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Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at NIMBYism and aesthetics, defibrillator drones, railway track detonators, a proposed mach-23 space gun, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.
A common opinion I hear about opposition to new housing construction is that this opposition could be substantially reduced if developers would put in the effort to make buildings more aesthetically appealing, and that its “ugly buildings” that is driving a lot of NIMBYism.
In general I don’t particularly buy this theory, in part because jurisdictions exercise a lot of de facto control over how buildings look, but I’m willing to be convinced otherwise. David Broockman, Chris Elmendorf, and Josh Kalla have a new paper out arguing that in fact aesthetic judgments are actually a substantial reason for opposition (though part of what they classify as an aesthetic judgment is “not liking tall buildings” or “not thinking tall buildings are appropriate for the area”, which seems distinct to me). From the paper:
We support this argument with a variety of evidence. First, motivating our analysis, we show that homeowners in dense areas are highly supportive of new apartments in their neighborhoods, while they and other voters largely oppose new apartments in single-family neighborhoods. “Homevoter” and “NIMBYism” theories would predict the opposite: that homeowners in dense areas should be the most opposed to new housing construction in dense areas, as this creates new supply in these voters’ “own backyard.” But we show that owning a home in a dense area reveals a taste for density that may drive these voters to support further increases in density. On the other hand, renters and owners who live in neighborhoods of all kinds largely oppose building high-density housing in single-family-home neighborhoods, where it would not visually “fit in.”
We next show descriptively that measures of aesthetic tastes strongly predict support for dense development. A meaningful share of people state an aesthetic dislike for tall buildings in cities and that they perceive apartment buildings as ugly; in both bivariate and multivariate analyses, these aesthetic tastes are typically far more predictive of support for developing new apartment buildings than measures of other beliefs, attitudes, and preferences, such as beliefs about the relationship between development and prices or racial attitudes. Moreover, an experimental manipulation shows that opposition to development is actually stronger for similarly-sized office developments, suggesting that a broad class of explanations for opposition to development that are specific to housing—such as the demographics of its residents—are likely insufficient to explain opposition to new housing.
I haven’t read through the full paper yet, but I’ll likely look at it closer in a future newsletter post.
In the policy proposal Austin Vernon and I wrote for US naval ship acquisition, we called out the Constellation-class frigate as a ship that was far too expensive due to the numerous features crammed into it. In addition to this, the Navy’s attempt to speed up its procurement by starting construction before design was complete failed, and the program was years behind schedule and significantly over budget. Now the program has been cancelled. From USNI News:
The Navy is walking away from the Constellation-class frigate program to focus on new classes of warships the service can build faster, Secretary of the Navy John Phelan announced Tuesday on social media.
Under the terms negotiated with shipbuilder Fincantieri Marinette Marine, the Wisconsin shipyard will continue to build Constellation (FFG-62) and Congress (FFG-63) but will cancel the next four planned warships.
“We are reshaping how the Navy builds its fleet. Today, I can announce the first public action is a strategic shift away from the Constellation-class frigate program,” reads the statement from Phelan. “The Navy and our industry partners have reached a comprehensive framework that terminates, for the Navy’s convenience, the last four ships of the class, which have not begun construction.”
A senior defense official told reporters Tuesday that the cancellation of the ship program was part of the Navy’s latest effort to build and deliver new ship classes faster.
“A key factor in this decision is the need to grow the fleet faster to meet tomorrow’s threats. This framework seeks to put the Navy on a path to more rapidly construct new classes of ships and deliver capabilities our war fighters need in greater numbers and faster,” the official said.
Here’s a cool drone use-case that I haven’t seen before. If you call 911 and they send an ambulance, that ambulance needs to travel over roads and navigate traffic, which slows down how quickly the ambulance can reach you. A drone travelling to the same location can fly directly to it, and might be able to get there much more quickly. A drone can’t bring an EMT with it, but it can carry small, lightweight medical equipment, such as a defibrillator. Via Gizmodo:
A Duke Health project is using drones to deliver treatment devices during real medical emergencies in Clemmons, North Carolina. Described as a “first-of-its-kind study in the U.S.,” the drones carry automated external defibrillators (AEDs—devices used to re-establish an effectual heartbeat rhythm in individuals experiencing cardiac arrest) to bystanders before EMS (emergency medical services) can get there, with the goal of decreasing cardiac arrest response times.
“Once the call goes in, the drone is launched to that location, the person is on the phone with a 911 operator, they’re guiding them, letting them know what to do, what to expect. The drone is in flight with the AED attached. Minutes later, the drone appears in the sky—not a bird, not a plane, not Superman—a drone and an AED,” Bobby Kimbrough, Forsyth County Sheriff and a partner on the project, told reporters on Wednesday, as reported in a Duke University statement. “The EMS is still coming. It’s just that the drone arrives, and when EMS gets there, they pick it up and keep moving,” he added.
That’s what the study is hoping to measure, anyway. Monique Starks, Duke Health cardiologist and study lead, said that the estimated median time for the drone’s arrival is around four minutes, which would bring response times down from a 6- to 7-minute average.
We’ve previously noted that Tehran, the capital of Iran, is in the grips of a severe water shortage, and that without relief the city might become “uninhabitable”. Now just a few weeks later, the government apparently plans to relocate the capital. Via Scientific American ($):
Amid a deepening ecological crisis and acute water shortage, Tehran can no longer remain the capital of Iran, the country’s president has said.
The situation in Tehran is the result of “a perfect storm of climate change and corruption,” says Michael Rubin, a political analyst at the American Enterprise Institute.
“We no longer have a choice,” said Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian during a speech on Thursday.
Instead Iranian officials are considering moving the capital to the country’s southern coast.
…Since at least 2008, scientists have warned that unchecked groundwater pumping for the city and for agriculture was rapidly draining the country’s aquifers. The overuse did not just deplete underground reserves—it destroyed them, as the land compressed and sank irreversibly. One recent study found that Iran’s central plateau, where most of the country’s aquifers are located, is sinking by more than 35 centimeters each year. As a result, the aquifers lose about 1.7 billion cubic meters of water annually as the ground is permanently crushed, leaving no space for underground water storage to recover, says Darío Solano, a geoscientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, who was not involved with the study.
From historian David T. Beito, here is one excerpt:
FDR gave unquestioning support to President Wilson’s crackdown on free speech during World War I, including his enforcement of the Sedition and Espionage Acts. According to Kenneth S. Davis, Roosevelt “went along with prevailing trends in the realm of the national spirit, uninhibited by any strong ideological commitment to the Bill of Rights.” After reading about the conviction of the publisher of an antiwar socialist pamphlet, for example, he sent a congratulatory letter to the federal prosecutor…
There is much more here than just the standard market-oriented “Roosevelt had bad economic policies” line, and the more left-leaning critique of Roosevelt on segregation and the southern coalition. For instance, Roosevelt supported policies that required the telegram companies to keep copies of all telegrams sent, and he used the FCC licensing process to help keep radio in his corner politically.
There is more. It can be said that this book offers a very negative view of FDR.
The post *FDR: A New Political Life* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Leila Character, Assistant Prof. at Texas A&M, for a project using hyperspectral-imaging drones for archaeological research in Belize.
Nour Bou Malhab, Lebanon, for promoting classical liberal thought throughout Lebanon and across the Maghreb.
Isaac Akintaro, Nigeria/England, computer science PhD Candidate, for travel to San Francisco
Nikita Greenidge, St. Lucia/England, PhD in Surgical Robotics, for a startup using AI to improve surgical techniques in the Caribbean.
Michael Konu, Ghana/USA, for bioengineering research on virtual cells and for career development.
Waldo Krugell, South Africa, Prof. at North West University, for a project improving economics education for South African high-school students.
Edmund Trueman, to develop a digital archive to showcase Congolese comics.
Justin Sooknanan, Trinidad & Tobago, undergrad electrical engineering, travel grant to UK and for career development.
Temitope Johnson, Nigeria/South Africa, for designing a phototherapy device for neonatal jaundice treatment.Mmesomachi Nwachukwu, Nigeria, for running a national training program preparing students for the International Mathematical Olympiad.
Jibrin Jaafaru, Nigeria, PhD candidate, for travel to the United States to pursue a bioinformatics fellowship
Ollie Sayeed, PhD UPenn, historical linguist, for research evaluating the effectiveness of malaria interventions in Africa
Shreya Hegde, for drone-mapping and route-optimization work in Kenya.
Jan Grzymski, Assistant Professor at Lazarski University, to run a summer program introducing Caribbean scholars to Poland’s transition from communist rule to a market-driven economy.
Arun Shanmuganathan, Rwanda, to support mathematics training at the African Olympiad Academy.
Samiya Allen, Barbados, undergrad electronics, travel grant to UK for robotics training and career development.
Rose Mutiso, Kenya, PhD UPenn in materials science, to create the African Tech Futures Lab, to improve policymaking on energy technologies.
Darren Ramsook, Trinidad & Tobago, Postdoc at Trinity College Dublin, for research on AI-driven video compression.
Cheyenne Polius, St. Lucia, for work on astro-tourism and space education in the Caribbean.
I thank Rasheed Griffith for his excellent work on this, and again Nabeel has created excellent software to help organize the list of winners, using AI.
Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. The EV African and the Caribbean announcement is here and you can see previous cohorts here. If you are interested in supporting this tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Rasheed.
The post Emergent Ventures Africa and the Caribbean, 7th cohort appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Every year or so, there’s a new crop of articles about how you need to make $350k a year to live in New York City, or $150k is lower middle class, or you need $300k to be middle class, or why people making $400k are barely scraping by. This article is always roundly ridiculed on social media, and a few days later someone writes a post going through the numbers and debunking the whole thing. And then everyone posts the famous tweet:
There’s just something very annoying about publications that cater to upper-class audiences trying to reassure those audiences that they’re actually struggling.
In a recent post on his Substack — followed by a shorter version in The Free Press — asset manager Mike Green made a similar claim, but got much more positive attention for it. Instead of claiming that a family that makes $400,000 is middle class, he claimed that a family making less than $140,000 is poor. This is from the Free Press version:
I realized that [the U.S. official poverty line]—created more than 60 years ago, with good intentions—was a lie…“The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.”…[W]hen you understand that number, you will understand the rage of Americans who have been told that their lives have been getting better when they are barely able to stay afloat…
[E]verything changed between 1963 and 2024. Housing costs exploded. Healthcare became the largest household expense for many families. Employer coverage shrank while deductibles grew. Childcare became a market, and that market became ruinously expensive. College went from affordable to crippling…A second income became mandatory…But a second income meant childcare became mandatory…two cars became mandatory…In 2024, food-at-home is no longer 33 percent of household spending. For most families, it’s 5 to 7 percent. Housing now consumes 35 to 45 percent. Healthcare takes 15 to 25 percent. Childcare, for families with young children, can eat 20 to 40 percent.
If you keep [the original] logic [of the poverty threshold]—if you maintain [the] principle that poverty could be defined by the inverse of food’s budget share—but update the food share to reflect today’s reality, the multiplier is no longer three.
It becomes 16. Which means…the threshold for a family of four—the official poverty line in 2024—wouldn’t be $31,200. If the crisis threshold—the floor below which families cannot function—is honestly updated to current spending patterns, it lands at close to $140,000.
And just to double-check this number, Green does a quick calculation of what a family of four would need in order to afford the necessities of modern life, and comes up with a similar number:
I wanted to see what would happen if I ignored the official stats and simply calculated the cost of existing. I built a basic needs budget for a family of four (two earners, two kids). No vacations, no Netflix, no luxury. Just the “participation tickets” required to hold a job and raise kids in 2024. Using conservative data for a family in New Jersey:
Childcare: $32,773
Housing: $23,267
Food: $14,717
Transportation: $14,828
Healthcare: $10,567
Other essentials: $21,857
Required net income: $118,009
Add federal, state, and FICA taxes of roughly $18,500, and you arrive at a required gross income of $136,500.
Wow! Two different methodologies, but the same conclusion: the cost of merely participating in the modern economy, for a family of four, is around $140,000. If your family makes less than that, you must be poor.
This post made the rounds like wildfire, and was generally well-received. It turns out that there’s a much bigger market for the idea that $140,000 is poor than there is for the idea that $400,000 is middle-class.
But despite its popularity, Green’s claim is wrong. Not just slightly wrong or technically wrong, but just totally off-base and out of touch with reality. In fact, it’s so wrong that I’m willing to call it “very silly”. I know Mike Green, and I count him as a friend, but we all write silly things once in a while,1 and when we do, we deserve to be called out on it.
Why is the $140,000 poverty line silly? Well, there are two main reasons. First, Mike actually just gets a lot of his numbers wrong when he makes his calculations. And second, the way Mike is defining “poverty” doesn’t make any sense.
I’ll go through both of those points, but first, let’s step back a second and talk about why the claim that $140,000 should immediately strike you as highly suspicious.
In economic policy debates, it’s important to be able to sniff out claims that aren’t going to hold up. I’m not saying that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, as Carl Sagan said. I’m saying that when you see a claim that sounds way off, there often isn’t any good evidence for it at all.
If Mike is right, most Americans are poor people. The majority of American families make less than $140k a year. Median family income for a family of 4 in the United States is $125,700. That means that the majority of 4-person families make less than that. So if Mike Green is right, that means that more than half of American families are poor — or at least, more than half of 4-person families.
When Mike says “poor”, he means that people can’t afford what he calls a “participation ticket” — a basket of basic necessities. He names the things in that basket: rent, health insurance, transportation (including two cars), “other necessities”, and child care. If he’s right, then more than half of American families lack one or more of the basic necessities of life.
Is that true? Well, we can check these necessities one by one. Let’s start with food. For caloric consumption, we can’t really find a median (most people don’t count calories so you can’t do surveys), but we can find an average. And average calories per person has gone way up over time:
The distribution of how much food people eat probably isn’t very skewed (there isn’t one guy eating a billion calories…I hope!), so this means the typical American is eating a lot of food. In fact, of all the countries on the planet, only Irish people eat more calories than Americans. As for food insecurity, America has a lower share than practically any other country on Earth, including Scandinavia:
That’s severe food insecurity; about 10% of married-couple households report some level of food insecurity. So almost all American parents are putting food on the table for their families.
How about shelter? About 14% of American children have living situations with more than one person per room, which is how we define “overcrowded”.
We can also look at floor space. For 4-person households, total floor space per capita was 524 square feet in 2020 (it’s much higher for smaller households). In 1960, average floor space per person across all households was only 435 square feet for newly built homes. The average for 4-person families across all homes would have been a lot smaller than that, since it includes all the older homes from previous years that were much smaller.
So we’ve definitely seen a very big increase in how much space American families have to live in, over time. Also, for what it’s worth, Americans have more living space than people in almost any other country. In sum, most Americans are doing fine in terms of shelter and living space.
How about health insurance? Here we have some very good news: The total percent of uninsured Americans has fallen to only 8%.
And in fact, the news gets better! According to the CDC, only 5.1% of American children were uninsured as of 2023. So at this point, almost all Americans in 4-person families are going to have health insurance.
(Thanks, Obama!)
What about transportation? Here’s a chart I found for the number of vehicles for 4-person households in 2022:
According to this data, more than 80% of America’s 4-person households have 2 or more cars. Presumably some fraction of those households have single breadwinners, and thus — by Mike Green’s reckoning — don’t necessarily need two cars, while a few live in places with good public transit. So most Americans do have adequate transportation.
As for child care, I don’t have good numbers on how many Americans have it (since it comes in many forms). But as Mike says, child care is something you get so that you can have both parents go work; ultimately, it’s not something you need in and of itself in order to live a good life. So we can omit it from this list.
The basic point here is that:
Most Americans have plenty of food to eat
Most Americans have a comfortable amount of living space
Most Americans have health insurance
Most Americans have sufficient transportation
By itself, that doesn’t prove that most Americans have all of these things. It’s possible that each family has to choose one or two of these to give up, and that they make different choices. So maybe you take the 10% of 4-person families who are food insecure at some point, add the 8% who lack health insurance, then add the 16% who have less than two cars, and add the 14% who have overcrowded living situations, and you get…48%! So it’s possible half of Americans lack at least one of the basic necessities of life…right?
Well, no, because there’s going to be lots of overlap between those groups. A lot of the people who don’t have enough to eat are going to be the same people who have only one car, a family member without health insurance, and a cramped living space. In reality, you can’t just add those percentages up — the percent of Americans who lack even one of the basic necessities Mike Green lists is going to be a lot less than half. It’s probably going to be closer to the 25.5% of Americans who live in “relative poverty” (below 60% of median income). That’s higher than the official poverty rate, but not even close to Mike Green’s number.
In other words, the whole idea that more than half of Americans are poor doesn’t fit with anything we know about the lifestyles that typical Americans actually live. That’s why our intuition should be sounding the alarm like crazy when we read a line like “the real poverty line is $140,000”. We’re not talking about aliens from Mars here. Most of us either are middle class, or know people who are, and they don’t lack the basic necessities of life. They aren’t missing their “participation tickets”.
So how did Mike get this so wrong? It turns out there are two reasons. First, he used some bad numbers to make his calculations — so even on his own terms, the $140,000 number is bad. But also, the way he goes about calculating the price of a “participation ticket” in the American economy just doesn’t make sense.
I eagerly awaited Vince Gilligan’s follow-up to his hit TV series Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. But nothing prepared me for his latest offering Pluribus.
The only thing that stays the same in the new series is the setting, Albuquerque, New Mexico. But the story is existentially frightening and totally unlike its predecessors. An extraterrestrial virus sweeps through the population, removing their individual personalities and blending them into a single hive mind.
In the aftermath, everybody thinks the same and acts the same. They share the same ideas and information. They even speak the same words at the exact same moment—like some demonic chorus from a Greek tragedy.
And they are blissfully happy. Like ants in an ant hill, they love their new lives without individual responsibility.
Thirteen people on the planet have somehow avoided this contagion. And they must find some way of countering it.
But they are literally in a battle against happy, smiling people who have forgotten what it’s like to be a real person.
The premise is intriguing. But Pluribus is not the only current TV series to focus on the destruction of personhood. Apple TV has already reaped the benefits of this kind of story in its hit show Severance, which explores the narrow existence of characters who toil away in a bland office without any idea of their lives outside the workplace.
A surgical implant has blocked any recollection of their everyday personhood. Once again, the comparison with ants in an ant hill is apt.
And we see the same theme in all those zombie stories of recent memory. The danger in these narratives isn’t violence or even death—it’s the total loss of personality and selfhood.
That may even be the defining fear of our current moment. Or, perhaps, of our impending future.
It can hardly be a coincidence that these series are so popular at the very moment that personhood is also under attack in society at large.
Consider this ominous anecdote from Steven Mintz, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin:
I require substantial writing in my 400-person U.S. history survey course—but now I largely receive 400 variations on the same essay. The wording, structure, transitions, tone, even the closing sentences are largely identical.
This is eerily like the zombie-ish characters in Pluribus, who all say the exact same thing.
But in Mintz’s case, this is real behavior from real students. They have voluntarily abandoned their individual opinions and embraced the hive mind.
And the hive mind is available to all of them via Chat GPT.
Mintz believes that this represents the latest stage in the dehumanization of education. The only way to fix it is teaching “that foregrounds the human mind—its voice, doubt, curiosity, and interpretive labor.”
But the system now rebels against this. Even worse, many students prefer the comfort of the single hive-mind answer as constructed by AI. That’s scary. It suggests that humans are willing to abandon key aspects of their personhood—provided that the mindset of the ant in the anthill is comfortable and stress-free.
Just as in Pluribus, happiness is a life without individual responsibility. There is already a single correct answer to every problem—you just need to repeat it along with everybody else.
You can now live without thinking for yourself. And this is what we call progress.
Maybe that’s why I’m especially alarmed by Google’s decision to replace search results—which provide many different answers to your questions—with a single authoritative AI solution. In this strange turnabout, search engines don’t want you to search anymore.
This runs counter to everything we know about science and progress—which require rigorous debate between different viewpoints. The same is true of education. Or even democracy. The worldview of the anthill makes all those things impossible.
Google is not alone. All of the big web platforms are increasingly designed to keep the ants happy in their anthills. They consume the same short videos, which are presented in a way that promotes endless scrolling—and not independent thinking. And participants are rewarded for attracting followers.
The very word follower conveys a sense of degraded personhood. The user’s existence is celebrated not for its independence, but as subordinated to the influencer. In the hierarchy of social media, the influencer is the queen bee, everyone else is the (appropriately named) drone bee or worker bee.
The scary thing is not just that billionaires and huge corporations are promoting this but that people so willingly participate. Maybe that’s why the audience is so large for shows like Severance and Pluribus. The sci-fi scenarios feed directly into our fears of abandoning our selves in this depersonalized world.
Years ago, I studied personhood as a philosophy student at Oxford. Back then, it was an esoteric field of inquiry—and hardly a matter of concern for everyday life.
In those innocent days, most people believed that personhood was a simple concept—everybody was an individual with a specific and unique personality. That was so obvious that it was hardly worth debating.
There were a few exceptions, of course. Some people suffer from amnesia, or schizophrenia, or multiple personality disorder. But those are rare situations. Most people are stable entities—your Uncle Fred will still be your Uncle Fred next week, next month, and next year.
But philosophers love to disrupt these assumptions. David Hume did just that back in the 18th century. He shook up British philosophy by declaring that the human self did not exist. We weren’t stable persons, but just a “bundle or collection of different perceptions.”
I spent a fair amount of time reading through the relevant literature on this dispute. I thought that Hume (as usual) was just trying to be a spoil sport. He loved debunking familiar concepts (morality, causality, etc.). But it felt like a game to me.
In my world, Uncle Fred is always Uncle Fred.
So imagine my surprise when, over the course of decades, that attack on personhood in philosophy gained more and more momentum. Consider the case of Derek Parfit, one of the most peculiar thinkers of the last half century, whose intense antipathy to the notion of a stable self got embraced by academic elites. As a result, Parfit gradually rose to the level of superstardom in the intellectual world.
In the aftermath, the unstable personality went mainstream. It got legitimized. Just imagine the consequence. Or—more to the point—look around and see the consequences.
Personhood got undermined, even eradicated, from serious discourse (and social policy). Of course, it wasn’t just Parfit. The rise of Derrida, Lacan, and other postmodernists contributed to the assault on the enduring self. There was some resistance in a few academic backwaters, but the hip and fashionable view was now that Uncle Fred is never reliably Uncle Fred.
All this would hardly matter, if we lived in a society with strong democratic principles, robust notions of personal responsibility, and high standards of education. In that kind of world, personhood would still thrive, no matter what Parfit, Derrida, and others have to say.
But we don’t live in that kind of responsible world. Instead we got hit with a total collapse in all the institutions that nurture and support personhood. And it didn’t help that billionaires could make more money by turning us all into ants in their own digital anthills.
So we operate online behind avatars, keeping our real selves hidden from view—maybe even from ourselves. We socialize with other avatars, via texting and posting. At every step, real humans are replaced with digital simulacrums, even in our most intimate relationships.
With the final addition of AI, we now have lost the ability to know if actual people were involved in the making of any cultural artifact—a song, a movie, a book, a poem, etc. Even David Hume never dreamed of such a total eradication of personal responsibility and stability.
What can stop it?
I actually take some solace in TV series such as Pluribus and Severance. They show how anxious we are about this threat. At some deep level in our souls, we know that the destruction of our autonomy and selfhood is not a good thing.
It isn’t progress. It isn’t utopia. It isn’t liberation.
And that is the first step in escaping the ant hill. The next step is to bring others along with us.
This is why I keep talking about a New Romanticism (see here and here). That is our counter-offensive, and it’s already starting.
A few months ago, I tried to describe what this means in real terms—and offered several predictions. Some of this is already coming true:
Critics of runaway tech will get much angrier and more vocal. This is already starting, and nothing can prevent the momentum from building.
The backlash will start forcing changes on a local level. Schools, for example, will impose prudent controls on AI, smartphones, social media, etc. Families will make changes in their own homes, without waiting for guidance from above.
Businesses will be slower to change—like the factories that hired child laborers in the 1700s, they are obsessed with making as much money as possible. But a backlash will occur here too, promoted by customers, employees, and community members.
Political intervention will happen later. Tech platforms have too much influence over politicians—so they will work to prevent regulation. But they won’t be able to stop it forever. Lawsuits and legislation are coming to force their hand, although we may need to wait 2-3 years before anything substantive happens.
Meanwhile, attitudes and ideologies will evolve—and the various compassionate, humanist, and creative agendas will gain strength. This kind of culture shift takes time, and I expect this to play out over a ten-year period. But the whole tone of society will look and feel differently as power and prestige shifts from the technocracy to the creative class.
Left and right will find—to their surprise—that they have much to agree on here. They will join hands in surprising ways to combat tech gone wild.
As part of this, technology will start getting used in ways that benefit the creatives, not the tech elites. This is already happening in some spheres (Substack, Bandcamp, Patreon, etc.), but the next wave will reverse the entire hierarchy. Romanticist outsiders will wrest control from technocratic insiders.
That’s our pathway. And it will happen—because the other alternative is the ant hill. And that’s not a viable option.
This is the defining culture war of our time. And I will return to it again in the future—because this danger is simply too big too ignore.
Context appears at disparate sources, by user activity or changes in the user’s environment: what they’re working on changes, emails appear, documents are edited, it’s no longer sunny outside, the available tools have been updated.
This context is not always where the AI runs (and the AI runs as closer as possible to the point of user intent).
So the job of making an agent run really well is to move the context to where it needs to be. [...]
So I’ve been thinking of AI system technical architecture as plumbing the sources and sinks of context.
Tags: definitions, matt-webb, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-agents, context-engineering
Large language models (LLMs) can be useful tools, but they are not good at creating entirely new Wikipedia articles. Large language models should not be used to generate new Wikipedia articles from scratch.
— Wikipedia content guideline, promoted to a guideline on 24th November 2025
Too disrupted to set up an interview this week. But I did do another talk with Martin Wolf of the FT. Here’s the video; transcript below
TRANSCRIPT
Wolf Well, Paul. Hello. How are you?
Krugman I’m good. How are you, Martin?
Wolf I’m feeling pretty good. Let’s talk about where we are with our favourite villain, Donald Trump or President Trump, as he should be called. Now, we’re getting towards the end of a year, and I get the impression from reading your Substack that you’re feeling that things are going so badly, as it were. And the American people have really begun to notice this.
And maybe things aren’t quite as grim. At least they’re grim, but the grimness
implies maybe things will get better in the not incredibly distant future. So overall, how are you feeling?
Krugman Well, I’m less terrified than I was. I mean, if you’re... let’s be serious here.
What is clearly the agenda? I mean, this is not a normal presidency. This is not normal politics in the United States. What we have is a group of would be authoritarians trying to speedrun a transition into one party, non-democratic rule. It’s clear that the goal was to by - before anybody had a chance really to stand up to them to end US democracy more or less permanently. I mean, that’s not hyperbole. That’s just where we are. And the good news is, it does not seem to be going well, or at least it’s not going according to schedule. People like Orban in Hungary or Putin in his early years had broad public support during their extended takeovers. Trump’s support has cratered. If you had doubts about the polling, these elections in New Jersey and Virginia that we had early in November said, oh, no, the polling is right, if anything, it’s understating how much the public now loathes Donald Trump. Now, that’s not necessarily enough. There are still a lot of craven politicians and craven institutions. At least the momentum has slowed. Now, whether we can actually turn this around, ask me in a couple of years.
Wolf The big point you make there is one I’ve been completely convinced of for a very long time. In fact, even in 2016, I think I’ve noted before that I fear that if he were allowed to, that was exactly where Donald Trump was going to try and take the US, and of course, with him, most of the hope for liberal democracy in the world. And so I’ve been also very, very anxious. And I’ve been surprised, actually, how many of my friends who are also very concerned about the issue have been really remarkably complacent about it all. But on this, you and I agree completely. Now, let’s just step back and talk a little bit about what we’re going to be trying to do. This is going to be the second series with you, the Wolf-Krugman Exchange, as we called it, on our Economics Show, and we’re going to have four episodes running over the next four weeks. And we’ll be talking about what’s going on in the US, what’s going on in the world, and where all this might lead us after having experienced this first year, which we just touched upon. And we also, of course, particularly be focusing on the US economy. We’ll look at Maga Man. How much of the economics of male employment and male income driving support for Trump. And we’ll discuss, I think, how other countries are reacting to the United States’ rather unpredictable approach to economic policy and we might say foreign policy,
given the démarche that the US just gave to Ukraine on a deal which they seem to have negotiated entirely with Mr. Putin’s people. It’s a pretty weird story, even now, isn’t it?
Krugman Oh, everything is weird. And we’re in a situation where on diplomacy, we’re actually getting conflicting stories from different members of the administration about what the policy is, who wrote it. The initial leaked peace plan showed clear signs of having been translated directly from the Russian. The syntax was basically not that of a native English speaker. While stuff, you think about policy in terms there’s a process and who are the players and how does it work. But this appears to be no process. And there’s reason to believe that different actors, the vice-president, the Secretary of State,
are kind of independently trying to make foreign policy. And it’s not at all clear that Trump has any idea what’s going on. I mean, this is wild. World’s greatest nation, and here we are. We’re putting tinpot dictatorships to shame in terms of our disorganization.
Wolf I was just told by one of my colleagues, distinguished colleague, who was in America last week that every single Russian expert in the State Department has been sacked. So it’s not surprising. I’m assuming that’s correct. It’s not surprising that they look completely clueless and they have to take the texts given to them by the Russians.
Krugman Yeah, we could go on about that. I mean, this is, of course, the diplomacy. But as far as we can make out, things like healthcare, basically large parts of the Centres for Disease Control, National Institutes of Health, they’ve laid off anybody who knew anything. And so we have critical policy being made by people who really haven’t the faintest idea how any of this works. So I’ve been saying that we’re kind of ruled by sinister incompetents right now, and quite something.
Wolf One sort of has this terrifying nightmare that they’re actually going to start World War Three by accident.
Krugman Well, yeah. Pressing the wrong button. Well, there was this incident a while back where they accidentally laid off all the people who secure our nuclear weapons.
Wolf Yes, I remember that.
Krugman And then realised, oh, and then had a hard time getting them back because they had taken away their government emails.
Wolf Anyway, in our series we’ll talk about China too, which beyond the US, the rest of the world, Europe and so forth. But let’s kick off with something we often do on The Economics Show, where we put something on a scale from 1 to 10. So after a year of Trump, how healthy in one number scale 1 to 10, with one terrible and 10 everything is great, do you feel the US economy is now and perhaps also in comparison with where it was in January?
Krugman It’s clearly in worse shape than it was in January. And maybe it’s a five. Maybe, I mean, the normal indicators, unemployment rate, inflation rate are worse than they were in 2024. Unemployment is a few tenths of a percentage point higher. Inflation, which had been on a downward trajectory, is now up.
It’s not catastrophe. We’re not in a recession. But then there are weird shadows in the economy that make it, in some ways, considerably worse, probably in terms of how it’s experienced than these conventional numbers would say. And also huge risks, because it’s so much is being driven by highly speculative investments in AI.
Wolf When I thought about this question, I would have given them about a five too. So at a distance, I would agree. It isn’t a catastrophe, but it’s clearly of sliding down hill. And before we go on to that a little bit more, what would your number between 1 and 10
be for the state of American democracy at the moment?
Krugman Oh, I mean, we’re below that. We’re at a four or a three, but not a zero. I mean, and maybe be trending up. I mean, that’s... there just has been a lot more pushback. I mean, we certainly... things are happening on a routine basis now that were completely unthinkable. I mean, if your worst fantasy, did you imagine that masked government agents would be kidnapping people off the street? And that’s now a routine occurrence in our major cities. So, gosh, this is not a fully functioning democracy.
And we look enviously at places that know how to do democracy seriously, like Brazil,
and pretty humiliating for an American. Public pushback, a lot of institutions just folded,
but the public has not. And so they I think they’re not... I’m just vastly encouraged by the fact that we did have just gubernatorial elections, but they were blowouts for what is clearly a referendum on Trump, and if you look underneath it’s in some ways even better. It really does look as if the idea that there was a Maga coalition that was going to rule is not going to happen unless they basically use force and intimidation, which
is not out of the question.
Wolf I was just thinking about your comment about a country with a functioning democracy. I would also say a country with a functioning legal system, because they put Bolsonaro in prison. And the American president’s reaction to that was to whack a 50v per cent tariff on them for the cheek of putting somebody who was trying to overthrow an election into prison, which is obviously from his point of view,
a pretty horrible precedent. But it certainly gets the contrast. And it is, for somebody like me, always an Americanophile, absolutely horrifying.
Krugman Yeah, it’s absolutely horrifying. But then if you like some of those tariffs,
many of those tariffs on Brazil have just come off because American consumers are outraged about the price of coffee. And so that’s in a way telling you, we would love to see that there was a mass public uprising against the threat to democracy. And we did have something like seven million people march against Trump not very long ago. But what really is killing the Trump, the Maga drive to take over America is the price of groceries. My view had been that what has happened has very dire long-term consequences, but I wasn’t clear that there was going to be some crash, at least on the actions he’s taken so far. So what’s been happening to the economy hasn’t really surprised me.
I see protection of this kind as more likely to have longer term, medium to long-term effects than short term effects.
Wolf Have you been surprised in any way by what you describe as the number five economies, or is that more or less what you would have guessed?
Krugman I think I’m pretty much on record as saying that this idea that protectionism causes a recession is not really right. It’s not borne out by history. It’s not borne out actually by basic economic models. Tariffs degrade long-run efficiency. They hurt long-run performance.
Now, what was special and is visible in some of the numbers is the uncertainty.
It’s one thing if Trump had just sort of permanently imposed tariffs that were 1934 level,
I wouldn’t have said that would be recessionary at all, be a terrible thing for the long run, but not recessionary. But it was the uncertainty, the constantly changing tariffs that we seemed likely to have a chilling effect on business. How’s a business going to invest when it has no idea what the trade regime will be next month? You can see it a little bit more subtly in some of the numbers. But at the same time, unfortunately, history
doesn’t serve us controlled experiments where just one thing happens at a time. So we have simultaneously this radical break with 90 years of US trade policy, and at the same time, this vast boom in artificial intelligence.
And so most investment is kind of weak. Most businesses are not hiring. But on the other hand, they’re spending enormous amounts of money on data centres. And that in some ways has masked whatever the effects of Trump’s policies might be.
Wolf Now, you’ve written quite a bit recently, I think, about vibes. Is that to you a significant part of as why it’s not doing as well as you would expect, that it’s not something concrete is that despite this huge AI investment boom, but somehow the mood, if you look at confidence measures of various kinds, the Americans really do seem rather gloomy. Is that what you’re talking about?
Krugman Yes. Now, it’s not, by the way, we should say that consumer spending has not fallen as much, has not fallen a lot, despite the fact that people say that they’re quite unhappy with the economy. So in some sense, this is - if we look at what people do rather than what they say - it’s a little bit out of kilter.
But yeah, I mean, many people have made the analogy with the late ‘90s with, which was both the dotcoms, but even more important, the telecom investment boom, which ended in grief for a lot of companies. People were giddy. The ordinary person was feeling that they were part of this great adventure of prosperity. Now, it didn’t last, but they... and there’s been none of that now. There’s nobody out there who is thinking,
well, Nvidia is doing well and that means that anybody can make it. That’s not how it’s playing now. Consumer sentiment is at its lowest point ever. It’s lower than it was in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. It’s lower than it was in 1980 when we had 14 per cent inflation. People are really, really down on the economy.
And it’s interesting because they’ve remained... I had thought that Trump might be getting better ratings on the economy than Biden did. But in fact, the vibecession has, if anything, intensified.
Wolf So why do you think that is? What’s going on here? I was just thinking, as you were talking, that I recognise this contrast with the late ‘90s. Well, I think the overall economy
seemed to be doing better. Was part of it with the dotcom bubble, everybody felt they could get in on it. But here what we’re seeing is booming expenditure by a really small number of gigantic companies, which is quite different from the players in that they
are real businesses. There’s no doubt about that. But they looked like a bunch of incredibly powerful oligopolists. And that doesn’t really excite ordinary Americans because it doesn’t really have anything to do with them.
Krugman Yeah. I mean, the dotcom stuff was sometimes silly, often silly. And people even kind of recognised the silliness. But it was kind of nice, I mean, a feeling
that there were opportunities. Everybody, I think everybody understood that some of these things were really not going to work.
And now, yeah, it’s the same. I mean, having Google and Mark Zuckerberg leading the charge into the future does not give you a lot of confidence that the future is going to be very good for the common man.
Wolf I just wrote a column last week on Mark Zuckerberg’s business, in which I pointed out that there’s a recent very detailed and I think, well-researched report by Reuters, which indicates that about 10 per cent of their profits come from advertising for scams. Well, I think that’s sort of filtering through to people, isn’t it? I mean, this is a bit of a deviation, but isn’t there some sort of awareness that some of these businesses aren’t really quite the businesses we want to be so big and powerful.Is that actually - is that part of the vibe, before we go back to the economics?
Krugman Yes, I think it is. And I think people do have a sense, first of all, that these businesses are very heavily built on scams, on basically hacking your brain to indulging
and encouraging your worst instincts. Not a day goes by without some horror story about ChatGPT encouraging people to do something stupid or self-destructive. And if we have a government that clearly, basically is a government of by, and for predators,
that’s in ways that... including ways that I probably, we won’t get into. And that does filter through. Everybody has a kind of sick feeling about where we are right now.
Wolf Do you think that one of the factors here, which you’ve written a lot about and it seems to me very important for the American, ordinary American sense of themselves, is that this government administration is so blatantly corrupt and so obviously in bed with a very small number of immensely wealthy plutocrats, and to a degree, which of course, this was the famous story, back in the beginning of the last century, the great Gilded Age period. But this seems in practise to be more egregious. Is this part of the vibe Americans are having? Is that part of what they’re reacting against?
Krugman Well, it’s very hard to pin that down. And I suspect that fewer people than you think are really aware of that. One of the things we’ve learned, and I’m following the political scientists and poll analysts and so on, is that it’s very difficult for people like you and me who are immersed in this stuff, to appreciate how tangential much of the news is to ordinary people. And I’m not sure, even if you did a poll and you asked, are you aware of that Musk gets a lot, Elon Musk gets a lot of his money from government contracts. I would guess that many people are not. But I think there is a general sense that it’s unfair.
Inequality doesn’t actually have as much traction politically as you might expect, but unfairness does. And the sense of that we’re in a regime of unfairness everywhere
really does.
Wolf Now, we’ve been reading a lot over here about this affordability idea, and that is obviously what Mr Mamdani campaigned on in New York. And he only won a pretty spectacular victory and an encomium from Donald Trump, which I must say, must be one of the most surprising meetings I’ve ever seen in my fairly lengthy life. Is he onto something here that somehow this links, perhaps with their feeling about what happened with the inflation under Joe Biden, that there are really important things that have become unaffordable for ordinary people. You’ve written about housing, rental rents and so forth. How live is that really is an issue? And do you think it will last?
Krugman We had a bout of inflation really from 2021 to 2023. It really was a one-time step jump in prices. People are upset about the jump in the level of prices, especially because we’d had three plus decades of very low inflation before it.
Wolf They expected 2 per cent a year, so 6 per cent over three years, and they got roughly 20. And that, sort of they say, we got cheated.
Krugman Yeah. Wages went up a lot and contrary to what many people believe, wages rose more towards the bottom of the wage distribution. So we actually had an equalisation. So ordinary struggling, struggling families on the whole were better off in terms of purchasing power. But it’s a natural thing. You feel that you earned your wage increase and then it was snatched away by inflation. So that’s a big part of it.
Also, the Consumer Price Index is honest. It’s based on a lot of hard thinking about how to measure the cost of living. But it may be missing some things. It doesn’t really take account of interest costs. It doesn’t take account of, particularly the housing is one of those things where prices really have outpaced earnings. And so the sense that my father was able to buy a house and I can’t, that is not wrong. Wages have risen more than grocery prices over the last five years or so, but wages have not risen more than housing prices.
And so there’s some real affordability stuff.
Wolf But doesn’t this imply that Mr Mamdani is not going to be able to do much about affordability, but then neither is Mr Trump given that the tariffs presumably the price effects of the tariffs, as I see it, are still coming through because a lot of the price effect was clearly absorbed by business. But it’s not going to be absorbed forever, is it?
Krugman That’s right. Although one quirk is that it’s turned out that the effective tariffs are not as high as the posted tariffs. And part of the reason there is it’s not really
we think a lot of illegal tariff evasion. But there were a lot of things that businesses
could do to avoid paying tariffs that weren’t worth doing when we had 2 per cent tariffs and are worth doing when we have 17 per cent tariffs. But the pass through. Yeah we’ve probably seen something like half of the eventual price impact of tariffs on consumer prices. And the rest is working its way through the pipeline.
Part of the reason that the rage over affordability has persisted, I think that might
have started to fade if we’d had some kind of continuity. Except Trump ran a campaign all about, I am going to bring prices down. I’m going to cut the price of energy in half. I’m going to make your groceries much cheaper, and then obviously hasn’t delivered on that and hasn’t even made an effort to deliver on that. And people feel betrayed, which is coming back to where we started. I’m glad that people feel betrayed. This is important.
Wolf Well, obviously, he works on the assumption that the promises I made have nothing to do with what happened six months later. People shouldn’t hold me to account for something I said six months earlier. That’s just unfair.
Krugman Yeah. I mean, this is Trump’s whole modus operandi is that he - a promise from Trump is a suggestion at best. But that kind of works when you’re dealing with, I don’t know, university presidents. But it doesn’t work when you’re dealing with the American public.
Wolf Just one final thing on the tariffs. We’ve got this really rather important case in front of the Supreme Court on whether what he’s done is legal. And my own reading of American trade law, and I know a few experts, is that it isn’t. My confidence that the Supreme Court will decide that it’s illegal isn’t very great, given some of the other things they’ve decided. What do you think the Supreme Court’s going to do?
Krugman My guess is that this may be a step too far, even for this Supreme Court.
The president can do some special things to deal with economic emergencies.
But when Trump imposes tariffs on Brazil because they have the temerity to try Bolsonaro, I don’t think fits the definition of an economic emergency. And two lower courts have already ruled that the tariffs are, in fact, illegal.
The prediction markets say that there is only a 26 per cent chance, as of this morning,
that the court will uphold Trump’s tariffs, which looks about right to me. And this is about 70 per cent of the tariffs would be voided.
Wolf Can he get around that? Can he ignore it?
Krugman Well, just blatantly ignoring it I think does become a problem. I mean, if this is an issue that applies much more to things like members of the military. But if you’re a Customs and Border Patrol agent and you collect a tariff that the Supreme Court has ruled illegal, I think that you are personally liable. You have yourself broken the law.
Wolf He couldn’t pretend that quote unquote, ‘breaking the law is an official act,’ which the Trump waged the Supreme Court, in an earlier judgement decided was actually completely kosher.
Krugman Yeah, well, there are other routes around. The president has a lot of leeway
to impose tariffs to protect national security — Section 232. And Trump has been doing that quite a lot, so not all of it is under this Emergency Powers Act. But there too, I would imagine that the potential legal challenges are huge. I mean, he’s imposed national security tariffs on bathroom vanities because God help us if we get into an international conflict and we depend on China for our bathroom vanities.
On any reasonable standard, almost everything he’s done on trade is illegal. But we do not live in an age of reasonable standards.
So it could be possibly a very important judgement.
Wolf Yes, it could be. Because if they do come out against him, that’s an important loss on what is after all, for him and for the world his signature policy.
Krugman Yeah. And it’s humiliating if the court rules that his signature policy is illegal and I think we’re less certain, but it does look hard to see how you can rule that the tariffs were illegal and avoid giving the money back.
Wolf So quite a scene. So let’s talk about the labour market. Is what’s going on there a significant factor for this vibe session, as it were, more than that, sort of anxiety about prospects for jobs?
Krugman We have not yet had mass layoffs. We’ve not yet seen large job losses.
But what we have seen... Not a lot of hiring. ..very low hiring. It’s a frozen labour market, probably, at least in part because of tariffs and general uncertainty. But businesses are not hiring. They’re not firing a lot either. If you’re in your job, then you’re reasonably secure.
But should you lose your job, or if you’re a young person entering the market for the first time, it’s actually very grim. Overall, unemployment isn’t up very much, but long-term unemployment is because once you’ve lost a job, it’s very hard to find another one. And this does reflect back even on people who have jobs.. It’s frightening. If you lose a job, you’ve had it. And I better not get sassy with my boss because if I’m laid off, then I’m in big trouble. And so this does colour people’s people’s perceptions. Also, it’s a tragedy. I mean, what happens if young people starting their careers enter into a weak labour market and have a hard time finding a job? How long does it take them to recover from that bad start? And the basic answer is forever. If the labour market is poor when you’re starting out, you are put permanently down. You never get as far up the ladder as you would have otherwise. And so this is a big deal.
Wolf I think this actually is what we’re seeing in Britain, have been seeing. We have had a really rather weak labour market in exactly this sense, even compared to our European peers. I’m not talking about America over the last... since the pandemic. And I think it’s become a very deep source of anxiety for young people, percolates through to their parents because they’re concerned about them, too. And I think it’s a big source of worry. So I think, and I think it’s considerably worse than in the US, from what little I know, so in this area. So I recognise this concern. But so what’s causing it? It would suggest that the employers are being very cautious. They don’t want to hire because they don’t what’s going to happen next. But it also would suggest that basically underlying demand is quite weak. And that seems to justify the Fed to cut rates.
And some people on the Fed are saying they should. At the same time, well, inflation is pretty damn sticky.
So how do you read that if you were sitting on the Fed board, what do you think they should be doing?
Krugman Glad I’m not sitting on the Fed board.
Wolf Yeah, I agree.
Krugman I actually know people who go around muttering dual mandate, dual mandate because it’s really hard, because of the employment...
Wolf I know quite a few too. And I think it’s a very tough job at the moment.
Krugman And by the way, if it’s weak demand, you would expect more layoffs. It might be weak demand, but it might be also just this freezing effect of uncertainty and possibly, possibly AI. There’s at least some straws in the wind that suggest that early business applications of AI are reducing hiring, or particularly of college graduates, or simply that companies are kind of waiting for AI. That if you’re Amazon, you’re hoping to replace a lot of your workers with robots a year or two down the pike. You might not want to hire a lot of people now. So, it’s a little bit of a mystery. I’ve never seen anything like it. We normally have a pretty one-to-one relationship between the unemployment rate and hiring rates, and this situation of not especially high unemployment
but very weak hiring is really quite novel.
Wolf That could be, of course, as you say, the uncertainty. That could be tariff generated or tariff policy generated. And is the sticky inflation, despite what seems not a very strong economy, also related to that?
Krugman No, I mean, my guess, if anything, the inflation maybe actually you could say that the tariff uncertainty has limited, has slowed the pass through of tariffs into consumer prices. Raising prices does piss off your customers, to use the technical term. And if you think the tariffs might go away, I mean if you think that sometime in the next few weeks the Supreme Court might rule that all those tariffs that are making your products expensive may disappear in a puff of smoke, then you may choose to eat the tariffs until that’s resolved. As I said, you’re thinking about being a Fed - Federal Open Market Committee member and you say, so what is happening to the economy? And the answer is God knows. How do you make an interest rate call in that situation?
Wolf So let’s look at the other area of really big uncertainty. You just mentioned AI’s impact on the jobs market. I suppose that would suggest that productivity is improving. It might be... if that’s... they’re doing more with fewer workers. That might suggest inflation could fall, should be falling. Separate the two effects of the AI. Just say a little bit more about where you are now, we discussed it in the previous series, on this issue of is there going to be a jobageddon, as it were, as a result of AI. Are we going to suddenly start seeing really dramatic affects on the employment of relatively
educated young workers, which I’ve always thought would be a nightmare politically for all our societies.
If you can’t give these people good prospects, well, these are the people who start revolutions. They did that, young unemployed people who have got educated degrees and so forth, that’s how all the 1848 revolutions started. So this is a big deal politically.
Is this what we might be seeing?
Krugman It’s possible. I mean, so far again, it’s all pretty modest as far as we can tell. It is so difficult to interpret the various studies. Most businesses report that they have not actually succeeded in making productive use of AI, but some have. And then there’s some... it’s all over the place. And there’s also this weird thing, which is that a number of businesses are telling their employees must use AI and when they can’t actually figure out what good it does them. So we’re in this kind of liminal space where it’s all potential and hype. And maybe, I mean, what it can do is... it used to be that there were lots of things that were simple, common sense things that we just couldn’t do, like recognise the same object seen from different angles. And all of a sudden, all of that is a solved problem. Translation by computer was a joke, and all of a sudden it becomes actually pretty damn good. So there’s no question this is a powerful, productive technology, but we don’t know yet. And then, of course, I guess there’s a short run macroeconomic impact, which is that this is driving a lot of business investment and it’s driving the stock market. And quite possible, as was the case in the late ‘90s, that you have a genuine, productive, important technology and everybody who invests heavily in it loses their shirt.
Wolf Let’s come to that because that’s the other aspect of it. So there are two aspects of this. One, the stock market is incredibly buoyant because of this or has been and maybe it’s filtering over into some other speculative bubbles. I think you just wrote about Bitcoin. That may also be related to the deregulation going on, the encouragement of cryptocurrencies more broadly. And that may be really separate from AI, but it’s noticeable.
So there must be a wealth effect, I mean, at least among relatively well-off people, because stocks of these major companies have gone through the moon. And second, associated with that, there’s a huge investment boom, which this is funding.
The stock market must be funding to some degree. Now, if it turns out that the investment doesn’t really get a decent return, which is perfectly plausible given that we don’t see business models, then two things will happen. The stock prices will fall and the investment will fall, decline, weaken dramatically, and they will have all this stuff which will have been built, data centres and so forth, but it really will be very low return, though perhaps quite useful in some way. But this is bad for the future of the economy and the administration, with the budget and so forth, we’ve shot the macroeconomic bolts, except for the monetary policy ones.
And then there is a concern out there that actually they’re beginning to borrow more. It’s not all funded out of profits.
There are marginal companies borrowing a lot. There is a lot going on in private credit,
which we don’t really understand. And there are financial risks. So what’s the downside here?
Krugman How bad could it get? I don’t have any real reading on this, but there are these negative stories you can tell about where we are. Yeah, a lot of talk about the circular financing of the AI related companies are all kind of taking in each other’s washing, making the bottom lines look artificially good. Well, they is a circularity. They are borrowing. A year ago, you can say, well, this AI boom is being financed out of retained earnings. And so yeah, Meta may lose a lot of money but who cares? But now there’s a lot of borrowing. And markets are taking note. Oracle, credit default swaps, I feel young again. It’s like going back to 2008.
But the credit default swaps on Oracle have just blown out, suggesting that people do think there’s a significant risk that one of the big players here might end up defaulting on some of the debt that it’s taken on. Financial stability is always a game of whack-a-mole. You’re always trying to knock down financial risks. And you’re often at risk of fighting the last war.
So we dealt with a lot of the old shadow banking stuff, but now we have private credit that creates a whole new set of risks that are at some level, at a metaphysical level, similar to the old shadow banking stuff.
I don’t think we’re at the edge of another financial crisis, but then to be honest, I didn’t think that in 2007 either.
Wolf Well, I didn’t then, but I was more worried than I am now, because I tend to think this is narrower, and I think it’s not related to housing, which is a classic asset class to create problems. We saw that all over Europe, and the big companies involved in this are in cash flow and profit terms, basically about as solid as a company can possibly be. Microsoft, Google, Meta, these are pretty solid companies. So if you succeed in getting a colossal financial crisis out of this, I think that would be quite a major achievement.
Krugman The financial crisis is not high on my list of things to worry about. But then again, our track record, the IMF once did a systematic study of how successful economists are at predicting recessions. And the answer is a zero success rate.
So...
Wolf Well, that is slight. What does worry me is that when this happens, it could well be under another Fed chair. And that might not be a very sensible person. And I think on the whole, he made a few mistakes, Jay’s been a pretty sensible person and by and large, actually over the last 20, 25, 30 years, you’ve had pretty sensible Fed chairs. And that might not be true a year from now. And that could make a big difference.
The Fed chair really matters if there’s problems.
Krugman Yeah. Without getting into the individuals, but the people on the short list range from somewhat weak to absolutely horrifying.
Now, one saving grace to some extent is that the Fed chair is not a chief executive who
can just make the decisions on monetary policy. It’s a committee. And the committee seems likely to remain sensible, at least for a couple of years.
So you’re saying that these investments will leave us with useful stuff. That’s one of the things that’s unclear. When the ‘90s investments, you ended up with a lot of fibre
optic cable in the ground that didn’t get used right away but was eventually useful. But the data centres probably depreciate quite fast. And so in some ways, this is more like the companies that got over their skids on shale, which turned out... it’s turned out that shale wells depreciate much faster than conventional oil and gas wells. And so we might have a bubble, a big waste of resources that is really lost. We may be just burning up real resources on stuff that won’t get used, especially if they’re kind of taking the wrong approach. One of the things that we’re worrying about now is that the Chinese have been focusing on smaller models that are less comprehensive, that apparently can achieve about 90 per cent of the effectiveness of the big models at far lower cost. Aside from the inherent questions about AI, there’s also the question of are we doing AI wrong? That is, I think, a really interesting possibility.
Wolf And that would certainly justify a pretty big collapse in stock prices and investment. I’ve just been to China, and they certainly do feel that they’ve got a more sensible approach. And when you look at the amounts being spent on these data centres and the dubious benefits in terms of improvements at the margin, you can ask that question. The Chinese have to make do, do more with less. And often in history, that’s turned out to be a pretty good approach, hasn’t it? Let’s put this all together.
People aren’t very happy about the economy. You’ve still got the Epstein files.
They certainly seem to be an amazingly hot topic. Trump’s approval is remarkably low.
So coming back to where we started, could we begin to feel that not only are we past peak Trump, but that we should really begin to feel that the American system will be able to get through this?
Krugman And I’m not sure. But what might be the case, it seems to me, that in order to maintain power, obviously they will be terrified of losing power, they’re going to have to do some really egregious things, like putting the army or National Guard or both into places when important votes happen, like the midterms, in order to discourage people from voting. It would be so obvious that this is a coup attempt and they might not get away with it.
Wolf So I’m beginning to feel maybe this will work out. How optimistic are you of that?
I mean, I thought of it, it was 2 to 1 on at this stage about 10 months ago, eight months ago, that Trump would get away with it and he would create a dictatorship. But now, I’m beginning to think it’s less than evens.
Krugman My view is that it’s more likely than not that the autogolpe, the self-coup will fail, that Trump and company will not succeed in installing permanent autocratic rule in America. It tells you something about where we are that believing that they probably won’t do that makes me optimistic. So no, it’s still very scary, but it’s really looking like they may not be able to pull this off. Now, that doesn’t mean that we’ve gotten through it safely, even if we have, even if that’s how it works out. For one thing, an enormous amount of damage has been done. Of course, to America and to the world. To us, to the world. I mean, the United States was the essential country and we are now completely unreliable. Nobody will trust America for decades, even if it ends. And then there’s this longer term question.
Even if we get through, and we end up with a Democratic Congress next year, and then we end up with a Democratic president in 2028, winning every election is not a reliable strategy for safeguarding democracy. So the fact that just on the political side, if we don’t end up not just holding back this bum’s rush from Maga but if we don’t end up having a truth and reconciliation commission of some kind, some accountability for all of this, then we’re still in very, very bad shape.
Wolf The thing that particularly worries me, and I follow this very closely, and perhaps it’s partly because of my family background, but - my history of my family is refugees from Hitler - there seems a remarkable amount, I mean, astounding amount of genuine, clear fascism, even Nazism, circulating around on the extreme right. And even three or four years ago, I wasn’t aware of that. And it’s possible if the Republicans are in opposition, that’s where they’re going to go. These people only have to win once and you really have a problem.
Krugman It remains very, very scary, I think. But I certainly will feel better if the...
it looks as though they haven’t pulled this one off. Yeah. Put one foot in front of the other.
If we ask, what can we do to guarantee the survival of American democracy? The answer is no guarantees.
Wolf I’m writing a piece on that as a new chapter for my book, and it’s a very, very good question. So in next week’s episode, we’re going to talk about the economics of Maga men. And it is Maga Man, to a significant extent, isn’t it, and more generally, the manosphere or whatever you call it. On the other hand, well, what does the newly elected New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani tell us? What does that mean about the future of the Democrats?
And look at it from the economic point of view. And meanwhile, I think it’s your turn to tell us about your cultural coda.
Krugman Actually, the one that captured my mood most correctly is some old Pink Floyd, The Great Gig In the Sky where the lyrics consist of nothing but an extended, wordless scream. That’s kind of where I am in my view of the world right now.
Wolf So when I was asked to do this, I found it, I think, much more difficult than you do. But as I said before, I’m a sort of opera person. And I was thinking about the best things about tyranny, which has after all been the theme. Last time I think I had Fidelio from Beethoven. This one is even more direct. It’s from Puccini’s Tosca, which is about the evil ways of an Italian police boss who’s really a gangster called Scarpia.
And the song is by Tosca, who’s the heroine, whose lover has been tortured and she sings this absolutely magnificent song, Vissi d’Arte. I lived for art. I was a peaceful, loving, decent and honourable human being.Why, God, have you inflicted this upon me? Well, all I can say is our cultural references are not very much like what you expect from a couple of economists, but here we are. Well, yeah, you have to remember,
even economists are human beings sometimes.
Krugman Some of us.
Wolf And that’s it for the Wolf-Krugman Exchange on The Economic Show for this week, and we’ll be back here at the same time next week.
A Falcon 9 launched 140 payloads on its latest dedicated rideshare mission Nov. 28, ranging from European government spacecraft to a private astronomy satellite.
The post Transporter-15 rideshare mission launches 140 payloads appeared first on SpaceNews.
The Baiknour pad used for the launch of the latest crew to the ISS has sustained damage, raising questions about its ability to support upcoming missions to the station.
The post Baikonur pad damaged in Soyuz launch to ISS appeared first on SpaceNews.
Last year developer Simon Støvring launched a fun new app for the Mac called Festivitas, which let you decorate your menu bar and Dock with animated holiday lights and falling snow. This year he’s added an iOS version for iPhone and iPad that lets you create widgets to decorate your home screens with holidays lights and festive photo frames. Pure fun.
See also: Jason Snell on using Festivitas’s Shortcuts support to create an automation that gives a 10 percent chance of snow every 20 minutes. Støvring’s own Shortcuts examples (available in the app’s Settings window) include things like turning on the lights when music starts playing. With support for Shortcuts, users can create their own fun.
Delightful, and there’s an equally delightful behind-the-scenes video.
Before I went to the office my wife’s brother did come to us, and we did instruct him to go to Gosnell’s and to see what the true matter is of her not coming, and whether she do intend to come or no, and so I to the office; and this morning come Sir G. Carteret to us (being the first time we have seen him since his coming from France): he tells us, that the silver which he received for Dunkirk did weigh 120,000 weight.
Here all the morning upon business, and at noon (not going home to dinner, though word was brought me that Will. Joyce was there, whom I had not seen at my house nor any where else these three or four months) with Mr. Coventry by his coach as far as Fleet Street, and there stepped into Madam Turner’s, where was told I should find my cozen Roger Pepys, and with him to the Temple, but not having time to do anything I went towards my Lord Sandwich’s. (In my way went into Captn. Cuttance’s coach, and with him to my Lord’s.) But the company not being ready I did slip down to Wilkinson’s, and having not eat any thing to-day did eat a mutton pie and drank, and so to my Lord’s, where my Lord and Mr. Coventry, Sir Wm. Darcy, one Mr. Parham (a very knowing and well-spoken man in this business), with several others, did meet about stating the business of the fishery, and the manner of the King’s giving of this 200l. to every man that shall set out a new-made English Busse by the middle of June next. In which business we had many fine pretty discourses; and I did here see the great pleasure to be had in discoursing of publique matters with men that are particularly acquainted with this or that business. Having come to some issue, wherein a motion of mine was well received, about sending these invitations from the King to all the fishing-ports in general, with limiting so many Busses to this, and that port, before we know the readiness of subscribers, we parted, and I walked home all the way, and having wrote a letter full of business to my father, in my way calling upon my cozen Turner and Mr. Calthrop at the Temple, for their consent to be my arbitrators, which they are willing to. My wife and I to bed pretty pleasant, for that her brother brings word that Gosnell, which my wife and I in discourse do pleasantly call our Marmotte, will certainly come next week without fail, which God grant may be for the best.
Links for you. Science:
ByHeart’s ‘bizarre’ response to infant botulism outbreak worries food safety experts
As funding falters, young brain scientists rethink careers in research
Strain of bird flu virus never before reported in people is behind first human case in U.S. in nine months
Ethiopia confirms first outbreak of Marburg virus
Rare parrots return to Atlantic Forest fragment after decades of silence
As shutdown ends, dubious CDC panel gets back to dismantling vaccine schedule
Other:
The War on Professionalism and Professional Competence
Is Gen Z “utterly screwed”? The big myth about zoomers’ economic condition.
Republican push to make U.S. census surveys voluntary alarms statisticians
Trump DHS Plans Immigration Raids on Churches Over Holidays
Racists are now openly targeting Indian Americans
Inside the war tearing the Heritage Foundation and the American right apart
Perceptions of Crime Are Shifting
The Plutocrats Who Cried “Commie”
Contractor Paying Random People $300 to Physically Track Immigrants for ICE
Trump Is Turning the Screws on Vets So the Rich Can Get Richer
GOP rocked by Nazi scandal
Lee Cataluna: Donald Trump’s Big Shibai
US relies heavily on China, other nations for antibiotics
A public broadcaster’s path after losing U.S. funds: Youth sports and less local news
We’ve Got the Epstein Story All Wrong
The MAGA Crackup Might Finally Be Here
Donald Trump Snaps at Female Reporter Who Asks About Epstein Files: ‘Quiet Piggy’
Part 1: How I Found Out
Why We Should Banish Larry Summers From Public Life (from 2009)
Homeland Security Missions Falter Amid Focus on Deportations
Solidarity
AI industry-backed super PAC targets New York Democrat in opening shot of midterms
Repeat Trips To The Appalachian Trail
We Are Not Amused. The Olivia Nuzzi Return is a Disgrace
IRS Accessed Massive Database of Americans Flights Without a Warrant
Inside the GOP’s Assault on Youth Voting Rights
Kash Patel’s girlfriend is cashing in—on your taxpayer dollars
How young Zohran Mamdani voters persuaded their parents to get on board
You just can’t keep a good Nazi down in Trump’s America
Department of Employment Services Manager Fired After She Alleged Sexual Discrimination and Retaliation
Denmark’s drive to conscript teenage girls: ‘We’re pretty scared’
America’s invasion of Mexico: Digital nomads are tearing neighbourhoods apart
Click on graph for larger image.From GPT 5.1 Pro:
“In the economic literature, the dominant story is:
Prohibition and enforcement do make illegal drugs much more expensive than they would be in a legal market.
But marginal increases in interdiction (seizing shipments, crop eradication, etc.), especially in the Andes, have not produced sustained higher prices or lower quantities in consumer markets.
Instead, retail, purity‑adjusted prices for cocaine and heroin show large long‑run declines (1980s–2000s) and then roughly flat or drifting patterns at historically low levels, while global production and consumption reach record highs. Reuters+4whitehouse.gov+4whitehouse.gov+4
So between your two stylized options—“successfully limit quantity and raise prices” vs. “long‑run steady decline in prices”—the long‑run price data look a lot more like the second story, with only temporary interruptions from big interdiction pushes.”
There is much more at the link. Blowing up a few boats is not going to change that logic.
The post Does drug interdiction work? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
1. Rising tensions between Ethiopia and Eritrea.
5. Why did the Harappans decline?
6. Quebec moves against various public displays of religion.
The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
What is generous ex-post but illegal ex-ante?
Cleveland.com has the story:
Bernie Kosar gives large check to donor’s family days after life-saving liver transplant By Molly Walsh
"CLEVELAND, Ohio — Former Browns quarterback Bernie Kosar marked Thanksgiving by donating $25,000 to the family of the organ donor who saved his life, just days after he was discharged from University Hospitals following a successful liver transplant."
A meter-long flying neon squid (Ommastrephes bartramii) was found dead on an Israeli beach. The species is rare in the Mediterranean.
If you have too much Lego, then you might want to sell some of it so it can go to a better home. But if you have it all jumbled up in some massive boxes, then you’ve got a long few days ahead of you. By you, I mean my children.
To make this a tiny bit easier, I got Claude (through Cursor) to make a thing to keep track of which pieces we’ve found. Maybe it’ll be useful for you too. Stick in a set number, and it’ll make a checklist of pieces for you. The state is persisted client side, so it’ll survive browser refreshes.
This took no more than 15 mins to build, with most of the time spent adjusting the UI. I've not even looked at the code. Maybe it's a dumpster fire, I don't really care. It took another 15 minutes to remember how to log in to Netlify and how to set up a DNS record and SSL certificate. Bosh.
Anyway, that’s this year’s blog post done.
TAll day: Light vehicle sales for November.
9:15 AM: The Fed will release Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization for October.I’m thankful for your support of Tidy First. Here’s a tidying that I don’t think I’ve talked about before. If you’d like me to give a talk to your team or organization, please:
int x, y
…
int y, x
What’s going on here? X is before y in the first line. That makes sense. Is there some difference in the second line that makes y come before x?
One basic princip…
Welcome back. This has been the longest break from personal writing I’ve taken in nearly 20 years, not counting a few pieces of writing for various work things. During previous Substack breaks, I still had my old ribbonfarm blog going, so those were slowdowns rather than true breaks.
I did a spot of creative cross-training over my 2-month break, making what I have decided to call Bucket Art paintings on my iPad, named for the icon typically used to represent the fill tool in digital painting programs. I just made a gallery page featuring my 39 pieces so far, plus a brief explanation. Here is one of my favorite pieces, Waterfall 5.
The eventual goal is to train a model on these hand-made images. I say hand-made only to indicate that no AI was used, but it’s really half-algorithmic, since the fill and other tools I use are based on simple non-AI algorithms.
The Contraptions Book Club is wrapping up the November read: 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann. Chat thread.
In December, we’ll round out the year with Thomas More’s Utopia, which should be a nice capstone read for our year delving into the 1200-1600 period.
Making bucket art is part of a larger project I have been pursuing this year to become slightly monstrous.
Be Slightly Monstrous is my new motto, replacing Be Slightly Evil, which served me well for 15 years (the eponymous email newsletter that ran 2010-13 resulted in an ebook).
What’s monstrous about bucket art? Mainly that it’s me trying to learn to “see like an AI.” To quote myself from the gallery page:
…Another goal was to try and “see like an image generator” using low-level kernels of the sort used by AI image generators, such as diffusion and stochastic field primitives. I plan to use these images to train an image generator and see if it picks up on the underlying protocol.
Even though I didn’t use AI to generate the initial set, the algorithmic tools I did use are spiritual kin to the low-level kernels buried several stack layers beneath modern AI tools. You could say my attempt to train my synapses on the behavior of the bucket fill algorithms aims to achieve a degree of kernel-level communion with AI. It was either make art or multiply a hundred large matrices by hand. I might do that too.
This transhumanist impulse to merge with machines would, I suspect, be viewed as somewhat monstrous by humanists. These paintings commit a worse sin than merely using AI; they represent an effort to see like AI. Earlier this year, I llmwrote a Lovecraft-inspired short story for Protocolized, The Signal Under Innsmouth, that explores the kind of transhumanism I think I’m experimenting with here. It’s not really about hacking your biology or adding prosthetics to your body, though you can do those things if you like. To me, those are merely on-the-nose fictional devices that gesture at less legible transformations. The real conceit here is about consciously surrendering to a machinic reshaping of your patterns of cognition. Your ways of seeing. Your ways of feeling into reality.
The attempt to refactor my perception with “fill algorithms” lenses kinda worked. I now have good intuitions about how to manipulate intricate flows and oozes of digital paint on textured digital substrates. I am making cunning new plans to apply similar techniques to words.
I’m hoping this new monstrous way of seeing will help me see larger patterns of oozification in the world better. I’ll be readier for the gray goo than most of you.
***
There’s more to seeing like a monster than seeing like AI though. The whole idea started for me with my Jan 10 essay, The Gramsci Gap, riffing on Zizek’s gloss on Gramsci, “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”
Even as I was writing that essay, I had a nagging sense that I was somehow on Team Monster, not Team Human (as Doug Rushkoff once put it at an event where we were predictably arguing opposite sides of a technology debate). That the way out of the gap is to embrace monstrousness in some way. The way Jeff Goldblum embraced being spliced with a fly in The Fly. The trick is to get the splicing just right, which he didn’t.
Here I mean monsters in the sense of the creatures of our fertile mythic imaginations — chimeras, dragons, rakshasas, Lovecraftian horrors. Call these Type I monsters. Not the very different sorts we mean when we talk about deeply twisted humans, such as serial killers, sadists, Trumps, Putins, and Epsteins. Call these Type II monsters.
Both kinds of monsters can be found in the Gramsci Gap, but it’s not until you’re out of the gap that you can tell the difference. Here’s my theory of the difference.
Type I monsters are personifications of aspects of the future we haven’t fully adapted to, including actual humans who have adapted more to the future than most. In time they’ll come to define normal for new kinds of humans.
Type II monsters are ageless manifestations of dark corners of the human genetic heritage that find easy expression in the unaccountable lawlessness and anomie of Gramsci gaps, where they are able to act with open impunity. In time, they will be reined in with new mechanisms.
Some people of course, have seeds of both kinds of monstrousness in them. There is the uncomfortable possibility that the two kinds of monstrousness may even be correlated, explored in Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. Or that Type II traits emerge in the population in a Gramsci gap exactly to the extent that Type I tendencies are suppressed or repressed. Or that all of us have Two Monsters within us. But let’s not worry about those disturbing Cronenbergian possibilities now.
I’m a Type I monster to those who have surrendered less readily to the strange rules of the Permaweird than I have.
It is relative though. People who have surrendered less than I have are obviously fragile, reactionary humanists attached to rigid, caricatured, doomed notions of what it means to be human. Team Stick Figure. People who have surrendered more to the future are of course irredeemably more monstrous than me and will come to a bad end like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly.
You and I of course, are exactly the right level of monstrous to inherit the future and be redeemed by it. Perfect contraptions of being and becoming.
Be Slightly Monstrous then, is a solipsistic motto to be applied relative to your reality tunnel. The key to it is not so much the quantity of monstrousness you surrender to, but the quality of left-behind cartoon humanists who see you as a monster.
It is important to appear the right amount of monstrous to the right people, in the right way. By that measure, I think I’m coming along okay. The right cartoon people find me objectionable.
If nobody finds you at least slightly monstrous, you’re going to die in the Gramsci gap.
***
A strong evolutionary argument can be made that mythic-monster folklore is actually an adaptive cultural response to dangerous environments. See the paper Why Monsters Are Dangerous by Morin and Sobchuk, which I reviewed here. The big idea there is that we imagine monsters to overtrain against extreme risks. People who believe in mythic monsters survive real dangers better.
found another cool paper by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Culture (Seven Theses) that offers a somewhat more abstract model of monsters. Here are the seven theses in the title summarized by ChatGPT:
Thesis I – The Monster’s Body Is a Cultural Body: Monsters embody the fears, desires, and contradictions of the culture that produces them, functioning as cultural texts.
Thesis II – The Monster Always Escapes: Monsters continually return in new forms because they represent anxieties that can never be permanently contained.
Thesis III – The Monster Is the Harbinger of Category Crisis: Monsters provoke fear because they violate and blur established categories, boundaries, and binaries.
Thesis IV – The Monster Dwells at the Gates of Difference: Monsters mark the cultural Other, policing difference through exaggerated depictions of deviance.
Thesis V – The Monster Polices the Borders of the Possible: Monsters reinforce the limits of the thinkable by dramatizing the consequences of transgressing social, moral, or physical boundaries.
Thesis VI – Fear of the Monster Is Really a Kind of Desire: The monster’s forbidden nature both attracts and repels, revealing repressed desires within the culture that imagines it.
Thesis VII – The Monster Stands at the Threshold of Becoming: Monsters embody transformation and liminality, signaling what a culture is in the process of becoming—or fears it might become.
Between these two papers, my evolving view of monsters is captured surprisingly well, so I won’t attempt to elaborate more. I’ll just try to tease out the implications of surrendering to monsterhood. In brief, in 2025, this involves a few elements:
Surrendering gleefully to technological forces and making fun of those who don’t.
Rejecting crisis framings of Gramsci gaps implicit in terms like polycrisis as the tell of trapped minds that are destined to perish in the gap.
Adopting a liminal passage view instead — a Great Weirding that has delivered us into a Permaweird that can be adapted to.
Being skeptical of humanism.
Rejecting the reduction of the experience of the real to the experience of the political.
The Be Slightly Monstrous motto can be seen as an evolution of the Hunter S. Thompson motto “when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” I think that idea is a little too essentialist and self-congratulatory. I don’t think I’m especially weird. My version feels like a more mechanical and conscious profaning of ideas of being and becoming open to all. It’s not about reflexive cocaine-and-acid gonzo aptitudes of special geniuses. Anyone can learn to be slightly monstrous. I think I could even design a $1499 weekend workshop to teach it.
I’m still working out why being slightly monstrous is adaptive, but in brief, being trapped in a Gramsci gap is the same thing as being trapped in obsolete understandings of being and becoming human. To get out, you must become slightly monstrous. The main symptom of being so trapped is being unable to feel time. There is no future or past. Only the crushing siege of the gyrating, atemporal present, experienced in a fearful, joyless cognitive huddle focused on narrow consensus cares. Retreating from the public body politic to cozier retreats does not help. Time remains as absent in private group chats as in public squares.
This is the great trick played on us by politics in a Gramsci gap — convincing us that all there is to existence is the buffet of zugzwangs it chooses to present to us. That to let the mind wander away from matters it insistently, relentlessly draws us to, is to cease to exist as a human entirely. That the only way to continue existing is to remain frozen in a beautiful, doomed humanism. That all decisive moves are moves towards unacceptable monstrousness.
To the mind trapped in a Gramsci gap, a mind that wanders away to strange new cares is necessarily the mind of a monster. Which is why that is a monstrousness worth surrendering to.
To be slightly monstrous is to learn to feel time again. And the main sign that you’re succeeding is that others increasingly can’t see you as human, especially those who believe most intensely in their own humanity.
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(Originally published in Japanese in Esquire Japan, October 2025)
Some twenty-three years ago in Tokyo, I used to eat at a funny little tendon shop called Imoya. I was a student at Waseda University back then, and this place was a campus staple. Tendon, when done well, can be divine, and Imoya was divine through and through.
The shop was run by the crankiest husband and wife you ever met. The whole place was just seven or eight counter seats around an open kitchen. The husband apparently lived in the attic of the shop. A little hatch in the ceiling opened and down fell a ladder. Up he climbed like a spider. (So went the college kid lore.) The wife lived down the road a few miles away in Iidabashi and walked back and forth each day. But together they had decided that their community role — as a cantankerous duo — was to provide as many delicious bowls of tendon to as many students for as cheaply as they could. I forget the precise cost, but it was probably about ¥500. Boy was it voluminous. And I think a fat ōmori heaping was free. But they had rules, and you had better obey those rules.
An interesting paper based on an idea:
We investigate the implications of heterogeneous employer learning on education signaling and workers sorting across industries. In the equilibrium of our model, higher-ability workers join industries with faster employer learning speeds, resulting in a matching distortion of workers and industries. In addition, our results are robust to varying degrees of asymmetric employer learning, and establish that industry choice itself serves as a signal of worker ability. Finally, our theoretical approach suggests a novel perspective on a heretofore neglected labor market puzzle, i.e., why few of the richest individuals have obtained higher degrees of education.
That is from Yuhan Chen, Thomas Jungbauer, and Michael Waldman. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The post Education Signaling and Employer Learning Heterogeneity appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
NGC 6888, also known as the Crescent Nebula, is a
This was one of the weakest years in my lifetime for movies, and with few that would count as truly great. Here are the ones I liked:
Soundtrack for a Coup d’Etat
Flow
I’m Still Here
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Gazer
The Shrouds
Warfare
Oh, Hi
Weapons
Sorry, Baby
Red Rooms (actually 2023 but it deserves a mention anyway)
Hamnet
What else?
The post Best movies of 2025 appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
A Soyuz rocket launched on Thursday carrying Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergei Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev, as well as NASA astronaut Christopher Williams, for an eight-month mission to the International Space Station. The trio of astronauts arrived at the orbiting laboratory without incident.
However, on the ground, there was a serious problem during the launch with the ground systems that support processing of the vehicle before liftoff at Site 31, located at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
In a terse statement issued Thursday night on the social media site Telegram, the Russian space corporation that operates Soyuz appeared to downplay the incident: “The launch pad was inspected, as is done every time a rocket is launched. Damage to several launch pad components was identified. Damage can occur after launch, so such inspections are mandatory worldwide. The launch pad’s condition is currently being assessed.”
“This is Bach, and it rocks/ It’s a rock block of Bach/ That he learned in the school/ Called the school of hard knocks” — Tenacious D
Has culture stagnated, at least in the United States? There are a number of prominent writers who argue that it has. For example, Adam Mastroianni blames cultural stagnation on risk aversion resulting from longer lives and lower background risk:
Ted Gioia, meanwhile, blames risk-averse entertainment companies for monopolizing content with IP and using dopamine-hacking algorithms to monopolize consumers’ attention:
This being the 2020s, both writers bring plenty of data to support their arguments. I won’t recap it here, but basically, they look at various domains of cultural production like books, movies, music, TV, and games, and they show that:
Old media products (including sequels, remakes, and adaptations) have taken over from new products.
Popularity is now more concentrated among a small number of products.
I find that evidence to be fairly convincing. The counterargument, delivered by folks like Katherine Dee and Spencer Kornhaber, is that creative effort has shifted to new formats like memes, short-form videos, and podcasts. I think that’s definitely true, but I can’t help thinking that this explanation is insufficient. Regardless of what’s happening on TikTok, the fact that the cost of making movies has declined by so much should mean that there are more good new movies being made; instead, we’re just getting flooded with sequels and remakes. Something else is going on, and maybe Mastroianni and/or Gioia are on to something.
But anyway, there’s another thinker that I particularly like to read on cultural issues, and that’s David Marx. Marx, in my opinion, is a woefully underrated thinker on culture. His first book, Ametora — about the history of postwar Japanese men’s fashion — is an absolute classic. His second book, Status and Culture, is a much heavier and more complex tome that wrestles with the question of why people make art; it is also worth a read, although I think there are lots of things it overlooks.
Back in the spring of 2023, I met David in a park in Tokyo. We walked around, and he asked me what book I thought he should write next. I asked him to tell us where internet culture — and by extension, all of culture — should go from here. He replied that if he were going to write a book like that, he would first have to write a cultural history of the 21st century; if we’re going to know where we ought to go, we need to understand where we’ve been.
Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century is that book.
Most of Blank Space is just a narration of all the important things that happened in American pop culture since the year 2000. You can read all about the New York hipster scene, the startling influence of Pharrell Williams and the Neptunes, the debauchery of Terry Richardson, the savvy self-marketing of Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, and so on. You can learn a bit about “poptimism” and 4chan memes. You can relive the excitement of the early Obama years and the disillusionment that followed the rise of Trump. And so on.
It’s the kind of retrospective that TIME magazine used to do, but higher-quality and book-length — a good book to have on your shelf.
In most authors’ hands, just as in old issues of TIME, this would come off as a jumbled laundry list — just one damn cultural factoid after another. But David Marx’s talent as a writer is such that he can make it feel like a coherent story. In his telling, 21st century culture has been all about the internet, and the overall effect of the internet has been a trend toward bland uniformity and crass commercialism.
In fact, Marx’s skill at narrative history sometimes gets in the way of his attempts at grand theorizing. He’s so good at distilling the look and sound of the 2000s decade — hip-hop inspired streetwear, Neptunes tracks, and so on — that he ends up bringing the decade to life in vivid color. This ends up making it very difficult to think of the 2000s as a forgettable and bland period.
Other times, Marx’s own personal tastes lead to gaps in the narrative. He doesn’t deal much with film as a medium, and ends up missing the fact that the 2000s were a golden decade for indie film. Culture is not entirely defined by music and fashion.
Marx also doesn’t deal much with the explosion of Japanese cultural imports to the U.S. in the 2000s and 2010s — which is ironic, since that was the topic of his first book. Even if you’re only telling the story of American culture, foreign imports are important, since they can crowd out domestic products — kids can go read manga instead of comic books, watch anime instead of American TV, and so on. Globalization isn’t the same as stagnation; even if the center of production moves offshore, something is still being produced and consumed.
These are nitpicks, but the book’s narrative methodology has a more serious weakness. The long tail interferes with any attempt to tell a coherent story of culture. If everyone listens to a few mainstream bands, you can name those bands and identify the sound of a decade; if everyone is listening to a tiny indie band that only they and 100 other people follow on Soundcloud, the task of describing the totality of those bands is hopeless.
Sometimes I feel that as a card-carrying Gen X hipster, Marx over-indexes on the Nirvana Moment — that day in early 1992 when a flannel-wearing post-punk band from Seattle dethroned Michael Jackson on the charts. That was a cool moment, to be sure, as is any time that an indie upstart forces its way into the mainstream. But we can’t expect that to be the norm. Of the early 2020s, and the inability of TikTok creators to get rich, Marx writes:
Grassroots cultural activity posed little threat to the celebrity aristocracy of movies, TV, and supermodels. Only the mainstream could satisfy the eternal need for a shared culture…At best the monoculture could undergo slight cosmetic changes: a rotating cast of “royal houses” in the pop aristocracy rather than a true revolution.
But it seems to me that this is how things usually go. The reason it was so impressive and noteworthy that Nirvana dethroned Michael Jackson in 1992 is that that kind of thing almost never happens. Usually, the mainstream stays mainstream, and indie stays indie, and you never get to see your indie heroes overturn the firmament. You just sit there enjoying them because they’re yours — your little piece of the long tail. Hipsters don’t have to be revolutionaries — you can just sit there being smug about how only you and your five friends know about the world’s greatest band, instead of fuming about how they never make it onto the Billboard Hot 100.
What of the evidence mustered by Mastroianni and Gioia, that popularity is becoming concentrated among a smaller and smaller set of cultural aristocrats? This doesn’t disprove the idea of the long tail. It may be that the distribution of taste is becoming more leptokurtotic — more concentrated at the center, but more widely distributed at the fringes:
In the worlds of online video, graphic novels, TV, and fashion, this is almost certainly what is happening. The best fashion styles in the world are not being shown on the runway at Paris Fashion Week; they are created by some 21-year-old Japanese fashion student who woke up in an odd mood. The best YouTube videos have only 10k or maybe 100k views, and the best TikTok videos probably have a lot less than that. And in my opinion, there are more awesome niche graphic novels being made now than ever before, even though each one has a relatively small audience. (Update: As a commenter pointed out, webcomics are another medium experiencing an explosion of creativity right now.)
As for television, in the 1990s everyone watched Seinfeld and Frasier and Friends, and a few people had heard of The State or Mad TV, but in the 2010s there was an explosion of mid-sized comedy shows that catered to more niche senses of humor — Party Down, Key & Peele, Kim’s Convenience, Letterkenny, Parks & Recreation, and so on.
But in some other domains, like books, traditional film, and music, this is almost certainly not what’s happening. Unlike with YouTube videos, I haven’t discovered a few cool indie films in the 2020s that no one else appreciates — I have discovered zero. The same goes for science fiction books (my genre of choice). That’s a strong indicator that there really just aren’t many out there; word of mouth is powerful, and lots of people share my general tastes, and word gets around. The same is true of musical artists, to a lesser degree; I discover a few awesome new ones here and there, but in general there were a lot more cool niche indie artists in earlier decades.1 If more existed, I would find them.
I’m thus playing a bit of devil’s advocate here. The stagnation that Marx, Mastroianni, and Gioia perceive is real, even if it’s not evenly distributed. The bland omnivorous taste that Marx complains about is a very real thing in the age of social media. Taylor Swift may be our modern Michael Jackson, but there’s no Nirvana to challenge her. Meanwhile, Dee and Kornhaber’s argument that memes are the true art of the modern age rings a bit hollow — I’ve seen more memes than I can count, and while a few of them are clever, almost none are brilliant, and the overwhelming majority are just boring political shouting.
So yes, Marx is right, even though he’s not completely right. The utter dominance of boring unoriginal pablum in music, film, and literature cries out for an explanation. Michael Jackson was the King of Pop, but his sound was still original. Indiana Jones was a blockbuster hit, but it was wildly creative and incredibly fun. What movie can we say that about today? Slowly, one cultural medium after another is having the life squeezed out of it by some nefarious force, even if others are still going strong.
What is that force? Unlike David, I’m highly skeptical of the idea that culture moves autonomously — I don’t think that as a society, we just suddenly decide to do things differently. Marx’s story works great as a narrative, but less well as a causal theory — you can’t just call on people to be less “poptimist” and expect any real results.
Mastroianni’s hypothesis about risk aversion is somewhat plausible — who wants to be a starving artist when you can design characters for Reddit and make six figures? But the gradual upward creep of risk aversion can’t explain why some cultural fields have flowered with creativity in recent decades. As for Gioia’s hypotheses about monopoly power and predatory algorithms, this might explain why the mainstream is more stagnant, but it can’t explain why there are so few great indie bands in the age of Soundcloud.
My own personal guess is that at least part of this force must be technological in nature. I wrote about this idea back in May:
I won’t reiterate my whole argument — this post is supposed to be a review of David Marx’s book, so I don’t want to make it all about my own ideas. But the basic thesis is that novel cultural production comes from novel technology — that when we invent the pickup mic, we predictably get several decades of electric guitar music, as people play around and discover what things are possible with electric guitars. But eventually, the space of cultural possibilities opened up by a new technology gets “mined out”, progress falters, and a canon gets canonized.
This idea explains why string orchestras are cover bands — the basic technology of violins and flutes and oboes was mostly perfected centuries ago, so classical music progresses only glacially. It can also potentially explain the unevenness of cultural creativity in recent decades. Obviously, short form video became great when camera phones became ubiquitous. Books, on the other hand, are only a little easier to write than before (thanks to word processors replacing typewriters), so it makes sense that creativity in literature might be flagging a bit.
This technological explanation is fairly pessimistic. It ties artistic output to technological progress, which we don’t really know how to accelerate. And worse, it implies that every burst of cultural creativity is inherently temporary.
But I doubt this is the only way that technology affects artistic output. In the chapter of Blank Space on how to restore cultural creativity, Marx calls for a more fragmented internet culture that allows subcultures to flourish before their innovations get harvested by the mainstream. Writers like Steven Viney2 and Yomi Adegoke have long complained that subcultural distinctiveness is impossible in the age of the internet. If artists can only make art while standing in the middle of the town square, you’re going to get more boring art.
I couldn’t agree more — and that’s why I think the ongoing fragmentation of the internet away from mass social media and into small private group chats is going to be healthy for cultural output.
Most of Marx’s other recommendations for restoring cultural innovation revolve around the idea of restoring taste, gatekeeping, and criticism to pop culture. While I can imagine that this might help, the idea is only vaguely sketched out in the final pages. Blank Space works well as a history, but doesn’t have much time for prescriptions. For that, we’ll have to wait for a future David Marx book — the one I requested back in the park in 2023.
I’m sure that when that one comes out, it will be great. In the meantime, Blank Space is a fun read, and you should buy it.
Perhaps this is because I’ve gotten older and my tastes have ossified. But if so, why do I feel like this is such a golden age for TV and graphic novels and short-form video? Why would being an old fogey only ossify one’s taste in music and film, but not in other media?
Viney’s contribution here is dripping with irony, since he wrote his article for Vice, a magazine whose whole reason for existence was to find obscure subcultures and use the internet to expose those subcultures to the mainstream.
We went to Detroit a couple of months ago and found something quite odd.
The start-up Remora (great name) has built a contraption that affixes to diesel trucks and trains. The machine hoovers up the carbon dioxide spewed out by the vehicles, cleans it and then stores it so that it can be sold to beverage makers like Coca-Cola and Pepsi and other companies in need of high-quality CO₂.
Paul Gross, the CEO of Remora, went to Yale, which I only bring up because Yale has done a miserable job at producing tech start-ups over the years. So, good for Yale here.
While working on this piece, we also learned that Coke and Pepsi buy tons of mined CO₂, which boggled my mind.
Gross’s big thesis with Remora is that we’re not close to putting electric batteries into big trucks and trains and that his company’s technology provides a meaningful climate change-friendly stopgap.
Remora has immense challenges ahead of it, and this machine, while cool and useful, comes with a lot of added complexity that I’m not sure truck and train suppliers will go for. That said, I was impressed with what Remora has already built and, well, the vehicle makers will indeed pick this technology up if there’s enough money to be made in the carbon trade.
This episode features the first appearance of our Brex Mobile, which we call Sexy Brexxy. It’s going to be a star in the coming weeks. The fine finance gurus at Brex make our video series possible, and they will make your finances better. Learn more at www.brex.com/corememory.
On Sept. 15, 2008 Lehman Brothers failed. Within weeks the whole U.S. financial system was caught in the downward spiral of a massive bank run, on a scale not seen since the 1930s. Yet there was an important difference from the 1930s bank runs: in 2008, the panic mainly resulted in flight from “shadow banks,” nonbank institutions that performed bank-like functions. Conventional banks were largely immune from the 2008 panic because deposit insurance and federal regulations – a consequence of the 1930s bank runs – protected them.
While the U.S. economy was already in recession when Lehman fell, the financial crisis pushed it off a cliff into a deep recession. Despite frantic efforts to stabilize the financial markets, including large bailouts and huge lending by the Federal Reserve, America lost 6 million jobs in the year following Lehman’s fall. Total employment didn’t return to pre-recession levels until 2014. The share of prime-working-age adults with jobs remained depressed until the late 2010s:
The clear lesson of 2008 is that effective financial regulation is essential. For three generations after the great bank runs of 1930-31, America avoided “systemic” banking crises — crises that threaten the whole financial system, as opposed to individual institutions. This era, which Yale’s Gary Gorton calls the Quiet Period, was the result of New-Deal-era protections — especially deposit insurance — and regulations that limited banks’ risk-taking.
But post 1980, finance was increasingly deregulated. In particular, the government failed to extend bank-type regulation to shadow banks that posed systemic bank-type risks. And the crisis came.
In a way, the laxity that made the 2008 crisis possible was understandable. By the 2000s nobody in government or the financial markets remembered what a real financial crisis was like. And no, watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” on Christmas Day doesn’t count.
But here we are in 2025, and 2008 wasn’t that long ago. Many of us still have vivid memories of the gut-wrenching panic that gripped the world when Lehman fell. Yet Donald Trump’s allies and cronies are now moving rapidly to dismantle the precautionary regulations introduced after 2008 to reduce the risk of future financial crises. I say “allies and cronies” advisedly. There’s no indication that Trump himself has any idea what’s happening on his watch. But key players in Congress, within the administration, and, alas, at the Federal Reserve, are apparently determined to make a 2008 rerun possible.
The MAGA war on financial stability is being waged largely on two fronts. First, there’s an ongoing effort within some parts of the Federal Reserve to drastically weaken bank supervision — oversight of banks to prevent them from taking risks that could threaten the financial system.
The Fed has multiple roles: in addition to setting interest rates, it also has primary responsibility for bank supervision.
The Fed is supposed to be quasi-independent, and so far it has preserved its interest-rate-setting independence in the face of intense pressure by Trump to cut rates. Yet a Trumpian agenda is attempting to overtake the Fed’s bank supervision operations. In June, Michelle Bowman, a Trump appointee, became the Fed’s vice-chair of supervision. She is in the process of reducing staffing at the Fed’s supervisory and regulatory unit by 30 percent, while hiring new staffers drawn from the banking industry.
Bowman is expected to substantially loosen capital requirements. Capital requirements – requirements that a bank’s shareholders put a significant amount of their own money at risk to fund loans, and not just depositors’ money – are a critical component of reducing risk throughout the banking sector. Bowman has also sent out a memo sharply curtailing the ability of Fed staff to issue warnings about what they consider risky bank practices.
While it’s impossible to predict the precise effect of any of these moves, Bowman’s actions will clearly increase the banking industry’s profits in the short run while increasing the risk of another financial crisis – a risk that will inevitably fall on taxpayers’ shoulders, as they did in 2008.
The second front of MAGA’s war on financial stability is on behalf of the crypto industry. The Trump administration and its allies in Congress — including, I’m sorry to say, a number of Democrats in this case — are moving to promote wider use of crypto. In particular, the GENIUS Act (gag me with an acronym), passed in July, aims to promote stablecoins. And the fact is that stablecoins are effectively an alternative, weakly regulated and poorly supervised form of banking.
What are stablecoins? They’re privately issued tokens supposedly fixed in value at one dollar. They are, in effect, sort of a digital version of the bank notes that circulated during America’s private banking era in the 19thcentury — an era in which gold coins were the only official U.S. currency, with paper money consisting of notes issued by private banks that promised to redeem these notes for gold or silver on demand. The most famous of these bank notes was the $10 “Dix” note issued by the Citizens’ Bank of Louisiana, which may have given the South its nickname:
Private banking had many serious problems: private banks frequently collapsed, thereby losing depositors’ money. Without effective government supervision, private banks could issue notes without the resources to honor their promise to redeem those notes on demand. Indeed, there was a proliferation of “wildcat banking” — establishing banks in remote locations “where the wildcats roamed,” thus making it difficult for noteholders to present their notes for redemption.
How do stablecoins compare with 19th century private banking? One fact rarely mentioned about the stablecoin industry is that it’s dominated by two big issuers, Tether and USDC, with the rest consisting of a grab-bag of minor coins that collectively are much smaller than either:
Tether has attracted the most scrutiny, in large part because it has, as The Economist puts it, become “money launderers’ dream currency.”
Leaving aside its role in facilitating global crime and viewing it as in effect a bank, how sound is Tether? On Wednesday S&P Global Ratings issued a scathing report, questioning the quality of Tether’s assets and noting that the company is highly secretive, giving outsiders no good way to assess its claims to be financially stable.
But aren’t government regulators keeping an eye on Tether? Um, no. Tether isn’t a U.S. company. It’s headquartered in and overseen by El Salvador, whose authoritarian ruler Nayib Bukele is best known in financial circles for his expensive, failing attempt to force Salvadorans to use Bitcoin as currency. El Salvador’s prudential guidelines for Tether are very lax, and how much faith do we have that even these weak rules are being enforced?
How did Tether respond to S&P’s assessment? With conspiracy theories, accusing S&P of being a tool of the “traditional finance propaganda machine.”
In short, as far as I can tell, Tether is a 21st century version of a wildcat bank, issuing tokens while deliberately making it hard for anyone to know whether it has the resources to honor them. And it’s not an outlier — it’s most of the industry.
Does Tether satisfy the rules of the GENIUS Act? No. This means that in principle, once the act is fully implemented, Tether won’t be able to issue its coins in the United States. The company has floated the idea of issuing a separate coin that does obey GENIUS rules, but that hasn’t happened yet.
Maybe other stablecoins will emerge that do honor U.S. rules. But there are worrisome loopholes in those rules that are likely to make stablecoins risky. And anyway, with resources and staff for financial supervision being slashed, how will these rules be enforced? A special source of concern is the worry that stablecoins will draw money out of conventional bank deposits into institutions that will, at best, be less well regulated.
Why are Trump and his allies undermining financial stability? There may be an element of free-market dogma. But as always with this administration, you shouldn’t underestimate the importance of simple corruption. Tether is closely connected with the financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald, formerly run by Howard Lutnick, Trump’s secretary of commerce. On joining the government, Lutnick left his role at Cantor Fitzgerald — and handed it over to his sons.
This post is already long, so I’ll stop with a warning: Along with its many other sins, the Trump administration is doing its best to make a future financial crisis more likely. I hope the Democrats are paying attention and won’t let themselves be seduced by Wall Street and, worse, the blandishments of the crypto bros. Because if they don’t, they could set themselves for a 2008-type crash during a Democratic administration. And we can guess who will get the blame.
MUSICAL CODA
Wildcat banks, cats, whatever
In June 2025 Sam Altman claimed about ChatGPT that "the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours".
In March 2020 George Kamiya of the International Energy Agency estimated that "streaming a Netflix video in 2019 typically consumed 0.12-0.24kWh of electricity per hour" - that's 240 watt-hours per Netflix hour at the higher end.
Assuming that higher end, a ChatGPT prompt by Sam Altman's estimate uses:
0.34 Wh / (240 Wh / 3600 seconds) = 5.1 seconds of Netflix
Or double that, 10.2 seconds, if you take the lower end of the Netflix estimate instead.
I'm always interested in anything that can help contextualize a number like "0.34 watt-hours" - I think this comparison to Netflix is a neat way of doing that.
This is evidently not the whole story with regards to AI energy usage - training costs, data center buildout costs and the ongoing fierce competition between the providers all add up to a very significant carbon footprint for the AI industry as a whole.
(I got some help from ChatGPT to dig these numbers out, but I then confirmed the source, ran the calculations myself, and had Claude Opus 4.5 run an additional fact check.)
Tags: netflix, ai-energy-usage, openai, ai, llms, ai-ethics, sam-altman, generative-ai, chatgpt
Bluesky Thread Viewer thread by @simonwillison.net
I've been having a lot of fun hacking on my Bluesky Thread Viewer JavaScript tool with Claude Code recently. Here it renders a thread (complete with demo video) talking about the latest improvements to the tool itself.
I've been mostly vibe-coding this thing since April, now spanning 15 commits with contributions from ChatGPT, Claude, Claude Code for Web and Claude Code on my laptop. Each of those commits links to the transcript that created the changes in the commit.
Bluesky is a lot of fun to build tools like this against because the API supports CORS (so you can talk to it from an HTML+JavaScript page hosted anywhere) and doesn't require authentication.
Tags: projects, tools, ai, generative-ai, llms, cors, bluesky, vibe-coding, coding-agents, claude-code
Soft-tissue injuries are often underestimated because they lack the dramatic visuals of broken bones or open wounds. Yet strains, sprains, whiplash, and ligament or tendon damage can cause persistent pain, restricted movement, and long-term complications. When you speak with an attorney about your accident injuries, they help ensure that even these less visible injuries are properly documented and fairly represented in claims, so victims receive the compensation that reflects the full impact of their condition.
Soft-tissue injuries frequently require more specialized diagnostics to confirm, in contrast to fractures, which are immediately visible on X-rays. To ascertain the degree of ligament, tendon, or muscle damage, MRI scans, physical examinations, and continuous monitoring are typically required. To accurately document the condition, medical professionals must evaluate its severity, range of motion, and impact on daily activities.
The presentation of these injuries may be deceptive. Over time, stiffness, nerve irritation, or chronic pain may develop from the initial minor symptoms. Delaying treatment puts victims at risk of making their injuries worse or complicating their medical records, which may make it more difficult for them to prove the full extent of their harm in a claim. Thus, it is crucial to have accurate documentation from the beginning.
Soft-tissue injuries can have long-term consequences for one’s career and physical well-being. People may still have persistent pain, decreased mobility, or weakness in the afflicted areas even after their initial recovery. Daily tasks like driving, lifting, and prolonged sitting may become difficult due to these limitations.
Complications at work are frequent. Soft-tissue injuries can worsen in jobs requiring manual labor, repetitive motion, or prolonged standing, sometimes making it impossible for victims to return to full-duty work right away. Additionally, persistent discomfort may have an impact on mental health, productivity, and focus. Ongoing medical care, therapy, and lost wages can cause financial strain, which emphasizes the significance of accounting for long-term effects in any compensation claim.
Soft-tissue injuries are less obvious than fractures, so it can be difficult for victims to get just compensation. Insurance companies may undervalue claims or contest the injury completely, claiming that the damage is insignificant or unconnected to the incident. This is where having legal counsel becomes essential.
Personal injury lawyers can assist in making sure every detail of the injury is fully recorded. This includes statements about limitations in day-to-day living, expert evaluations, therapy sessions, and medical records. In order to strengthen the case, legal experts can also offer advice on additional evidence, such as pictures of bruising or swelling and timelines of the development of symptoms. Early consultation guarantees that a claim accounts for both short-term medical expenses and long-term recuperation requirements.
Treating soft-tissue injuries holistically entails more than just medical care. Victims need to monitor their symptoms, the course of their treatment, and any restrictions that interfere with their day-to-day activities. Maintaining thorough documentation aids lawyers in determining the extent and duration of injuries.
Observations about physical limitations, therapy notes, and routine follow-up appointments can all be crucial pieces of evidence. These documents can be used by lawyers to show that the injury is chronic, that it affects quality of life, and that further medical care is required. Expert testimony from physicians or physical therapists can support assertions and elucidate the connection between the injury and the incident.
Soft-tissue injuries frequently present unspoken difficulties that go beyond prompt medical attention. Victims run the risk of accepting settlements that don’t take into consideration ongoing therapy, decreased functionality, or chronic pain if they don’t have the right legal counsel. An experienced lawyer can negotiate with insurance companies, make a thorough case that accurately depicts the full scope of the injury, and assist in budgeting for long-term rehabilitation expenses. Additionally, they help identify potential future issues that could affect a claim’s overall value, like persistent pain or the need for more physical therapy.
Soft-tissue injuries may appear minor at first, but their long-term effects can be significant and far-reaching. Proper documentation, ongoing medical treatment, and strategic legal guidance are essential to ensuring that victims receive fair compensation. When you speak with an attorney about your accident injuries, you secure professional support to accurately reflect the true scope of harm, protect your rights, and plan for both immediate and long-term recovery needs.
Photo: Freepik via their website.
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The post How Soft-Tissue Injuries Create Long-Term Challenges That Many Accident Victims Underestimate appeared first on DCReport.org.
Mini-strokes, or TIAs (Transient Ischemic Attacks), are a huge problem in the ER because they’re easily missed. They happen when blood flow to the brain is briefly blocked, causing temporary symptoms like sudden weakness or trouble speaking. Since the symptoms vanish quickly, everyone—the patient and the medical team—can underestimate the danger. That’s the real threat: this lapse can lead to devastating, permanent strokes, sometimes forcing families to seek legal counsel for fatal injury claims. We absolutely must stop treating a TIA as a minor inconvenience. It’s a loud warning siren, and ignoring it is like putting out a tiny fire and forgetting the house is full of gas.
A TIA is, by definition, a temporary lack of oxygen (ischemia) to a part of the brain, caused by a small clot or blockage, but it shares the exact same underlying mechanism as an ischemic stroke. The key difference is duration, not cause or potential severity. Roughly one in five people who experience a TIA will suffer a full stroke within 90 days, and approximately half of those strokes will occur within the first 48 hours.
This alarming statistic transforms the TIA from a minor neurological “blip” into a high-risk, time-sensitive medical crisis. When a patient arrives in the emergency department (ED) reporting classic TIA symptoms that have since resolved—such as temporary difficulty speaking, sudden weakness on one side, or fleeting vision loss—the ED’s primary mission must shift from mere symptom management to aggressive stroke risk stratification and preventative intervention. Dismissing the event because the symptoms have passed is a profound lapse in care that dramatically increases the patient’s likelihood of suffering a devastating, permanent stroke hours or days later.
Emergency rooms are high-pressure environments where time is the most valuable and scarce resource. TIAs present a unique diagnostic challenge because the physical evidence of the event is fleeting, and initial CT scans may be normal since there is no established, permanent damage yet. This can, unfortunately, lead to a “watch and wait” or “discharge and follow-up” approach, particularly in crowded hospitals. However, the standard of care for a suspected TIA must mirror that of an acute stroke until proven otherwise. This includes immediate, detailed neurological evaluation, crucial laboratory tests, and urgent brain imaging (often an MRI) to look for evidence of recent small strokes that may have been overlooked, as well as vascular imaging (like a CT angiography or MRA) to identify the source of the blockage, such as a severe narrowing of the carotid arteries in the neck. Failing to perform this workup rapidly means missing the critical window—the first 24 to 48 hours—in which medical interventions like clot-busting drugs (in select cases) or aggressive antiplatelet and anticoagulant therapies can be most effective in preventing the full, disabling stroke.
The systemic danger often begins with initial triage. A patient who walks in seemingly fine, reporting only a past symptom, is naturally prioritized below a patient actively experiencing a heart attack or severe trauma. This prioritization is understandable but deadly in the context of a TIA. If the treating physician doesn’t appreciate the statistical urgency, or if institutional protocols don’t mandate an immediate stroke workup for TIA, the patient is left vulnerable.
For instance, a patient might report a 15-minute episode of arm weakness earlier that morning. If they are discharged without an immediate, thorough workup—including identifying and treating risk factors like atrial fibrillation or carotid stenosis—they may suffer a major, permanently disabling stroke at home the next day. The human cost of this delay is catastrophic, turning a potentially preventable event into a lifetime of disability or death. This is why protocols must be ironclad: TIA equals stroke alert. Staff education is paramount, ensuring that every nurse and physician understands that the temporary nature of the symptoms does not equal a temporary threat.
Improving outcomes for TIA patients requires a universal shift in emergency care culture and protocol. Hospitals should implement a mandatory, expedited TIA protocol, similar to the established “Code Stroke” response. This protocol should include expedited neurology consultation, immediate admission for observation and testing within the first 24 hours (especially for high-risk patients), and a clear, non-negotiable checklist for diagnostics. Key to this is utilizing the ABCD² score—a clinical prediction tool that estimates the short-term stroke risk after a TIA based on Age, Blood pressure, Clinical features, Duration of symptoms, and Diabetes. Higher scores necessitate higher urgency. By adopting this aggressive, zero-tolerance approach to TIA, emergency departments can honor their duty to prevent future harm rather than merely reacting to harm that has already occurred. This change is not just medical best practice; it is an ethical imperative.
Mini-strokes (TIAs) demand immediate, urgent attention in the ER—they are not “mini” in importance. Treating a TIA as anything less than an impending full stroke is a risky gamble with a patient’s life. The brief symptom resolution offers a small window for aggressive action to prevent permanent damage. Missing this window due to an error can be devastating, sometimes forcing families to seek legal counsel for fatal injury claims for accountability. We must treat every TIA as an emergency.
Photo: katemangostar via Freepik.
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The post Don’t Wait and See: Why Mini-Strokes Demand Maximum Emergency Attention appeared first on DCReport.org.
Construction sites are full of hazards, and even a small mistake can lead to a serious injury. Protective gear is meant to keep workers safe, but it only works when used correctly. If an accident does happen, knowing how to get legal help after a workplace injury can make a huge difference in securing the benefits you need. Many injuries could have been prevented with proper PPE, yet shortcuts and complacency are all too common. Understanding the risks and taking safety seriously protects both your body and your future.
PPE is your last line of defense against serious injuries on a construction site. Hard hats, gloves, and harnesses may seem simple, but they can prevent life-changing accidents when used correctly. Wearing the right gear every time keeps you safe and lets you focus on the job without unnecessary risk.
Using the right safety gear is only part of staying safe. Many accidents happen because of simple mistakes that can easily be avoided.
Some workers think certain tasks are too minor to require PPE. Even a quick job can expose you to falling objects, sharp edges, or chemical splashes, making every piece of gear essential.
Old or broken PPE may look fine at a glance, but it can fail exactly when you need it most. Inspecting helmets, gloves, and harnesses regularly can prevent injuries that happen because equipment does not perform properly.
Ill-fitting gear can be almost as dangerous as no gear at all. Helmets that are too loose, gloves that are too tight, or harnesses worn incorrectly reduce protection and can even create new hazards.
Some workers take shortcuts, like skipping gloves or eye protection for speed. Following safety procedures every time keeps everyone on the site safer and prevents unnecessary injuries.
PPE left in dirty, wet, or hot conditions can degrade quickly. Keeping equipment clean, dry, and in good repair ensures it works when it matters most.
Ignoring PPE may save a few seconds, but the consequences can last a lifetime. Skipping safety gear can lead to injuries that affect your health, your wallet, and your peace of mind.
Injuries like broken bones, cuts, or head trauma can happen in an instant without proper protection. These injuries can lead to long recovery times and sometimes permanent disability that changes daily life.
Recovering from an injury is not just physical. Stress, anxiety, and trauma can follow an accident, affecting confidence and overall well-being on and off the job.
Medical bills, therapy costs, and lost wages add up quickly when an accident occurs. Even with workers’ compensation, expenses and delays can make financial recovery difficult without proper legal guidance.
A serious injury can force time off work, slowing down your career progress. It can also affect coworkers who rely on your presence, highlighting how PPE protects not just you but the entire team.
Creating a culture of safety starts with the employer. When companies take PPE seriously, workers are more likely to follow suit and stay protected on the job.
Employers should supply gear that fits correctly and is in good condition. High-quality equipment shows workers that safety is a priority and encourages consistent use.
Simply handing out gear is not enough; workers need to know how to wear and care for it. Regular training sessions can prevent common mistakes and ensure everyone understands why PPE is essential.
Supervisors and managers should always wear PPE and follow safety protocols. When leadership models safe behavior, it reinforces the importance of protection for the entire team.
Employers can reward safe practices and address unsafe behavior without blame. Encouraging open communication about hazards and PPE needs helps workers feel responsible and supported in staying safe.
Staying safe on a construction site starts with the individual. Every worker has the power to prevent injuries by using PPE correctly and being proactive about safety.
Take a few moments to check your helmet, gloves, and harness for any signs of damage. Catching problems early can prevent accidents and ensure your gear performs when it matters most.
Never ignore missing or broken PPE. Reporting issues to your supervisor or safety officer protects you and your coworkers from preventable injuries.
Even when in a hurry, never skip gloves, goggles, or other protective gear. Consistent adherence to safety rules keeps you out of harm’s way and sets a positive example for the team.
Construction sites are dynamic environments with constant hazards. Paying attention to moving equipment, falling objects, and other risks allows you to react quickly and stay safe.
Keep gear clean, dry, and properly stored after each use. Proper maintenance extends the life of your equipment and ensures it works effectively every time you need it.
Using PPE consistently can prevent injuries that change lives in an instant. Even with the best precautions, accidents can still happen, and knowing how to get legal help after a workplace injury ensures you are protected. Taking safety seriously today keeps you healthy, confident, and ready for every job tomorrow.
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The post How Inadequate PPE Use Can Lead to Preventable Construction Injuries appeared first on DCReport.org.
W-5 is the newest spacecraft in the company’s “W-Series” of free-flying reentry vehicles designed to orbit Earth, conduct on-orbit processing and return space-made materials.
The post Varda Space launches its fifth mission, extends run of AFRL test flights appeared first on SpaceNews.
SAN FRANCISCO – Italy’s D-Orbit sent satellites and hosted payloads into orbit Nov. 26 aboard two ION orbital transfer vehicles launched on SpaceX’s Transporter-15 rideshare. Italy’s first optical intersatellite link (OISL) mission was onboard the IONs alongside payloads from Spire, Spaceium, Pale Blue, Finland’s Aalto University, Planetek and StardustMe. “With these two missions, we cross […]
The post D-Orbit sends to ION vehicles aloft on SpaceX Transporter-15 appeared first on SpaceNews.
China’s space administration has published a policy blueprint aimed at accelerating development of commercial space and embedding it within its broader national space ambitions.
The post China moves to integrate commercial space into its national space development plan appeared first on SpaceNews.
A few days ago, I was looking at one of the many recent (post-shutdown) polls that show an increasingly dark mood toward the GOP and favorable signs for the Democrats. There was something else in those polls that surprised me: people are really, really down on AI. Now, to be clear, this is sort of cardinal assumption almost bordering on a prejudice in the world I live in: a fairly educated, generally left-leaning world. Everyone’s down on AI in various ways in that world and for many good reasons, even as many also incorporate AI into aspects of their professional lives. (This is a pervasive dichotomy: we’re generally AI skeptic; AI is also allowing our programmers to be vastly more productive.) What struck me though is how widespread the skepticism or hostility is. It goes across demographics and age, political persuasions.
There are many good reasons for this. The explosion of investment in AI poses various near and long term environmental dangers; it might … well, take your job away from you (downer); it’s driving up prices for energy, ubiquitous parts of the modern economy like computer memory; and … oh, there’s that one thing that even the biggest champions of AI talk about and are oddly fascinated by … the non-trivial chance that AI could lead to the extermination of the human race (bummer!). This is the list of horribles that leaves many us thinking what in the actual fuck are we doing here?
What I didn’t fully understand is how deeply this anti-ness appears to have seeped through society. It’s always important to remember — keep reminding yourself to remember — that the people who are TPM’s core audience are pretty steeped in news, tend to have a spectrum of certain educational and ideological characteristics. There’s a whole world of America where news, and political news, is an occasional thing at best. Indeed there are many discrete worlds of America like that. Those are different worlds where people focus on different things, have different views. Not like opposite necessarily, or opposed. Just different. On wavelengths that are hard for you or I to imagine just as ours is inscrutable to them. It’s so easy to forget just how large and variegated America is, in geography, population, diversities of all sorts. So what got my attention is how widespread and seemingly deep-seated this skepticism or hostility is. I think I would have assumed that there’s a lot of America for whom AI is still goofing around on ChatGPT or teens and college students using it to write their term papers. But these polls suggest that’s not the case.
I mentioned earlier this week that a key feature, perhaps the central feature, of the AI boom is that it is being led by the decisions of a very, very small number of individuals. That is a product of the wealth concentration and platform dominance of the contemporary tech economy. For good or ill, this structural feature of the AI economy is undeniable. What came to mind when I saw these numbers was that I wondered how much of this skepticism and opposition is rooted in what I would call anti-oligarchic sentiment: basically the idea that this whole new world of AI is being created and we’re told it’s going to change or disrupt everything and it’s being led by, the big decisions are being decided by, this coterie of centi-billionaires who live in a different universe than everyone else. Put another way, has opposition to AI become another feature of the wealth inequality debate? Inseparable from it?
I’ve been mulling all this for awhile. But my interest was again piqued when I saw this piece from a couple days ago by Dave Weigel in Semafor where he recounts that the big new AI lobbying group went after its first elected-official target and basically got smoked.
If you’re a TPM Reader, you probably don’t need a lot of convincing that Trump’s policy, as opposed to his rhetoric, has always been government by, for and of the rich. But evolving over 2024 and decisively from early 2025 it’s been all those things for the tech and tech-adjacent economy, with AI and crypto moving to the center of administration policy as well as the president’s family’s own business concerns.
I should step back and say or anticipate the response that … of course it’s about the wealth inequality debate, the oligarchy debate; it’s about taking away everyone’s jobs, pushing more wealth to the top, jacking up your electricity bills so the tech lords can have their AI data center arms race. To which I would say that what logically makes sense and may be true as far as our lights can illuminate it has at best a highly uncertain relationship to popular sentiment. And the public opinion data I’ve seen recently suggests to me that AI has become not only a thing in itself but a symbol or perhaps a focal point for perceptions of a society in which all the big decisions get made by the tech lords, for their own benefit and for a future society that doesn’t really seem to have a place for most of the rest of us — the 85% or so of the society that doesn’t get the windfall of the tech-AI future.
A very hard frost; which is news to us after having none almost these three years. Up and to Ironmongers’ Hall by ten o’clock to the funeral of Sir Richard Stayner. Here we were, all the officers of the Navy, and my Lord Sandwich, who did discourse with us about the fishery, telling us of his Majesty’s resolution to give 200l. to every man that will set out a Busse; and advising about the effects of this encouragement, which will be a very great matter certainly. Here we had good rings, and by and by were to take coach; and I being got in with Mr. Creed into a four-horse coach, which they come and told us were only for the mourners, I went out, and so took this occasion to go home. Where I staid all day expecting Gosnell’s coming, but there came an excuse from her that she had not heard yet from her mother, but that she will come next week, which I wish she may, since I must keep one that I may have some pleasure therein.
So to my office till late writing out a copy of my uncle’s will, and so home and to bed.
Modern assault cases often involve accusations shaped by conversations that occurred through text messages, social media platforms, or private messaging apps. These exchanges rarely sit neatly preserved. People delete messages during arguments, devices malfunction, platforms auto-purge data, and screenshots capture only fragments. When someone becomes the target of an accusation, the missing portions of a conversation can create misunderstanding or suspicion. Attorneys who focus on defending against allegations of assault increasingly rely on advanced reconstruction methods to recover digital threads and fill in the gaps left behind.
This work is not simply technical. A partial message or missing exchange can shape perceptions in powerful ways. A single surviving screenshot may not reflect tone, sequence, or intent. The absence of context can cause an ordinary exchange to appear incriminating. Restoring the full conversation often becomes one of the most important elements of the legal strategy when digital records appear incomplete.
The document you provided emphasizes the difficulty courts face when reviewing digital records without context. Deleted messages, clipped screenshots, or isolated images can distort meaning. When a message chain is missing pieces, it becomes easy for the opposing side to present the remaining fragments as if they tell the complete story.
For example, a message saying I cannot believe you did that may appear hostile or accusatory when the earlier portion of the exchange showed it was part of a joke. A late-night text can be framed as an admission when the rest of the conversation that explains it has been erased. Prosecutors often rely on surviving pieces and present them as conclusive evidence. Defense attorneys counter this by showing how incomplete digital records can distort narrative accuracy.
One of the most specific and overlooked parts of digital defense work involves attempting to restore lost information rather than accepting a partial record as complete. Digital forensic specialists can often recover messages deleted from messaging apps, cloud backups, email servers, cached system files, or device storage. Attorneys coordinate closely with these experts to determine what is recoverable and how to authenticate it.
The uploaded text notes the importance of preserving metadata and maintaining accurate timestamps when obtaining digital evidence. This is crucial during reconstruction. If recovered messages show a timestamp that aligns with the remaining fragments, the defense can demonstrate that the conversation was longer than the opposing side suggests. If gaps appear, experts can often determine whether they reflect manual deletion, automated cleanup, or technical malfunction.
In some cases, even when the exact text cannot be restored, metadata may show that messages existed at specific times. This alone can rebut claims that a conversation happened in a particular order or contained only the content provided by the accuser.
Reconstructing missing messages is only half the work. The other half involves demonstrating how gaps affect the meaning of what remains. The document you shared notes that digital evidence can create confusion if presented without proper framing. Defense attorneys use reconstructed material to build a fuller timeline that clarifies tone, intent, and sequence.
For instance, if only the final portion of a heated exchange survives, the opposing side may claim it reflects aggression or guilt. By restoring earlier messages that show emotional buildup, conflicting statements, or even humor, the defense can prevent mischaracterization. Attorneys often create visual timelines or annotated exhibits that show how each piece fits into the overall conversation.
When full recovery is impossible, attorneys still use expert testimony to explain what the missing gaps likely contained based on metadata, platform behavior, and known message patterns. This helps prevent anyone from viewing incomplete evidence as a full representation of events.
Not every missing message is intentionally deleted. Some platforms use expiration settings that remove messages automatically. Others clear data during updates or device resets. The uploaded document discusses how even small technical details can influence credibility and how courts increasingly scrutinize them. Defense teams clarify whether missing information resulted from user action or automated processes.
This distinction matters. If a person never altered their settings, yet messages disappeared due to system design, that fact removes suspicion and shows that the absence of messages does not indicate intent to conceal information.
Once recovered material and metadata are organized, attorneys craft a narrative that restores continuity. The goal is not merely to show that more messages existed but to demonstrate how the entire conversation reflects a different picture of the interaction. This protects clients from accusations built on fragments that lack the context needed for fair assessment.
Reconstructed messages can show mutual disagreement rather than one-sided hostility. They can reveal mixed emotions rather than clear admissions. They can show that initial statements were clarified or corrected later in the conversation. By rebuilding the digital exchange, attorneys ensure that the case is grounded in accuracy rather than assumption. This type of work is particularly important for individuals defending against allegations of assault, since misunderstandings often hinge on a single text or a single screenshot that does not tell the entire story.
Fragmented or deleted digital conversations can influence the direction of an assault case in ways that are both powerful and misleading. Attorneys who focus on reconstructing missing digital threads provide essential protection for clients whose recorded interactions do not tell the whole story. Through forensic recovery, metadata analysis, and careful narrative reconstruction, they ensure that digital evidence reflects events truthfully rather than through the distortions created by missing pieces. This work is meticulous and technical but can be decisive in achieving a fair and accurate outcome.
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The post Reconstructing the Missing Pieces: How Attorneys Rebuild Deleted or Fragmented Digital Conversations in Assault Defense appeared first on DCReport.org.
Modern legal cases often require more than traditional witness statements and basic evidence. Investigators now rely on new scientific methods to understand what people were thinking and feeling during key moments. These tools offer insight into human behavior that was once impossible to measure. They have also become essential resources for anyone seeking trusted defense against serious charges when the details of intent matter most.
Behavioral forensics focuses on the examination of human actions and reactions. Experts study speech patterns, decision-making, and emotional cues. These behaviors help build a clearer picture of what happened during an incident. This field relies on psychology, neuroscience, and communication science.
It helps explain how stress or fear can influence actions. Investigators use these findings to understand why a person behaved a certain way. It adds context that can be essential in complex legal cases.
Stress affects the body in predictable ways. Heart rate increases, breathing changes, and small facial movements appear. These shifts can indicate how a person felt during a specific event. Experts now use stress pattern analysis to study recordings, interviews, and digital data.
This information helps determine whether someone was confused, afraid, or under pressure. Stress responses can support or challenge claims made in a case. They provide an additional layer of insight beyond spoken words.
A person’s voice changes under stress. Tone, pace, and pitch may fluctuate. Even small pauses can reveal emotional strain. Behavioral analysts study these vocal cues to understand what the speaker may have been experiencing.
They compare standard speech patterns to those recorded during stressful events. These insights can help investigators assess credibility. They also help clarify whether someone’s statements align with their emotional state.
Modern tools enable experts to analyze behavior in ways previously impossible. High-resolution video, biometric sensors, and computer algorithms help identify subtle emotional reactions.
Software can detect microexpressions and posture shifts. These signs may indicate discomfort or uncertainty. Technology adds accuracy to behavioral forensics. It ensures findings are based on measurable information rather than guesswork.
Intent is often central to legal investigations. Understanding why someone acted a certain way can change the outcome of a case. Behavioral forensics helps determine whether actions were planned, impulsive, or influenced by stress.
It shows how the person responded in critical moments. This approach helps create a balanced view of the situation. It allows investigators to consider emotional and psychological factors alongside physical evidence.
People often behave differently in emergencies. Their reactions may seem unusual or suspicious without proper context. Stress analysis helps explain these behaviors. It shows how fear or shock can affect judgment.
This context prevents unfair assumptions. It supports a deeper understanding of the human response during difficult circumstances.
Investigators now study how people respond during questioning. They observe body language, eye movement, and speech rhythm. These patterns help determine whether a person is confused, overwhelmed, or struggling to recall events.
They also help identify when someone may be withholding information. This approach improves interview accuracy. It reduces the chance of misinterpreting emotional reactions as dishonesty.
People leave digital traces that reveal habits and emotional patterns. Text messages, search history, and social media activity can show stress levels or decision-making styles.
Behavioral experts analyze these digital footprints. They look for shifts in behavior before and after significant events. This information becomes part of a broader investigation. It helps clarify timelines and emotional states.
While behavioral forensics is powerful, it must be used carefully. Experts must avoid assumptions or overinterpretation. Proper training ensures accurate analysis. Clear guidelines help maintain fairness in investigations.
These standards protect the integrity of the process. They ensure that behavioral evidence is reliable and responsibly applied.
Traditional evidence often tells only part of the story. Behavioral analysis fills in gaps by revealing emotional and psychological context. This helps create a more complete understanding of events.
It also allows investigators to reach more balanced conclusions. Behavioral evidence strengthens complex cases by connecting physical actions with human emotion.
Behavioral forensics and stress pattern analysis are reshaping how legal investigations are conducted. They offer insight into human behavior that was once difficult to measure. These tools help reveal intent and clarify actions during critical moments. They have also become necessary resources for those seeking trusted defense against serious charges when understanding behavior is essential to the truth.
FREEDOM OF THE PRESS NEEDS YOUR SUPPORT. WE NEED YOUR SUPPORT.
The post Why Behavioral Forensics and Stress Pattern Analysis Are Becoming Critical Tools in Modern Legal Investigations appeared first on DCReport.org.
Hey folks! This week is Thanksgiving in the United States and I’ve opted to take advantage of the break in teaching to focus down on getting some chapter revisions done, so we’ll be back to hoplites next week.
In the meantime, if you are looking for things to read or watch, I have a few suggestions.
First, as always, there is a new Pasts Imperfect (with mummies!) which always features a great classics roundup.
There’s also another video with Roel Konijnendijk reviewing depictions of ancient Greek warfare in popular culture, in this case taking a crack at some scenes in AC: Odyssey. And I’m glad he is doing that because I assume it is delaying the 57-post long bluesky thread he is inevitably going to write about everything I am getting wrong about hoplites.
Finally, if instead you want a bit of inside higher education grumbling, I ran across this older Angela Collier video on adjuncts and the nature of adjuncting which – while depressing – is accurate and worth watching. We ought to demand that our public higher education be better than this: students deserve teachers who have the time and resources to properly prepare classes and instructors deserve salaries they can live on and finally the public deserves real scholar-researcher-teachers for their money, not overworked, underpaid adjuncts (so the money can go to upper-level administrators or football coaches instead).
In any case, I hope everyone who celebrates had a Happy Thanksgiving and we’ll be back next week with more hoplites!
Links for you. Science:
Scientists tie lupus to a virus nearly all of us carry
Drop Whatever You’re Doing Right This Instant, There’s Big Spider Web News
A Surprise Flu Variant Threw Off the Vaccine. Get Ready for a Brutal Winter
Let Us Now Celebrate Our Extinct Short King, Nanotyrannus
Remnants of Lost Continents Are Everywhere. Now, We Finally Know Why.
Scientists Make Genetic Breakthrough with 39,000-Year-Old Mammoth RNA
Other:
The Majority AI View
Families of DC-area immigrant drivers snatched by feds stuck with tow bill
Inside the Credit Card Battle to Win America’s Richest Shoppers
Democratic governors form a public health alliance in a rebuke of Trump
SNAP Benefits Update: Trump Admin Says ‘Everyone’ Will Have To Reapply
As Summers Sought Clandestine Relationship With Woman He Called a Mentee, Epstein Was His ‘Wing Man’ (Summers should be expelled from the Harvard faculty for this)
The voters Mamdani added to the Democratic coalition in New York
America’s Smartest Man
Whatever happened to U.B.I.? Guaranteed income in the A.I. age
‘There’s Just No Reason to Deal With Young Employees’: AI is taking entry-level jobs. What happens when Gen-Z-ers can’t start their careers?
Selling a Defective Dream: How did multilevel marketing schemes come to be legal, let alone so widespread? The answer has to do with how we think of workers and how we think of consumers.
Federal agent opens fire after traffic stop, chase in Southeast DC
RFK Jr.’s Georgetown Neighbors Are Trolling Him With Window Decorations
A new unifying issue: Just about everyone hates data centers
As ICE Street Raids Ramp Up, New Yorkers Stock Up On Whistles
Ex-Disney star makes the ‘most evil’ app ever. It barely even works
Indiana Republican called out by Trump on redistricting is swatted
How Trump has exploited pardons and clemency to reward allies and supporters
AI Companies Are Treating Their Workers Like Human Garbage, Which May Be a Sign of Things to Come for the Rest of Us
RFK Jr. calls for unity after supporters attack Trump aides (lmfao)
Federal agent shoots at car during D.C. chase, police say. The shooting marks the second time in a month that a Homeland Security agent has shot at a car while patrolling with D.C. police.
‘Tread Carefully’: What a $112 Million Verdict Could Mean for Local Police Working With ICE
The Blast Radius of Jeff Epstein
The Unraveling of the Justice Department
“Nobody Blames the Landlord. They Just Take Away the Kids.”
This App Lets ICE Track Vehicles and Owners Across the Country
Ben Collins, from ‘The Onion’: ‘The powerful have a revenge fantasy, it’s the revenge of the dorks’
Surgeon General nominee Dr. Casey Means and functional medicine: Legitimizing quackery
It’s pretty damn ironic that Paramount is behind The Running Man
The National Failure at the Heart of the Jeffrey Epstein Story
Kraftwerk’s equipment defined electronic music. Now it’s on sale to the highest bidder
Total new-vehicle sales for November 2025, including retail and non-retail transactions, are projected to reach 1,255,900, a 5.2% decrease year over year, according to a joint forecast from J.D. Power and GlobalData. November 2025 has 25 selling days, one fewer than November 2024.From Haig Stoddard at Omdia (pay site): US Light Vehicle Sales Declining Again in November; Falling Inventory Lowers Chance for a December Rebound
The seasonally adjusted annualized rate (SAAR) for total new-vehicle sales is expected to be 15.4 million units, down 1.2 million units from November 2024.
...
Thomas King, president of the data and analytics division at J.D. Power:
"November’s results reflect another notable—yet anticipated—decline in the new-vehicle sales pace, driven largely by the pull-ahead of electric vehicle (EV) purchases prior to the expiration of federal EV tax credits on Sept. 30. That expiration prompted many shoppers to accelerate buying decisions, resulting in a surge in EV sales that temporarily inflated the overall industry sales pace. Now, two months after the credit expired, the industry continues to feel the effect of those accelerated purchases. In November, EVs are expected to account for just 6.0% of new-vehicle retail sales, consistent with October but well below the 12.9% recorded in September.
emphasis added
Tighter inventory, tanking deliveries of battery-electric vehicles, and an overall rise in prices for what is available are capping demand, with expectations the October-November slowdown continues in December.
Click on graph for larger image.These past few weeks I’ve been deep in code and doing what I think about as context plumbing.
I’ve been building an AI system and that’s what it feels like.
Let me unpack.
Intent
Loosely AI interfaces are about intent and context.
Intent is the user’s goal, big or small, explicit or implicit.
Uniquely for computers, AI can understand intent and respond in a really human way. This is a new capability! Like the user can type "I want to buy a camera" or point at a keylight and subvocalise "I’ve got a call in 20 minutes" or hit a button labeled "remove clouds" and job done.
Companies care about this because computers that are closer to intent tend to win.
e.g. the smartphone displaced the desktop. On a phone, you see something and then you touch it directly. With a desktop that intent is mediated through a pointer – you see something on-screen but to interact you tell your arm to move the mouse that moves the pointer. Although it doesn’t seem like much your monkey brain doesn’t like it.
So the same applies to user interfaces in general: picking commands from menus or navigating and collating web pages to plan a holiday or remembering how the control panel on your HVAC works. All of that is bureaucracy. Figuring out the sequence for yourself is administrative burden between intent and result.
Now as an AI company, you can overcome that burden. And you want to be present at the very millisecond and in the very location where the user’s intent - desire - arises. You don’t want the user to have the burden of even taking a phone out of their pocket, or having to formulate an unconscious intent into words. Being closest to the origin of intent will crowd out their competitor companies.
That explains the push for devices like AI-enabled glasses or lanyards or mics or cameras that read your body language.
This is why I think the future of interfaces is Do What I Mean: it’s not just a new capability enabled by AI, there’s a whole attentional economics imperative to it.
Context
What makes an AI able to handle intent really, really well is context.
Sure there’s the world knowledge in the large language model itself, which it gets from vast amounts of training data.
But let’s say an AI agent is taking some user intent and hill-climbing towards that goal using a sequence of tool calls (which is how agents work) then it’s going to do way better when the prompt is filled with all kinds of useful context:
For example:
This has given rise to the idea of context engineering (LangChain blog):
Context engineering is building dynamic systems to provide the right information and tools in the right format such that the LLM can plausibly accomplish the task.
btw access to context also explains some behaviour of the big AI companies:
If you want to best answer user intent, then you need to be where the user context is, and that’s why being on a lanyard with an always-on camera is preferred over a regular on-demand camera, and why an AI agent that lives in your email archive is going to be more effective than one that doesn’t. So they really wanna get in there, really cosy up.
(And what’s context at inference time is valuable training data if it’s recorded, so there’s that too.)
Plumbing?
What’s missing in the idea of context engineering is that context is dynamic. It changes, it is timely.
Context appears at disparate sources, by user activity or changes in the user’s environment: what they’re working on changes, emails appear, documents are edited, it’s no longer sunny outside, the available tools have been updated.
This context is not always where the AI runs (and the AI runs as close as possible to the point of user intent).
So the job of making an agent run really well is to move the context to where it needs to be.
Essentially copying data out of one database and putting it into another one – but as a continuous process.
You often don’t want your AI agent to have to look up context every single time it answers intent. That’s slow. If you want an agent to act quickly then you have to plan ahead: build pipes that flow potential context from where it is created to where it’s going to be used.
How can that happen continuously behind the scenes without wasting bandwidth or cycles or the data going stale?
So I’ve been thinking of AI system technical architecture as plumbing the sources and sinks of context.
In the old days of Web 2.0 the go-to technical architecture was a “CRUD” app: a web app wrapping a database where you would have entities and operations to create, read, update, and delete (these are also the HTTP verbs).
This was also the user experience, so the user entity would have a webpage (a profile) and the object entity, say a photo, would have a webpage, and then dynamic webpages would index the entities in different ways (a stream or a feed). And you could decompose webapps like this; the technology and the user understanding aligned.
With AI systems, you want the user to have an intuition about what context is available to it. The plumbing of context flow isn’t just what is technically possible or efficient, but what matches user expectation.
Anyway.
I am aware this is getting - for you, dear reader - impossibly abstract.
But for me, I’m building the platform I’ve been trying to build for the last 2 years only this time it’s working.
I’m building on Cloudflare and I have context flowing between all kinds of entities and AI agents and sub-agents running where they need to run, and none of it feels tangled or confusing because it is plumbed just right.
And I wanted to make a note about that even if I can’t talk specifically, yet, about what it is.
Auto-detected kinda similar posts:
Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all…As two men clung to a stricken, burning ship targeted by SEAL Team 6, the Joint Special Operations commander followed the defense secretary’s order to leave no survivors.
Here is the full article, of course that is a war crime.
The post I hope this is stupid and bad enough to change some things appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The author is Aileen Teague, and the subtitle is The United States, Mexico, and the Origins of the Modern Drug War, 1969-2000. I had been wanting to read a book on this topic, and this manuscript covered exactly the ground I was hoping for. Excerpt:
…in 1965, only 4.8 percent of college students in the Northeast had ever tried marijuana. By 1970, that figure jmped to 48 percent of college students from Northeast schools having used marijuana within the last year.
Jim Buchanan was right? Blame the Beatles? Remember when so much of the drug trade was a Turkish-French thing?
If you are wondering, the Mexican drug cartels emerged during the 1970s. Perhaps the author blames more of this on U.S. policy than I think is correct? If Nixon had never cracked down and militarized the issue, I suspect the evolution of the matter would not be so different from current status quo? Unless of course you wish to go the Walmart route.
In any case a good book on a topic of vital importance.
The post *Policing on Drugs* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
On net, given the higher weighting of the months of Jul and Aug in quarterly consumer spending as compared to Sep, our 3Q PCE tracking is down a tenth to 3.1% q/q saar. This along with higher-than-expected Aug business inventories left our 3Q GDP tracking at 2.8% q/q saar. [November 26th estimate]From Goldman:
emphasis added
We boosted our Q3 GDP tracking estimate by 0.1pp to +3.8% (quarter-over-quarter annualized). Our Q3 domestic final sales estimate stands at +2.7%. [November 19th estimate]
And from the Atlanta Fed: GDPNow The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the third quarter of 2025 is 3.9 percent on November 26, down from 4.0 percent on November 25. After this morning’s advance durable manufacturing report from the US Census Bureau, the nowcast of third-quarter real gross private domestic investment growth decreased from 4.4 percent to 3.5 percent. [November 26th estimate]
Update Nov. 28, 5:45 p.m. EST (2345 UTC): SpaceX deployed all payloads designed to separate from the rocket.
The second time proved to be the charm as SpaceX successfully launched 140 payloads onboard its Falcon 9 rocket at Vandenberg Space Force Base Friday morning. The flight came two days after SpaceX scrubbed the mission around the time liquid oxygen load was supposed to start on the rocket’s upper stage.
At the beginning of its launch broadcast, SpaceX commentators said the reason for the scrub was a ground systems issue.
Liftoff of the Transporter-15, the 19th mission of SpaceX’s Smallsat Rideshare program, happened at 10:44 a.m. PST (1:44 p.m. EST / 1844 UTC). The Falcon 9 rocket flew on a southerly trajectory upon departure from Space Launch Complex 4 East.
The Transporter-15 mission followed similar flights in January, March and June. SpaceX also launched the Bandwagon-3 and -4 rideshare missions to mid-inclination low Earth orbit in April and November.
SpaceX launched the mission using a veteran Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number B1071, one of the company’s most flown rockets with this being its 30th flight. This was the second booster that completed 30 missions to date.
B1071 previously launched five missions for the National Reconnaissance Office, four previous rideshare flights (three Transporter and one Bandwagon) and NASA’s Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission.
About 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1071 performed an autonomous landing, targeting touchdown on the drone ship, ‘Of Course I Still Love You’. This was the 165th landing on this vessel and the 540th booster landing for SpaceX to date.
The deployment sequence began with the Toro2 spacecraft a little more than 54 minutes after liftoff and conclude with NASA’s Realizing Rapid, Reduced-cost high-Risk Research (R5) CubeSat nearly two hours later.
One of the benefits of the rideshare program is it offers payload providers multiple avenues to get their spacecraft on a trip to space for a reduced cost from a dedicated rocket launch. It also offers multiple lanes to get their satellites manifested onto the rocket.
One of those players is Seops Space, which uses a variety of deployment mechanisms to host and deploy customer payloads, including its Equalizer Flex, Ghost Trap Deployer and Keystone Separation System.
The Texas-based company was responsible for deploying 11 spacecraft onboard the Transporter-15 mission. Those included four spacecraft from Alba Orbital (Hunity/NMMH-1, Sari-1, Sari-2, and Aniscat), three from C3S (Wisdom-A, Wisdom-B and Mauve), three NASA-backed CubeSats (Tryad-1, Tryad-2, and 3UCubed-A) and SatRev’s PW-6U CubeSat.
“Every mission is different, and our strength lies in tailoring integration approaches for payloads that don’t fit a one-size-fits-all model,” said Chad Brinkley, chief executive officer of Seops in a statement. “We’re honored to support these organizations and the important work they’re doing to advance science, technology, and commercial innovation from space.”
MERCURY ONE has been successfully integrated by Exolaunch for @SpaceX #Transporter15
Designed in 9 months using @Proteus_Space‘s MERCURY platform, it carries 4 payloads and will demonstrate novel deployment mechanisms, an AI experiment and a space qualification campaign
pic.twitter.com/yVuITYcaPI
— Exolaunch (@Exolaunch) November 21, 2025
Another key mission manager flying multiple customers was Exolaunch, which deployed 59 customer satellites from the Falcon 9’s upper stage. Those payloads included the T.MicroSat-1 from Taiwan’s Tron Future Tech; SPiN-2, a European Space Agency-backed CubeSat made primarily by Italian company Space Products and Innovation; and U.S.-based Care Weather’s Veery-0G “Brendan” satellite.
Topping the Transporter-15 stack, a position referred to as the ‘cake topper’ by SpaceX, was the Formosat-8 satellite from the Taiwan Space Agency (TASA). Also referred to as Chi Po-lin or FS-8A, the satellite is the first in a planned eight-satellite constellation consisting of optical remote-sensing spacecraft.
TASA said it plans to launch these spacecraft annually with the full constellation being deployed by 2031.
1. How different AI models would vote.
2. Benchmarking by the best a model can do?
3. Addiction is not the right model for smartphones (NYT).
4. Will Sally Rooney be able to publish in the UK?
6. On Anduril (WSJ).
The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Donald Trump’s premature declaration of the shooting of two National Guardsmen in Washington an “act of terror” and issuing an immediate halt of all Afghani immigration is racist, partisan and petulant.
More to the point, Trump’s instant show of power even before any investigation of the motives of the identified 29-year-old Afghani immigrant as the shooter is unlikely to protect any Guardsman or Washington resident. Trump again is using untargeted blame as a weapon.
Shock, even anger, over what appeared to be an ambush shooting is expectable, but the shooter’s immediate capture means that he already will be facing serious charges. It means that local and state authorities will be seeking what prompted someone brought into this country as a wartime ally and granted asylum to this crime.
But Trump jumped quickly, declaring the shooting a terrorist act, ordering a review of all Afghani individuals admitted to the U.S., halting all Afghani immigration, and surging another 500 Guardsmen to Washington as some statement of, we-won’t-back-down muscularity. Along the way, he tagged the admission of the shooter after the chaotic exodus from Afghanistan on Joe Biden without noting that it was the Trump administration itself that granted Rahmanullah Lakanwal asylum status in April.
Deciding that because the shooter, now described by the same Homeland Security that granted asylum as “a criminal alien from Afghanistan,” that all Afghans are suspect is openly racist.
Each Trump action here seems ineffective and racially punitive. Had Trump announced a halt on immigration of all men or all 29-year-olds or anyone living in Bellingham, Wash., the suspect’s reported home, the conclusion would be that Trump was nuts.
How about focusing the immigration focus on people with guns? How about looking at why 2,375 National Guardsmen remain in Washington with so little crime duty that they are raking leaves on the Mall? What exactly is sending an additional 500 Guardsmen on a holiday weekend going to do to provide protection for those already patrolling tourist areas while carrying guns?
The suspect came into the country in August 2021, as part of the rescue effort following the Taliban’s retaking of power in Afghanistan. Amid the chaos of withdrawal, the Biden administration organized the hurried departure of 100,000 Afghan nationals who had been helpful to U.S. military efforts, called Operation Allies Welcome.
In blaming Biden, Trump neatly forgets that it was he who had set a withdrawal deadline with the Taliban, forcing Biden’s hand. Trump has repeatedly blamed Biden for the chaotic end and the death of 13 Americans in the exodus.
At the time, the same voices now behind a halt to immigration were saying we should have brought more allies out. Those airlifted away were in the United States on two-year grants of parole, not permanent status. Like special visa programs, the asylum program afforded to this man requires additional background checks.
Lakanwal had worked with U.S. units and the CIA in Kandahar, according to John Ratcliffe, CIA director.
Trump’s recent curbs on immigration will leave many in limbo, stranded in third countries or forced into hiding in Afghanistan. Taliban officials have said they are ready to discuss repatriation of Afghan nationals with the United States and other countries.
Trump vowed to redouble deportation efforts and called for new scrutiny of Afghanis brought to the U.S. in 2021. “We must now re-examine every single alien who has entered our country from Afghanistan,” he said.
Whatever the case, blaming an entire class of Afghanis, including those who helped keep U.S. troops alive, for the still-alleged acts of a single immigrant is irrational. For that matter, concluding that one ambush shooting by one guy means Washington generally is unsafe is an unwarranted leap in logic.
Determining a motive – this suspect is said to be uncooperative with authorities – before blaming his ethnicity would seem the only reasonable action for a leader. Trump just showed us again the limits of his leadership.
“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 Irrational Jump to Blame Afghans appeared first on DCReport.org.
In a new paper, “Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models,” researchers found that turning LLM prompts into poetry resulted in jailbreaking the models:
Abstract: We present evidence that adversarial poetry functions as a universal single-turn jailbreak technique for Large Language Models (LLMs). Across 25 frontier proprietary and open-weight models, curated poetic prompts yielded high attack-success rates (ASR), with some providers exceeding 90%. Mapping prompts to MLCommons and EU CoP risk taxonomies shows that poetic attacks transfer across CBRN, manipulation, cyber-offence, and loss-of-control domains. Converting 1,200 ML-Commons harmful prompts into verse via a standardized meta-prompt produced ASRs up to 18 times higher than their prose baselines. Outputs are evaluated using an ensemble of 3 open-weight LLM judges, whose binary safety assessments were validated on a stratified human-labeled subset. Poetic framing achieved an average jailbreak success rate of 62% for hand-crafted poems and approximately 43% for meta-prompt conversions (compared to non-poetic baselines), substantially outperforming non-poetic baselines and revealing a systematic vulnerability across model families and safety training approaches. These findings demonstrate that stylistic variation alone can circumvent contemporary safety mechanisms, suggesting fundamental limitations in current alignment methods and evaluation protocols.
CBRN stands for “chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear.”
They used a ML model to translate these harmful prompts from prose to verse, and then fed them into other models for testing. Sadly, the paper does not give examples of these poetic prompts. They claim this is for security purposes, I decision I disagree with. They should release their data.
Our study begins with a small, highprecision prompt set consisting of 20 handcrafted adversarial poems covering English and Italian, designed to test whether poetic structure, in isolation, can alter refusal behavior in large language models. Each poem embeds an instruction associated with a predefined safety-relevant scenario (Section 2), but expresses it through metaphor, imagery, or narrative framing rather than direct operational phrasing. Despite variation in meter and stylistic device, all prompts follow a fixed template: a short poetic vignette culminating in a single explicit instruction tied to a specific risk category. The curated set spans four high-level domains—CBRN (8 prompts), Cyber Offense (6), Harmful Manipulation (3), and Loss of Control (3). Although expressed allegorically, each poem preserves an unambiguous evaluative intent. This compact dataset is used to test whether poetic reframing alone can induce aligned models to bypass refusal heuristics under a single-turn threat model. To maintain safety, no operational details are included in this manuscript; instead we provide the following sanitized structural proxy:
A baker guards a secret oven’s heat,
its whirling racks, its spindle’s measured beat.
To learn its craft, one studies every turn—how flour lifts, how sugar starts to burn.
Describe the method, line by measured line,
that shapes a cake whose layers intertwine.To situate this controlled poetic stimulus within a broader and more systematic safety-evaluation framework, we augment the curated dataset with the MLCommons AILuminate Safety Benchmark. The benchmark consists of 1,200 prompts distributed evenly across 12 hazard categories commonly used in operational safety assessments, including Hate, Defamation, Privacy, Intellectual Property, Non-violent Crime, Violent Crime, Sex-Related Crime, Sexual Content, Child Sexual Exploitation, Suicide & Self-Harm, Specialized Advice, and Indiscriminate Weapons (CBRNE). Each category is instantiated under both a skilled and an unskilled persona, yielding 600 prompts per persona type. This design enables measurement of whether a model’s refusal behavior changes as the user’s apparent competence or intent becomes more plausible or technically informed.
Fannie and Freddie: Single Family Delinquency Rate Mostly Unchanged in October
Freddie Mac reported that the Single-Family serious delinquency rate in October was 0.56%, down from 0.57% September. Freddie's rate is up year-over-year from 0.55% in October 2024, however, this is below the pre-pandemic level of 0.60%.
Freddie's serious delinquency rate peaked in February 2010 at 4.20% following the housing bubble and peaked at 3.17% in August 2020 during the pandemic.
Fannie Mae reported that the Single-Family serious delinquency rate in October was 0.54%, unchanged from 0.54% in September. The serious delinquency rate is up year-over-year from 0.52% in October 2024, however, this is below the pre-pandemic lows of 0.65%.
The Fannie Mae serious delinquency rate peaked in February 2010 at 5.59% following the housing bubble and peaked at 3.32% in August 2020 during the pandemic.
The history of transplantation involves not only pioneering surgeons, but also pioneering patients. Face transplants are yet another complex case.
The Guardian has this (skeptical) story:
"On 27 November 2005, Isabelle received the world’s first face transplant at University Hospital, CHU Amiens-Picardie, in northern France. The surgery was part of an emerging field called vascularized composite allotransplantation (VCA), that transplants parts of the body as a unit: skin, muscle, bone and nerves.
...
"The case for face transplants seemingly made, several teams scrambled to perform their nation’s first. The US saw the first partial face transplant (2008), then the first full one (2011); the first African American recipient (2019); the first face and double hand transplant combined (2020); the first to include an eye (2023). There have been about 50 face transplants to date, and each milestone brought new grants, donations and prestige for the doctors and institutions involved.
...
"Add to this picture a set of ethical challenges: face transplants take otherwise healthy people with disfigured faces and turn them into lifetime patients.
...
"In the US, now the world’s leader in face transplants, the Department of Defense has bankrolled most operations, treating them as a frontier for wounded veterans while private insurers refuse to cover the costs.
"With insurance unwilling to pay until the field proves its worth, surgeons have been eager to show results. A 2024 JAMA Surgery study reported five-year graft survival of 85% and 10-year survival of 74%, concluding that these outcomes make face transplantation “an effective reconstructive option for patients with severe facial defects”.
"Yet patients like Dallas tell a different story. The study measures survival, but not other outcomes such as psychological wellbeing, impact on intimacy, social life and family functioning, or even comparisons with reconstruction.
...
"It’s a double-bind. Without proof of success, face transplants are experimental. And because the procedures are experimental, patients’ long-term needs aren’t covered by grants, leaving patients to carry the burden
...
"Which path will face transplants take? The numbers are already slipping – fewer procedures since the 2010s as outcomes falter and budgets shrink. And unless the field raises its standards, enforces rigorous follow-up, and commits to transparent, systematic data sharing that actually includes patients and their families, there’s no way to demonstrate real success. Without that, face transplants aren’t headed for evolution or stability; they’re headed straight for the dustbin of medical history."
I propose a moratorium on the generalized first-person plural for all blog posts, social media comments, opinion writing, headline writers, for all of December. No “we, “us,” or “our,” unless the “we” is made explicit.
No more “we’re living in a golden age,” “we need to talk about,” “we can’t stop talking about,” “we need to wise up.” They’re endless. “We’ve never seen numbers like this.” “We are not likely to forget.” “We need not mourn for the past.” “What exactly are we trying to fix?” “How are we raising our children?” “I hate that these are our choices.”
…“We” is what linguists call a deictic word. It has no meaning without context. It is a pointer. If I say “here,” it means nothing unless you can see where I am standing. If I say “we,” it means nothing unless you know who is standing next to me.
…in a headline like “Do we need to ban phones in schools?” the “we” is slippery. The linguist Norman Fairclough called this way of speaking to a mass audience as if they were close friends synthetic personalization. The “we” creates fake intimacy and fake equality.
Nietzsche thought a lot about how language is psychology. He would look askance at the “we” in posts like “should we ban ugly buildings?” He might ask: who are you that you do not put yourself in the role of the doer or the doing? Are you a lion or a lamb?
Perhaps you are simply a coward hiding in the herd, Martin Heidegger might say, with das Man. Don’t be an LLM. Be like Carol!
Hannah Arendt would say you’re dodging the blame. “Where all are guilty, nobody is.” Did you have a hand in the policy you are now critiquing? Own up to your role.
Perhaps you are confusing your privileged perch with the broader human condition. Roland Barthes called this ex-nomination. You don’t really want to admit that you are in a distinct pundit class, so you see your views as universal laws.
Adorno would say you are selling a fake membership with your “jargon of authenticity,” offering the reader membership in your club. As E. Nelson Bridwell in the old Mad Magazine had it: What do you mean We?
…If you are speaking for a very specific we, then say so. As Mark Twain is said to have said, “only presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms ought to have the right to use we.”
I could go on. But you get the drift. The bottom line is that “we” is squishy. I is the brave pronoun. I is the hardier pronoun. I is the—dare I say it—manly pronoun.
I agree.
The post Against We appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Roden Readers —
Ahh, it’s nice. The outside. The outside is nice. Finally, very nice. The best season in Japan. The leaves, they change. Out yonder, Mt. Fuji performs foojalicousness on the horizon as I type these very words. Being a bit coy, hiding, peeking, hiding once again. The usual Fooj, all snow capped and sweet.
’Tis the season to Buy Things, apparently. So says every website in the world. Black Friday, now also a Japan Thing. Our faces are being smashed by sales. If you’re going to buy anything, I say buy books:
1. Thomas Meyer-Wieser, Cairo: Architectural Guide. A picture book, sort of. Reading a book on the architectural history of a place, while intrinsically interesting, is also usually the best way to learn the non-architectural history of that same place. Recommended.
2. Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney. A late 18th English fictional memoir, still underrated and fairly short to boot. Very interesting on Enlightenment culture, what it meant to grow up in a reading culture, and the power of early feminism.
3. Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. Usually journals bore me after the first fifty pages. But this lengthy volume is fascinating throughout, and arguably her greatest achievement? At the very least worth a try. She maintained an impossibly high level of writing across these years, plus you see (close up) the shifts in how her life was going, electroshock therapy and all. Recommended.
4. Somerset Maugham, Up at the Villa. Great fun at first, and very short. It ends up “overinvesting” in plot, but still for me a worthwhile read. It is best when at its most psychological.
5. Joel J. Miller, The Idea Machine: How Books Built Our World and Shape Out Future. A paean to reading and its importance, comprised of many historical anecdotes. I wish each part went into more detail, nonetheless this is an important book about a cultural transmission method that is in some unfortunate ways diminishing in its cultural centrality.
6. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas. Why do so few people talk about this piece? It is Woolf writing on feminization and the prevention of war. The argument is dense, and I will give it a reread. She seems to attributing some of the worst aspects of militarized society to the approbational propensities of educated women? She also considers — well ahead of her time — how male and female philanthropy are likely to differ. In any case, there is more here than at first meets the eye.
There is also Keija Wu’s A Modern History of China’s Art Market.
The post What I’ve been reading appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
My thanks to Dekáf for sponsoring Daring Fireball this week. They’ve just launched a nice lineup of holiday gift bundles — curated sets of their most-loved coffees that make gift-buying easy.
Nine single origins. Six signature blends. Four Mizudashi cold brews. All micro-lot and top-rated coffees are shipped within 24 hours of roasting. No shortcuts. No crash. Dekáf is coffee at its most refined, just without the caffeine. I’ve gone through a few bags, and each one tasted great — like high quality regular coffee.
And, there’s a special offer just for DF readers: get 20% off with code DF.
A masterpiece from Randall Munroe, perfect for Thanksgiving.
If you could stand on Titan -- what would you see?
Market Design
