I feel I am well aware of the limitations of effective altruism, and I have outlined many others in an hour-long dialogue I had with MacAskill, arguably the father of the movement, in 2022.
Nonetheless, at the margin I think more effective altruism would be a good thing.
First, I am not worried that the desires of current human beings will be devalued or ignored. Such desires rule the politics of all Western nations and many others as well. If anyone tried to pass a bill to advance shrimp welfare, I do not think it would get a single vote in Congress. In the meantime, we still do treat animals with excessive cruelty, relative to improvements we might make (you could start by eating less chicken and more beef, because a demand for beef kills fewer cows, given the larger size of the cow.) It would be better if people paid at least partial heed to the strictures of effective altruism on this and many other points.
What about the AIs? Well, artificial intelligence is going to fundamentally transform our world. Many connected to effective altruism may exaggerate its effects, or perceive a high risk of doom without sufficient evidence. Nevertheless, it would be a good thing if we paid more attention to AI issues, and to AI safety in particular. Score another point for effective altruism, at least if you make marginal rather than fully extreme adjustments.
As for aid to Africa and poor nations everywhere, I am not sure of the exact policy to pursue, but foreign aid is currently well below 1 percent of the U.S. federal budget, and the Trump administration pared it back. We are hardly sacrificing our seed corn in America to elevate the rest of the world. In the meantime, if you support some charitable public health programs in Africa and save some lives instead of donating to Harvard, that is probably a better decision.
Again, effective altruism is directionally correct, even if you should not follow its recommendations all the way.
President Trump speaks to riveted supporters in Nebraska
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At every rally he does in the home stretch of the midterm election, President Trump tells people to “pretend I’m on the ballot.” Democrats love this message, because Trump is so spectacularly unpopular right now; the more voters who have him in their minds when they make their choice for House, Senate, or city council, the better.
And yet, in the discussion of how Trump will and won’t affect the election, there is a broad acceptance, or at a minimum a lack of disagreement, with the foundation of Trump’s argument: that when he is literally on the ballot, waves of people who won’t vote in a midterm election, and might not even vote in presidential elections in which he isn’t participating, do in fact turn out to cast their ballots for him. He is such an extraordinary personality that he garners the support of millions of otherwise passive voters in a way no one else can.
This is a myth, one it’s long past time we discarded.
It’s fed by a widespread habit of treating Trump’s electoral history as though it contains only two relevant data points: 2016 and 2024. This narrative accepts Trump’s argument about him being the tribune of the masses; it’s just that some of them are staying home this year, as they have in previous midterms. But he isn’t the tribune of the masses, and never was.
To begin, let’s remind ourselves of Trump’s actual record when he’s on the ballot, which is essentially 1-2, or, if you want to look at it a different way, 1-1-1: one win (2024), one loss (2020), and one popular vote loss but electoral vote win (2016). Here are his vote margins:
2016: -2%
2020: -4.5%
2024: 1.5%
It may seem silly to have to remind ourselves of this, but when Donald Trump has been on the ballot, he hasn’t done very well. No matter how many times he says he was the true winner of the 2020 election, he wasn’t, and no matter how many times he says that 2024 was a landslide, it was one of the closest elections in American history.
Trump has never had magical powers
In a thousand ways, Trump has been a unique political figure. But when it comes to his performance at the ballot box and that of his party, he’s more like an ordinary, not-very-popular politician who has benefited from luck and good timing more than anything else.
As I have noted many times, we’re in an era in which every election is a “change” election. In the 10 midterm and presidential elections of the last 20 years, the president’s party has been victorious only once, when Barack Obama was reelected in 2012. If you want the Occam’s Razor explanation of Trump’s performance, there it is: He was the challenger in 2016 and 2024, so he won; he was the incumbent in 2020, so he lost.
His own interpretation of the current moment is that there are millions of devoted Trump fans who are not mobilized yet, but if he urges them to get to the polls, they will and Republicans will win. But there is no reason to believe that’s true. What we’re learning instead is that the population of truly devoted Trump supporters is rather small. In this recent UMass poll, for instance, a bit less than a third of Republicans say they very much identify with the MAGA movement, and a bit more than a third say they somewhat do. As a proportion of the whole population, it works out to 12% who are devoted MAGA supporters and 18% who are sort-of MAGA supporters.
Which is not enough to win an election.
With every new poll that comes out, we’re learning that there were large numbers of people who voted for Trump in 2016, 2024, or both not because he forged a profound and lasting connection with them, but because they thought things in the country kinda sucked and figured maybe he’d fix them, or because they didn’t want to vote for a woman, or some combination of those and other more mundane reasons.
Take, for instance, Latino voters. In 2024, Trump did extremely well with Latinos, losing them to Kamala Harris by only 3 points, after losing them to Biden by 25 points four years before. Was that interesting and significant? Sure. But now, like everyone else, Latinos think he’s doing a terrible job. An NBC/Telemundo poll finds that they favor Democrats controlling Congress by a 59%-35% margin, and only 27% approve of Trump’s performance. How could that have happened if Trump won the hearts of so many Latinos? The answer is: he didn’t.
This is part of a bigger picture in which the GOP’s central problem isn’t that loyal Trump voters who would be voting Republican if they turned out are staying home, but that so many independents and even self-identified Republicans are unhappy. A significant number of people who voted for Trump in 2024 no longer approve of his performance; for instance, in the latest Economist/YouGov poll, 23% of those who voted for Trump say they disapprove of him. A full 33% said they think the economy is getting worse.
The logical conclusion is that there is no demobilized Trump electorate that could be re-mobilized.
There are a variety of reasons why many in the media could be laboring under the misconception that there is, even if they aren’t so foolish as to think such a re-mobilization will actually happen this year. But I suspect the biggest reason is that they mistake the loyalty Trump has built among the party’s elite — members of Congress, elected officials at the state and local level, party activists, the conservative media — for a similar loyalty in the electorate at large.
But he has never had that kind of loyalty from the masses, and certainly doesn’t have it now. He stumbled his way into an accidental victory in 2016, got rejected with extreme prejudice by the voters in 2020, and won a squeaker in 2024 in another unusual year against a pretty weak sort-of-incumbent, all of it in an era in which the opposition party always has an advantage. And when he’s in office, his party does terribly in midterm elections, because he’s awful at governing and most of the electorate doesn’t like him.
It may not be the most colorful and fascinating story of the elections of the last decade. But it’s the true one.
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City Observatory welcomes this guest commentary from Ethan Seltzer. Seltzer is an Emeritus Professor of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University, a past President of the City of Portland Planning Commission, and former land use planner for Metro, the regional government in the Portland metropolitan area, and the Southeast Uplift Neighborhood Program in southeast Portland, Oregon.)
Attacking planning, particularly public sector-led planning, has received a boost lately from those on the right. However, whether Deriu is on the right or not is not what this response is about. Rather, as one who has seen both strengths and weaknesses in public planning efforts, Deiru’s painting with such a strikingly broad brush demands a response.
Setting aside that this is plainly, in fact, a rhetorical provocation, Deriu rightly identifies that urban planning, in practice, is largely a negotiation. Plans are guides that often don’t include or anticipate all the things that people might envision for their land, their investments, or their community. To bridge the gap between adopted policy and unsatisfied needs and desires, private interests engage public planning bodies to negotiate a fix.
This is not new or enlightening. In fact, the last 50 years of planning theoretical debates have most often revolved around the role that plans and planners play in what is in reality, a transactional process. Further, to simply blame “politics” for the ways in which plans get sidelined overlooks the fact that politics is nothing more than the process we use to allocate resources. In a world of limited resources, that negotiation through our politics is ongoing and never-ending. To think otherwise is simply naive.
Most of the planning history that Deriu relies on is from about 100 years ago and older, and where he ends up is largely with the writing of architects, not planners. On one hand he criticizes planning for not having an exclusive technical language and practice, and on the other he criticizes planning for relying on ideas and concepts unable to keep up with the pace of change in society and the ebbs and flows of politics. He wants it both ways: a rejection of planning for not being both authoritative in application and accommodating in thought.
Where he ends up is with three proposals. The first I fully agree with. Planning, at a minimum, must be based on clear ecological objectives for which there should be little to no compromise. The most important task for planning should be to contextualize the development of the present in the larger landscape ecology that it is a part of, and in light of the unknowable needs in the future for irreplaceable and fully functioning natural systems. He would do well to look at the writing and work of Benton MacKaye and Ian McHarg for reassurance that this has, in fact, not escaped the thinking of planners.
Second, he proposes to dump 20-year plans and substitute “discrete, fully financed strategic projects.” This raises a host of issues that he doesn’t consider. How can you assess the potential for unintended consequences outside of the context provided by a long-range consideration of the unfolding city? Why should the inertia of past decisions take precedence over all other possibilities? Why would a list of “strategic projects” not succumb to the same political manipulation that he says plans are bedeviled by? In this case, Deiru derides planning for not knowing the future while championing designers never asked to consider the possibilities. Robert Moses would love this.
Finally, Deiru calls for formalizing the negotiating table, making it public and accessible. Nothing wrong with transparency and access, but who can afford to engage in every negotiation? In a fast-moving world, offering a chair is of little consequence to individuals and communities unable to keep up with the pace of changes being proposed.
Sadly, Deiru does little to acknowledge the role that planning plays to engage everyone in making plans. When governing systems can’t hold private interests and public planners and decisionmakers accountable to broadly understood and adopted plans, then that is a governance, not planning, problem.
Some have said that cities rely on institutions and rules because the relational basis for decision making associated with very small towns and neighborhoods can’t operate at a city, much less metropolitan, scale. I would love to live in a city where I knew everyone and about everything going on or being conceived, but I don’t. There are 650,000 of us here in Portland alone. Maybe this would work for “inland Sardinia” but I would never think of substituting my experience with this place, its planning, plans, politics, and governance, for that of Deriu, anyone else in his community, or inland Sardinia itself.
From the point of view of my community, what Deriu proposes is simply disconnected from the reality of why we plan and when and how planning makes a difference. I have seen long-term plans that have made a profound difference for our city and region, and proposed “strategic projects” that, if fully funded, would have made this a far less livable place.
Designers will undoubtedly love his line of thought, since it looks to their presumed expertise as being decisive in the present-oriented, short-term world he is settling for. Had Deriu avoided going down the rhetorical road he chose at the outset of his essay, he might have arrived at a place where short-term, technical thinking could have worked well with the ongoing struggle to try to mesh a critical reappraisal of the past and the dynamic present with the hard-to-know future. Too bad he didn’t.
Space has long been associated with the cutting edge, and technologies developed for engineering purposes find their way into the designs of consumer products. Syed Hasan discusses the connection based on his experience as both an engineer and designer.
The National Museum of the United States Air Force opened a military space gallery a decade ago, raising hopes that the museum will pay more attention to space. Dwayne Day argues those hopes may be fading.
info@thespacereview.com (Katie Inman et al.)
Updated
Over the summer, the White House released a new space transportation policy while other agencies released other, related RFIs and documents. A group of lawyers examine those developments and their implications for the US space industry.
The growth of the space field in recent years has been fueled largely by commercial efforts. Jeff Foust reviews a book that argues that the future of space will rely almost exclusively on companies, not governments.
Concerns about the growth of orbital debris have led to the development of best practices to mitigate its growth. Graham Turnock explains why those approaches alone are insufficient when considering orbital sustainability.
Slept pretty well, and my wife waked to ring the bell to call up our mayds to the washing about 4 o’clock, and I was and she angry that our bell did not wake them sooner, but I will get a bigger bell. So we to sleep again till 8 o’clock, and then I up in some ease to the office, where we had a full board, where we examined Cocke’s second account, when Mr. Turner had drawn a bill directly to be paid the balance thereof, as Mr. Cocke demanded, and Sir J. Minnes did boldly assert the truth of it, and that he had examined it, when there is no such thing, but many vouchers, upon examination, missing, and we saw reason to strike off several of his demands, and to bring down his 5 per cent. commission to 3 per cent. So we shall save the King some money, which both the Comptroller and his clerke had absolutely given away. There was also two occasions more of difference at the table; the one being to make out a bill to Captain Smith for his salary abroad as commander-in-chief in the Streights. Sir J. Minnes did demand an increase of salary for his being Vice-Admiral in the Downes, he having received but 40s. without an increase, when Sir J. Lawson, in the same voyage, had 3l., and others have also had increase, only he, because he was an officer of the board, was worse used than any body else, and particularly told Sir W. Batten that he was the opposer formerly of his having an increase, which I did wonder to hear him so boldly lay it to him. So we hushed up the dispute, and offered, if he would, to examine precedents, and report them, if there was any thing to his advantage to be found, to the Duke.
The next was, Mr. Chr. Pett and Deane were summoned to give an account of some knees which Pett reported bad, that were to be served in by Sir W. Warren, we having contracted that none should be served but such as were to be approved of by our officers. So that if they were bad they were to be blamed for receiving them. Thence we fell to talk of Warren’s other goods, which Pett had said were generally bad, and falling to this contract again, I did say it was the most cautious and as good a contract as had been made here, and the only [one] that had been in such terms. Sir J. Minnes told me angrily that Winter’stimber, bought for 33s. per load, was as good and in the same terms. I told him that it was not so, but that he and Sir W. Batten were both abused, and I would prove it was as dear a bargain as had been made this half year, which occasioned high words between them and me, but I am able to prove it and will. That also was so ended, and so to other business.
At noon Lewellin coming to me I took him and Deane, and there met my uncle Thomas, and we dined together, but was vexed that, it being washing-day, we had no meat dressed, but sent to the Cook’s, and my people had so little witt to send in our meat from abroad in that Cook’s dishes, which were marked with the name of the Cook upon them, by which, if they observed anything, they might know it was not my own dinner.
After dinner we broke up, and I by coach, setting down Luellin in Cheapside. So to White Hall, where at the Committee of Tangier, but, Lord! how I was troubled to see my Lord Tiviott’s accounts of 10,000l. paid in that manner, and wish 1000 times I had not been there.
Thence rose with Sir G. Carteret and to his lodgings, and there discoursed of our frays at the table to-day, and particularly of that of the contract, and the contract of masts the other day, declaring my fair dealing, and so needing not any man’s good report of it, or word for it, and that I would make it so appear to him, if he desired it, which he did, and I will do it.
Thence home by water in great pain, and at my office a while, and thence a little to Sir W. Pen, and so home to bed, and finding myself beginning to be troubled with wind as I used to be, and in pain in making water, I took a couple of pills that I had by me of Mr. Hollyard’s.
If you’re still interested in the fallout from Brazil’s elections, here are some observations that add texture to the usual narratives:
Nine of the 10 candidates who received the most votes for the Lower Chamber are under 40. The exception is 41. Their average age is 31.6. They’re all very online and cultural-war centered. Four are pro-woke and six are anti-woke. The biggest vote-winner, anti-woke Nikolas Ferreira, will still be too young to run for president in 2030.
There is a divergence between evangelical influencers and the big evangelical churches. While evangelical politicians with strong personal followings did well, several major big church machines lost seats, particularly in Rio.
Brazil is expected to have its most female Senate ever, with 18 of 81 senators, driven by women on the right. All three senators representing the Federal District will be right-wing, including Jair Bolsonaro’s wife, Michelle Bolsonaro.
This might be the end of Lulismo. Lula or his chosen candidate has run in every presidential election since 1989, but he has no obvious successor. If he loses the runoff, his personal presidential record will stand at three wins and four losses. Several historical PT historical figures also lost their bids. And Lula, who began his career with votes from the educated middle class in Brazil’s industrial Southeast, is ending it by leading only in the poorest income bracket and the poorer Northeast region.
Flávio Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party won 121 seats in the Chamber and should hold 28 in the Senate, a record for any party since the 1988 Constitution. It will nevertheless remain short of a majority in both houses. The Chamber will feature 20 parties, down from the 30 elected in 2018.
The Bolsonaro family elected two senators (Jair’s wife Michelle and son Carlos) and two federal deputies (his son Jair Renan and brother Renato). His son Flávio is leading going into the presidential runoff, while his other son Eduardo might become minister. That is possibly the highest concentration of national political power in one immediate family since the Brazilian Republic was founded in 1889.
Lava Jato’s leading figures made a strong electoral comeback. Sergio Moro, the former judge who convicted Lula, won the governorship of Paraná in the first round. Deltan Dallagnol, who led the prosecution, won enough votes for a Senate seat, although his eligibility may be contested in the superior courts.
Anger over corruption and power grabs by Supreme Court justices was a defining factor in the first-round result. I expect a confrontation between the new Senate and the court over limits on its powers to become a major story in 2027. Brazil’s Supreme Court issued over 100,000 decisions in 2025 alone.”
In case you missed this (and you likely haven’t), Donald Trump traveled to Nebraska yesterday, where—among a string of batshit crazy offerings that could fill up 1,000 rooms—he served up this genocidal gem of gems …
And if you’re wondering, “What was Will O’Neill response?”—the head of the Orange County Republican Party offered this quote: “After sending the National Guard and Marines to occupy California, Donald Trump is now saying our foreign enemies should ‘take out’ Los Angeles and San Diego. ... He is deranged and dangerous.”
Oops. That was Gavin Newsom.
If you’re wondering, “What was Will O’Neill response?”—the head of the Orange County Republican Party offered this quote: “The President says the Iran war will end ‘very soon.’ How many times have we heard that promise? And if it means attacks on two major American cities in the process, he is not troubled by the cost.”
Oops. That was Adam Schiff.
If you’re wondering, “What was Will O’Neill response?”—the head of the Orange County Republican Party offered this quote: “Thirteen million Californians call LA and San Diego counties home. Their lives are not a ‘small price to pay’ or a punchline for Donald Trump.”
Oops. That was Xavier Becerra.
If you’re wondering, “What was Will O’Neill response?”—the head of the Orange County Republican Party offered this quote: “America must stand up to Iran and defend our interests, but the first responsibility of our Commander in Chief is to protect the American people and our homeland,” Desmond, the former mayor of San Marcos, said in a statement.”
Oops. That was Republican Jim Desmond, who is in a competitive San Diego-based House race.
No—if you’re wondering what, exactly, Will O’Neill said—stop wondering. The Truth OC can confirm that, at this very moment, O’Neill is hiding in his Newport Beach coat room (deftly designed and organized by California Closets) , wrapped in the Snuggie he bought off QVC in 2002, blasting Air Supply’s Greatest Hits (Volume I, not II) and repeating the mantra, “I am a beautiful blonde swan named Pepper … I am a beautiful blonde swan named Pepper … I am a beautiful blonde swan named Pepper” while Isabella, his undocumented Guatemalan house keeper for the past 13 years, strokes his hair and coos Marco Antonio Solís lyrics into his left ear.
Last night, on October 4, U.S. Southern Command posted that it had struck another small boat in the Caribbean, killing another four people it called “narco-terrorists.” This brings the number of strikes to more than 70, and the number of people killed in the strikes that began a year ago to more than 230 people.
The administration’s justification for the strikes has not been made public. It has claimed—without evidence—that the men on the boats were trafficking drugs, but such a charge would normally be handled by the legal system. The Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice produced an opinion providing legal cover for the strikes, and some of the members of Congress who have seen it are alarmed.
Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) saw the memo in November and said: “If that opinion were to be adopted, it would not constrain any use of force anywhere in the world. I mean, it is broad enough to authorize just about anything.” In December the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights sued to gain access to the memo after the government denied their requests to see it under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
On September 21 a report from the United Nations concluded that the extrajudicial killings broke international law and may be crimes against humanity.
Last Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ordered the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice to show him the memo and let him know who else has seen it, in order to evaluate whether to release it to the public.
On October 1, John Hudson of the Washington Post reported that the Trump administration has taken $52 million Congress appropriated for countries impacted by Russia’s war on Ukraine and rerouted it to right-wing governments in Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Peru.
On Saturday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters the U.S. could move U.S. military personnel from Europe to the Western Hemisphere, saying: “Well, we’re definitely expanding our presence and our footprint in Central and South America with partners, and because of the bold move the president made in Venezuela,” referring to the U.S. capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife in a nighttime raid in early January. “We have a whole new suite of options economically and militarily with partnerships.”
While the administration is billing its intervention in Latin America as a battle against drugs, the comparison to Venezuela, where Trump has claimed control over the country’s oil fields and says he has taken billions of dollars out, although there is no public acknowledgement of where that money has gone, is instructive.
On Sunday, Jan Crawford of CBS News published an interview with Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, in which Alito said one of his first thoughts after he learned that a draft of his Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision had been leaked was that “this would endanger” the people on the court.
Alito went on to say that he does not anticipate that the court will overturn the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision recognizing the right to same-sex marriage. That case is different from Roe v. Wade, he said, because people have come to rely on Obergefell as they organize their lives.
“One of the important factors we take into account in deciding whether we should reexamine a past decision is the degree to which there has been reliance on the decision,” Alito said. “Obviously a great deal had changed in the country as a result of Obergefell. There was a lot of reliance in various ways on the decision in Obergefell.”
In fact, all but one of the justices who overturned Roe—Thomas declined to answer—said in their confirmation hearings that they considered Roe settled law. Crawford pointed out that people thought Roe was settled law and had organized their lives around it, just as people had organized their lives around Obergefell.
“After Obergefell, people of the same sex got married and entered into contracts…it was much more concrete,” Alito told Crawford. “Whereas with Roe, the argument was made that it had an effect on people’s ideas, women’s ideas about the kind of society that they were going to live in, that this would have an effect on the society. It was much more abstract than what would’ve been involved had we been asked to overrule Obergefell.”
These are the same story: the deliberate destruction of the post–World War II order those who had lived through the horrors of World Wars I and II put in place to prevent another world war.
Even before the U.S. entered World War II, U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill and their advisors laid out principles for an international system that could prevent future world wars. In the 1941 Atlantic Charter, they declared that countries must not invade each other.
In April 1945, 850 delegates and their staff and advisors met in San Francisco, California, where they wrote, and adopted unanimously, the United Nations charter prohibiting “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”
Trump and his loyalists reject this framework in favor of one favored by those like Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, one that looks much like the world did before 193 nations signed onto the United Nations charter. In their worldview, strong nations exercise spheres of influence, taking political and economic control of neighboring nations.
Part of the post–World War II attempt to prevent future wars was an insistence that all human beings had certain rights and must be treated equally before the law. In 1948 the United Nations General Assembly announced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which provided a common standard of fundamental rights for all human beings.
Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of former president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and much beloved defender of human rights in the United States, led the commission that wrote the UDHR, figuring out how to define the violation of human rights not only internationally but also within a nation, and how to protect “the rights of man all over the world.”
Drafted over the next two years, the final document established that “[a]ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights…without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status” and regardless “of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs.”
Those rights included freedom from slavery, torture, degrading punishment, arbitrary arrest, exile, and “arbitrary interference with…privacy, family, home or correspondence, [and] attacks upon…honour and reputation.” They included the right to equality before the law and to a fair trial, the right to participate in government, either “directly or through freely chosen representatives,” the right of equal access to public service. After all, the UDHR noted, the authority of government rests on the will of the people, “expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage.”
Under Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the U.S. has abandoned the U.N. prohibition on violating the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, as well as the human rights of the people in the small boats, not to mention migrants. As Alito’s statement that the right of women to have control over their healthcare was simply an abstract idea that didn’t have to be protected suggested, undermining the post–World War II order has been a long-term project.
In its place, Trump and his allies propose a dictatorship. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who was jailed in the U.S. for money laundering but pardoned by Trump, worked with the Trump family to establish the crypto start-up World Liberty Financial, which put $799 million in Trump’s pocket last year. Zhao now lives in the United Arab Emirates.
In a recent interview with David Yaffe-Bellany of the New York Times, Zhao explained: “Democracy has been hailed as, like, the holy grail for the last couple hundred years, but democracies are inefficient. If you get a benevolent dictator, it’s actually extremely efficient. There’s very little debate going on. You don’t waste time on a lot of frivolous stuff.” It’s a model for which Trump repeatedly has expressed admiration.
In March 1941, eight months before the U.S. joined World War II, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt noted that “Nazi forces are not seeking mere modifications in colonial maps or in minor European boundaries. They openly seek the destruction of all elective systems of government on every continent—including our own; they seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers who have seized power by force.”
“[T]hese men and their hypnotized followers call this a new order,” FDR said, but “[i]t is not new and it is not order.” “[T]he rallying cry of the dictators, their boasting about a master-race, will prove to be pure stuff and nonsense,” he said. “There never has been, there isn’t now, and there never will be, any race of people on the earth fit to serve as masters over their fellow men.”
“The world has no use for any Nation which, because of size or because of military might, asserts the right to goosestep to world power over the bodies of other Nations or other races,” he said. “We believe that any nationality, no matter how small, has the inherent right to its own nationhood” and that “the men and women of such Nations, no matter what size, can, through the processes of peace, serve themselves and serve the world by protecting the common man’s security; improve the standards of healthful living; provide markets for manufacture and for agriculture. Through that kind of peaceful service every Nation can increase its happiness, banish the terrors of war, and abandon man’s inhumanity to man.”
“Never, in all our history, have Americans faced a job so well worthwhile,” he concluded. “May it be said of us in the days to come that our children and our children’s children rise up and call us blessed.”
Here's how I ran the two together, giving me neat local visualizations of traces of Datasette responses.
Installing Parseable
I used the open source release of Parseable from their GitHub releases - I tried v3.2.4. They have a macOS Apple Silicon release (a 171MB download) which I downloaded and ran like so:
Running ./parseable local-store starts Parseable with all of the default settings, and stores data in ./data and ./staging directories. It uses ports 8000, 8001, and 8002.
Then visit http://localhost:8000/ and sign in with the default admin/admin username and password.
Note that we are not starting datasette directly - we are instead starting opentelemetry-instrument datasette ... to properly initialize the tracing.
Viewing a trace
Load up http://localhost:8004/ and click around a bit, then wait a few seconds for the traces to be sent to Parseable. Then navigate to "traces" in the Parseable web interface and you should be able to find things like this:
Each request now has a trace which shows the details of every subsequent SQL query. Consult the Datasette OpenTelemetry docs for more details.
Alternative ports
To run Parseable on ports other than 8000, 8001, and 8002:
Amazon wants more than 5,000 satellites in orbit. Blue Origin has proposed another 5,400. Chinese companies have filed plans encompassing vastly more. Elon Musk has talked about a constellation numbering […]
Pope Leo XIV recently tweeted that there is “an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others.”
As a description of how today’s models work, that’s fair enough. AI learned to paint by looking at our paintings.
Paul Graham (also a painter!) notes that this is about to change. Robots wired into the world will soon perceive it for themselves. A robot or AI that learns from its own sensors isn’t borrowing images from others. LLMs were founded on our words but their words will dominate the future.
So picture a robot on a beach at dusk. It watches the sun go down, then paints what it saw. Is it art? The Pope would no doubt still assert an ontological difference. But once the factual distinction between borrowing and perceiving fades, what makes that more than a statement of faith?
The EU AI Act requires generative AI providers to make generated
text identifiable in a machine-readable way. Text watermarking and
detection remain early technologies with significant limitations,
and views about their benefits and responsible uses are still
developing. Our phased approach reflects both the EU AI Act
requirements as well as the technology’s limitations, with an
emphasis on transparency about what a text watermark can and
cannot tell people:
Starting today, API customers globally will be able to opt in to
text watermarking for select models. Text watermarking will
remain off by default in the API.
Over the coming weeks, we will add an invisible watermark to
eligible ChatGPT and Codex text output in the European Union.
We’re opening applications to access our text watermark
detector. Access will initially be limited to approved
researchers and expert organizations that can help us evaluate
and improve the technology.
First, unlike Anthropic, OpenAI is only forcing this upon users in the EU, where it’s mandated by their ill-considered 2024 regulation. Second, also unlike Anthropic, OpenAI has made this available via an API so developers should be able to actually see if this adulterates text output with real-world usage.
Third, none of these companies have yet made their watermark detectors publicly accessible. I remain highly skeptical that they will work as advertised in the real world. I think this is all somewhat of a sham to claim compliance with the EU AI Act without actually providing anything that anyone can actually use in a practical way.
Our text watermarking technology, textGrain, adds an invisible
statistical signal to the model’s word choices. Our detector looks
for that signal to assess whether a passage contains an OpenAI
watermark. More details about how textGrain works can be found in
our technical report, which will be updated with additional
details in the coming weeks. We also plan to make the technology
available in open source so that others can build on it.
In our evaluations, textGrain matched or exceeded the performance
of other approaches we tested, including SynthID for text. Even
so, strong performance under ideal conditions does not guarantee
reliable detection in everyday use.
SynthID-Text is the Google algorithm that Anthropic says they’re using too.
Maybe I’m all wet, but I think what they mean in that last sentence quoted above is that it only performs usefully in ideal conditions, with simplistic prompts, and will prove to be unusable in practical everyday use, especially if the user’s prompt contains instructions designed to circumvent it.
The way Steve taught us to care about every detail, every
experience, every person, still guides our work today. Forever
grateful.
Tim Cook, also on X (with a photo I don’t recall seeing before):
There are people who leave a mark on the world, and then there are
people who change it entirely. Steve changed the world and so many
lives in the process. He certainly changed my life forever. His
spirit lives on in everything he created and everyone he inspired.
Hard to know quite what to make of this, or how much to make of it. But we’re getting what may be a preview of elements of a new era in the Middle East. According to a just released communiqué, Turkey and Pakistan will be sending troops to Saudi Arabia under the three countries’ new “Mecca Pact” to assist with fighting the Houthis in Yemen. The statement is very short on details. So it’s not clear whether this is a meaningful deployment of manpower and resources or something more nominal and symbolic. Nor is the timing of any deployment clear.
To the extent this is real it’s part of longer-standing trends. But the effects of the US/Israel/Iran war are clearly key. Saudi Arabia can’t easily defend itself against the emerging Houthi blockade along the Red Sea – notwithstanding its vast supply of high dollar, high dollar weaponry from the US. That used to be the US’s job – defending Saudi Arabia. But Trump has refused. So this new alliance could be in the process of becoming more than mere signatures on paper.
It’s hard to know what to say about former Republican Speaker of the House Denny Hastert, whose death at the age of 84 was reported this morning. Few if any political leaders in modern American history have experienced a fall quite so ignominious and total. The obvious point of comparison is Richard Nixon. But post-Watergate Nixon was never without his defenders and supporters. All but his most adamant critics granted significant successes of his presidency. And by the time of his death in 1994, he’d made significant progress in being treated by many as a sage elder statesman, albeit a greatly tarnished one. Hastert remains almost a test case of a top political leader whose fall was immediate and absolute. He came as close as one can come to have to having zero public defenders (though a significant number of former colleagues wrote leniency letters on his behalf at sentencing in 2016).
What stands out in my mind are two moments, one from his moment of ascent to power and another at the denouement but certainly not the nadir of career. Go back to 1998. The so-called Lewinsky scandal had been trundling forward for most of the year. Republicans are giddy about the Red Tsunami that was about to supercharge the existing GOP majority. Predictions of a 30- or 40-seat pick up were common and assumed. (I was one of few people I knew to basically predict no wave at all; it was simply a matter of watching the polls rather than the bipartisan hype.) When Democrats ended up gaining five seats, House Speaker New Gingrich was summarily tossed overboard — a mix of the failure of his wild overpromising and slowly building frustrations with his erratic and high drama leadership style.
After Newt’s defenestration, Rep. Bob Livingston of Louisiana quickly emerged as his successor. But a problem soon emerged: Livingston himself had been carrying on an affair. He soon bowed to the inevitable and pulled himself out of the running. At the time, I was about a year into my first journalism job working at The American Prospect, then located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But I was covering the drama for Salon as a freelancer. Before we get to any of that, it’s important to understand the context of this moment.
As noted above, basically the whole year had been a drip, drip, drip about Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. With today’s high octane politics in mind, it’s hard to capture just how wild, chaotic and disruptive this was. A 24/7 news cycle, the beginnings of upstart online news, all with a daily feed of subject matter that had never been this explicit in American politics. What presaged the 1998 electoral outcome was that Republicans had wildly overplayed their hand from the beginning, focusing attention on their hypocrisy and the fact that people were generally pretty happy with how the country was doing. Inexplicably but also predictably in this context, Clinton’s approval ratings didn’t sink but rather shot up and stayed in the 60s throughout the year. In this climate, there was a deep hunger among angry Democrats to uncover Republican affairs. And Salon in September had published a story that then-senior Republican Rep. Henry Hyde, who was 74 years old at the time, had carried on an affair in the 1960s. What wouldn’t come out until the following year was that Gingrich himself had been carrying on an affair with then-staffer, now-wife Callista Bisek, all through the scandal and for years before.
So the point is that when Livingston stepped aside, it was in this context of Republican affairs seemingly popping up all over the place, the background of the ever-present Lewinsky scandal, what had been experienced as a massive electoral upset and two consecutive House Speakers getting tossed in a matter of weeks. Both Gingrich and Livingston announced they’d also be leaving Congress entirely. (Livingston never actually became Speaker. But that was kind of a technicality.) On top of all this, after first suffering a electoral rebuke over the Lewinsky scandal, Republicans had steadied themselves and were now rushing as fast as possible to impeach Clinton — election verdict notwithstanding. Livingston announced his departure on the morning of the impeachment vote. This all came together in one concentrated day of almost unimaginable drama on Capitol Hill when Republicans absolutely more than anything else wanted calm and some sense of predictability, regularity and trust. And in this climate, out of the blue, all eyes turned to an all-but-unknown congressman from Illinois named Denny Hastert.
Now, to be clear, Hastert wasn’t unknown on Capitol Hill. He was a known commodity, chief deputy whip for the Republican majority. To most of the public, though, he seemed like someone very much from the back bench, not someone at all who seemed primed to ascend to the speakership.
That day was Dec. 18, 1998, and on that particular day I was busily phone reporting from Somerville, trying to make sense of it all for a piece for Salon. It’s difficult to overstate the degree to which everyone rushed to endorse Hastert within hours of Livingston’s departure because he seemed like the one person who could absolutely relied upon to be normal, no scandal, no skeletons, a return to steady, uncontroversial and calm leadership. “It’s really the power structure putting him forward. It’s a consensus day in the capital,” one GOP staffer told me that afternoon.
The irony of this has always remained with me. Because that was absolutely the calculus. It’s wild how close to the sun some people will fly.
But there was another key moment which looks very different in retrospect.
Fast forward eight years to 2006. There was a lot of talk coming out of the 2004 presidential election that the GOP had constructed permanent Republican congressional majorities. This wasn’t simply about public opinion or gerrymandering or the small state advantage. It was also about creating a kind of iron system of campaign contributions and regulatory and legal returns on that investment to corporate America. Because of that conventional wisdom, there was well into 2006 doubt that Democrats could really retake Congress, despite how much evidence there was that that would happen. The so-called Foley scandal, which broke out in September, helped catalyze shifting expectations.
For those who don’t remember it, Mark Foley was a very lightly closeted gay congressman from Florida. I’m not even sure it’s right to say he was closeted. It emerged that Foley had sent a series of sexually suggestive emails and instant messages to former teenaged male pages who had worked on Capitol Hill. When the messages were released, Foley resigned. But then the scandal quickly moved to what leadership had known about Foley’s behavior. Hastert, of course, remained Speaker of the House.
In retrospect, it is clear this scandal must have filled Hastert with fears that his past would be exposed. (In fairness to Foley, who was never charged with a crime, his wrongdoing paled in comparison to Hastert’s.) This was another period of chaos on Capitol Hill. There were lots of end-of-the-majority vibes, changing of the guard. In a different role, I was working phones much as I had eight years earlier. What was clear at the time was Hastert was taking a very passive and kind of MIA role toward the whole unfolding drama. One potential theory was that Hastert had either warnings or knowledge about Foley’s behavior. And that was probably true to at least some extent. There were also rumors or I guess what you’d call chattered suggestions that there was a kind of “gay mafia” of staffers around Hastert that wanted to keep the whole story under wraps, or prevent further investigations.
Accusations like that have a long and dark history. I mention them now — 20 years on — not to suggest they were true but to give you a sense of the climate of that moment, the kinds of rumors and accusations that were flying — a mix of homophobia and some legitimate bafflement about Hastert’s hands-off role. Of course we can’t know what Hastert was thinking in September 2006 while all this was happening. But it seems all but impossible not to conclude that Hastert feared that this was a climate in which his own secrets would be revealed. It’s a bit like kryptonite being casually brought into the office of a dark-side Superman.
Subsequent House investigations and news reports found that there was a history of inappropriate emails, overtures and more from Foley, and that many of these had come to the attention of House officials and been briefed to Hastert. Hastert said almost nothing publicly and relied on his office to in most cases deny testimony or claims that he’d been briefed on different incidents months or years before.
Everything eventually came pouring out into the open in 2015. Hastert had left the House soon after the Republicans’ 2006 defeat and had transitioned into a high-flying D.C. lobbyist. Hastert’s undoing actually began with FBI scrutiny of what they suspected was more typical D.C. lobbyist corruption as far back as 2012. Hastert had been paying hush money to one of his then-teen victims. And it was his efforts to hide those payments that led to charges of “structuring”, lying to federal agents and more. The statutes of limitations on the actual sex abuse had run out decades earlier. The payments themselves weren’t necessarily illegal, though perhaps they could have led to blackmail charges.
Hastert served just over a year in federal prison and lived another nine years after his release.
Colin Frasier posted on Bluesky about an experiment he ran over two years ago using GPT-4o to see how well it could "compute the sum but return the answer in words" across increasingly large numbers. Here's the chart he shared of those results:
I'm confident GPT-4o didn't cheat and use a calculator, especially since it got so many of the calculations wrong, but I was inspired to run the experiment again on local hardware (a DGX Spark) to explore the effect in a fully controlled environment.
I pasted his image into a Codex Remote session (GPT-6 Astra) and had it run the same experiment using Qwen3.8-27B-Q4_K_M.gguf. Here's the result for a run of 30 attempts per combination with reasoning disabled:
Then I ran it again with reasoning enabled. This took a lot longer per pair, so instead of running 30 samples per square I ran just one - which results in a much less visually appealing heatmap since each square is either 100% or 0%:
It got the right answer in 167 out of 169 attempts, and since these were one-shot I'm confident a second run would produce different results here.
Here's a version of the report that includes the reasoning traces from some of those larger calculations, which include text like this:
Wait, let me redo this more carefully.
4,299,366,105,622
6,088,794,067,970
Let me align them:
4 2 9 9 3 6 6 1 0 5 6 2 2
6 0 8 8 7 9 4 0 6 7 9 7 0
Adding from right to left:
Position 1 (units): 2 + 0 = 2
Position 2 (tens): 2 + 7 = 9
Position 3 (hundreds): 6 + 9 = 15, write 5, carry 1
It feels like only yesterday that techies on X first heard the sound of TBPN’s gong. The show was so ridiculous, its hosts so charismatic, its content so nerdy that Silicon Valley just couldn’t look …
Today’s post is brought to you by my sponsor, Mechanize. They’re hiring junior software engineers at $300K/year base salary. Apply now!
* * *
Janan Ganesh has a recent Financial Times piece entitled A tribute to great wrong ideas, which argues that flawed models occasionally end up generating useful insights. Ganesh suggests that the Enlightenment concept of the blank slate contributed to the rise of liberalism, the Malthusian Trap contributed to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, and Freudian psychology contributed to innovations in painting and literature.
But the primary focus of Ganesh’s essay is Francis Fukuyama:
The title was too good for the author’s own good. The End of History: it had a definitive ring, and therefore travestied the subtler argument that came in the following hundreds of pages.
Francis Fukuyama, who has a memoir out, can be defended on another count. Even if he was wrong to assume the ultimate triumph of freedom circa 1989, he was usefully wrong. His thesis shaped and guided debate for decades. At the margins, it might also have had real-world benefits. The era of liberal hubris that he unwittingly fed probably swept people along who otherwise had illiberal instincts: who might, say, have opposed EU or Nato enlargement. People back the strong horse. He told them which one it was, accurately or not.
The view that Fukuyama was actually sort of correct has now become so popular among intellectuals that it probably no longer counts as contrarian—similar to how the observation that Machiavelli wasn’t all that Machiavellian is now common knowledge. Mocking Fukuyama has become an indicator of having a “mid” intellect.
My view is that very few books in politics are as insightful or as important for understanding where liberal democracy went wrong, why figures like Donald Trump keep rising and why the opposition to them seems so wan and uninspiring so often.
This is a book that I think needs to be cleared of a sin it didn’t really commit because it has something to say to us now.
Ironically, Fukuyama did mention Trump in his book:
I actually referred to Donald Trump in my original End of History and the Last Man, when I said that one of the great advantages of living in a capitalist democracy is that it gives you an outlet for megalothymia — for the desire to be recognized as better than other people — in the economy. You could get very, very rich, and that would bleed off some of the ambition and energy that might otherwise go into politics. Little did I realize that, more than thirty years later, that wouldn’t be enough for Donald Trump. So it’s not a guarantee that you won’t have destabilized democratic politics as a result of that kind of outsized ambition.
Matt Yglesias cites another example of a book that is important despite its core thesis being wrong:
For an 80-year-old book written by an Austrian guy in a language he didn’t speak natively, Friedrich von Hayek’s 1944 book “The Road to Serfdom” is incredibly engaging and accessible. It’s also crackling with insights on nearly every page — I kept furiously highlighting passages that reminded me of contemporary controversies and phenomena so I’ll have quotes and points for future articles on everything from antitrust policy to Waymo to health care.
What’s remarkable is that even though the book is really good and I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in the future of liberalism in these fraught times, its ostensible core thesis also seems totally wrong.
I’d like to nominate another example. It seems to me that Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s Monetary History of the United States is the greatest book on monetary policy ever written, despite being in an important sense wrong about its core thesis.
Friedman and Schwartz argued that contractionary Federal Reserve policy was largely to blame for the Great Depression. More recently, economic historians including Barry Eichengreen, Peter Temin, Ben Bernanke, David Glasner, and Clark Johnson have suggested that this claim overlooked the key role of the international gold standard. I’d include my own work (The Midas Paradox) within that revisionist group.
So why does Friedman and Schwartz’s Monetary History remain such a great book, if its central thesis is at least partly wrong? I’d point to two reasons:
At a time when most people believed the Great Depression showed the inherent instability of capitalism, Friedman and Schwartz showed that the actual problem was contractionary monetary policy. They erred in putting too much weight on the specific role of Fed policy at a time when we were part of an international gold standard, but monetary policy broadly defined was in fact the cause of the Great Depression.
The policy implications of their study became vastly more important just 5 years after the book was published (in 1963), as in 1968 we transitioned to a 100% fiat money system where the central bank really does have the ability and responsibility to stabilize nominal spending. In that sense, they were ahead of their time.
Now I’d like to argue that NGDP targeting is another useful but wrong idea. In the past, I’ve argued that while NGDP targeting is not precisely optimal, it is a useful proxy for nominal wage targeting. I’ve also argued that NGDP targeting is likely to be inappropriate in countries where non-wage income is highly volatile, such as major commodity producers like Kuwait. Even so, I suggested that there was little difference between NGDP targeting and a theoretically more optimal approach such as wage targeting for an economy like the US.
So, why did I advocate NGDP level targeting? Perhaps because I couldn’t fit aggregate nominal labor compensation targeting onto my license plate:
It is easier to market NGDP targeting than labor compensation targeting, and I assumed that it made little practical difference. Over the past year, however, NGDP in the US has been distorted by a number of factors, some of which I do not fully understand. Tariffs seemed to cause a big increase in indirect business taxes. And both the tech boom and the energy crisis seem to have sharply boosted corporate profits. This is important because NGDP has four components: wages, capital income, indirect business taxes and depreciation. As a result, NGDP has been rising more than 6.5%/year even as average hourly earnings growth has slowed to 3%:
By early December, 12-month wage growth will likely fall to well below 3%. I did not expect to see this, especially at a time of such rapid growth in NGDP.
But even if NGDP targeting was not precisely optimal in 2026, I’d still argue that NGDP targeting is a useful wrong idea. The actual optimal policy target might be a component of NGDP, such as total labor compensation. Or it might be a Divisia-type index that puts more weight on wage income and less weight on capital income. Either way, NGDP is the place to begin when thinking about stabilizing the economy, as inflation is subject to the “never reason from a price change” problem. NGDP targeting is not perfect, but it’s usefully wrong.
My mistake in this case was not in overlooking the theoretical flaws in NGDP targeting—those are well understood—rather my mistake was in assuming these flaws were not likely to matter for a large, diversified economy such as the US.
Will this mistake be consequential in the future? My hunch is that we’ll go “back to normal” over the next few years, with NGDP once again closely tracking labor income. After that it’s anyone’s guess, as it all depends on progress in AI. If we get the sort of productivity explosion that some are predicting, then capital income might rise sharply as a share of GDP. It’s also possible (but unlikely) that employment would decline sharply. In either case, the Fed should try to maintain a rate of NGDP growth consistent with stable growth in nominal hourly wage rates.
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Until now, discussions of the potential economic problems created by the AI boom have mostly focused on the future. Will it destroy millions of jobs? Is there a bubble and will it cause a severe recession if it bursts? Will it destroy humanity? While these are doubtless very important questions, attempts to answer them are at best educated guesses.
We don’t have to guess, however, about one major effect of the AI boom, because it’s happening right now: Massive spending on data centers is crowding out investment in everything else in the economy.
“Crowding out” is a familiar term in economics, usually considered a consequence of government spending. When a government engages in deficit spending and the economy is at or near full employment, it drives up interest rates. That’s because, at near or full employment, the private sector is using all the available credit in the economy at the current interest rate. Therefore, in order to attract enough funds to satisfy its deficit, the government has to offer a higher interest rate. And this, in turn, leads to lower private investment. In effect, private investment is “crowded out” by the government deficit.
Note that this story only applies when the economy is near full employment. In the past, conservative claims about crowding out were widely invoked to justify fiscal austerity after the 2008 financial crisis, when all the world’s major economies were deeply depressed. Harsh spending cuts created severe slumps in Europe, while in the US Republicans compelled Obama to cut government spending, delaying full recovery from the Great Recession. In fact, when an economy is suffering from high unemployment, deficit spending doesn’t hurt private investment. Instead, it often leads to “crowding in”: government spending boosts the economy, and the private sector is more willing to invest when the economy is stronger.
However, given the situation we are in now, with relatively low unemployment and elevated inflation, crowding out is a legitimate concern. Yet it’s important to understand that the sources of crowding out aren’t limited to government spending. Surges in private spending, like the current immense AI boom, also drive up interest rates. And that is where we are now: the surge in AI spending is driving up interest rates and crowding out all other investment. Indeed, in my October 4 primer I argued that the AI boom is the main cause of soaring long-term interest rates.
Evidence of that crowding out is revealed by a recent article in the New York Times, which noted that the AI Boom is not being slowed by these soaring rates. Yet the spike in interest rates is being felt throughout the non-AI economy. In other words, all that money going into construction of datacenters and purchasing foreign produced semiconductors comes at the expense of investment in everything else.
The chart at the top of this post, which I borrowed from Steve Rattner, clearly makes this point: construction of datacenters appears to be diverting funds and resources from the construction of housing, office buildings, and factories — more or less everything that isn’t AI-related.
That said, AI-related construction — building the structures that house datacenters — is only a fraction of the AI spending boom. Most of the money is going for equipment and software. In fact, that’s one main reason AI spending is so resistant to high interest rates: Borrowing costs matter much less for assets like GPUs, which depreciate rapidly in any case, than they do for long-lived assets like buildings.
Does this story hold if we focus on investment in equipment and software rather than construction? Yes.
Chart 2 shows my version of Rattner’s story. I look at business investment in “tech” — information processing and software — measured as a percentage of GDP. The blue line in the graph below shows how much that measure of tech spending has changed since the beginning of 2023. I compare that with the corresponding change in all other investment. This chart clearly reveals dramatic crowding out by tech spending of all other investment:
Chart 2: Data from FRED
So the AI boom is crowding out everything else. While high interest rates are the main mechanism, there are also others: datacenters are gobbling up scarce electricity, and their demand for semiconductor chips has caused a “RAM apocalypse” of soaring chip prices that is hurting a wide range of industries such as autos and personal computers.
There are, as I see it, three main questions that we should ask about this AI-induced crowding out.
First, wasn’t it always thus? That is, isn’t this what always happens when a new technology drives an investment boom?
Surprisingly, the answer is no. Chart 3 shows the same calculation as Chart 2, but applied to the tech boom of the 1990s, and it doesn’t show any crowding out at all — in fact, non-tech investment rose:
Chart 3
How was that possible? Most of the answer is that during the 90s boom America attracted very large inflows of investment from abroad, which effectively financed the tech boom even as other investment rose.
That isn’t happening this time. True, Donald Trump insists that he has brought in 20 quadrillion dollars of foreign investment, or something like that, but most of that alleged foreign investment surge is a figment of his imagination, and there’s no sign of such a surge in balance of payments data.
A second question is, shouldn’t we assume that the private sector knows what it is doing -- that the reallocation of investment toward AI and away from everything else makes economic sense?
Definitely not. We shouldn’t assume that this reallocation of investment makes economic sense for the country as a whole. Through the tax code, and especially through changes in the tax code in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, the data center boom is effectively being subsidized by taxpayer dollars.
Moreover, we shouldn’t assume that the private sector knows what it’s doing. There’s often a double standard when thinking about bad investments, in which public investments that go bad are treated as evidence that the government can’t do anything right, while private malinvestment is brushed off as no big deal.
Think about the $80 billion that Meta, formerly known as Facebook, spent on the “metaverse,” only to basically abandon the concept. A government program that spent $80 billion on a failed project would be the subject of endless Congressional hearings. Yet the waste from a failed private investment is equally real.
Finally, how much risk is the AI boom creating in the rest of the economy? Tales of financial stress caused by high interest rates are proliferating. For example, a report in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal was titled “The surge in rates is blowing up commercial real-estate deals.” There’s a growing sense among observers I talk to that the adverse financial fallout of the AI boom for private credit and other loosely regulated parts of the financial system may be larger than many realize.
So it’s clear that crowding out by the AI boom is happening on a very large scale. And unlike the risks of technological unemployment or a burst bubble, this isn’t a hypothetical risk. It’s happening right now.
The "old" version of Cowork runs model inference in the cloud, executing tool calls in an Anthropic-provided VM we shipped to your computer. We added the VM for capability, safety, and security reasons - mapping in just the data you explicitly added to your session. People loved what they were able to do with Claude but didn't love the disk, battery, and performance cost of running the VM locally. Also, people didn't love that closing your laptop means the work stops.
The "new" version of Cowork runs model inference and the VM in the cloud. Each session gets its own sandbox, not sharing state with other sessions. When the VM needs something on the users' device (like a file), the desktop app is responsible for that file access tool call. [...]
We think this solves a lot of problems we've heard about (like using Cowork from a phone, keeping work running, or getting all the same power without losing battery to the VM)
Paul Krugman is the greatest econ writer in the world, and also a legendary economist. But I sometimes feel that he has a blind spot when it comes to the value of new technologies. In 1998 he famously wrote:
The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.
By the time he wrote that, America was already well into an IT-driven productivity boom that would temporarily interrupt the stagnation that had begun in the 1970s. The internet was surely part of that story; it allowed companies to reshuffle and optimize their supply chains for greater efficiency, find customers, suppliers, and workers more easily, conduct business communications cheaply and in greater depth, and so on. Dolfen et al. (2023) estimate large consumer gains from the rise of e-commerce, Barrero, Bloom, and Davis (2021) find large economic gains to households from high-quality internet access, and so on. The internet is a lot more than just people yelling at each other on forums and social media. (Krugman later argued that the internet’s economic impact had been disappointing, but I suppose that depends on your expectations.)
In 2011, Krugman wrote that American kitchens hadn’t changed much since 1957. I can forgive him for not being an early adopter of the air fryer or the Instant Pot, which came out in 2010, but he really should have given more consideration to countertop microwaves, food processors, Keurig-type coffee machines, crock pots, and induction stoves, all of which became available between 1957 and when he wrote the post.
So although it’s always dangerous to disagree with Paul, I am going to go ahead and push back on his argument that AI technology “does nothing” for most Americans:
There is also, however, a more prosaic reasons for the public’s dislike of AI: This is a technology of, by and for oligarchs, with hardly any of the benefits trickling down to regular Americans…Or to put it a different way, never before in history have corporations spent so much money — playing a major role in soaring interest rates — to create so few jobs.
I think that this is basically wrong. Although we don’t know the long-term effects of AI on the distribution of income and wealth, right now we can see a substantial amount of economic benefit flowing — I wouldn’t say “trickling down”1 — to regular Americans.
This is not to say that regular Americans couldn’t stand to benefit more from the AI boom. I think they could. I like some (though not all) of Jared Bernstein’s ideas for spreading the benefits of the data center boom more broadly. But I think Krugman has underestimated the benefits of the data center buildout in terms of direct employment, and has basically ignored the fiscal, macroeconomic, and consumer benefits of the current AI boom.
The AI buildout is creating lots of construction jobs
Building data centers takes a lot of labor. But Krugman argues that data centers aren’t doing much in the way of providing construction jobs:
Given this spending surge, one should expect a sharp rise in nonresidential construction spending — basically construction for businesses rather than housing...But that’s not what we actually see. Nonresidential construction…has basically flatlined under Trump, despite the immense AI investment boom…[E]ven the physical construction of a data center involves relatively little construction.
He quotes Van Nieuwerburgh (2026), who shows that only about a third of the cost of a data center involves construction work.
But I don’t think Krugman proves his case here. First of all, if we’re talking about construction jobs, we should look at employment levels, not spending. And here we see an increase in construction jobs since the AI boom began in late 2022:
Construction has also increased as a percentage of the workforce:
And remember, this was at a time when Trump was deporting construction workers en masse — 13% of the construction workforce is undocumented, and deportations also have knock-on negative effects on the industry that result in the firing of native-born workers as well. This probably explains the pause in the increase of construction employment in 2025. But even that couldn’t stop construction’s rise.
And it’s exactly the type of construction workers who are required for building data centers who are seeing the biggest job gains:
Construction workers’ real wages have also risen since the middle of 2022:
You might be tempted to think that this is a composition effect from Trump deporting the lowest-paid construction workers in 2025. But in fact, there has been a big jump in construction workers’ wages relative to national average wages just this year:
These are all signs of healthy labor demand.
In fact, although estimates of the effect of the data center buildout on construction employment produce very different numbers, they all agree that it’s a significant positive impact. The state of Virginia, for example, produced the following numbers:
And of course these are just the numbers so far; the data center buildout is accelerating, and Goldman estimates that 500,000 new construction and trades jobs will have to be added by 2030 in order to sustain it.
So while you can argue that this boost to labor demand isn’t worth the costs of AI (whatever you think those are), we need to count it on the positive side of the ledger here.
Data centers can be a huge tax windfall for state and local governments
Jobs aren’t the only way that the economic benefits of data centers get spread to ordinary Americans. There’s also the tax system. Data centers pay property taxes, sales taxes, corporate taxes, various fees, and so on — here’s a good explainer from the Tax Foundation. All in all, depending on their policies, local and state governments can reap large windfalls from data centers:
Those taxes go to pay for local public goods, like roads, public transit, and parks. They go to pay for public services like education and health care. Those expenditures all tend to benefit regular people. This is from a story in the New York Timesabout Loudoun County in Virginia:
A convergence of early fiber internet access and fast-track zoning has made Loudoun the data center hub of the world…Two decades into its experiment, Loudoun has become a case study for the rest of the nation on how to make data centers pay off. Thanks to the proliferation of the warehouses, the quiet bedroom community 30 minutes outside Washington, D.C., has transformed into a tech destination with trophy schools and libraries, and freshly tarred roads.
Now that doesn’t mean data centers are necessarily good for a city or state on net. There are real costs, too — electric power demands that put strain on the grid, nuisance noise, and so on. But the benefits are real, and they don’t come in the form of job creation.
And crucially, state and local governments can demand even more benefits whenever they want! They can raise taxes and fees — in fact, they can even raise them after a data center is already up and running, so that relocation to avoid higher taxes becomes less attractive of an option.
And before construction, they can demand “community benefit” agreements that are actually just additional taxes. Here’s what Jared Bernstein suggests:
Such agreements should include reduced electric and water rates for the surrounding community, funding for the local infrastructure upgrades (roads, substations, water systems) these facilities require anyway, and substantial investment in the schools, parks, and public goods that make a host community better off for having said yes.
Bernstein wants much more of this, of course, and better enforceability. But note that even as things stand, taxes and fees are substantial, and community benefits agreements are common.
AI is sustaining the macroeconomy in the face of Trump’s chaos
I spent my early blogging years supporting Paul Krugman in his epic quest to remind people that aggregate demand is a real and important thing. But for whatever reason, Paul doesn’t mention the demand-side benefits of AI investment in his post.
When Donald Trump came into office, he did a bunch of things that should have clobbered the economy. He announced high tariffs on nearly all of America’s trading partners, then created massive uncertainty by walking some of these back, periodically announcing new ones, granting tons of exceptions, and striking opaque and confusing “deals”. On top of that, he deported large swaths of America’s workforce, visibly weakened the U.S. international alliance system, ran enormous deficits, and behaved in a lawless and corrupt manner that caused people around the world to question the long-term stability of the U.S. government.
All of this created huge amounts of policy uncertainty:
Uncertainty on this scale usually causes big economic problems. Businesses can’t invest if they don’t know if the president of the United States is going to destroy their business model with an executive order tomorrow. All of this Trumpian chaos and meddling should have caused a visible negative demand shock.
But it didn’t, because just as Trump was trying his best to hit the American economy over the head with a stick, the AI boom came along and pushed in the opposite direction. AI technology itself is a positive supply shock, of course, but the data center buildout is a positive demand shock.
How big of a shock? It’s hard to say, because causal estimates of aggregate demand are inherently difficult. But it’s clear that the data center boom has made up a large percent of economic growth for Trump’s entire second term so far:
Now as I mentioned, it’s hard to know whether we’d just be building something else instead if this boom wasn’t happening. Data center construction certainly crowds out some other forms of economic activity, by sucking up scarce labor, and by raising interest rates (which makes it harder to finance other projects).
But to believe that the AI boom isn’t having a big effect on aggregate demand would require some heroic assumptions. You’d have to assume very strong crowd-out. You’d have to assume that Trump’s tariffs and other irresponsible policies are having basically no effect on demand, so that there isn’t any negative shock in need of canceling out. You’d have to assume that “animal spirits” — i.e. corporate bullishness — basically don’t affect the business cycle. And so on.
I don’t think those assumptions are realistic. I think if you see one industry contributing a very large percentage to U.S. economic growth, your prior should be that it’s causing a positive demand shock.
And if so, that means that the AI boom is the only thing standing between countless regular Americans and Trump’s self-destructive chaos. According to Okun’s Law, shaving just 1 percentage point off of economic growth would throw almost a million Americans out of work. That would be bad for regular people.
This macroeconomic benefit is hidden; it’s the proverbial dog that didn’t bark. But it’s pretty significant.
Americans use AI a lot, and they value it a lot
So far, I’ve been talking about the benefits of the data center construction boom. But I should also mention the impact that AI technology is already having on consumers. Krugman’s post seems to treat AI and the data center buildout as synonymous, and jobs as the main (or only) way by which regular Americans might benefit from the new technology. But the truth is that AI is also something that lots of Americans already use, and seem to derive a lot of utility from.
By every measure I can find, AI has seen more rapid household adoption than any other consumer technology in recorded history. And what do Americans use AI for? Everything. This poll is from over a year ago, but already it showed the incredible diversity of use cases for consumer AI:
Medical advice and diagnosis has emerged as a particularly important consumer use case. But in general, Americans say chatbots make them more productive, informed, and creative:
This does not mean Americans like AI overall; in fact, they’re overwhelmingly negative on the technology. They’re afraid it’ll take their jobs, and increasingly afraid it’ll kill them. But there are real, substantial consumer benefits from AI that we shouldn’t ignore.
How substantial? In April of this year, Brynjolfsson et al. used surveys to estimate a total annual consumer surplus of $172 billion in the United States. That’s more than the run rate revenue of Anthropic and OpenAI combined, and certainly much much more than their combined profits would be even if they stopped spending anything on fixed costs right now. It’s about half of the annual profits of Nvidia.
So when Krugman says that “this is a technology of, by and for oligarchs, with hardly any of the benefits trickling down to regular Americans,” he’s just wrong. Just the consumer surplus alone is substantial. On top of that the data center boom is creating a significant amount of jobs, generating a significant amount of local and state tax revenue, and propping up the macroeconomy and the job market as a whole.
There are plenty of big problems with AI. Malicious use or accidents might wipe out our whole species in the not-too-distant future. Job loss hasn’t been a big deal so far, but it might eventually be huge. Cognitive weakness from overreliance on AI could affect our society in strange and negative ways that we have yet to even comprehend, much less reckon with. When you ask Americans why they hate AI, these are the things they’ll tell you. Anger at “oligarchs” monopolizing the wealth from AI doesn’t typically make the list, and I don’t think it’s a great way of framing the AI issue.
I’m kind of annoyed by the use of “trickling down” to describe the broad benefits of an investment boom. Yes, businesses make investment decisions, but this is the case in every boom, and for economic growth in general. By this definition, pretty much all benefits in the entire economy “trickle down”, except perhaps for the tiny amount produced by worker-owned co-ops.
Two weeks ago at Rails World, I told my fellow programmers that it's time to put down the pencils. We're not going to write the vast majority of code by hand any longer. Coding agents have gotten so good that it's simply not an economically viable enterprise going forward to have humans typing out lines of Ruby, Rust, or C++.
When I polled the room for how many people were still writing a material amount of code by hand on a weekly basis, only a handful put up their hands. So they all knew this, but it still came as a shock to many to actually hear it.
And I get that shock. Programming has barely been a professional career for a generation, and now it's being completely transformed. That's unsettling, even for a group of people who've seen technologies come and go on a regular basis.
But this isn't just another technology, because AI isn't just another tool. It's far more like gaining some new coworkers who are exceptionally good and fast at a wide range of tasks, but still need a bit of help with some, and whose choices you might occasionally disagree with.
From a certain angle, that looks like competition. Especially when it was barely five minutes ago that programmers were being treated like precious priests whose incantations were necessary to yield even the most low-hanging fruit of the computer. This perceived threat of disintermediation is clearly hitting some programmers hard.
But I don't think anyone who's willing to lean into the future, make the most of this intelligence explosion, and apply their skills to what comes next needs to worry much. We're about to see an absolute bloom in software development as the price of development plummets and everyone realizes how much automation we still have left to do in this world.
I think the only programmers who have to worry about this change are those who refuse to embrace, or drag their feet on, the progress brought by the age of agents. It's fine to be skeptical about the areas where our new clanker colleagues still occasionally get it wrong, but refusing collaboration is not a viable career path for almost anyone.
Don't go down with the pencils. There's so much to build. We need you.
The Second Industrial Revolution sparked a wave of new products and industrial processes, fueling an optimistic Roaring Twenties. But did excitement about technological progress contribute to an over accumulation of investment, despite a slowdown in new product development and satiated demand during the 1920s? And, was this over investment worsened by continuous process innovation? Could these factors have played a role in triggering the Great Depression? To explore these questions, a macroeconomic model that incorporates both process and product innovation is proposed. Proof-of-concept simulations are performed to assess whether these factors can help explain the Great Depression. The answer is yes.
Honestly, simply skimming the headlines is enough to provide a heady jolt of ye olde schadenfreude:
Yankees' Disastrous Defense Pushes Season To Brink With ALDS Game 2 Loss
Yankees Doomed By Errors In Game 2 Loss To Rays
The Yankees Humiliated Themselves In Game 2. Now They're On The Brink Of Elimination
The Yankees Ace Needed Help This Time — And His Teammates Utterly Failed Him
Yankees Do Just About Everything Wrong In Calamitous First Inning
Aaron Boone's Toughest Decision Immediately Backfired In Game 2 Debacle
Yankees Better Remember How To Play Baseball After This Clown Show — Or Else
Thankfully, we have so much more than tantalizing headlines . . . First, however, here are two pre-Game 2 headlines to set it all up:
Yankees Ace Is Built For Surprising Environment Team Faces
In Game 2
Momentum In A Best-Of-Five Series Can Flip Quickly — And Yankees
Have Just The Thing To Do It
Sure they do. . . . P.S.: Here's some advice for any gamblers out there. Do not -- I said, DO NOT -- rely on the Post for any tips when it comes to wagering even a nickle.
Expect Bellinger, Yanks To Even ALDS On Monday vs. Rays
Game 5 of the 2024 World Series, you now have company.
The stakes were not quite as high on Monday, but the Yankees turned in an even bigger defensive abomination to put themselves in a 2-0 hole in the ALDS.
Three errors in the bottom of the first inning . . . [and] another error in the fifth helped provide the dagger, sinking the Yankees in a 5-2 loss to the Rays in Game 2 of the ALDS . . .
The Yankees flew home licking their wounds with their season on life support . . .
In a recurring theme of too many postseasons past, the Yankees melted from the Rays' ability to put the ball in play and wreak havoc . . . resulting in four errors – one shy of their franchise record for a single postseason game. . . .
[A]fter [the Yankees] left the bases loaded in the top of the fifth [unable to break a 1-1 tie], they lost the game in the bottom of the frame.
Jonathan Aranda, who homered for the only run in Game 1, led off with a sinking liner to right field that Spencer Jones did not get a good jump on as it fell for a single. [Sung to the tune of "O'Neill plays it on a hop"]
After Junior Caminero's double put runners on second and third, Liam Hicks . . . hit a weak tapper to Chisholm, who looked at home before taking the out at first as the Rays went up 2-1. The infield was in again when the speedy Chandler Simpson hit a chopper to shortstop, where George Lombard Jr. could not get his backhand on it, allowing another run to score.
That led Aaron Boone to pull Schlittler, who looked stunned, for Brent Headrick, who got the second out on a strikeout. Then he generated a ground ball to shortstop that Lombard fielded and fired slightly off-target to first, where Luis García Jr. dropped it, putting runners on the corners. Brooklyn's Richie Palacios came up next and delivered the big swing, a two-run single to center field that put the Rays ahead 5-1. . . .
The Yankees played a bottom of the first that was just about disastrous as possible, except by some miracle, . . . it only resulted in a 1-0 deficit.
It began with Yandy Diaz's leadoff chopper to third base that Ryan McMahon – who Boone considered replacing in the lineup for a better threat of offense but said he wanted to "prioritize the defense" – whiffed on for the first error.
After Aranda's single through the right side, Caminero hit a grounder up the middle that Lombard ranged to and flipped to second base for the out. But Chisholm tried an off-balance, ill-advised throw to first for the double play, which instead bounced past the bag, allowing Diaz to score for the 1-0 lead.
The comedy of errors continued when Schlittler appeared to strike out Liam Hicks for the first out, except Hicks' bat hit Austin Wells' glove for a catcher's inference.
Simpson then hit a grounder to second base where Chisholm fielded it and threw high to second base, pulling Lombard off the bag. The rookie was able to get his foot back in time to get the force out, but Chisholm's throw wiped away any chance of a double play.
Yankee fans behind the dugout are glum and a Rays player is extremely happy watching Schlittler jog after one of the many errant baseballs in the bottom of the first.
The final count from one nightmare of a bottom of the first inning for the Yankees: three errors, four misplays and somehow . . . just one run.
Against a team that famously puts the ball in play often on a home turf that famously can be difficult to adjust to, the Yankees looked as if they had never played on this stage of the ALDS or at this locale of Tropicana Field. . . .
[T]he Yankees did just about everything wrong to start Monday's Game 2.
On Schlittler's second pitch, Yandy Díaz chopped the ball to third baseman Ryan McMahon, who appeared to misjudge the turf bounce as the ball ticked off his glove for an error. . . .
Junior Caminero sent a bouncer up the middle. George Lombard Jr. ranged over and backhand-flipped to Jazz Chisholm Jr. to record the only potential out on the play — but Chisholm wildly spun and threw to first, far off-line of Luis García Jr., enabling Díaz to score and Caminero to reach second base.
The comedy of errors was only going to grow funnier for Rays fans.
Schlittler appeared to strike out Liam Hicks, but what looked like strike three instead became a catcher's interference . . .
I hope Mrs. Knoblauch brought a glove this time . . .
The Yankees made error after error, miscue after miscue in Game 2 of the ALDS.
And now, there's no more margin for error.
A mistake-filled 5-2 loss to the Tampa Bay Rays at Tropicana Field on Monday night left the Yankees in an 0-2 hole and on the brink of elimination . . .
The Yankees committed four errors — including three in the first inning — and failed to make several other defensive plays on a nightmarish night that just kept snowballing. . . .
In 17 road starts this regular season, Schlittler pitched to a 1.16 ERA — the fifth-best road ERA in MLB history. . . . But the Yankees defense did the flame-throwing ace no favors.
Third baseman Ryan McMahon booted a chopper off the bat of Yandy Díaz, the Rays' very first hitter.
Two batters later, Junior Caminero grounded into a force out, but second baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr. made an off-balance throw wide of first base as he attempted to turn a double play, allowing Díaz to score.
Catcher's interference by Austin Wells erased a called third strike and further extended the inning, as did another off-line throw by Chisholm . . .
That marked the first time in Yankees playoff history that they committed three errors in a single inning. . . .
It was a similarly frustrating start for the Yankees' offense . . . Rays starter Freddy Peralta . . . retired the first nine Yankee batters. . . .
[The MFY left the bases loaded in the top of the fifth.] It all unraveled for the Yankees from there.
After back-to-back hits against Schlittler to begin the fifth, the Rays took a 2-1 lead when an aggressive Jonathan Aranda scored from third base on a slow groundout . . . with the infield in.
Caminero then scored on a slow roller off the bat of Simpson that rookie shortstop George Lombard Jr. failed to field. That play was deemed an error before the official scorer changed the ruling. After Brent Headrick replaced Schlittler . . . Lombard committed an actual error — this time on a wide throw . . .
The only playoff game with more Yankee errors was Game 2 of the 1976 ALCS, when they committed five.
"I'm not disappointed in our defense," Schlittler said. "I'm not disappointed in the offense."
Boone: "The offseason golf course is thataway? Thanks, I wanna make a reservation for Thursday morning."
Manager Aaron Boone kept the lineup intact from Game 1 — most notably keeping a struggling Ryan McMahon at third base — in part because he wanted "to prioritize the defense," he said a couple of hours before Monday's first pitch.
It took two pitches from Cam Schlittler for that decision to backfire.
McMahon made the first error, a drip that became a flood, in an embarrassing 5-2 loss in Game 2 to the Rays in which the Yankees defense was charged with four errors and probably should have been charged with more.
The problems started on the second pitch Rays leadoff hitter Yandy Díaz saw, chopping a grounder toward McMahon. The normally sure-handed veteran, perhaps misjudging the springs on the Tropicana Field turf or an infield dirt that played fast, missed on his backhand attempt. The ball skittered past him, McMahon raising his palms wondering what had just happened. Two more errors followed in an inning in which the Rays scored an unearned run.
McMahon did not make a second mistake in the field, but he also did not atone at the plate. . . . In four postseason games, McMahon is 1-for-7 — the lone hit an infield single — with two walks . . .
"'Hitler' is an essential part of my last name . . . and my fuckin teammates can't catch the goddamn ball. FML."
"I feel like if I need to get [a strikeout]," [Cam Schlittler] said Saturday, "I'm going to be able to do that."
Schlittler's prediction was off the mark because Tampa Bay's bats were constantly on the mark.
The Yankees ace of aces . . . was not able to play hero . . .
In the game's biggest moments, Schlittler needed the help of his defense, which let him down repeatedly. . . .
It started immediately, with the aggressive Rays swinging early in counts and making consistent, often loud contact in the first inning. Errors by Ryan McMahon (on a chopper) and Jazz Chisholm Jr. (an ill-advised throw to first after recording an out at second) scored one run, but Schlittler did well to limit the damage.
The game changed, though, in a four-run fifth inning during which the flame-throwing righty needed to throw pitches by Rays bats and could not.
A single by Jonathan Aranda (played conservatively by Spencer Jones, who might have had a chance at a diving catch) and a smashed double from Junior Caminero put runners on second and third without an out in a game that was then tied, 1-1. Schlittler needed one of those strikeouts. Unlike the Rays, he whiffed.
Liam Hicks managed to make contact — the softest imaginable, a tapper that traveled 5 feet in the air — but the slow roller to Chisholm was good enough to score the go-ahead run. . . .
Next it was Chandler Simpson who fell behind 1-2 but kept fighting. . . . [He] chopped a swinging bunt 4 feet in the air toward George Lombard Jr. The rookie shortstop had a play at the plate and knew it, his eyes toward Austin Wells instead of the ball as he booted it on a backhand attempt to let in another run.
On a night Schlittler needed help . . . [he] received none . . .
Ben Rice wonders when would be the right time to ask for a trade to a team that doesn't burst into flames like a dumpster-shaped Tesla in October.
Cam Schlittler has to be "win day" for the Yankees in these playoffs. That felt nonnegotiable . . .
Still, his teammates had to help him a little.
Yet, they could not even muster a little . . . All you need to know is that in a four-batter span to begin the bottom of the first inning, the Yankees committed three errors . . . So they had as many errors in about five minutes as they had hits in this game until . . . one out in the eighth inning.
Basically the Rays forced the Yankees to play baseball — and the Yankees were just awful at it.
And because of that their season is on life support. They need a three-game winning streak against a rival who has outplayed them all season and now in the postseason. Or else it will assure a 17th straight title-less season. Or else yet another Aaron Boone team will have been ousted in the playoffs by a team that had a better record in the regular season. The competition rises and the Yankee hitting and defense sink; it has become a rite of fall.
They lost embarrassingly, 5-2, Monday night to the Rays. They have two runs in 18 innings in this division series, compared to one unpardonable baserunning gaffe by Austin Wells in the opener Saturday in which they were nearly no-hit and lost 1-0. They then committed four errors in Game 2.
Those four errors do not fully encapsulate how incompetent the Yankees were defensively. Because no team struck out fewer times this season than the Rays (18.8 percent) and what they did against Schlittler was attack strikes early in the count, put it in play and let the Yankees fielding clown show do the rest. . . .
[After five innings, Tampa led] 5-1 — and the way the Yankees are hitting against Tampa Bay, that was insurmountable. The Yankees have gone 1-2-3 in 12 of 18 innings. They have five hits and two runs in two games — and yet their baserunning and defense might be worse.
The Yankees have now lost their last six road playoff games. . . .
It feels like déjà unacceptable.
They play at home Wednesday trying to extend their season . . . Their fans will hope that somewhere between Games 2 and 3 they recall how to hit, field and run the bases smartly. You know, play baseball well.
Anyone wanna see my balance-the-baseball-on-the-side-of-my-glove trick?
As Aaron Boone awaited the start of the ALDS in the visiting manager's office at Tropicana Field on Saturday, he answered what turned out to be a prescient question.
Does it bother Boone, he was asked, that opposing teams' scouting reports say its key to put the ball in play when the Yankees are in the field. The insinuation made by such scouting reports . . . is that the Yankees don't have a sound defense. . . . [T]hat's been their rep for years under Boone, and it even became public that the Dodgers made the same evaluations after the Yankees lost the 2024 World Series to L.A. in sloppy fashion.
[The Yankees] ranked 24th in errors, 17th in Outs Above Average and 13th in Defensive Runs Saved this season . . .
"[A]t times we've been very good and people don't acknowledge it," Boone insisted. . . . "We're trying to prepare as best we can . . . If you're implying with that question we're a bad defense, no, we're not." . . .
While the manager can debate just how strong his defense was on the whole this season, there is no arguing that it was catastrophic . . . . embarrassing . . . . pathetic — take your pick — in Game 2 of the ALDS on Monday. With three errors in the first frame, four totaled on the night, and several other balls misplayed, the futile Bombers suffered a humiliating 5-2 loss to the much tidier Rays.
Now both teams are headed to Yankee Stadium with the pinstripers on the brink of elimination . . . They have no one but themselves to blame.
"Tonight was just not good enough for us . . .," Boone said . . .
The Yankees' comedy of errors in this series began on Saturday when, in a desperate attempt to jumpstart a dormant offense, Austin Wells was thrown out inexplicably trying to stretch a double into a triple. On Monday . . . Ryan McMahon committed a fielding error on the second pitch of the game.
Earlier in the day, Boone said that he had given some thought to Anthony Volpe starting in place of the light-hitting third baseman . . . "I want to prioritize the defense," Boone said, but his defense didn't prioritize taking care of the ball.
McMahon wasn't the only Yankee to falter in the first, as Jazz Chisholm Jr. helped a run score when he made an off-line throw from second base to first base on a double play attempt. With his back turned to first and Jonathan Aranda sliding at him, Chisholm's heave was off-balance and ill-advised. And yet, he didn't think he should have held onto the ball.
"Honestly, I'd probably still throw it in the play that was trying to be made," Chisholm said. . . .
Wells was then called for catcher interference upon review, and Chisholm nearly threw another ball away before the inning ended.
[D]isaster struck their defense again in the fifth inning, which began with an Aranda single to right. The ball bounced in front of Spencer Jones after he got a jump that was -13.4 feet below average, per Statcast. Boone claimed the 109.4-mph "bullet" wasn't catchable . . . Jones disagreed. He said he should have caught it, but he admitted to hesitating on a "tough read." . . .
Now the Yankees — devoid of fundamentals, riddled with mistakes, and short on offense — find themselves in an unenviable 2-0 hole as they head back to Yankee Stadium, where the Rays have already celebrated a division crown in the past month. The Yanks need to win three straight to keep their season alive . . .
This has never been what you would call a standard house of horrors. Nobody has ever thought to give it a nickname. . . .
It's just "The Trop," short for Tropicana Field, and let's be very honest: It's not even anywhere close to the best atmosphere in a building that has been named for orange juice. That would be Daikin Park, formerly Minute Maid Park, in Houston.
The Trop?
The Trop could mostly pass for study hall for most of its existence. . . .
But the Yankees are going to be grateful to get the hell out of Dodge, to get the hell out of St. Petersburg. This has been a road trip from hell, and it has shoved them right to the brink of a season that promised so much and is on the verge of delivering precious little.
The Rays beat the Yankees 5-2 on Monday night, but they only got around to that once the Yankees were done beating the Yankees on Monday night. They couldn't catch the ball, couldn't hit the ball . . .
It was like that fifth inning of the fifth game of the World Series a few years ago, only spread around the whole game. And the suddenly very audible Rays fans took great delight in silencing the Yankee invaders — the ones in the stands as well as the ones on the field — and enjoying every one of the four — four!! — errors the team in the road grays committed.
The Yankees' slapstick contrasts sharply with the Rays' tight, smart, efficient brand of ball. . . .
The Yankees used to feel at home down in Tampa-St. Pete . . . Tampa used to be an easy, breezy stop along the way, with so many Yankees fans inside the arid walls of the Trop that it felt and sounded like a smaller, uglier version of Yankee Stadium. . . .
But this year they lost five of the seven games they played in St. Pete during the regular season, and they're now 0-2 here in the postseason, and maybe the most dire of all the thoughts the Yankees face in their present predicament is this: They will now pay any price and bear any burden to get another game here. . . .
[B]ack in The Bronx . . . [i]t'll be a desperate house facing desperate times . . .
They couldn't do it last year. . . . The Bronx couldn't save them last year.
Heroes, zeros and the inside pitch from the Yankees' 5-2 loss to the Rays in Game 2 of the ALDS . . .
Hero
Old-school baseball. Baseball's best team at putting the ball in play struck out just four times total in a game started by Cam Schlittler, putting constant pressure on a Yankees defense that wilted.
Zero
The entire Yankees defense. Misplays, four of which were scored as errors, from (in order) Ryan McMahon, Jazz Chisholm Jr., Austin Wells, Spencer Jones, George Lombard Jr., Lombard again and Luis García Jr. led to three unearned runs and one of the ugliest playoff performances you will see. . . .
Key Stat
4: Errors by the Yankees — and they probably should have been charged with five — including three in the first inning
The Yankees have a few days this week to demonstrate that when the playoff going gets tough, they don't just get going toward their offseason golf game.
Until proven otherwise, they are the Boone Bullies. They are capable of outdoing inferiors and the AL Central in the postseason, but wilt when their equal or better shows up. . . .
[A]s Game 1 of the division series again reiterated, at this time of year, when the level of competition goes up, the Aaron Boone Yankees have yet to rise concurrently.
Saturday night, they were nearly no-hit by Drew Rasmussen, totaled just one hit and lost 1-0 to the team that outdid them all season — the AL East champion Rays.
This is not a funeral. The Yankees have their most postseason bulletproof player of the Boone Era, Cam Schlittler, starting Monday night's Game 2. . . .
Still, the math is not favorable for the Yankees. They have to win three of four now to advance, with the knowledge that the Yankee killer Rasmussen (1.60 ERA in 12 games/11 starts against the Yankees) will get one more start if necessary. Plus, the Rays were just better than the Yankees over 162 games. . . .
To this point, a Boone Yankee team has completed 15 playoff series since he became manager in 2018. They are 7-0 against foes they had a better overall record than during the year. They are 1-7 against those with the same or worse records. The one series win was against Cleveland during the 60-game 2020 COVID season.
And really the meek AL Central should hardly count. They are like the mildly good wrestler who gets beaten to elevate a challenger for a championship shot. The Boone Yankees are 5-0 against the AL Central in the postseason. . . .
[In Game 1] the Yankees did not give their fans many reasons to cheer. Even their lone hit, an Austin Wells eighth-inning double, devolved into the kind of boneheaded play that has defined the Boone Yankees' extinction this time of year when Wells unforgivably tried and failed to stretch it into a triple.
The Rays and Yankees have had the two best records in the AL every day since April 23 except for one. Tampa Bay went into first place for good June 27. The Yankees have been trying to play catch-up since. Even reset at 0-0 on Oct. 3, the Rays have gone up on the Yankees again. . . .
[U]ntil proven otherwise, this is the time of year in which the Boone Yankees see their superiors and begin offseason plans.
I talk to a lot of old people, those who were born in the 20th century, and if I ask them what the word “unalive� means, they usually have no idea what I’m talking about, except for some of them who have kids or who study Internet culture.
This will, of course, probably seem very weird to most people who were born in or grew up in the 21st century. Just to recap for the olds: “unalive� is the word you use to represent concepts like dying, or death, or killing or being killed, on digital platforms where saying those words accurately will cause the algorithm to punish or censor you. Or, maybe, where the perception is that using those words will result in being censored by the algorithm, and no one is actually willing to find out what happens if you use the forbidden words.
This sort of attack on people’s expression started on platforms like TikTok, where nearly all content is distributed through an algorithmic feed, but has since become ubiquitous in nearly all digital media that we see. In fact, these tics are now so prevalent that it’s routine to hear people using this kind of language in everyday life, even though there’s not yet an algorithm to appease in the physical world. I’ve heard people say, out loud, “he unalived himself�, in reference to someone dying by suicide.
And all of this has become even more visible in recent days as online conversation has turned to discussion of the horrific lack of accountability around the tragic rape case at Cornell University. Across the Internet, people are routinely referring to the central crime in the case as r*pe or “grape� or even using the � emoji, without a second thought for what it means that the very word can’t be said online anymore. Or, at least, the assumption is that it can’t be said.
To be clear, I am very much in favor of people using content warnings or sensitivity markers for content, and fine with people using abbreviations like “SA� for references to disturbing or triggering topics like sexual assault; we should provide people with as much context and control as possible when choosing what information they want to consume and when. I also know that sometimes, people use lesser terms for stressful subjects like death or assault to create a bit of ironic distance from painful or upsetting topics.
But most of the different variations of wording and emojis are coming from trying to appease the platforms, and there’s a heavy cost for those who are worried about being mindful: If someone is using a tool to filter out content, it will no longer be effective because everyone is using misspellings and euphemisms and imagery to get around the algorithm.
The spread of censored and mangled syntax is happening because people believe, or have experienced, that platforms will silence them for accurately describing the world in plain language. This shit is terrible, and it has to stop.
You Were Not Born With These Constraints
One of the things that’s most concerning to me is that an entire generation has grown up not realizing how extreme it is that their very language is being chosen for them by platforms run by people who hate that generation’s ability to express itself, and who hate the things it has to say. From their youngest days, this generation grew up watching people make stupid faces at them for YouTube thumbnails and never had a chance to reflect on the fact that those creators didn’t want to be humiliating themselves by making those expressions — the demands of the algorithms of Big Tech forced them to do that.
The rituals of feeding the algorithm are so built into people’s everyday habits that they’re invisible to people who weren’t alive before today’s platforms took over. Every parent of my cohort remembers the first time they heard their toddler finish doing something cute in their living room, and then turn around and say, “please like and subscribe!� afterwards. It’s a ghastly, sickening feeling to confront the fact that our little kids were being brainwashed into thinking that every adorable thing they did should be followed by a prompt to provide data to Google.
Over on Instagram, where people originally signed up thinking they were going to see someone’s vacation pictures, or shots of their cousin’s kids, you’re now stuck watching people beg for everyone to reply with cultish phrases in the comments, which will then earn them an obviously AI-generated response in return, all in service of “showing activity� to the algorithm, like it’s an angry god that needs a sacrifice. They’re just not sure exactly what the angry god wants.
Your free speech was taken away from you, and the people who did it are the same ones who spent years pretending to care about “free expression�. They contrived examples of lack of free speech on college campuses while squashing protests, and cried crocodile tears about “cancel culture� while getting people fired for political criticism. Now they have no problem with billionaires deciding exactly what words everyone is allowed to say. Larry Ellison is not content with his family owning all of the movies and TV shows — his family has to control what words people are allowed to speak on TikTok, too. Elon Musk isn’t content to merely generate and distribute child sexual abuse material for profit — he wants to silence the messages of the few decent people who are foolish enough to remain on Twitter/X, too. (That’s why I wrote you a guide on how to get your organization off of that cursed platform.)
Now that an entire generation has grown up using these Orwellian euphemisms, and all of the Big AI products are trained on the Internet that was created under this regime, do you think today’s AI tools even know that the real, uncensored world exists? If you can’t say “genocide� on any of the major platforms, yet those are the ones all of the Big AI tools used as their training data... well, then the AI tools sure aren’t very likely to know much about genocide, are they?
Fuck the Algorithm
Our creativity can be constrained by the language we use — our imaginations are limited by what we can think to say. If we’re trained to limit the words we speak just by habit, and those limits are put in place by people whose social, political, cultural and moral goals are the opposite of what we value, then our work is unalive before it is even born.
The answer to this is simple: say what you mean. This will take, to some degree, courage. It may even take, I hesitate to say, some sacrifice. When I suggest this course of action to people, they inevitably say, “But it will cost me audience!� or “But what if I lose followers!� or “What if they demonetize me!�
Okay, what if they do? What if they do.
Are you willing to push on this? To make a point about it? To move to platforms where you can actually say what you mean? Or to remember that you already have platforms where you can say what you mean? On an email newsletter or podcast you can say whatever the hell you want and nobody can stop you. On my blog right here, I can even curse in a headline and it won’t affect anything about how my site operates.
(And a reminder: Substack is not an email newsletter, and a Spotify show is not a podcast — they’ll be unaliving your distribution any day now.)
If you are a 20th century relic like me, it is incumbent upon you to remind the generation that grew up inside the algorithm that another world is possible, and that we know this because we lived it. We were able to style a MySpace page in any way that we wanted; the code for LiveJournal was entirely open source so there was no part of the algorithm that was unknowable. A blog like the one you’re reading right now could be made by anyone, and put up for pennies, and nobody could stop it from being read by millions of people. (And that last one? It’s still possible.)
If you are from this century, forget all that rambling bullshit about ancient history: all that matters is you getting what you deserve, because you’ve been fucked over by the same billionaires who’ve poisoned your planet and infested your world with slop. The best artists around you are invisible to you, and the most important statements by activists that you care about are being silenced. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a system working as designed. And the proof is as obvious as the fact that the angriest activists you know can’t even talk about systemic abuses or state violence without having to put it in algorithmically approved speech or censoring their captions like they’re going to be read by 5-year-olds.
It should make you furious. It is time to kill “unalive�.
The response is simple:
For every message you put out, start by saying what you mean. Don’t work backwards from what the algorithm wants or what a platform permits.
Build a presence on every platform you can, even the ones where you have fewer followers or where you’re harder to find.
Tell your audience that your speech being free matters more than corporate convenience. Keep saying it, and keep it positive: independence gets them better art, better information, and more connected communities.
Build alliances with other artists, activists and people who share your values, and let them know you’re going to start sharing your work uncensored.
Start releasing your work uncensored and see where the platforms push back. (You may be surprised: sometimes you were censoring yourself in anticipation of limits that weren’t even there.)
If a platform does try to limit your reach or expression, make a LOT OF NOISE about it. Tell the press, rally your alliance, and spread the word on your other platforms, using the moment to build audience and raise support there. Get others to amplify the parts of your work that don’t violate platform policy, so the controversy drives people to the rest.
Find the others pushing back on algorithmic control of expression, and raise and praise their work when they do the same.
If we keep accepting the words that are forced upon us by TikTok and Meta and Google and all the rest, while platforms like Twitter/X allow the most hateful and harmful content in the world to be distributed completely unfettered, we’ll only see authoritarianism rise, and the harms against the vulnerable accelerate. But what breaks my heart almost as much is that we’ll see so many brilliant artists and activists and thinkers whose genius will be muted or silenced by mindless, heartless algorithms that capriciously decide who gets to say exactly what words, in what ways.
I get angry every time I think about it. The tech tycoons get ever more brazen in what they’re willing to say publicly, boasting about how they’re going to cause the end of the world, or calling for ethnic cleansing, all while putting tighter and tighter reins on the speech and expression of ordinary people. It’s time for “unalive� to die.
We analyze the academic affiliations of nearly 6,000 award-winning researchers in 18 major fields in the natural sciences, engineering, and social sciences from the 1820s to the 2020s, focusing on the 1960s onward. The analysis reveals a trend of declining concentration in the institutional affiliations of award-winning researchers, shifting from a few science-strong universities in high-income countries to a more diverse set of institutions across the world. The decline in concentration is observed in all fields except one: economics. The institutional affiliations of prizewinning economists have become more concentrated over time, making economics the most concentrated field. We associate the higher concentration of prizewinning work in economics with the field’s stronger sorting by institutional prestige, its lower reliance on specialized equipment and instruments, and its assessment of findings based on a synthesis of evidence rather than on decisive experiments or proofs. We discuss the benefits and costs of this high and rising institutional concentration of prizewinning economists.
In 1960, a country boy named Glen Campbell showed up in Los Angeles with a guitar, a pompadour hairdo, and a lean, hungry look. He was blessed by fate, and soon started playing on hit records. He was always on the radio.
But there was a catch—they weren’t his records. Campbell was just a member of the band, and the public didn’t know his name. Even so, what amazing company this young man kept: He now played guitar for Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Phil Spector, Nat King Cole, Dean Martin, Bobby Darin, Sammy Davis Jr., the Everly Brothers, Doris Day, and dozens of other superstars.
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This all happened because he had earned the respect of some lesser-known peers, the first-call musicians who worked in the trenches during these sessions. Nowadays they are known collectively as the Wrecking Crew, and are acknowledged as the leading studio players of the era. Glen Campbell would be remembered today, even if he had never released a single record under his own name, just for his membership in this elite cohort.
He deserved every bit of his new-found success. Rock star Leon Russell, who also worked in these sessions, called Campbell the “best guitar player I'd heard before or since.” Songwriter Jimmy Webb later declared that Campbell could match up with “any guitar player in the world, from George Benson to Eric Clapton.” Eddie Van Halen was so desperate to get a guitar lesson from Campbell, that he traveled all the way to Arizona just to make it happen.
Campbell was that good.
“In 1963 alone, he showed up on 586 recorded songs.”
There was, of course, a tiny problem. Glen didn’t know how to read music. So he sometimes asked the other musicians to play a new song without him the first time, so he could hear what was happening. But for the second run-through, Campbell was ready and contributing.
He played for union scale in those early days. That meant $65 for a three-hour session. In the early 1960s that was solid money. Back in Arkansas, Glen had picked cotton for $1.25 for every hundred pounds—that was more than a whole day’s work. Music was a much better option. And Campbell was in the studio constantly now. In 1963 alone, he showed up on 586 recorded songs.
But this young man hoped for more. Glen Campbell wanted to be a star. And he tried everything to make it happen. But nothing worked.
In 1962, he focused on bluegrass, and released his first album on Capitol. It came and went with little fanfare.
In 1963, Campbell reinvented himself as a traditional country singer. He released his second album on Capitol, but it also fizzled out.
In 1964, he set himself up as a guitar virtuoso, and released The Astounding 12-String Guitar of Glen Campbell, again on Capitol. Judging by the sales, few were astounded.
In 1965, Campbell adopted the guise of a rock musician. He put out The Big Bad Rock Guitar of Glen Campbell. It’s amazing that Capitol was still in his corner. Audiences, however, gave it a pass. That was the year everybody wanted British rock stars from Liverpool, not former studio musicians from Billstown, Arkansas.
Was there anything left to try? Yes, there was.
Around this same time, Glen Campbell rebranded himself as a surf musician, and got a choice gig with the Beach Boys. That’s quite a feat for a kid from a landlocked state. For a time, he actually replaced Brian Wilson as lead singer with the band. You might think this would turn him into a superstar, but fans wanted Brian back, and had no interest in celebrating his successor.
At this point, I would have given up and gone back to Arkansas. Campbell had made enough cash from those Beach Boys gigs to lease a Gold Cadillac, and could have returned home in grand style. But he was determined to try his luck one more time, and Capitol Records—then flush with cash, due to all those Beatles hits—still had money to burn.
That’s when they finally struck gold, or a gold record, to be more precise. Gentle on My Mind, released in August 1967, not only got Campbell on the charts but earned him two Grammy awards. He was now on a rapid trajectory to stardom, and would never look back.
Glen Campbell publicity photo from 1966
During the next 34 months, Campbell released twelve more albums. This staggering output not only happened while he was concertizing and touring, but Campbell was now also acting in Hollywood movies. Adding to the craziness, he launched his CBS television show The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour in 1969.
For the next three years, this good-looking young man, with his polite manners and affable demeanor, would entertain audiences from the small screen in their homes. He also showed a knack for comedy (it helped that Steve Martin and Rob Reiner were his writers). Best of all, Campbell always seemed to have some new hit song to share.
This was his golden era, and a surprising time for a down-home performer to enjoy pop music acclaim. In an age when teenage tastes controlled the charts, and three-minute anthems of rebellion took over the radio, Campbell found success in the most unlikely way of all, with lonely songs about lonely guys far away from home.
The protagonist in a Glen Campbell song isn’t heading to San Francisco with flowers in his hair. He’s not a street-fighting man or a working-class hero or even just a fortunate son. He’s sad and alone and wants to get back to Wichita or Galveston or some other place he used to be.
Listeners could relate to his, and maybe especially in a time when almost everyone was going on strange trips—at least in their head, if not to actual locales like Haight-Ashbury or Vietnam. There was something comforting in Campbell’s repeated reminder that places like home still existed, and someone special might be waiting there.
“The protagonist in a Glen Campbell song isn’t heading to San Francisco with flowers in his hair. He’s not a street-fighting man or a working-class hero or even just a fortunate son….”
Of course, I can’t give Glen Campbell total credit for these songs, because he didn’t write them. He got his best songs from a Hollywood hippie named Jimmy Webb. The first time they met, it didn’t look like they had much in common. They both showed up at the same studio one day, where they had been hired to make music for a Chevrolet commercial. That’s when country boy Campbell strolled up to long-haired Webb, and simply said: “Get a haircut.”
As it turned out, they had more in common than they realized. Jimmy Webb may have been a Hollywood hippie, but he was also a country boy from Laverne, Oklahoma—population of one thousand souls, and almost as many oil rigs. Webb may have left the heartland, but it stayed in his songs.
Campbell rode Webb’s tune “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” into the Billboard top forty and up to number two on the country chart. He wanted more of the same, and asked the hirsute balladeer to compose another song about a city. So one day, Webb let Campbell hear an early version of “Wichita Lineman.”
There would never be a later version—although Webb thought the song needed more work—because Campbell recorded it immediately. “When I heard it I cried,” Campbell later admitted. It made him feel homesick—almost the defining sensation of his best work from the 1960s. Others must have felt the same, because this time Campbell reached number three on the Billboard Hot 100.
Webb was worried that “Wichita Lineman” had two many flaws. It lasts for just two verses, without a chorus or bridge, and the verse modulates by a third in the middle—so the song doesn’t resolve in the tonic. There wasn’t even an intro (although bassist Carol Kaye invented a short one at the session). And the rhymes didn’t always rhyme.
The closing word of the song is line, but it’s supposed to rhyme with time. Webb wanted to come up with something better but, ironically, he didn’t have time to fix his line. It was already on the radio.
That didn’t stop “Wichita Lineman” from thrilling audiences, or earning extravagant praise from famous admirers. Bob Dylan once called it “the greatest song ever written.” Billy Joel cited “Wichita Lineman,” in his recent interview with Rick Beato, when asked to pick a perfect song. I’ve been playing it for decades (even at jazz gigs), and wouldn’t change a note of this supposedly flawed tune.
Glen Campbell now saw his name in lights—as they say in show business. That was quite a change for someone who had grown up without any lights, or even electricity, in the family home. That was back in Billstown, a city so small that it didn’t show up on road maps.
His father was a sharecropper, and the family only ate what they grew or hunted—and sometime there wasn’t enough for the large Campbell family (which produced twelve children). There were days when Glen stayed inside his classroom during school recess, because it was cold and he didn’t own a coat. “We didn’t just endure poverty,” Campbell recalled, “we wore it.”
In his autobiography, Campbell tells of the time his father gave up all hope, and decided to commit suicide. The story is half a tragedy, and half a miracle:
Dad couldn’t bear the pressure of not being able to provide the bare necessities for his large family any longer. So he took a shotgun and headed into the woods. He loaded the weapon and was about to put the barrel in his mouth when he was distracted by a squirrel running down a tree branch. He shot and killed it. Almost instantly another came down, and another. My dad was crying and shooting his gun, and the family had eight squirrels for supper….Dad lived an additional forty years.
The father was a survivor, but his son was destined for greater things and, like Johnny B. Goode, that little country boy could play the guitar. He got his first instrument at age four—a three-quarter size Sears Roebuck model that cost five dollars—and was gigging and going on the road while still a child. He joined his uncle’s band and they made the move to Albuquerque when Campbell was seventeen. Six years later he came to Los Angeles. And six years after that, Glen Campbell was a superstar.
He enjoyed every bit of it. Campbell built the first million-dollar house in Laurel Canyon—a 16,500 square-foot home on seven acres. He later bragged that he had “stayed in smaller three-story hotels.” But he could afford it—he was now making $50,000 or more in a single night.
But the enjoyment soon turned sour. “There were times when I was too drunk to recall what I did or with whom I did it,” he later admitted. He sometimes got bad write-ups in the press for the times he faltered on-stage.
In his autobiography, Campbell admits his failings, but can’t resist pointing out that the same journalists who criticized him were also drinking and using drugs, although nobody called them out. But the reality was that Campbell was under the bright lights, front and center, night after night—undergoing a kind of scrutiny no music critic ever faces.
The pressure was intense. “In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I didn’t have a career,” he later mused. “My career had me.” Sometime he was so confused on the road, that he would hunt for a local telephone book just to remind himself what city he was in. And now, in addition to the booze, he was also using cocaine.
They say all publicity is good publicity—but that’s not true.
“You have the illusion of new energy and refreshment,” he later explained, “You think you’re alert and become optimistic and happy, but this feeling only lasts ten to fifteen minutes.” Your choice is to snort more, or return to reality. And after too much cocaine, reality is more depressing than ever.
This was when the slow-motion collapse began. His marriage fell apart. He lost the fancy house in Laurel Canyon, and moved into an apartment. In the aftermath, he had little contact with his children. Campbell’s TV show got cancelled, and his record sales started to dip.
How did he respond? In the worst possible way: “I was drinking and drugging now to ease the pain.”
Not all the blame accrues to Campbell for his declining record sales. The public’s taste in songs changed too. In the late 1960s, a new style of wistful pop music, infused with country and folk elements, had taken off, and he was a beneficiary. Capitol Records was the leader in this new sound, and released a series of hit records featuring Glen Campbell, Bobbie Gentry, and Linda Ronstadt. He rode that wave as long as it lasted—but it didn’t last long.
Many thought that this was the beginning of a new era in pop, but it was really the end. Gentry soon disappeared from view (never seen in public after 1982). Ronstadt gradually adopted a more mainstream pop sound, and eventually tried her hand at almost every other genre (Latin, jazz standards, R&B, punk, even Gilbert & Sullivan operetta). And Campbell had to reinvent himself again, or at least that’s what he believed at the time.
He pulled a lot of these things off through sheer talent. He always had plenty of that. But many were now asking: Who is the real Glen Campbell? I’m not sure even the artist himself could answer this question at the time.
And certainly not his family. After his third divorce, Campbell told the press: “Perhaps I’ve found the secret for an unhappy private life. Every three years I go and marry a girl who doesn’t love me, and then she proceeds to take all my money.” For his faithful fans, this cynicism was as much a shock as the artist’s personal travails. Campbell had always been known as one of the nicest people in show business, but even that reputation was lost from all the drinking—which made him rude and angry.
“When he wasn’t drinking, he was the best guy in the world,” his last wife Kimberly Woollen told an interviewer after Campbell’s death. “But I feared every time he took a drink.”
Campbell eventually found his way back to the charts, releasing two more mega-hits: “Rhinestone Cowboy” from 1975 and “Southern Nights” in 1977. But there would be no more gold records after that—not until his final studio album Adiós, forty years later. These triumphs from the mid-1970s have powerful hooks, but I’m not the only person who missed those lonesome, intimate songs from the 1960s. I’m still puzzled why Campbell didn’t try to build more on that sound and his relationship with Jimmy Webb.
On the few occasions when those two reunited, the results were memorable. My favorite Campbell album after the 1960s is Glen Campbell and Jimmy Webb: In Session from 1988—but that collaboration only happened because of a Canadian TV show, and the music wasn’t released on record until many years later. It’s worth hearing if only for the slower version of “Galveston,” which captures delicate emotions not found on the original hit single.
Around that same time, Campbell released Light Years, which featured eight Webb songs. That record deserves to be better known, but this duo would never get back to the Top Forty. Campbell, for his part, quickly shifted to other moods and genres—performing church hymns or (a staple of his live shows) the “William Tell Overture” or whatever else captured his fancy in any given month.
In time, Campbell gravitated more and more to religious music, a choice that reflected his own deeply held faith. That may have been when he was most true to his own sense of his vocation—sometimes people asked him if he was going to start a ministry, and he always responded: “I’m already in it.” But a turn to Christian music didn’t help his record sales.
Yet even without new hits, Glen Campbell never lost his audience. Everybody fell under his charm, even crusty jazzcats like me. Campbell was just plain likeable with that aw shucks demeanor and beaming smile. Even when his personal troubles got into the news, fans found a way to forgive him. There was something about him that invited forgiveness.
We wanted him to succeed. And when he had victories in his battle with alcohol and drugs, we cheered him on, despite the relapses. Fans did the same when the singer finally settled into a more peaceful life with his fourth wife Kimberly Woollen. And they offered him support, one final time, after he went public with his Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 2011.
They came out in droves for his farewell tour, and their support lifted his album Ghost on the Canvas to his highest Billboard chart placement in decades. His last studio album Adiós, released a few weeks before his death in 2017 also sold well, and earned him his sixteenth appearance in Billboard’s ranking of the top forty albums.
At the time of his death, all the stars sang his praises—Paul McCartney, Brian Wilson, Dolly Parton, and other luminaries. They liked him too. How could they not? “Find me somebody that doesn’t like Glen Campbell,” commented Alice Cooper, in an unlikely tribute. “Find me anybody.”
“When you think about great singers, you’ll think of Glen Campbell,” Parton reminisced. Then she went on: “When you think about good looks, you’ll think of Glen Campbell. When you think about an all-around entertainer and wonderful human being, you will think of Glen Campbell.”
Brian Wilson said pretty much the same thing about his former understudy. Campbell, he declared, was an"incredible musician and an even better person.”
That’s his legacy, and always will be. Those two aspects of Glen Campbell—the musical and the personal—somehow merged, almost effortlessly. In his definitive moments, he felt real in a way that few celebrities do, and that same realness came across in his songs.
Maybe Campbell didn’t write his hits, but he brought something to them that was distinctly his. Even Sinatra and Presley couldn’t capture that particular kind of feeling. When Campbell sang about Wichita and Galveston and Phoenix, you felt he really was that man on a lonesome journey. That’s why you listened. And it’s why we still do, long after his journey has ended.
Up with pain, and with Sir J. Minnes by coach to the Temple, and then I to my brother’s, and up and down on business, and so to the New Exchange, and there met Creed, and he and I walked two or three hours, talking of many businesses, especially about Tangier, and my Lord Tiviot’s bringing in of high accounts, and yet if they were higher are like to pass without exception, and then of my Lord Sandwich sending a messenger to know whether the King intends to come to Newmarket, as is talked, that he may be ready to entertain him at Hinchingbroke.
Thence home and dined, and my wife all day putting up her hangings in her closett, which she do very prettily herself with her own hand, to my great content. So I to the office till night, about several businesses, and then went and sat an hour or two with Sir W. Pen, talking very largely of Sir J. Minnes’s simplicity and unsteadiness, and of Sir W. Batten’s suspicious dealings, wherein I was open, and he sufficiently, so that I do not care for his telling of tales, for he said as much, but whether that were so or no I said nothing but what is my certain knowledge and belief concerning him. Thence home to bed in great pain.
On September 30th, the first officer on a FlyDubai 737 en route from Dubai to Tel Aviv attacked the captain with a cockpit crash axe. A panicked struggle followed as passengers and off-duty pilots rushed to the cockpit.
The first officer, Hamam al-Hammami, was subdued and the jet landed safely in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia — though not before it was pushed into a high-speed dive that tore away part of its tail. Nobody was killed. Injuries to the captain were serious but he’s expected to recover fully.
Al-Hammami’s exact intentions are uncertain. According to reports thus far, his most likely plan was to hijack the Boeing and fly it into a Tel Aviv skyscraper.
This was a close call. If the captain, 38 year-old Smith Machchhar, hadn’t managed to unlatch the cockpit door from inside, al-Hammami would have probably killed him and crashed the plane.
It later came to light that al-Hammami had been banned from commercial flying in his home country of Oman, apparently for espousing radical Islamist views. How FlyDubai, a large and successful carrier, managed to overlook this is a question that needs answering.
Goodness. It’s Germanwings all over again. Or EgyptAir flight 990. Or SilkAir 185. Air India 171. Sad but true, pilots have gone rogue and crashed airplanes before. That list is much too long.
So how do we keep it from growing?
Passing through aircrew security yesterday at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, the screeners were a little more tightly wound than usual. It took our crew a good half hour to get through, with our luggage enjoying lots of extra scrutiny. This kind of nervousness isn’t surprising, but neither is it logical. The weapon employed by al-Hammami wasn’t something he smuggled aboard; it was a piece of standard cockpit equipment. And heck, you can fashion a deadly weapon out of any number of innocuous things.
It’s not about hardware. It’s about the element of surprise. The danger was Hammami himself, not what he was carrying. This was true of the others on that list above — and of the 9/11 hijackers as well.
We can, in the meantime, debate the merits of additional psychological testing, though at a certain point there’s not a lot we can do. We’re forced to rely on a set of presumptions. It comes down to trust. I don’t want this to sound like an airline press release, but you can confidently presume that the people flying your plane are exactly what you expect them to be: well-trained professionals for whom safety is their priority. As an airline pilot I do not leave for work wondering if one of my colleagues is going to kill me. I shouldn’t be expected to. And neither should passengers.
For someone like me, the most frustrating takeaway from this near-disaster is knowing that people around the world are getting on airplanes today and wondering, if only idly, if their pilots are potential mass-murderers. No, this wouldn’t have been the first instance of pilot murder-suicide, but such acts have been, and will remain, exceptionally rare.
So there are select times in this world when it pays to be a racist, xenophobic piece of shit.
For example, oh, you’re president.
Or you attend MAGA rallies.
Or you’re the chief sales manager at the David Duke Gift Emporium.
Or you live in Biloxi.
Mostly, however, it backfires tremendously.
Take, for example, Lori Nunis, a wedding and Laguna Beach.
Somewhat recently, Nuns (a Laguna Beach resident and owner of Lori Nunis Handcrafted Jewelry) was walking her dog inside Crescent Bay Point Park when she stumbled upon a looming marriage proposal. There was a setup involving some umbrellas and a mariachi band and a photographer, and Nunis—white as the snow, frustrated as a speed bump, Karen as Marsha Blackburn—didn’t seem particularly happy.
Take a gander …
I’ve been a journalist for more than three decades, but this may well be the best exchange of all time:
Nunis: “This isn’t Mexico either, you motherfuckers.”
Woman: “Say hi to TikTok.”
Nunis: “Go back to Mexico.”
Bam.
And, thanks to the power of social media, Nunis is famous. Well, infamous. Wildly infamous. That exchange went crazy viral, to the point where millions upon millions upon millions of people have witnessed an ugly-yet-real moment frozen in time.
I suspect, in the coming days/weeks/months:
A. Lori Nunis will take to Facebook and offer a tearful apology, including some variation of the now-familiar sentence topper, “I’m not racist …”
B. Lori Nunis Handcrafted Jewelry will hold a kick-ass GOING OUT OF BUSINESS sale.
C. The Nunis Family will find Boise an inviting place to relocate.
•••
To be clear, I am not always a fan of social media justice. It’s often ugly and unfortunate and grotesque. We jump to conclusions unlike ever before.
Also, I feel badly for Nunis’ kids, who surely now walk the hallways of their schools with heads low and overwhelming shame. This is not their fault. And the dog is cute, and just wanted a walk.
But this was a real moment, when an ugliness that needed to be exposed deserved to be exposed.
On Friday night, just before 11:00, Trump announced that his administration “will, immediately, begin sending ‘Checks’ of nearly $100 to over 20 MILLION wonderful Seniors to help pay for their Medicare Part B premiums, which we have already reduced by significant amounts. This money will come from the Medicare Improvement Fund, a pointless ‘Slush Fund’ that has only been used by Dumocrats in Congress to pay for the Waste, Fraud, and Abuse for their Special Interest friends, and drive up Healthcare costs.”
Congress established the Medicare Improvement Fund in 2008 to enable improvements to the program and periodically adjust payments to healthcare providers. A Republican congressional aide told Dan Diamond of the Washington Post that lawmakers had been planning to use the fund to help fund several health programs this year, and were taken aback by Trump’s announcement.
Trump continued: “Because I delivered on this very important issue for the American People, they can also rest assured the highly popular $5,000 Trump Dividend will be distributed to every U.S. Citizen if, and when, the Republicans win the Midterm Elections!”
The fact that he is openly using taxpayer money to buy votes in the election suggests just how worried Trump is about Democrats winning control of Congress in the upcoming midterms.
He has reason to be worried. If Democrats retake control of one or both chambers of Congress, they will not necessarily be able to pass legislation, since Trump will still be able to veto it. But they will be able to start investigations immediately, and they have made it so clear they intend to do so that the administration is already taking steps to trip them up.
In April the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice issued an opinion that the president doesn’t have to comply with the Presidential Records Act, enacted to make sure presidents after Richard M. Nixon could not destroy their records; in May a federal judge said they did, in fact, have to follow the law. In August the Department of Justice issued a memo saying that the executive privilege that enables a president to protect his conversations with government advisors also covers any civilian to whom the president speaks “so long as they relate to official presidential decisionmaking.”
As Trump’s time in office stretches out, more and more stories of corruption are surfacing. As Aaron Parnas reported in Meidas News, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, wrote a letter on September 30 to Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI director Kash Patel demanding they immediately release a document they are “illegally” concealing, and any others like it.
Wyden has been doggedly following the money trail connected to sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein, noting that his operations, including human trafficking and sexual abuse, depended on the banks whose officers looked the other way as Epstein’s finances repeatedly indicated he was engaged in criminal activity. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has refused to give the Senate Finance Committee access to Treasury materials about those finances, including Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs). When Wyden tried to get Congress to pass a law forcing the release of those files, Senate Republicans blocked it.
Now Wyden’s investigators have discovered that the FBI conducted an interview with a banker tied to Epstein, but the bureau did not release the transcript of the interview, known as a “302 report,” as Congress required when it passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Wyden suggested that the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI “are withholding key documents from Congress and the public.”
“Furthermore,” he added, “the existence of this 302 indicates that it is likely that the FBI possesses additional, related, FBI 302s that have not been released” as they should have been under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
A new report from Anton Troianovski and Eric Lipton of the New York Times Saturday revealed that the administration’s talk about doing business deals with Putin while he continues to strike Ukraine was not hypothetical. As they have allegedly been negotiating for an end to Russia’s war on Ukraine, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff—neither of whom are diplomats—have been talking with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin about a multibillion-dollar deal to buy the assets of Russian oil giant Lukoil at the rock-bottom prices to which they have sunk because of U.S. sanctions.
Because such a sale would immediately remove those assets from U.S. sanctions, they would instantly become far more valuable. Those looking to benefit financially from the purchase would include a major Trump donor, as well as Middle Eastern investors tied to the Trump family and the Witkoffs. The U.S. government would take a stake in the company as well, through the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, which Congress authorized in 2018 to invest in development projects in lower- and middle-income countries.
While Lukoil is technically a private company, observers believe Putin has control over it. And while the deal would have to be approved by the U.S. Treasury Department, it seems unlikely that Trump loyalist Bessent would stop it.
According to Troianovski and Lipton, Putin suggested the deal on September 5. It was likely not coincidental that the offer came after Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) died on July 11. Graham, who was close to Trump, was firmly behind Ukraine as it tried to fight off Putin’s invasion. Until Trump, Democrats and Republicans both felt strongly that American national security depended on stopping Putin’s aggression, and they stood behind Ukraine.
Trump’s ties to Russia are extensive and well known, but this apparent attempt to buy Trump’s support for Russia even as the war drags into another winter and Ukraine’s drones are destroying Russia’s oil sector seems especially blatant. It puts a spotlight on the fact that, under Trump, U.S. national security is for sale. A Democratic-led Senate would undoubtedly object to what the Republicans have permitted.
Indeed, under Trump there does not appear to be a line between foreign affairs and Trump family business deals. On October 1, Allegra Goodwin, Katie Polglase, and Majlie de Puy Kamp of CNN reported that while in discussions about ending the war in Gaza, Kushner has major financial interests in the Israeli military.
Kushner’s private equity firm, Affinity Partners, has invested in Phoenix Financial, a firm based in Tel Aviv, Israel, that, in turn, has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in at least nine companies that provide equipment for the Israeli military. The CNN journalists report that the stock values of all the nine companies grew last year and that many of the companies attributed the growth to the war in Gaza. Kushner’s firm sold a quarter of its stock in Phoenix in July for more than $340 million, more than five times the value of its initial purchase.
If he were a government employee, Kushner would have to disclose his finances, but he is a “volunteer” negotiator. One of Kushner’s lawyers told the reporters that Kushner has “never participated in or directed Phoenix’s decisions” about investments, but, as the journalists note, Kushner told Forbes that he meets with the leaders of the financial group every few weeks and maintains “a very active dialogue” with them.
Kushner’s lawyer confirmed that was true a year ago when Kushner said it, but that since he has been “substantially more engaged in volunteer public-service and diplomatic efforts,” he has scaled back that contact significantly.
It’s not just Kushner. The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal on October 2 warned that “Don Jr.’s Star Turn Is Coming,” noting that the “Trump family businesses will be in the spotlight on Capitol Hill for the next two years.” “Does the Trump family know what is about to hit them?” the board asked. It noted that even Republicans are upset at the news that an oligarch close to Putin had paid for Don Jr.’s wedding celebration. Senator John Curtis (R-UT) has called for the Senate to subpoena Don Jr. to find out how that financial underwriting came to happen. While they’re at it, Curtis wants to learn more about the family’s cryptocurrency and prediction market ventures.
The corruption of the administration is matched by its incompetence, and neither will come out well in congressional investigations.
In September, hackers broke into the FBI jobs portal and stole information about nearly every FBI employee as well as more than 8,000 state and local law enforcement officers who had worked with the FBI agents. On Saturday, Ken Dilanian and Carol Leonnig of MS NOW reported just how devastating that breach was. The hacked data included “names, home addresses, cell phone numbers, FBI email addresses and employee ID numbers, in addition to personal identifying information for emergency contacts, including Social Security numbers and personal email addresses.”
According to FBI officials and outside experts, Dilanian and Leonnig report, the breach is a counterintelligence disaster—one of the worst in U.S. history. The information not only exposes the people involved, but also enables adversaries to figure out U.S. priorities and who is working on what.
One cybersecurity expert at the FBI said the cause of the breach was “definitely incompetence.” The information should never have been linked to the internet, the expert said. “It belonged on our internal system and some dumbass moved it all” to a system connected to the internet. The expert told Dilanian and Leonnig that in chats the FBI obtained, the hackers wrote they couldn’t believe that the hack of such important information was so easy.
Speaking at a high school gymnasium in Ohio Saturday night, Trump told an audience: “Just get out and vote. If you do that, we’re going to win, and we’re going to win big, and we’re gonna shove it up their *ss.”
DURANGO, Colo., Oct. 5, 2026 — Agile Space Industries today announced that Jonathan Baliff has joined its Board of Directors, bringing extensive experience in aerospace, finance, and corporate leadership. His […]
There is one. Wait, two. No, three. Ok, four humans who directly inspired my writing. (Ok, five.)
The list is not in order of importance, but by time:
Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (Fall 1988)
Think what a better world it would be if we all—the whole world—had cookies and milk about three o’clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap. Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess. And it is still true, no matter how old you are—when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.
Fulghum wrote a whole series of front-porch wisdom books, but the one that most people know is All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, published in 1988. I was working at Waldenbooks in the Vallco Mall, and this book literally flew off the shelves. Fulghum was a Unitarian minister, and he wrote “Kindergarten” for his church bulletin. The essay was passed around (pre-Internet) and eventually landed with a literary agent.
The essays were brief, dense, and heartfelt. He effortlessly gives names to all parts of the human condition… ideas and feelings you have all the time, but have not named.
Fulghum is hopeful.
Robert B. Parker, Looking for Rachel Wallace (Fall 1991)
I waited. I knew he was trying to size me up. That was okay, I was used to that. People didn’t know anything about hiring someone like me, and they almost always vamped around for a bit.
Looking for Rachel Wallace was published in 1980. Fall 1991, unlike other entries on this list, is when I read the book as part of a UCSC class called “The American Detective.” It’s how you know a new author or book is novel — you start reading, hours pass, you are hungry and have a headache, but you read the whole god damned book.
Parker comes from the Dashiell Hammett School of detectives. Spenser, the detective who never has a first name, is an ex-boxer from Boston, but geography is not important to these books. It’s dialogue. 80% of Parker books are gritty, intelligent dialogue. His characters are talking all the time, and it’s delicious. They are clever, funny, moral, and respectful. You sniff out the villains because they can’t keep up the banter with Parker’s main recurring characters.
Parker was conversational.
Robert X. Cringely, Accidental Empires (February 1992)
Here’s the important part: they are our nerds. And having, by their conspicuous success, helped create this mess we’re in, they had better have a lot to teach us about how to recreate the business spirit we seem to have lost.
I first discovered Cringely as he wrote a gossip column for InfoWorld. This was on the last page of the magazine and, again pre-Internet, was full of the latest gossip and news about the relatively nascent technology landscape. Accidental Empires read like a historical record of the early days of tech companies like Microsoft, but it later became clear that many of the more entertaining stories were unsubstantiated. Cringely explained this by claiming he was not a historian, but an explainer.
Like PC Week’s Spencer F. Katt, Cringely’s column was the first thing I flipped to when InfoWorld showed up. Sure, it was gossip and mostly not true, but…
Cringely was entertaining.
Douglas Coupland, Microserfs (June 1995)
Bill (Bill!) sent Michael this totally wicked flame-mail from hell on the e-mail system — and he just whaled on a chunk of code Michael had written. Using the Bloom County-cartoons-taped-on-the-door index, Michael is certainly the most sensitive coder in Building Seven — not the type to take criticism easily. Exactly why Bill would choose Michael of all people to whale on is confusing.
We figured it must have been a random quality check to keep the troops in line. Bill’s so smart.
Accidental Empires was still echoing through Silicon Valley when Coupland’s article that became Microserfs was published in the then-fledgling print magazine Wired. Like Rachel Wallace, I vividly remember starting the piece, realizing I was reading something revolutionary, and finishing it.
And reading it again.
While clearly fiction, the book read like nonfiction to me because it so clearly reflected my life working in technology in the early 90s. This was pre-Big Bang Theory, where we nerds were not remotely mainstream. Seeing my work and personal life so clearly reflected hilariously in writing made me feel like less of an outsider.
Coupland is hilarious.
Michael Sippey, Stating the Obvious (August 1995)
Basically, what it comes down to is that there is no place in the Pointcast world for anything resembling a point of view. And that is what you should be surfing for. Now that you can have all the pre-digested information you can handle spewed to you in real time — in a nice, animated screensaver, nonetheless — you should spend your time surfing for someone that actually has something to say.
Finally. Michael Sippey started the blog Stating the Obvious in August of 1995. You know the feeling. You know you can write, but you haven’t really gotten around to that first piece, and then you read something so good, so relevant, and so important that you realize… yeah, I would never be able to write like that.
Fortunately for me, I ignored that instinct and, like everyone else in the mid-to-late 90s, I started a blog before we called it a blog in 1996 called The Bitsifter Digest. Like my early journals, I can’t read any of those early writings without nauseating disgust. Horrible, horrible writing. I stopped in 1999 probably because I knew the writing was… bad.
Sippey did not. Some version of Stating the Obvious has been published every year since 1995 and, thankfully, quite a bit more starting in October of 2003. If you’ve ever read one of my pieces and thought, “Duh, that’s obvious,” my first question is, “It is. Are you already following that advice?” Probably not.
Sippey states the obvious.
Rands, Rands in Repose (April 2002)
With the Bitsifter Digest purged from the system, I started this place on a whim when someone irrelevant said, “You should blog.” So I did.
It's October once again, and that means it is time to take the new release of Python for a spin (technically, it is the 3.15.0rc3 release that I'm using, the official 3.15 release is still a few days out). As I did with my Python 3.14 performance article of a year ago, today I'm sharing a new run of my informal Python benchmark, comparing Python 3.15 against previous interpreters all the way back to 3.10.
If you are not interested in the charts and the tables and just want to read my analysis, feel free to jump to the conclusions section at the end.
Authenticity doesn’t interest me. It’s a way of marketing subpar material: this might not be any good, but at least it’s sincere. You can always tell when a book is going to be dogshit because the blurb copy describes it as ‘raw’ or ‘unflinchingly honest.’ In my personal experience, the writers who make a big show of authentically portraying themselves in their writing, warts and all, raw and authentic, are all actually portraying an entirely separate set of more interesting personality defects that they wish they had. In person, they’re unbearable. Authenticity is exactly the same as phoniness. Good writing is never authentic to the self, because a good writer needs to know that the self is fundamentally unknowable: it’s the ‘wedge-shaped core of darkness’ that Virginia Woolf saw humming beneath the surface of daily life, and definitely not anything you can write autofiction about.
From Sam Kriss, there is more of interest at the link, on varied topics, some of the remarks being quite “off.” Via Isaac.
Paradise is not lost, the world is not ending, and most material metrics of humanity have never been better. Yet the endless, incessant dooming about the climate, the inequality, and AI is everywhere. We may have killed God, but we clearly didn't bury the devil's anxieties with him.
Yes, we're born with a negativity bias to keep us safe from starvation, saber-toothed tigers, and rival tribes. Good! But you don't have to let your caveman instincts run your whole life. The gift of fear — when the threat is credible and immediate! — is a key survival mechanism. This vague, fuzzy dooming about everything outside your control is not.
In fact, nothing will make you more miserable than ruminating over climate tigers, other people's wealth, or thinking machines. Because rumination will break your brain and render it unfit for the purpose of living.
If it turns out that The Terminator really is coming to get you, you'll have gained nothing from the upfront neurotic fretting. And if The Terminator fails to appear, you will have squandered your precious time missing the intelligence boom and the creativity abundance that AI has and will unleash.
Likewise, if the climate really is doomed, you're not going to stop that spiral by planting another windmill or choking on a paper straw. Game theory has already seen to it that rival superpowers will accelerate their quest for power. None of the climate doomer nonsense Europe has wrung it hands about in the last thirty years has managed to curb the growth in global emissions (but it did wreck the continent's economy!).
Finally, envy sits among the seven of deadly sins for a reason. Because freeloader thinking is also a primordial survival tactic, and it sneaks into your psyche when your disappointment with the outcome of your efforts overcomes your rational mind.
There have always been "winners" and "losers", and most of history had the majority of humanity live in abject poverty. The mystery is not "why are some people poor" but "why are some people not". And you won't find the answer to the latter in grievance soups of sorrow and self-pity.
This is not the time to doom, baby. This is the time to bloom. Intellectually, spiritually, and productively. Put down your anxieties, arrest your neurotic impulses, and decide to be happy about the present, the future, and your own ability to make something of yourself and this world.
"Alvin Roth, vencedor do Prêmio Nobel de Economia de 2012, analisa o que acontece quando os mercados esbarram em questões controversas e mostra por que precisamos lidar com escolhas difíceis quando não conseguimos concordar sobre o que é certo ou errado para a coletividade.
"Economia moral parte de algumas das perguntas mais complexas de nosso tempo: o que pode ser comprado, vendido ou trocado em uma sociedade e quais são os limites morais dos mercados? As pessoas devem ter o direito de interromper uma gravidez, de realizar tratamentos de fertilização in vitro ou de “alugar” seus úteros? A maconha deve ser comercializada em mercados legalizados? E quanto aos opioides? Devem ser vendidos irrestritamente? É aceitável remunerar alguém pela doação de sangue ou até mesmo de um rim? Essas questões geram debates intensos, uma vez que os argumentos sustentados por aqueles que consideram essas transações aceitáveis e os que as consideram repulsivas geralmente se baseiam em convicções morais ou religiosas inegociáveis.
"Em Economia moral, Alvin Roth defende que é possível buscar a resolução desses e de outros impasses da atualidade quando os examinamos sob a perspectiva dos mercados. Mediante uma análise cuidadosa dos mercados controversos e das chamadas transações repugnantes, o autor aborda temas que provocam debates éticos e sociais, como a venda de órgãos, a prostituição e a eutanásia. Sua proposta não é a liberação ou a proibição de todo tipo de transação repugnante, mas sim suscitar uma profunda reflexão acerca de um desenho de mercado eficiente e responsável que encontre o equilíbrio entre preservar a liberdade individual e proteger os grupos mais vulneráveis."
“O livro aborda assuntos fundamentais, mas controversos, de maneira profunda, perspicaz e envolvente. Esta é uma leitura essencial.” ― Science Magazine
We agree wholeheartedly with Clark’s overall message that genetics accounts for outcomes long assumed to be due to nurture. Like other books in his trilogy, Clark marshals evidence from diverse sources to support his argument.
The data reach in this book—1600–2026—is jaw-dropping. Clark (and his colleague Neil Cummins) turned to wedding-register marks, probate courts, Huguenot wills, Oxbridge matriculation rolls, Sandhurst cadet lists, Wedgwood servants, and the Guild of One-Name Studies, to name a few. These data are imaginative, arresting, and inspiring. The analyses conducted, given the manifest complexities of harmonising across data types, time, and place, are impressive.
…This audacious scholarly book properly lights a fire under important questions. We look forward to following the work, its critics, and its rebuttals. It’s a terrific scientific contribution; because it is so thoroughly interdisciplinary, it will enrich and enliven the conversation about social status, its causes, and malleability.
One thing I am struck with from the critics (not just those in the symposium) is that most acknowledge that twin and adoption studies have badly undermined the claim that parental investments are big determinants of adult ability and earnings. The critics are correct that more elaborate environmental models can reproduce genetic-looking correlations but keeping an environmental explanation alive is not the same as vindicating the explanation people originally believed. Clark and many others have pushed the debate far into new territory.
There is also a basic asymmetry between the competing explanations. Genetics supplies independently established inheritance rules. When an environmental model reproduces the same patterns by choosing transmission rules precisely because they mimic genetic inheritance, it is accommodating the evidence, not independently predicting it. True, Clark also requires some free parameter choices, but he is clear that these can and need to be independently estimated.
The kinds of parental effects being demonstrated also matter. The nurture effects the environmentalists point to often seem to be for optional, steerable, or transferable choices than for more fundamental abilities, that is, changing what a child chooses to do with a given set of abilities, versus changing those abilities. Parents, for example, have more influence over religious identification than over religiosity, more influence over wealth than income, more influence over educational attainment than IQ.
The genetic arguments in the book draw the most criticism and yet the book has much else offer as Clark notes. For example:
Social status is inherited as strongly as height. Even relatives as distant as nine generations apart, 270 years, still show significant correlation in social status.
That is a very striking finding–especially given the intervening industrial revolution, multiple wars, huge changes in social mores etc.–but if it stands, it does so independent of the genetic explanation.
The fact that this monumental and challenging book–right or wrong–cannot find a major academic publisher is an intellectual scandal. The editors at Princeton University Press and the University of Chicago Press should be ashamed.
The cesspit of corruption that is Donald Trump’s presidency is finally getting the attention it deserves. It’s about time. And if a massive blue wave sweeps Washington on November 3rd as polls now suggest, Democrats should put corruption front and center of their agenda in Congress.
The level of corruption that Trump has engaged in and enabled in others is completely unprecedented – self-dealing that, as Trump would say, is like nothing anybody has ever seen before. America currently has a Republican president who, along with his family, has raked in billions, possibly close to $10 billion in personal gain from office in less than two years. He has effectively sold criminal pardons to scammers, invalidating the legal claims of their victims for restitution. His son-in-law Jared Kushner has become a billionaire running an investment fund for Gulf petro-state autocrats despite having no discernible investment skills. The Times just reported that Kristi Noem paid hundreds of millions over the reasonable price for 5 aircraft – one of which contains a marble bathroom and luxury bedroom – that were ostensibly for deportations but are instead sitting on the runway. And then there’s Trump’s Secretary of the Commerce, Howard Lutnick, whose family has doubled its net worth to over $7 billion, largely through its investments in Tether, the crypto-currency of choice by Iran, terrorists and rogue states.
And I shouldn’t omit the tragic fate of Simon Andriesz, the British banker and whistleblower, who recently died by suicide. Andriesz revealed to the Senate that Lutnick had lied about the extent of his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Right before his death, Andriesz spoke openly about how threats to himself and his family as a result of his testimony had ruined his life.
Despite the extent of Trump and Co’s corruption, there’s still some voter education to be done here. Given everything else — the disastrous Persian Gulf war, tariffs, inflation, threats against our closest allies, visions of AI annihilation — it has taken a long time for Trump and Co’s lurid, open corruption to emerge as a major political issue. But there are growing signs that corruption is finally breaking through into the public consciousness. Hopefully this breakthrough will be hugely important not just for the midterm elections but for what happens afterwards.
A clear indication of this breakthrough was the startling Oct 2nd lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal — yes, that left-wing rag, the Wall Street Journal —excoriating the Trump family’s corruption. True, the headline — “Don Jr.’s star turn is coming” — was oddly elliptical, and the example of corruption it chose to focus on – the wedding gift bestowed by a Russian oligarch worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, is penny-ante by Trump standards. The tone was more “this is a public relations problem for Republicans” than “the Trumps are selling America to the highest bidders, some of whom are enemies of the State”. But apparently even the formerly pro-Trumpian Wall Street Journal editorial page has finally reached its gag level.
Reflecting this trend, the latest Economist/YouGov poll included questions about corruption and which political party voters blame most. This appears to be the first time that this question has been asked systematically. Here’s what the poll found:
At first sight, these poll results are somewhat disappointing: only 30 percent of Americans see Republicans as the more corrupt party, with a majority either saying that Democrats are more corrupt or that there is no difference between the parties. But if one combines a closer look at these numbers with a more realistic understanding of public opinion, this poll actually shows that corruption is becoming a serious G.O.P. problem.
First, only a small fraction of independents say that Democrats are more corrupt than Republicans. The only group in which a majority say that the Democrats are the more corrupt party are MAGA Republicans — and as the old line puts it:“they would say that, wouldn’t they?”
Second, most voters, too busy trying to cope with daily responsibilities compounded by inflation and surging car loan rates, don’t pay close attention to the news. They are vaguely aware that corruption is an issue, and too often equate low-level, routine grifting like that of Hunter Biden or Bob Menendez with Trump’s wholesale looting and vandalism. They have little sense of the reality that recent corruption is orders of magnitudes bigger and more blatant than anything we saw in the past.
But that may soon change. According to all the polls, Democrats have a virtual lock on winning the House by a large margin. In addition, polls indicate a high probability that they will also take the Senate. And this means subpoena power. Through Congressional hearings and investigations, Democrats can vastly elevate the visibility of the extent of the outright looting and vandalism of this country by Trump and his gang.
Given the extent of the corruption, the rise of oligarchy in America, and the ever-rising flood of money in politics, many people may reasonably ask “Why will this matter?” Having elected Trump twice, can we trust Americans to vote for what is right rather than for lies? And can we trust Democrats, once in power, to be immune to the seduction of Big Money, as the Big Money will certainly try?
So, in a very real sense, once in power Democrats will have multiple battle fronts on their hands. In addition to battling Trump in his two remaining years of power, they will also have to prove to the American people that they will be immune to the inevitable attempts by Big Money to buy them off through campaign contributions and back-room deals. A couple of examples of what is already going wrong are the recent employment of Chuck Shumer’s daughter by OpenAI and the crypto billions raised by Kirsten Gillibrand’s 22-year old son for a new venture.
Granted, these two examples are exceedingly small potatoes in comparison to Trumpian corruption. But a significant number of voters won’t see it that way and will instead settle into a disaffected stance that both parties are equally bad. Furthermore, it’s a sure bet that once Democrats are in power, the Wall Street Journal and its ilk will revert to form, lambasting Democrats and elevating the Republicans.
So Democrats need to use this coming blue wave not only to clean out Trump’s corruption but to also put their own house in order. Because the forces that gave rise to Trump will not go meekly into the night.
With surrogacy illegal in China, an industry of agencies, consultants and fertility clinics has emerged to connect clients with women overseas willing to carry their children. While there is no data on the number of children born to Chinese parents via surrogacy, a recent study showed nearly a third of intended parents for surrogate babies in the US were international and some 40 per cent of those were from China.
Early demand largely came from couples struggling with fertility. But there was growing interest from younger women physically capable of becoming pregnant but reluctant to accept its impact on their bodies and careers, said consultants, clients and doctors interviewed by the FT…
Other destinations include Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, where packages can cost as little as $63,000.
What caused the historically unique volatility in American homicides since 2019, driven by gun homicides? While there is no shortage of candidate explanations, a coherent understanding has been elusive because of the widely held view that gun violence, like other crimes, stems from a rational weighing of benefits and costs as in Becker (1968). This model does a generally poor job of explaining recent trends in homicide. Behavioral economics helps explain what the Becker model cannot. This view starts with the fact that most shootings don’t further some larger goal like robbery or gang wars over drug turf (“instrumental violence”); they’re arguments settled with guns (“expressive violence”). Why do arguments start or escalate? The behavioral model points to automatic cognition that is fast, effortless but sometimes prone to error. The pandemic increased automaticity by increasing distress – a cognitive “bandwidth tax.” Recent homicide trends, driven by changes in expressive violence, are mirrored by similar trends for deaths from drug overdose, car crashes, and suicide (especially for Black Americans, the group most affected by violence) – “deaths of decision-making.” Also relevant is a large rise and fall in gun carrying, which might partially stem from Becker-like mechanisms: Large changes in handgun sales and police stops, both of which may also have been affected by the killing of George Floyd. Since American gun violence is mostly arguments with guns, no wonder homicide trends are due mostly to changes in the number of arguments and the odds a given argument had a gun present.
Like a portal to another dimension, a hypnotising swirl features in today’s Picture of the Week. This is the spiral galaxy M83, also known as the Southern Pinwheel, located approximately 15 million light-years away. It is one of the brightest galaxies in the night sky, but this image –– taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which ESO is a partner –– doesn’t show how M83 looks in the light our eyes can see. Instead, it depicts the light emitted by cold gas molecules, the ingredients of star formation.
Astronomers are interested in molecular gas clouds as virtually all stars are born from their collapse. Once stars form, they heat up their surroundings, making it harder for gas to condense and form further stars. This, combined with galactic dynamics that continually stirs gas, controls the growth of galaxies. ALMA allows astronomers to map how the density and temperature of these gas clouds change in different locations within a galaxy, such as the central regions, the spiral arms, or the space between them. This in turn helps us understand whether stars form differently in different galactic environments.
M83 closely resembles our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Since M83 appears nearly face-on in the sky, astronomers enjoy a privileged view to study whether the recipe to turn gas into stars is universal or changes within M83.
Tropical Weather Outlook NWS Central Pacific Hurricane Center Honolulu HI Issued by NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL 800 PM HST Tue Oct 06 2026
For the central North Pacific...between 140W and 180W:
Active Systems: The National Hurricane Center is issuing advisories on Hurricane Rachel, located several hundred miles west-southwest of the southern tip of the Baja California Peninsula.
Tropical cyclone formation is not expected during the next 7 days.
Tropical Weather Outlook NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL 200 AM EDT Wed Oct 7 2026
For the North Atlantic...Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of America:
Active Systems: The National Hurricane Center is issuing advisories on Tropical Depression Nine, located in the southwestern Gulf of America.
Tropical cyclone formation is not expected during the next 7 days.
&& Public Advisories on Tropical Depression Nine are issued under WMO header WTNT34 KNHC and under AWIPS header MIATCPAT4. Forecast/Advisories on Tropical Depression Nine are issued under WMO header WTNT24 KNHC and under AWIPS header MIATCMAT4.
Tropical Weather Outlook NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL 1100 PM PDT Tue Oct 6 2026
For the eastern and central North Pacific east of 180 longitude:
Active Systems: The National Hurricane Center is issuing advisories on Hurricane Rachel, located several hundred miles west-southwest of the southern tip of the Baja California Peninsula.
South of Southern Mexico (EP92): A broad area of low pressure located offshore of southern Mexico is producing disorganized showers and thunderstorms. Environmental conditions appear favorable for gradual development, and a tropical depression is expected to form within the next day or so while the system moves slowly west-northwestward to northwestward. Regardless of development, heavy rainfall is forecast across portions of southern and southwestern Mexico over the next few days. Interests along the coast of southwestern Mexico should monitor the progress of this system. For additional information, including Gale Warnings, see High Seas forecasts issued by the National Weather Service. * Formation chance through 48 hours...high...90 percent. * Formation chance through 7 days...high...90 percent.
South of Guatemala: An area of low pressure is forecast to form south of the coast of Guatemala early next week. Environmental conditions appear conducive for some gradual development of this system thereafter while it moves generally west-northwestward around 10 mph. * Formation chance through 48 hours...low...near 0 percent. * Formation chance through 7 days...low...30 percent.
&& High Seas Forecasts issued by the National Weather Service can be found under AWIPS header NFDHSFEPI, WMO header FZPN02 KWBC, and on the web at ocean.weather.gov/shtml/NFDHSFEPI.php
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