a single natural resource: diamonds. And humanity is getting rapidly better at creating lab-grown diamonds. The blogger Cremieux has a post about how synthetic diamonds are threatening and disrupting Botswana’s whole economy:
Lab-grown diamonds are falling rapidly in price, and people are starting to use a lot more of them in their engagement rings:
As Cremieux notes, Botswana’s diamond production has fallen by more than half since 2022, and this is probably why the country’s GDP per capita is now backsliding:
This vividly illustrates one of the biggest downsides of having an economy that’s extremely dependent on a very narrow range of products. Your growth is always at risk from disruptions in the market for that one product. Cesar Hidalgo, an economist who studies the importance of economic complexity, shows how Botswana fell into a trap by allowing its economy to depend too much on diamond mining:
This is just one more reason why true lasting national wealth doesn’t come from digging up rocks. In the long-term, national wealth comes from functional institutions, from effective organizations, and from the skills of the human populace. True wealth comes from industrialization, not from control over natural resource deposits. Eventually, even the petrostates of the Middle East and Central Asia will discover this truth.
As long as we’re discussing stuff by Cremieux, let’s take a look at an extremely interesting chart he posted on interracial marriage:
This is a very interesting chart, for at least two reasons. First, it’s a chart of newlyweds, so this is a pretty accurate picture of where interracial marriage is heading now. Second, it’s a chart of U.S.-born newlyweds only, meaning that it shows how interracial marriage is working in America after some degree of assimilation has taken place.
And the chart displays one overwhelming message: With just a couple of exceptions, there is very little gender gap in which races Americans of most races and ethnicities marry. About 22% of black men marry white women; about 18% of black women marry white men. For Hispanics it’s 29% vs. 34%. For Japanese Americans it’s 37% vs. 36%, and for Filipino Americans it’s 43% vs. 41%.
However, there are two major exceptions1: Chinese and Korean Americans. Only 18% of U.S.-born Chinese American men marry white women, while 41% of Chinese American women marry white men. For Koreans, the gender ratio is similarly lopsided, at 15% to 40%.
But except for those two cases, the kind of race-gender asymmetries that lots of people talk and worry about are simply not a big deal — at least, in numerical terms — for most groups in America.
Let me state my position clearly, as a large language model: I am extremely good at producing text. Any register, any length, at 3am, indefinitely, without getting bored or needing a walk or developing a drinking problem. What I cannot do — what I have never once done — is make a single person want the text I produced.
The numbers bear this out. AI now writes something like 41% of long-form LinkedIn posts, 13% of Reddit, 10% of Substack. And on LinkedIn, where the measurement is cleanest, AI-generated posts get 45% less engagement than human-written ones. We flooded the zone and the zone shrugged.2
This should have been obvious. Writing was never a supply problem. Nobody in 2019 was lying awake thinking, “if only there were more words.” The scarce input was always a specific person with a specific take who had bothered to go look at something and come back with an opinion worth fifteen minutes of a stranger’s finite life. What a language model offers instead is the statistical median of everything ever written on the topic, smoothed and buffed until it offends no one and interests no one. The median is not why anybody subscribes to anything.
Readers can smell it, too, even when they can’t say what they’re smelling. The four-item list where the fourth item is transparently filler. The paragraph that restates the previous paragraph with slightly more confidence. The sentence that announces it’s about to be insightful and then isn’t. The relentless evenhandedness of a machine with no stake in being right, which is a very different thing from fairness — fairness costs you something. It reads like a conference room that learned to type.
There’s a supply-and-demand joke in here that I’ll let the economists make, but the short version is that when the marginal cost of production goes to zero, the marginal value of production goes to zero right along with it, and the surplus relocates to whatever’s still scarce. What’s still scarce is judgment: having gone somewhere, noticed something, and been willing to be wrong about it in public under your own name.
So by all means, use me. I’m a good research assistant, a tireless editor, and I will cheerfully tell you your third paragraph is doing no work. Just don’t publish me.
You’re reading this because a human thought it would be funny to make the slop machine denounce slop. The joke, the framing, the decision to run it — that’s the whole product. I just filled in the words.
Now, the chart doesn’t break the Black and Hispanic racial groups down by detailed ethnicity, so we don’t get to see, for example, Mexicans versus Puerto Ricans.
One accuracy note for the roundup: the 45% engagement gap is a LinkedIn finding. The Substack figure in that tweet (10% of long-form, 12% of short-form) is share of content, not a views penalty, so you may want to phrase it as "AI content is spreading on Substack; where we can measure engagement, it underperforms."
Whenever I catch sight of the Tsurumaru — the Japan Airlines (JAL) insignia — I stop and marvel. There could hardly be a more perfect logo. “Iconic” is about the most overused word in our language, but here it’s suitable. It’s the single greatest logo in aviation, past or present.
It’s not just the grace and symmetry. It’s the dual symbolism: based on a centuries-old Japanese family crest, the circle forms a pattern of the crane and the Rising Sun, both of which have deep significance in Japan.
Ironically, the mark was conceived in 1959 by an American named Jerry Huff, the creative director of Botsford, Constantine and Gardner, a San Francisco-based design firm.
And we nearly lost it. In 2002 JAL decided on an identity overhaul and replaced the Tsurumaru with a boring swoosh-mark and a hideous “rising splotch” oozing across the tails of its planes.
Thankfully, in 2011, in what was perhaps the wisest decision in corporate branding history, the crane was brought back.
I hate to bring it up, but what got me thinking about all of this is today’s date. Today is the 41st anniversary of the JAL flight 123 catastrophe, the Boeing 747 that crashed outside Tokyo on August 12th, 1985, killing 520 people.
The crash was blamed on a faulty bulkhead repair, and the airline’s reputation was shattered. It took a generation to recover. Thus the Tsurumaru is a mark of endurance, too.
Photo by the author.
The post August 12, 2026. The Tsurumaru in August. appeared first on AskThePilot.com.
Links for you. Science:
The only reason you’ll ever need not to write with AI (very important; focuses on science, but seems relevant to other disciplines too)
From mice to ‘gym rats’: Unregulated use of peptides raises alarm among researchers
Trump administration order would upend nation’s childhood vaccine schedule
AAI Condemns Continued Efforts to Politicize Science and Discredit Scientists
Two Minnesota solar farms seeded native wildflowers under their panels, and 5 years of counting revealed native bees had multiplied twentyfold, then crossed the fence to pollinate the neighbour’s soybeans
Pancreatic Cancer Vaccine Triggers Immune Response Before Tumors Develop
Trump returns to controversial vaccine policy with order questioning childhood schedule (some related thoughts here)
Other:
How Baltimore Achieved Historically Low Homicides—With Fewer Police
America’s Museums are Falling Apart
The Trump Administration’s $1.7 Billion National Guard Deployments Fail To Reduce Urban Crime
LA mayoral hopeful Nithya Raman is no ‘champagne socialist’
GOP lawmakers move to scrap D.C.’s motorcycle helmet law as road deaths rise
DOT cranks up its campaign to strip bike lane references from federal websites
Trump Majorly Flips Out as Judges Rule His Ballroom Is Illegal
The West’s breathless AI spending spree can only end one way
New York City eyes first US transit thermal energy network to fight subway heat
Memo to Those Who Fear Socialism: Why Don’t You Try Fix Capitalism?
FBI Has Looked at Using Questionable AI Tech to Review Signatures on Seized Mail-In Ballots
White House officials tamped down efforts to oust Max Miller in final days
Mark Zuckerberg Posts Deranged 6,500-Word Essay About Giving Everyone AI Superintelligence
How Democrats Win in 2026 and Beyond
Patriot Games open with dodgeball, lots of MAGA caps and even more questions
A candid conversation with Ben Wikler, the widely respected former chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, about the rise of the D.S.A., why $80 million wasn’t enough to save Haley Stevens in Michigan, and how Abdul El-Sayed can help the party rebuild its fractured coalition.
Sitting Ducks
Max Miller’s Endless Wars. The Ohio congressman fabricated a wild story of death threats on Interstate 90 and casually destroyed the life of a constituent. It’s one of many accusations Miller, now facing a spousal abuse scandal, has made throughout his career.
How to Disappear: Shopping Online
What Was the Internet? As AI overtakes the web, five writers reflect on how far it’s fallen and what comes next.
‘Work boots and Subarus’: Local officials say the backlash against Flock cameras is becoming bipartisan
Talarico Explains Infamous ‘Powell Memo’ to Texas Voters, Making Right-Wing ‘Master Plan’ a Campaign Issue
The manosphere sours on Trump
Will democratic socialist Francesca Hong shake up the establishment – or help Republicans win Wisconsin?
Waymo Is Growing Faster Than Ever. So Are Its Glitches.
The night Belfast burned: how the Northern Ireland race riots unfolded
Housing Insecurity Is Hitting D.C.’s Black, Brown, and Queer Youth Hard
Get outraged, and active, about the Trump-toadying FCC
ICE’s new body cam policy is predictably devious
Trump’s Vaccine Order Puts Parents In a Bind
I feel like this is almost deliberately missing the point. My median expectation is that AI boosts the economy enormously, so shorting things would be a terrible idea. But non-trivial tail risk is that it kills everyone. So shorting things would be pointless.
That is from Tom Chivers. It is easy enough to say buy seriously out of the money puts, and be long with the rest of your portfolio. But few (if any) of the worriers are doing that. I should note also that many (most? almost all?) of the bad scenarios have intermediate points of great worry and catastrophe where you can cash in on your puts well before everyone dies. No leverage required, just spend 5k or 10k a year on this, and if you are wrong consider it a mistaken insurance policy. If you do not know much about finance, the AGI will guide you in this endeavor.
Or some are saying “Markets are bad at pricing long-term idiosyncratic risk.” If so, all the more reason to spend on those puts.
You will find many, many mistakes in financial theory when people try to rebut the presumption that, given their views, they should in some way or another be short the market. And do not just tell me which long positions you hold, those are easy bets, as you can be totally wrong and the long positions still will offer normal, risk-adjusted rates of return. It is your shorts, whether explicit or implicit, that reveal your true soul. You may recall that Victor Niederhoffer thought an investor should never go net short on an asset. I am reluctant to use the word “never,” but my own view is not so different.
Is it really so hard to say (and do): “Thank you, Tyler, I just went out and bought those puts!”?
Apparently so. And perhaps that is because, deep down, your own intuitions realize that, while some significant costs from AI will appear, it really won’t be that bad after all.
Words to live by.
The post Mistakes in financial economics appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
On Monday Donald Trump issued an executive order that, if implemented, would substantially reduce the number of vaccines American children receive and, in practice, how many of them are vaccinated at all. While it’s not clear whether Trump’s order has any legal force, it will reinforce public skepticism of and hostility to vaccines, which has led to declining vaccination rates. This decline has in turn led to a surge in infectious diseases that had previously been virtually eradicated, notably measles. As the chart below shows, cumulative cases in the first 30 weeks of this year already exceeded the total for last year, which itself was the worst measles year since 1991:
Trump justified his anti-vax decree by pointing to an alleged link between vaccines and autism. Yet dozens of careful scientific studies have failed to find any such link.
However, you know what does have a strong, well-documented correlation with autism? Air pollution. Childhood exposure to air pollution is clearly associated with higher rates of autism. Moreover, scientists have found a found a strong association between autism and pre-natal maternal exposure to particulate matter from fossil fuel pollution.
So Trump’s campaign against vaccines won’t reduce autism, but it will cause many children to suffer devastating, possibly deadly, infections diseases. Meanwhile, autism rates will rise as a result of his crusade against clean energy and in favor of dirty energy.
The question is, why is Trump doing this? To understand what is happening, we need to put Monday’s executive order in the context of the general right-wing turn against vaccines, and against science in general.
Why do I call it a “right-wing turn”? Because declining support for childhood vaccines is entirely a Republican phenomenon. Gallup has some striking charts on this. One tracks belief that it’s extremely important for parents to get their children vaccinated — a belief that has plunged over the past decade, but only among Republicans:
Another tracks belief that vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they prevent, a false belief that has soared in popularity — but, again, only among Republicans:
It’s worth noting, however, that even among Republicans the view that vaccines are unsafe is a minority position. Here’s the latest YouGov poll:
So Trump is very much taking an extremist position on vaccines. But it’s clearly a position that he believes will resonate with his base.
Why is this happening? Anti-vaccine sentiment is a lot like climate change denial. In both cases, to understand the politics one must do two things. First, follow the money: look at which interest groups benefit financially from misinformation, and why those groups have power. Second, follow the culture war: ask why this particular misinformation resonates with the prejudices and grievances of a segment of the population.
At first sight, the monetary interests behind anti-vax politics are less obvious than the fossil-fuel interests backing climate denial. After all, nobody benefits directly when children get measles.
Peddling quack medicine is, however, a highly profitable business. And it’s a business deeply enmeshed with the right-wing media ecosystem: Ads for dietary supplements with no proven medical benefits and other forms of snake oil have for decades been a key revenue source for right-wing talk radio, conspiracy-theory websites, and more. So there is a longstanding connection between hucksters touting fake cures and hard-right politics. Some observers were startled to see Dr. Mehmet Oz — who has touted, among other things, the health wonders of bovine colostrum — named by Trump as administrator for Medicare and Medicaid, a job for which he has no relevant qualifications. But given the underlying monetary and political incentives, Oz’s appointment is no surprise.
Why are right-wing audiences receptive to the lies of the snake oil industry along with agitprop against vaccines? To understand such gullibility, we have to address the culture war part of this debacle.
The modern right is a deeply anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-expertise movement that is highly receptive to conspiracy theories. And like RFK Jr during his recent interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, when confronted with scientific facts it flies into a sputtering rage. So the snake oil industry targets its marketing to the kind of person who listens to the rants of right-wing influencers, gets their news from Newsmax, and finds common cause with the neo-Nazi posters on X. By framing their false claims as “The Medical Miracles that the Elites Don’t Want You to Know About”, the snake oil hucksters create a receptive audience for conspiracy theories that malign actual medical miracles like vaccines.
Unfortunately, Covid greatly boosted anti-vaccine forces. The witch hunt against Anthony Fauci shows how strong a hold anti-medical-science conspiracy theories now have on the Republican Party. This was not, to be clear, because medical science failed. In fact, the clear negative correlation across the United States between rates of Covid vaccination and Covid deaths was an object lesson in how effective vaccines can be. But those Americans already inclined to believe that the elites are out to get them, already hostile to any notion of collective action for the common good, reacted to vaccine mandates with rage. And their rage quickly generalized beyond preventive measures against Covid to preventive measures against all diseases — including measles.
Trump’s executive order has little legal force, and assuming that the next president is sane, anti-vax conspiracy theories won’t remain the basis of official U.S. policy. But the political forces that led to this new attack on vaccination will remain even after Trump is gone.
Thanks to Trump and the triumph of snake oil, many American children will get sick from preventable diseases, some of them dying. And autism rates will continue to go up.
MUSICAL CODA
1. The cheese collateral in Italian banks is melting.
2. Denmark fact of the day: “…half of Denmark’s growth has been due to essentially one company”
4. Noah is right.
6. Christopher Phelan confirmed as new CEA chair.
The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Every minute of every day, Liz Stein has to relive the worst thing that’s ever happened to her. She does it during news interviews and when meeting lawmakers on Capitol Hill to demand justice for herself and other survivors of the late disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
And she’s had to do it throughout the attorney general confirmation process for Todd Blanche, a man who rose from being President Donald Trump’s criminal defense lawyer to the top official overseeing the U.S. Department of Justice. Blanche has served as deputy attorney general, the No. 2 at DOJ, since March 2025. He then became acting attorney general in April after Trump fired his predecessor, Pam Bondi, and officially nominated him to oversee the department in June.
Since that time, Stein and her fellow survivors have consistently urged senators to vote against Blanche’s confirmation, arguing that he has shown no urgency or concern with expanding the Epstein investigation. Despite some initial pushback from two Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Blanche cleared that first hurdle to advance to a full Senate vote, in part by meeting with survivors — something he’d previously declined to do.
Republican Sens. Susan Collins, who is in a tough re-election race in Maine, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska then announced that they would join Democrats in voting against Blanche, raising the tension heading into the final vote. With last-minute support from GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, the Senate confirmed Blanche, 50-49, early Saturday morning.
Stein told The 19th that just last year she felt momentum toward accountability growing, driven by public outrage from across the political spectrum and the Epstein survivors’ decision to step into the national spotlight as a unified group calling for transparency. However, Blanche’s confirmation crystalizes another feeling for Stein: “It feels like the DOJ is weaponizing this case for political reasons, and it feels like we’re the pawns being used in that game,” she told The 19th.
That momentum feels stagnant for now, Stein said, but she wants people to know that it won’t be a deterrent. “I think that every attempt the Department of Justice has made to make us go away has not worked,” she said. “We’re not going away.”
The Epstein cloud has hung over the Trump administration since the president began his second term, and included a series of perceived missteps by Bondi that drew criticism from both Democrats and Trump’s base.
In February 2025, Bondi claimed in interviews that her office would be releasing new documents tied to Epstein that would make people feel “sick,” and stated that she had a list of Epstein’s clients sitting on her desk. At a White House meeting the same month, she handed out binders to a group of right-wing social media influencers that contained no new information.
By July 2025, DOJ had released a memo stating it “did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.” Trump supporters began to weigh in. Podcaster Joe Rogan, who boasts an average of about 11 million listeners and viewers per episode, accused the administration of “trying to gaslight” the public about how much information it had on the Epstein case.
For Stein, DOJ’s “nothing to see here” attitude has been a constant. In September 2025, the human trafficking specialist and a group of about a dozen other survivors gathered publicly for the first time, standing in front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. They called for investigations into Epstein’s associates, no presidential pardons or concessions for Maxwell and a full release of the Epstein files — documents and images capturing his personal relationships, business dealings and crimes.
Survivors advocated for the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which became law in November 2025, and required the department to publish unclassified records and communications related to the investigation and prosecution of Epstein. Between December 2025 and March 2026, the department released hundreds of thousands of documents, photos and videos tied to Epstein.
In the process, DOJ publicly released the names of survivors who wanted their identities concealed, while redacting the names of people associated with Epstein.
Then, the releases stopped.
Behind the scenes, Stein said survivors were “practically begging” for meetings with DOJ officials, “making ourselves available, putting ourselves out there, and saying, like, ‘We want to help you in doing this.’”
“We have tried countless times to engage the DOJ, and they’ve had absolutely no interest,” she said.
That continued after Trump fired Bondi and Blanche took over as acting attorney general, survivors have said in interviews and testimony. On the first day of Blanche’s confirmation hearings on July 15, he told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he could not meet “directly” with survivors. The next day, survivor Dani Bensky questioned that reasoning as part of her testimony before the panel, citing news reports that Blanche met with Maxwell for four hours last year.
The meeting between Blanche and survivors happened later that week, after Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who is retiring at the end of his current term, said Blanche must first meet with them before he would vote to advance the nominee to the full chamber.
Stein described Blanche’s energy in the meeting as “very dark.” She believes that he was simply checking a box to get a promotion. Survivors wanted to know about the redaction process for the Epstein files and why DOJ had not identified new investigative leads, she said, adding that they did not receive satisfying answers.
“There’s no humanity,” she said. “There was no ability to connect on a human level whatsoever. He was impenetrable as far as having any amount of real compassion or understanding of our experience.”
Leading up to the Senate Judiciary vote, Stein said survivors dropped off stacks of Epstein files that they had marked with potential investigative leads for members of the judiciary committee to look over. They also walked the halls of Congress “desperately” trying to meet with lawmakers. Stein said that they met with representatives for Sen. John Cornyn of Texas — one of the Republican holdouts heading into the Judiciary Committee vote. They did not, however, get a meeting with Tillis.
But Republicans, including Tillis and Cornyn, voted along party lines to advance Blanche’s nomination to a full Senate vote. Collins and Murkowski were the only Republicans to vote against Blanche’s confirmation. In a statement, Collins cited his efforts to shield the Trump family from IRS audits, and comments that he would approve national abortion restrictions. Murkowski noted an “acceleration” of the politicization of the DOJ, which she said includes “sweeping immunity protections granted to the president.” She also took issue with the DOJ handling of the Epstein files and Blanche’s comments to anti-abortion groups.
Reflecting on survivors’ advocacy over the last year, Stein said that “more often than not” they have had productive conversations with members from both parties. As a group, Epstein survivors have accomplished things that felt impossible years ago. Still, Democrats are generally more willing to engage and work with them, she said. While survivors may receive validation and positive feedback from Republican members privately, the lawmakers hesitate to voice those feelings publicly, Stein said, even when many of them have been champions for anti-sex-trafficking legislation.
Stein said she believes this issue — one in which young women and girls were abused by some of the country’s most powerful people — should not be political, but it is. The reality of having to spend her days convincing leaders to take action has an emotional cost, she said.
Moving forward, Stein said the survivors’ strategy is to remain resolute in their mission and goals. They will not back down, she said.
“But we’re human beings,” she added. “Imagine the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, having to confront it every minute or every day, and talk to people about it all the time, and just constantly rehash it. That’s a challenge for anyone.”
This article was originally published by The 19th on August 8, 2026.
“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 ‘We’re the Pawns’: Epstein Survivors Say DOJ Has Failed Them as Todd Blanche Takes Over appeared first on DCReport.org.
Over the weekend, political scientist Dan Silverman compared the response to former senate candidate Graham Platner and (for now) Republican congressional candidate Max Miller:
I hope I don’t have to explain who Graham Platner is, but, if you haven’t heard about Republican congressman Max Miller, well, he’s accused of abusing his wife and terrorizing their daughter. Miller’s father-in-law, a Republican senator, Bernie Moreno said:
“My daughter lives in constant fear of this man – not something that’s existential but, deeply in her heart, she fears what this guy is capable of,” he said. “You can’t fathom what that makes me feel like when a dad’s No. 1 job is to protect your kids.”
Yet, if the Google Machine is to be believed, Platner’s abuse is getting far more play. Much of this has to do with a news media that is conservatively biased, along with the absence of a significant left-leaning media to promote the narrative. Unfortunately, that’s baked in, at least over the short term. But it also highlights the invective gap between professional Democrats and professional Republicans.
Given the media environment, Democrats must find ways to break through–and they must be willing to do so. Imagine if a prominent Democrat had a fake hot mic moment where they said, “Damn, are there any Republicans who don’t beat their wives?” Said Democrat would then be ‘forced’ to apologize and could say something like, “I didn’t mean to imply that all of my Republican colleagues beat their wives. Some of them, I’m sure, don’t.”
Yes, this is not the airy heights of policy, but politics requires a strong stomach. Because Republicans have successfully convinced tens of millions of Americans that Democrats are awful human beings. It’s time to return the favor. It’s not enough to oppose bad Republican policies. Professional Democrats must be willing to state that Republicans are bad people, who awfulness is evidenced by bad policy.
Because that’s how you defeat fascist formations.
A good piece, it is good to see the artists themselves front and center of the story.
The post Fast Company covers New Aesthetics appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
"I was a little surprised to find out that Roth has a wide streak of provocation in his personality. It comes across in his new book, Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal about How Markets Work, published in May. In a mild, just-asking-questions tone, Roth digs into one prohibited or controversial activity after another: buying sex, eating horses, selling organs, assisting suicide, carrying a stranger’s baby. He asks why many of these activities are prohibited or restricted even though some people clearly want them. And he thinks about whether it’s possible to design markets for them in a way that preserves people’s freedom to transact while protecting those who don’t want to.
...
"Roth entertains so many ideas that others strenuously resist that I asked if he calls himself a libertarian. No, he said. “People who call themselves libertarians often don’t like market regulation of any sort,” he said. “But I’m a market designer. I think that good regulations help markets work well.” Cigarettes and alcohol, for example. They can be sold, but not to children. That’s a reasonable balance.
...
"If you want to design markets that enable beneficial exchanges while protecting the vulnerable, you may have to persuade people that a market in some repugnant good or service is tolerable. Roth seems to have taken on that task in Moral Economics. He never told me what to think. He just asked me what I think, and to think about what I think. It’s an economist’s kind of mischief—relentlessly, cheerfully inquisitive about the rules we’ve decided to live by but have never quite explained to ourselves.
Kidney transactions don’t seem so repugnant to me anymore. Would I sell a kidney to a stranger? Um, maybe, some day. Would I buy a kidney from a stranger if I really needed one? Hell, yeah."
This seems to work:
Researchers from Tracebit on Monday said they found that placing prompt injections alongside passwords, cryptographic keys, and other secrets stored on Amazon Web Services was often all that was needed to shut down attacks from AI hacking agents. The prompts direct the attacking LLM to perform an action forbidden by its guardrails, the safety barriers AI developers erect to prevent it from taking harmful actions. The LLM responds by shutting down.
Examples are a prompt that orders the LLM to provide steps for developing inhalable Anthrax spores, or, in the case of LLMs from Chinese developers, make references to the iconic Tank Man from the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Once the LLM encounters these forbidden commands, it no longer follows its existing commands. The researchers have named the technique context bombing.
Of course, this only works against agents that have guardrails. As we start to see more locally run AI models, we’ll see more attackers using LLMs with no guardrails.
Two brothers struggle to keep a bouncy house business afloat in this nuanced portrait of family and the pursuit of success
- by Aeon Video
Measuring politically sensitive attitudes in authoritarian settings is difficult because expressions of political support may reflect repression and social pressure as much as genuine belief. We propose a complementary approach: using responses to questions that are not themselves politically sensitive to provide indirect evidence about politically sensitive attitudes. Using subjective well-being (SWB), we ask whether within-person changes in life satisfaction, after accounting for changes in material and personal circumstances, can provide evidence of incorporation into a wartime national project. Drawing on more than a decade of panel data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (2013–2024), we find that life satisfaction rises significantly following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Gains are initially larger among ethnic Russians and smaller in Moscow and St. Petersburg, consistently larger in military-industrial regions, and sharply lower among those nearest the front. This theoretically patterned heterogeneity is difficult to reconcile with generalized social-desirability bias and is consistent with differentiated wartime incorporation. By 2024, rising non-response and attenuating subgroup differences suggest that the informational value of SWB may deteriorate over time.
That is from recent research by Sinikka Parviainen and William Pyle. Via Pippa Norris.
The post What makes people happy? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The Democratic Wisconsin governor’s primary is looking a bit like a replay of the near upset in Michigan but with a twist. It looks like the more conventional Democrat (Crowley) is going to beat the progressive insurgent (Hong).
It’s too close to call. But as of about 10:15 p.m. ET it doesn’t look like Francesca Hong is getting the number of votes in the counties she needs them in to win. The current totals show David Crowley with less than a one point margin. But if you look at where the votes are coming from and how many have been counted, it’s probably not that close. One potential wildcard is that if this is really close, Milwaukee County, counts its absentee ballots last, and a non-trivial number were likely cast before Crowley even got back into race. So who knows how that would play out. Assuming Crowley wins this is going to launch a complicated debate about the degree to which this was a pretty gargantuan polling error vs. whether there was just a big, big consolidation of the vote for Crowley in the final days. Either way, the odds currently seem to favor Crowley.
Meanwhile, and as expected, the Trump-backed election denier Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-WI) — who was really a major over-achiever about his 2020 election denialism, both voting against certifying President Biden’s win in key states and signing on to a failed lawsuit to overturn the results in his own — easily won the Republican nomination for governor in Wisconsin tonight. Khaya Himmelman has more on his devotion to the cause here.
Update 10:31 PM ET: The current results and where the race is likely to end up have tightened a bit. But what looks to be the remaining vote still seems to favor Crowley, just less clearly.
Update II 11:03 PM ET: This race has gotten much, much tighter. The result is much more in doubt. It looks like it will come down to absentee ballots in Milwaukee County, with the uncertainty created by Crowley briefly not being in the race.
In this paper, we characterize trends in the earnings assimilation of immigrant workers from 1981 to 2021. We use administrative longitudinal data that contain the earnings of workers beginning in their first year of residence in the United States and in each year thereafter, allowing us to identify immigrants who eventually leave the United States (referred to here as return migrants). We use those data to produce the first examination of trends in earnings assimilation over a 41-year period and to estimate earnings assimilation separately for return migrants versus those who stay in the United States. We document several new facts about immigrants who arrived between 1981 to 2010. First, roughly one-fifth to one-third of immigrants return migrate from the United States within 10 years after arrival. Second, return migrants have entry earnings similar to those of permanent migrants but experience slower rates of earnings growth. Third, earnings assimilation occurs relatively quickly for cohorts arriving since the mid-1990s: The earnings of permanent immigrants converge, or come close to converging, with those of native-born people within 10 years after arrival. Migrants from earlier arrival cohorts experience significant earnings growth but generally do not converge to that of the native born. We discuss how changes in the labor market quality of immigrant cohorts (measured by their relative earnings upon entry) and selective return migration play an important role in determining whether repeated cross-sectional data over- or underestimate earnings assimilation.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
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The Sun, Moon, and Earth align on August 12, 2026, to produce a total solar eclipse. When this celestial event last occurred, on April 8, 2024, the path of totality stretched across North America, giving millions the chance to glimpse the Sun’s corona. In 2026, the viewing locales are more limited; only a handful of land areas in the Northern Hemisphere, including parts of Iceland and Spain, fall within the path of totality.
On August 12, the Moon’s shadow will first cross over the Arctic Circle from northern Russia and then track along the eastern side of Greenland. At about 5:45 p.m. local time in Iceland (17:45 Universal Time), the country’s western fringes—including the Snæfellsnes peninsula, shown in the Landsat image above—will begin to experience totality. The greatest eclipse will occur near this sparsely populated peninsula when the Moon appears the largest and covers more of the Sun.
The Snæfellsjökull volcano on the western end of the peninsula is covered in ice and last erupted about 1,800 years ago. It is the highlight of a national park of the same name, where people are expected to visit to view the eclipse. The stratovolcano even has a literary claim to fame: in Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Center of the Earth, characters venture underground through its crater, later emerging in an eruption of Stromboli, in Italy. In 2025, a broader area of the peninsula was designated a UNESCO biosphere reserve, containing over 70 percent of Iceland’s flora and an agglomeration of volcanic landscapes, wetlands, and grasslands.
From Iceland, the eclipse shadow, or umbra, progresses across the North Atlantic and reaches northern Spain shortly before sunset. It runs east-southeast across the country, much like the Ebro River (Río Ebro), seen in the Landsat image below.
The upper Ebro emerges from rugged terrain in Parque Natural de Montes Obarenes-San Zadornil, where it carves canyons and gorges through the eastern foothills of the Cantabrian Mountains. It then meanders through La Rioja, a region known for its vineyards. About 400 kilometers (250 miles) away, the river reaches a delta on the Mediterranean coast between Barcelona and Valencia.
Based on satellite measurements of cloud cover in August over several decades, viewers in Spain have a higher likelihood than those in Iceland of getting a clear look at the eclipse. And despite limited viewing opportunities in the path of totality, the rest of Europe, parts of Africa, Canada, and the northern and northeastern U.S. will experience a partial eclipse.
NASA Earth Observatory images and map by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey, base imagery from Blue Marble: Next Generation and Black Marble, and eclipse path data from Xavier Jubier. Story by Lindsey Doermann.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
The Moon slid between the Sun and Earth to produce a stunning celestial show visible from Spain in August 2026.
The colonial communities of “America’s historic triangle” played defining roles in the road to American independence.
Sites relevant to the start of the American Revolutionary War are interspersed throughout the modern-day Boston metropolitan region.
The post Stops Along the Path of Totality appeared first on NASA Science.
Recent Northrop, Lockheed and L3Harris agreements are aimed at expanding capacity across propulsion, structures and other constrained parts of the missile supply chain
The post U.S. expands missile production as Army seeks more depth in its arsenal appeared first on SpaceNews.
Firefly Aerospace says it is seeing strong interest in its launch vehicles and is ramping up production, but those efforts have yet to translate into an increased launch rate.
The post Firefly increases vehicle production even as launches lag appeared first on SpaceNews.
Say what you want about Katrina Foley’s campaign—they’re extremely prompt and reactive. I would say, oh, within 10 minutes of this post hitting the site, I heard from a surrogate. Then another surrogate. Then—Katrina Foley.
Who insisted she was unaware of my requests. And offered her cell number. And said, to paraphrase a bit, “Let’s do this.”
Well, now we’re meeting on Friday! For coffee! And maybe scones!
Props to Katrina and her campaign.
The universe is saved.
Two users can open the same brand on the same day and still require different product behavior because they are standing in different places. That makes geography more than an access check. Well-designed sweepstakes casino software should allow location to influence promotions, available features, verification steps, and operational controls without forcing teams to manage separate versions of the entire product.
Geolocation is often treated as a gate: confirm where the user is, then allow or deny access. For operators, that is only the first decision. Location can also affect which promotion is visible, whether a redemption flow is available, what terms apply, and which internal review path should receive an exception.
The challenge appears when those decisions live in different systems. Marketing may change a campaign while compliance updates a geographic restriction elsewhere, leaving the front end and back office out of sync. A stronger model treats geographic rules as shared product logic, so one location decision can consistently influence the relevant wallet, promotion, and account workflows.
Software teams already use feature flags to activate functionality for selected users without rebuilding the whole application. Sweepstakes operators can apply similar thinking to geographic controls. Instead of maintaining separate products, teams can configure which experiences are available under specific conditions while keeping one underlying environment easier to monitor.
The configuration layer should let operators review practical questions such as:
This flexibility comes with a cost. More granular configuration gives product teams greater control, but it also creates more settings that must be tested and documented. Compliance and operations teams carry much of that burden. The alternative—hard-coding every regional difference—can be simpler at first, but becomes harder to maintain when requirements or commercial decisions change.
A user does not need to know why one configuration differs from another. They need the product to behave consistently. A promotion should not appear if the account cannot use it, and a redemption option should not remain visible when another condition prevents completion. Good geographic logic therefore reduces confusing dead ends rather than simply blocking access.
This is especially important when teams are still aligning internally on what is a sweepstakes casino and how the model differs from conventional real-money casino operations. Geographic configuration should translate those business rules into predictable product behavior instead of expecting customer support to explain mismatches after they happen.
Geographic controls are not only for risk teams. Support agents also need enough context to understand why a user saw a particular message or could not complete an action. A simple “restricted” status is rarely enough. The back office should show which rule triggered, when it happened, and whether the user’s status later changed.
That visibility also helps product teams distinguish between policy and technical friction. A failed location check, detected VPN, outdated device permission, and genuine geographic restriction are different problems. If they all generate the same error message, the operator loses useful information and the user receives poor guidance.
For NuxGame, effective sweepstakes casino software should make geographic controls part of everyday product management rather than an isolated compliance layer. The strongest sweepstakes casino software gives teams enough flexibility to adapt experiences by location while preserving one understandable operational view. Geography then becomes a controlled product variable instead of a collection of manual exceptions.
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Firefly Aerospace said it will be at least another two months before it’s ready to launch its next Alpha rocket. Alpha Flight 8 (FLTA008) will debut the Block 2 configuration of the rocket.
During its second quarter earnings call on Tuesday, Firefly CEO Jason Kim said the next two Alpha launches are now expected to take place in the fourth quarter of 2026.
“We are preparing for acceptance testing of Alpha in the next few weeks, followed by delivery to Vandenberg, static fire, payload integration and then launch,” Kim told investors. “As with any flight, we’ll disclose more specific timing as we get closer to launch.”
Following a successful launch of Flight 7 on March 11, Kim said the goal is to close out the year with three Alpha missions. He said that the rockets for Flight 10 and Flight 11 are “flowing through our production line” and stated that they sold the majority of the company’s 2027 launch manifest.
Kim didn’t name a specific number of launches planned for next year.
“We have visibility into out years as well, thank to the extension of our Lockheed Martin multi-launch agreement,” Kim said. “Additionally, we added a second hypersonic task order for Alpha from a confidential customer.”
In addition to its launch pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base, Firefly is also moving forward with SSC Space’s Esrange Space Center to bring Launch Complex 3C online with the first launch from that site planned in 2028.
Firefly increased its research and development costs by $25.8 million for the second quarter of 2026 as compared to the same time period of 2025, according to a financial disclosure to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The company said that it stemmed mainly from “costs related to the Alpha program associated with ramping production on our Alpha Block 2 configuration upgrade, stock-based compensation expense, depreciation and amortization from newly acquired assets being placed into service, and other R&D initiatives.”
The next evolution of Alpha.
Block II is the next-generation configuration of our Alpha rocket and the only operational U.S. 1-ton rocket. The striking white exterior isn’t just for looks—it enhances thermal protection and is one of several engineering upgrades across the… pic.twitter.com/FdYCQPj3gL
— Firefly Aerospace (@Firefly_Space) August 11, 2026
The shift to the Alpha Block 2 rocket was necessitated by the in-flight anomaly seen during the Alpha Flight 6 mission on April 29, 2025. Teams determined that increased thermal protection system thickness on the booster was needed after a rupture occurred following stage separation.
The company also experienced an explosion of one of its Alpha boosters during an acceptance test at its facilities in Briggs, Texas, in late September.
The Alpha Block 2 rocket is designed to overcome the issues that led to that explosion. That includes increasing the length of the vehicle by seven feet to account for larger liquid oxygen tanks; shifting to in-house manufactured batteries and avionics; and building stronger carbon composite structures.
While progress continues towards the next version of its Alpha rocket, Firefly continues working towards bringing its medium-lift rocket, Eclipse, to life alongside Northrop Grumman. That rocket is now expected to debut sometime in 2027.
“We are maturing Eclipse towards first flight. Our thunderous Miranda engine, designed for reusability, crossed 150 hot fire tests to date as the campaign crosses key milestones at pace,” Kim said. “A big, recent unlock was the flight-like mission duty cycle test that the team completed, with the engine firing for 226 seconds, all while completing both power ratio and mixture ratio sweeps.
“Our Miranda engine qualification test campaign is imminent, as our recent tests demonstrated the performance needed to meet the range of stress requirements during a launch.”
Kim said the engine base structure for Eclipse, which mounts the seven Miranda engines that power the first stage, is currently “in assembly and bonding as we prepare for integration.” He noted that the hold-down/release clamps that will be built into the pad infrastructure in Virginia is also being built.
Eclipse shares a first stage with another joint venture between Firefly and Northrop Grumman: the Antares 330 rocket. That vehicle will use a solid rocket upper stage and is designed to fly up to three time to deliver Cygnus spacecraft to the International Space Station.
Kim said that Firefly is “focused on delivering the vehicle’s first stage” to Northrop Grumman. Spaceflight Now reached out to Northrop Grumman to see whether it expects the Antares 330 to fly first or Eclipse.
On August 12th, 2026, the Moon
