Appearing on Meet the Press this Sunday, Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz was asked by host Kristen Welker about a new report revealing that as the Iran war drags on, “U.S. military commanders have been picking and choosing which Iranian missiles and explosive-packed drones to intercept and are allowing some attacks through their defenses,” since stockpiles of interceptors are running low. Asked about this situation, Walz said the shortage of equipment is Joe Biden’s fault, but also there is no shortage, but also anyone who tells the press about the shortage should go to jail:
Waltz also claimed that it’s not just equipment; the Trump administration inherited a “depleted military under the Biden administration.” This is, of course, utter baloney; the defense budget increased every year Joe Biden was in office. I suppose it’s possible that Waltz was referring to the depletion of the military’s sense of manly confidence, since under Biden, women and Black officers were permitted to serve in positions of authority, a situation that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has remedied with enthusiasm. But since he didn’t mention that, we can assume he was still talking about equipment.
While Welker pressed him a little before moving on, she failed to ask the obvious question reporters are failing ask when this comes up, a question that grows increasingly pressing as time goes on:
“At what point are you and everyone in this administration going to stop blaming Joe Biden for everything that goes wrong? Why don’t you ever take responsibility?”
The simplest answer is that the tone has been set by the president, who never takes responsibility for anything, not even in a “the buck stops here,” I’m-the-boss-so-I’m-ultimately-accountable way. He famously said “I don’t take responsibility at all” in the early days of the covid pandemic when asked why the U.S. was lagging in its ability to test for the virus. The violent January 6 insurrection, he said at one point, was the fault of the “Biden FBI,” despite the fact that Biden wouldn’t take office for another two weeks. Trump said Signalgate, when Mike Waltz added a journalist to a sensitive group chat about war planning, was actually Joe Biden’s fault because Biden hadn’t attacked Yemen. Two months into his term, the New York Times documented what had become a verbal tic for Trump:
Mr. Trump has made Mr. Biden into a political boogeyman so epic and omnipresent that it is impossible to ignore. His use of the name is most commonly followed by a verb: “Biden fudged the numbers … Biden canceled it … Biden let them get away with murder … Biden’s done nothing … Biden left him up there … Biden allowed it to get out of hand … Biden left us a mess … Biden said the wrong things … Biden gave away money like it was water … Biden set us up in Venezuela … Biden allowed China to go crazy … Biden ended it … Biden really screwed up our country.”
That was in March 2025. Of course, in the beginning of any presidency, the administration does have to deal with the situation they were handed by their predecessors. What distinguishes this president — and therefore not only his own administration spokespeople but other Republicans, who repeat whatever Trump says — is not only that they blame their own screwups on Biden when there is no plausible connection to the previous presidency, but that there appears to be no time limit on the Biden-blaming. We’re now a year and a half into the second Trump term, and everything is still Biden’s fault.
Grocery prices are high? Joe Biden’s fault. Gas prices are high? Joe Biden’s fault. ICE killing people in the street? Joe Biden’s fault. Housing unaffordable? Joe Biden’s fault. Trump’s trade war hurting farmers? Joe Biden’s fault. Screwworms killing cattle in Texas? Joe Biden’s fault.
There is no subtlety to this argument. “I would remind your viewers and the American people of who caused the affordability crisis in this country,” said White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt when asked about the midterms by hard-hitting journalist Lara Trump. “It was Joe Biden and it was the Democrats in this city when they were in power, and President Trump took immediate action on Day One to fix that.” But if that’s what Trump did on Day 1, and that was 18 months ago, shouldn’t it be fixed?
As I have argued before, this administration is filled with men who pretend to be ultra-masculine but are in fact the whiniest babies in the world, always bitching and moaning about how they’re being treated unfairly and no one should be allowed to be mean to them. All the Biden-blaming, from Trump on down, is yet more evidence of how pathetically weak they are.
So journalists need to start asking them, and keep asking them: At what point will you stop blaming Joe Biden for your own failures?
Thank you for reading The Cross Section. This site has no paywall, so I depend on the generosity of readers to sustain the work I present here. If you find what you read valuable and would like it to continue, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
SpaceX successfully launched its Starship vehicle on Friday and appeared to demonstrate important and credible steps toward fulfilling the massive rocket's immense promise. As soon as the vehicle's next flight, Starship could go orbital, begin delivering satellites into space, and potentially return to the launch site to be 'caught' by the tower.
All of this is impressive engineering on a gigantic scale. But despite the marked progress with the 13th test flight of Starship, one key issue—probably the key issue when it comes to Starship's future—remains unresolved.
This concerns Starship's heat shield, the roughly 18,000 ceramic tiles that protect the vehicle's underbelly during its fiery return through Earth's atmosphere. And some experts say SpaceX's current approach may not get Starship to its ultimate goal of flying frequently, at low cost.
We’re still not at zero homicides, but the decline is good. I usually post this on Friday, but some minor personal things got in the way, so I’m late. Anyway, as of Sunday 9pm, D.C. had reported two homicides this week, bringing the total for the year to 54*. Last year, during the same time period, we had 92 homicides, and in the surge year of 2023, there were 138 homicides during that time.
The good news is that other crime categories are trending downward too this week. We are still well on pace for another 33 percent drop in homicides for the third straight year–in fact, it looks like D.C.’s per capita homicide rate could be the lowest this year since 1900 (that’s not a typo).
Here’s to hoping that next week gets us back to a zero homicide week.
*Three of the 57 murders reported this year actually occurred in other years (e.g., a missing persons case from 2023 turned into a homicide case this year with new evidence).
Below I continue my survey of 50 essential western films. (Click here for part one.) I’m sharing these in chronological order. In this installment, I cover films released from 1955 through 1968.
It was a strange period for cowboy movies. The mass audience would soon abandon the genre, turning instead to space operas, disaster films, and superhero movies. The whole idiom sometimes now felt like a tired string of clichés—almost the antithesis of the free and untamed ethos that had originally made the Wild West so appealing.
But this shift in preferences also allowed—or even required—directors to take more chances when dealing with western themes. So in some ways, this end-of-an-era mentality produced many of the most innovative films in the genre’s history.
This film is as tightly constructed as a Greek tragedy, and even abides by the three Aristotelian unities of time, space, and action. The entire drama plays out over the course of a single day in Black Rock, a small desert outpost, where a World War II vet named John Macreedy (Spencer Tracy) attempts to repay a favor to a Japanese soldier who saved his life on the battlefield. But he finds himself unexpectedly caught up in a criminal investigation, with the entire town conspiring against him.
The film features five past or future Oscar winners—Tracy, Ernest Borgnine, Lee Marvin, Walter Brennan and Dean Jagger—who between them would eventually earn eight Academy Awards for acting. That’s essentially half of the cast, and it ensures a gripping ensemble performance rarely surpassed on screen.
Together they create a slowly building tension finally resolved in a fiery desert confrontation. The widescreen CinemaScope technology is artfully employed, and André Previn makes full use of its stereophonic capability for his brash, electrifying score. This film has been unfairly forgotten, but rewards repeated viewings.
John Wayne was often criticized for playing the same role over and over. But that’s not entirely fair. As we’ve already seen with Red River (1948), he sometimes took parts that undercut the simple heroism of his public image, defying the standard formulas of the genre.
In The Searchers, Wayne plays a Civil War veteran on a mission to find his niece, abducted by Comanches. But he grows obsessed with vengeance and hatred—no doubt shocking moviegoers unready for this ignoble side of the Duke. Yet The Searchers undercuts its disruptive story lines with the sheer beauty of its delivery. Director John Ford, taking full advantage of Technicolor technology, never made a more visually stunning film.
Even from that first scene, when the cabin door opens, you know you’re in for a magical experience. It’s like that other Hollywood doorway leading to Oz, or the journey to Narnia from the back of a closet. You almost feel as if you’re leaving your seat in the cinema and entering a spectacle from a different time and place.
Links for you. Science:
Why AI will not speed up science (yet) (one issue not raised is will the possible improvements actually be AI per se, or just “computer”)
RNA quality control enables antibiotic tolerance
Ancient ape fossil in Egypt challenges the story of human origins
U.S. Measles Case Count Breaks Record
Even camels can’t cope: Africa’s ships of the desert hit by rising temperatures
Other:
Trump Administration Admits Canceling Grants to States That Did Not Vote for Him (impeach him. Impeach him now)
Crews preparing DC streets for Freedom 250 Grand Prix
The Hat Was the Message. At the Correspondents’ Dinner, Trump wore the punchline on his head: he has no intention of leaving.
Inside the Phone-Throwing Drama at the Troubled, Broke Democratic Party (the article does neglect to say that the party raised more money than under Perez when Democrats were out of power)
The collapse of the American law school financing model
Apple targets WWDC 2027 for smart glasses but is still deciding on the camera question
Teeing Off on the DSA 2025-26 Platform
Andrew Tate’s arrest causes trouble for Trump’s youngest son
Real-World Democratic Socialism
A Penn professor thought she’d sell 1000 copies of her ‘Odyssey’ translation. She sold more than a million this year alone, thanks to Christopher Nolan.
Barack Obama And The Lost Art Of Broad Empathy
How Cops Consolidated So Much Power Over Local Governments
What Does Olive Garden’s Never-Ending Pasta Have to Do With Voting Rights?
The Accidental Senator
What Are We Going To Talk About This Week?
What Happened When Flock Came to My Town
Life During Bari
A Court Reporter Submitted AI-Generated Errors in Official Court Transcript, Judge Says
Maine’s working class hated Platner’s working-class shtick
The Rise of Anti-Flock Influencers Who Make Things Up for Clout
Trump Orders Warnings Placed at ‘Inaccurate’ Smithsonian History Museum
New Fed research suggests far fewer Americans own homes than widely believed
The SpaceX Files: Now that the post-I.P.O. “quiet period” has expired, nearly all of SpaceX’s Wall Street underwriters have published their initial research reports on the stock’s prospects. And wouldn’t you know it, the verdict is unanimous: buy, buy, buy! (gift link)
AI isn’t boosting productivity, says Barclays
Katy Perry ‘appalled’ that White House used ‘Firework’ song in Iran war video
Whether by intention, error or force of law, the Trump administration has owned up that Donald Trump sees himself president of MAGA, not of the nation.
A New York Times report this week disclosed a month-old court filing in which federal officials acknowledged that they cut $7.5 billion in clean energy programs selectively among states “based solely” on whether those stated had voted for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
In court answers about a lawsuit challenging the stated reasons of cuts based on “waste and fraud,” the government copped to the real reason – partisan politics. Indeed, the administration funded grants for states that had backed Trump in 2024, even though the Energy Department had recommended they be cancelled.
It may not be a specifically impeachable offence, but it certainly shows that Donald Trump is abusing his office, his oath – and weirdly even punishing the Trump voters in the states taking the cuts.
Trump certainly has been acting in a variety of ways as if he wants to target states that voted against him, but this court filing seemed a public acknowledgement that should get some serious attention.
As The Times concluded, “The admission showed how Trump has weaponized the provision of federal education, energy, health, housing and infrastructure aid in his second term. Far from rooting out the sort of misspending that Trump sees as rife in Washington, the White House has instead sought to leverage the budget as a tool to assist its allies — or as a cudgel to hurt the president’s foes.”
Trump certainly has no hesitation about collecting taxes from blue states or demanding voting rolls or demanding special treatment, just in spending the money disproportionately raised from those states.
The White House and Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget , have remained silent about the government’s court arguments in a suit brought by the affected states. At the time of the cuts, Vought posted that “Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled.”
Now, a government lawyer told the court that none of the cancellations were “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor.”
Apart from all else, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright repeated the waste argument in sworn congressional testimony, telling House members in June, “No decisions (about the cuts) were made on politics.”
Someone might tell Jim Jordan, chair of the Judiciary Committee, who referred former special prosecutor Jack Smith to the Justice Department for investigation of perjury for not answering a question that Jordan had never asked.
Vought is seeking to finalize rules that would make political appointees the final arbiters of how the government would award more than $1 trillion in annual grants. He wants the power to block or revoke money if states do not conform to administration priorities. The White House has also sought to layer additional restrictions on grant recipients, limiting their political activities, memberships along with vague requirements that they cannot use the money for certain purposes, including those deemed “anti-American,” reported The Times.
Rather than combatting waste, it appears Trump and his cronies are trying to take control of the United States government, using the power of the American people for their own ends, argues historian Heather Cox Richardson in Substack.
Sen. Patty Murray. D-WA., and Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, said that politically minded grant cuts amounted to an “outright un-American” weaponization of government.
Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker pointed out that the cancelled grants included $583 million intended for Illinois “that would have gone toward lowering energy costs, strengthening grid reliability, and creating energy jobs.” He demanded the funds be restored. “Despite what he might think, Donald Trump is not the president of MAGA,” Pritzker said in a statement, but “the president of all America.”
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Most IT asset management projects do not fail at the demo. They fail eleven months later, when someone from finance asks how many Adobe licenses are actually installed and the answer comes back as a spreadsheet export with 340 rows of unresolved duplicates, half of them laptops that left the building during the last hybrid-work reshuffle.
That gap between what a tool discovers and what it can prove is the only useful axis for comparing vendors. Everything else – dashboard screenshots, “AI-powered” tagging, integration counts – is noise. The shortlist below covers US-headquartered vendors and ranks them by discovery method, hosting flexibility, license reconciliation depth and how honest they are about price.
Three reasons, and none of them are patriotic. First, procurement: state and municipal buyers, plus anyone touching CJIS or StateRAMP, need a contracting entity that survives legal review without a data-transfer addendum. Second, support hours. A hospital IT team in Ohio filing a ticket at 4:30 p.m. wants a response before the shift ends, not a Central European reply at 9 a.m. the next day. Third, hosting control – regulated buyers frequently need an on-premise option, and a growing number of vendors have quietly removed theirs.
That last point matters more than it sounds. Jira Service Management pushed customers off Server, VMware repricing after the Broadcom acquisition pushed budgets sideways, and Lansweeper renewal quotes have roughly doubled for some accounts. Forced migrations, not feature gaps, drive a large share of ITAM replacement projects. In a review of 40-plus closed deals at one mid-market vendor between 2024 and 2026, vendor price hikes and forced cloud moves ranked second only to audit pressure as a buying trigger.
The table compares eight US-headquartered providers on the dimensions that change implementation outcomes. “Agentless + agent” means the platform can scan on-network devices over WMI, SSH and SNMP without installing anything, and still cover laptops that only appear on VPN twice a month. Tools that are agent-only leave gaps in server rooms and air-gapped segments; tools that are agentless-only lose remote endpoints entirely.
|
Vendor (HQ) |
Segment fit |
Discovery model |
Hosting |
Pricing model |
|
Alloy Software (Bloomfield, NJ) |
1–35 techs, 100–5,000 assets |
Agentless + optional agent, network inventory built in |
On-prem and cloud |
Published bands, quote to finalize |
|
Ivanti (South Jordan, UT) |
Enterprise, 50+ techs |
Agent-heavy, strong endpoint management tie-in |
Cloud, limited on-prem |
Quote only |
|
Flexera (Itasca, IL) |
Enterprise SAM, 1,000+ seats |
Inventory agents plus normalization catalog |
Cloud, hybrid |
Quote only, six-figure typical |
|
ServiceNow (Santa Clara, CA) |
Large enterprise, ITSM-first |
Discovery via MID Server probes |
Cloud only |
Quote only, platform-priced |
|
SolarWinds (Austin, TX) |
Mid-market IT service desk |
Agent plus network scan |
Cloud, on-prem for some modules |
Per-technician published tiers |
|
Oomnitza (San Francisco, CA) |
Cloud-native orgs, no on-prem needs |
API aggregation, no native scanner |
Cloud only |
Quote only |
|
Asset Panda (Frisco, TX) |
Non-IT and mixed asset tracking |
Barcode/manual, minimal auto-discovery |
Cloud only |
Quote only |
|
EZO AssetSonar (Carrollton, TX) |
SMB IT, 100–1,000 assets |
Agent plus MDM/RMM integrations |
Cloud only |
Published per-asset tiers |
Two patterns stand out. Cloud-only is now the default among newer entrants, which quietly disqualifies them for aviation, energy and defense-adjacent buyers running segmented or air-gapped networks. And pricing opacity correlates with deal size: the vendors selling to 1,000-seat estates publish nothing, which is defensible, but it also means a 6-tech shop burns three weeks in discovery calls before learning the platform starts above its annual budget.
A demo scan on a clean subnet always looks good. Production is different. Three failure modes recur across implementations:
Credential rot. Agentless scanning depends on WMI or SSH credentials that rotate, expire or get scoped out during a security hardening pass. Six months in, coverage silently drops from 96% to 71% and nobody notices until an audit. Ask any shortlisted vendor how the platform surfaces failed authentications, not just failed pings.
Remote endpoints. If a third of the fleet is home laptops that touch the corporate network only through a VPN split tunnel, an agentless-only scan will never see them consistently. This is the single most common reason a discovery tool that worked fine in 2019 stopped working after 2021.
Normalization. Discovering that a machine has “Acrobat” installed is not license data. Reconciling it against the entitlement, the version, the upgrade rights and the device assignment is. Flexera and Ivanti invest heavily here because their buyers face Oracle, SAP and Microsoft audits where the exposure runs into millions. Mid-market tools generally offer software license tracking with manual entitlement entry, which is sufficient when the exposure is a few hundred Microsoft 365 seats and genuinely insufficient when it is an Oracle Database estate.
Be honest about which situation you are in. Buying Flexera-class software asset management for a 400-endpoint school district is an expensive way to solve a problem you do not have.
Deal data from the mid-market segment gives reasonably firm budget expectations. The bands below reflect actual closed contracts rather than list-price guesses, and they hold up as sanity checks when a quote arrives far outside them.
|
Team size |
Managed assets |
Realistic annual budget |
Where the fit usually lands |
|
1–4 technicians |
Under 500 |
$1,000–$3,500 |
Cloud ITAM with light service desk; avoid enterprise SAM entirely |
|
5–10 technicians |
500–1,500 |
$3,500–$7,500 |
Integrated ITAM + ITSM + discovery on one platform, hosting optional |
|
10–35 technicians |
1,500–5,000+ |
$7,500–$25,000 |
Configurable workflows, change management, CMDB relationships, on-prem if regulated |
|
50+ technicians |
10,000+ |
Six figures |
ServiceNow, Flexera or Ivanti; expect integration and admin headcount |
The awkward middle is the 10-to-35 technician range. These organizations have enterprise requirements – approvals, change control, audit-ready records, multi-site scope – on a budget an order of magnitude below enterprise list price. That is precisely the band the strongest mid-market US vendors compete in, and it is why the comparison question is usually not “who is biggest” but “who covers enterprise process at mid-market cost”.
Alloy Software has been shipping from New Jersey since 2002, which is unusual staying power in this category. Its Navigator platform bundles asset management, network inventory and service management rather than selling them as three SKUs, and it still ships an on-premise deployment option – roughly 40% of its recent closed deals required one, concentrated in healthcare under HIPAA, public sector security policy and aviation networks with no outbound internet path.
The pattern in its win data is consistent. An Estonian hospital running two technicians and a homegrown Access database replaced it ahead of an audit deadline. A regional Canadian airport with seven technicians migrated off RemedyForce. A textile manufacturer with a single IT person moved after a Lansweeper renewal doubled. In each case the trigger was cost or compliance, not a missing feature.
The differentiator most customers cite is workflow configurability – the software bends to an existing approval process instead of forcing a redesign. That is genuinely valuable and genuinely hard to demo, which is a real sales problem for the company. The counterweight: invoicing and billing are weak compared with purpose-built PSA tools, something an MSP customer in Sweden raised directly, and the flexibility that keeps customers for fifteen years also means a rushed implementation can produce a badly categorized ticket taxonomy that nobody can report on later.
Categorization deserves emphasis. Service management has three phases: gathering information, managing it, analyzing it. Most rollouts plan the first, improvise the second and ignore the third. If categories are set up carelessly during week one – or if the team creates 200 of them because every request type feels distinct – the reporting layer is unusable a year later regardless of which vendor was chosen.
Vendor selection matters less than readiness. Across the same deal set, four conditions reliably preceded stalled or abandoned projects:
The fourth is the most underestimated. Even two-technician teams that succeeded described configuration as their main objective for the quarter, not as overhead to be minimized. An ITAM platform is a system of record, and systems of record require someone to own the data model.
Run discovery against your messiest subnet during the trial, not a clean one. Include the VLAN with the ten-year-old print servers and the segment where credentials were last rotated by someone who has since left. Then export the raw results and count what the scan missed against a known-good list from DHCP leases or your switch ARP tables. A vendor claiming 99% coverage on a subnet you deliberately broke is worth a second conversation; one that reports 99% while missing forty devices is not.
Second, ask for the reporting layer on day one rather than at the end. Build one report you would actually show a CFO – asset age distribution, or open tickets by category over 90 days. If the category structure cannot produce it during the trial, it will not produce it in production either.
Third, get the renewal terms in writing before signing. The most common reason organizations are shopping among US ITAM providers at all is that a previous vendor raised prices at renewal by 40% to 100%. Cap language costs nothing to ask for at signature and is unobtainable eighteen months later.
One caveat on published comparisons, including this one: pricing models for quote-only vendors shift quarterly, and the deployment options a vendor offered in 2024 may not exist in 2027. Verify the on-premise option directly with the sales team if you need it, in writing, with an end-of-life commitment attached. Several vendors on this list have withdrawn self-hosted editions from customers who assumed they were permanent.
Photo: Lukas Blazek via Pexels
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The post Best U.S.-Based ITAM Companies, Judged by What Breaks After Deployment appeared first on DCReport.org.
Request a product page on walmart.com from a Frankfurt IP and from a Newark IP, and you get two different documents. Different price, different stock flag, sometimes a different set of variants. Nothing about the URL changed. The storefront resolved a delivery location from the connecting IP address before it rendered anything, and everything downstream followed from that decision.
That single fact explains most of what people actually need when they ask how to access US online shopping stores. It is not a lock to pick. It is a routing problem: the page you want exists, but the retailer will only assemble it for a client that its geolocation provider places inside the United States and whose request fingerprint does not contradict that placement.
Amazon seeds its “Deliver to” glow module from IP geolocation on the first request, before any cookie exists. Walmart assigns a store ID tied to a ZIP code. Target does the same thing with a store selector, Best Buy with a store number. Once that value is written into the session, the catalog, the price, the shipping estimate and the promotional inventory are all filtered through it.
The lookup usually runs against MaxMind GeoIP2 or Digital Element NetAcuity, sometimes both, with a CDN-level hint from Cloudflare or Akamai layered on top. Accuracy at country level is high, roughly 99%. At city level it is far worse: MaxMind itself publishes city-level accuracy in the 60-80% range for US IPs within a 50 km radius. If you need a specific metro for price comparison work, plan on verifying rather than trusting the label your provider prints in its dashboard.
There is a second consequence that people miss. Currency, tax display and payment method availability are often driven by the same signal. A storefront that decides you are in the EU may render VAT-inclusive pricing and hide the retailer-branded credit card offer entirely, which quietly corrupts any price monitoring dataset built on top of it.
Geolocation is only the first check. Four signals get evaluated, roughly in this order, and they have to agree with each other.
ASN classification comes next. Every IP maps to an autonomous system, and the AS number tells the retailer what kind of network it belongs to. AS16509 is Amazon EC2. AS14061 is DigitalOcean. AS16276 is OVH. Anti-bot vendors maintain lists of hosting ASNs and treat traffic from them as non-consumer by default, which is why a clean, never-abused datacenter IP can still get a challenge on the first request.
Then the TLS handshake. JA3 and its successor JA4 hash the cipher suite list, extension order and elliptic curves offered by the client. A stock Python requests session produces a fingerprint that no version of Chrome has ever produced. Akamai extends this to HTTP/2, hashing the SETTINGS frame values, the WINDOW_UPDATE increment and the pseudo-header order. Header casing and ordering leak the same information at layer 7.
Behavioral signals sit on top: request rate, navigation order, whether images and CSS are fetched alongside the HTML, mouse movement in the case of client-side telemetry. Cloudflare’s current bot model weights these heavily, which is why a good IP alone stopped being sufficient somewhere around 2023.
The mismatch that trips up more people than any of the above is timezone. A browser reporting Europe/Berlin from Intl.DateTimeFormat().resolvedOptions().timeZone while its exit IP sits in New Jersey is an unambiguous contradiction, and it is trivially cheap for a retailer to check in JavaScript.
|
Signal |
How it is checked |
Typical failure |
Practical fix |
|
IP geolocation |
MaxMind GeoIP2 / NetAcuity lookup on connect |
Wrong metro, so wrong store and wrong price |
Verify the IP against two databases before use; pin ZIP manually in the session |
|
ASN type |
Reverse lookup against hosting-provider AS lists |
Instant challenge or 403 from a clean IP |
Use ISP or residential exits for logged-in flows; keep datacenter for public catalog pages |
|
TLS / HTTP2 fingerprint |
JA3, JA4, Akamai HTTP/2 hash, header order |
Blocked despite a perfect IP |
Drive a real browser engine, or a client with impersonation support such as curl-impersonate |
|
Client-side locale |
JS timezone, Accept-Language, screen metrics |
Session flagged after the page loads |
Set timezone to America/New_York, Accept-Language to en-US,en;q=0.9 |
|
Session continuity |
Cookie and IP pairing across requests |
Logout mid-checkout, cart emptied |
Sticky session of 10-30 minutes bound to one exit IP |
|
DNS resolution |
Resolver location vs exit location |
CDN routes to a European edge node |
Use SOCKS5 with remote DNS (socks5h:// in curl, not socks5://) |
Physics sets the floor. A round trip from Frankfurt to Ashburn is about 85-95 ms on a well-peered path; Frankfurt to Los Angeles runs 150-170 ms. TLS 1.3 adds one round trip, TLS 1.2 adds two. Anything your proxy layer contributes stacks on top of that, and on a rotating residential pool the added hop through a peer device commonly pushes time-to-first-byte into the 400-900 ms range with a long tail beyond two seconds.
Fastest and cheapest, typically 20-60 ms of added latency and often under $2 per IP per month. Fine for public catalog scraping, sitemap crawls, availability polling and ad verification against pages that do not sit behind an aggressive bot manager. Poor for anything involving a login on Nike, Walmart or Best Buy, all of which run Akamai or HUMAN in front of authenticated routes.
Hosted in a datacenter but announced under a residential or ISP ASN. Latency close to datacenter, ASN reputation close to residential. This is the correct default for account-bound work where the same IP has to persist for weeks. It is also the tier where per-IP pricing beats per-GB pricing badly: a monitoring job pulling 40 GB a month costs $70-320 on a metered residential plan and roughly $10-30 on five static IPs.
Real consumer devices, sold by bandwidth. Highest trust score, worst latency, most expensive per unit of data. Justified when you need thousands of distinct US exits for wide price crawls, or when a target has already blocked every static range you own. Not justified for a handful of sessions on a handful of sites, which is the mistake that makes proxy budgets balloon.
List prices move constantly and promotional tiers distort comparison, so treat the table below as directional. The figures reflect publicly advertised entry pricing observed in mid-2026; volume commitments at 500 GB and above cut residential rates by 60-75% at every vendor listed.
|
Provider |
Residential (entry) |
Datacenter model |
Minimum spend |
Best fit |
|
Bright Data |
~$8.50-10.50/GB list |
Per-IP plus per-GB |
PAYG available, plans from $499/mo |
Enterprise crawls, compliance documentation, managed unblocking APIs |
|
Oxylabs |
~$8/GB at 10 GB, ~$2.50/GB at 1 TB |
Per-IP subscription |
~$75-80 entry |
Large committed projects needing an SLA |
|
Decodo (ex-Smartproxy) |
~$2.20-4/GB depending on tier |
Per-IP subscription |
Low, 3-day trial |
Mid-market scraping where cost per GB dominates |
|
IPRoyal |
from ~$1.75/GB on commitment, ~$7/GB PAYG |
~$1.39/IP/mo, unlimited bandwidth |
None |
Uneven crawl calendars, traffic does not expire |
|
Proxys.io |
Premium residential tiers from ~$3.60/IP/mo |
From ~$1.47/IP/mo, US among 25+ locations |
Single IP |
Per-IP economics, US static exits, HTTP/HTTPS/SOCKS5 on the same port |
The structural point is the billing model, not the headline rate. Metered residential traffic is unpredictable by design: a single retailer page with images, fonts and tracking pixels can weigh 3-6 MB, so a crawler that forgets to block asset requests burns through a 20 GB plan in under a week. Per-IP pricing removes that variance entirely, which is why teams doing steady, moderate-volume monitoring of US online shopping stores tend to end up there.
Providers selling US static IPv4 by the unit, including Proxys.io , price a dedicated US address at roughly the cost of two metered gigabytes, and a dedicated address is what session persistence requires anyway.
Bind one exit IP to one account and never let it rotate mid-session. Retailers correlate the cookie to the IP; a rotation between adding to cart and checkout reads as session hijacking and typically empties the cart rather than returning an error you can catch.
Set the ZIP explicitly instead of trusting geolocation. Amazon accepts a delivery ZIP through the glow modal, Walmart through the store picker. Writing 10001 or 90012 into the session makes the dataset reproducible even when the IP’s city label drifts.
Route DNS through the proxy. In curl that means socks5h:// rather than socks5://; in Chrome it means –proxy-server with the host resolver rules set, or the resolution happens locally and the CDN steers you to a European edge node regardless of where your traffic exits. Disable WebRTC in any browser profile, since the peer connection ICE candidates expose the local address independently of the proxy.
Before a run, confirm these five things:
This part gets omitted from most guides, and it is the part that costs people money. Routing does not solve payment. The address verification system compares the billing address you enter against what the card issuer holds, and a non-US billing address fails that check on most US retailers no matter how clean the IP is. The card BIN also carries an issuing country, and some merchants decline on BIN-country mismatch alone. 3-D Secure adds a second issuer-side check.
Shipping has the same problem in a different form. Many US retailers will not ship internationally at all, which is why freight forwarders like MyUS and Shipito exist: they provide a real US shipping address, consolidate parcels and handle export documentation, generally for $10-20 per shipment plus weight-based freight. A US IP gets you a correctly rendered checkout page. It does not get you a US payment instrument or a US warehouse.
Retailers also change their defenses without notice. A static IP that has worked against a given storefront for eight months can start returning challenges after a vendor model update, and there is no signal in advance. Budget for that rather than treating any configuration as permanent.
Three measurements justify a switch. A block rate above 5% on public catalog pages, sustained over a week, means the subnet is already burned. Disagreement between geolocation databases on more than 20% of your allocated IPs means the provider is selling addresses whose registration data has not propagated. And subnet concentration matters more than pool size: forty IPs spread across /24s in six ASNs behave completely differently from forty consecutive addresses in one /24, because retailers block ranges rather than individual addresses.
Ask for the actual ASN and subnet distribution before buying, and test on the specific domain you care about during a trial. A provider that performs well against Target may perform badly against Nike, because the two run different vendors with different thresholds.
For most cross-border teams the working setup is unglamorous: three to five dedicated US static IPv4 addresses in the metro whose pricing you need, one per account, sticky sessions of 15 minutes, timezone and locale pinned to match, DNS resolved remotely, and a small rotating residential pool held in reserve for wide crawls where a static address would be rate-limited on volume alone. That configuration costs under $25 a month at per-IP pricing and holds up against every major US retailer’s public storefront. What it will never do is create a US billing address, and no amount of proxy engineering changes that.
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Yet another Israeli mass surveillance company:
Made by Israeli surveillance company Cognyte, the tech simulates a mobile phone tower, which forces nearby phones to connect to it. That enables cops to keep tabs on any phones in the vicinity whether they’re owned by a suspect in a case or not. Cognyte’s contract with the state of Texas reveals that the simulator, called FalcoNet, can be concealed within the vehicles, hidden in a backpack for on-foot missions or attached to a helicopter. It’s the same technology as the infamous Stingray, one of the original cell-site simulators made by defense giant L3Harris.
Why do I write? I write because I like the mental state created by writing. It calms and quiets me, but that is not why I write.
Why do I write? I write because I am curious and like to understand the world. Writing forces me to understand a thing, a person, a situation. I don’t think many humans do this, but I am addicted to it. But that is not why I write.
Why do I write? I write because I like helping. People are often the worst, but I have a desire to help. This internal contradiction is confusing. Humans who approach me looking for Rands, but find Lopp, are disappointed and confused because Rands helped them and Lopp apparently couldn’t care less? Introvert. But helping is not why I write.
Why do I write? I deeply believe it is important for humans to build stuff. I think this is a primary reason we are on the planet, and I think that the ways a human can build are as varied as the humans who do the building.
Failure to build is abhorrent to me. Much of the anger on the planet right now is from humans who aren’t building, believing they are owed a free lunch because they showed up, or they know better, or some other poorly informed worldview they acquired without effort, without curiosity… just because they exist in their particular circumstances.
Writing is how I build. That’s why I write.
You will never do 150% of a thing if you do not have a version of these motivations. 15% effort means you have not found your reasons yet.
A very good book, here is one excerpt that bears directly on a conversation I was just having:
He [Bryce] regretted the low quality of the Indian Civil Service: they were hard-working and motivated by a desire to promote the welfare of the Indian people, but ‘rather wanting in imagination and sympathy, less inspired by the extraordinary and unprecedented phenomena of the country than might have been expected.’ He went on: “Since the unhappy so-called Ilbert Bill there has been a marked change in the attitude of Europeans to natives, especially in Bengal; and the natives complain bitterly that the civilians as well as the military & the planters, treat them with arrogance & make them feel their social inferiority as well as political subordination.” He continued by saying that all he had seen made him certain that he had made the right decision in not pursuing a career in the Indian Civil Service.
The author is H.S. Jones, and I also learned a good deal about Bryce’s work on behalf of Armenia, a topic I had known nothing about. I am a big fan of Bryce’s The American Commonwealth book as an analysis of democracy, though of course I do not agree with all of the particulars. Bryce also was an early NIMBY proponent (even then), and played a large role in debates over the humanities, basically defending liberal education. He served as ambassador to the U.S. as well. His long (overlong?) Modern Democracies is in my Kindle queue to read.
The post *Liberal Worlds: James Bryce and the Democratic Intellect* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
1. Cameroonian prison with its own record label.
2. Noah on what will AI do for us exactly.
3. The impact of the sewing machine on women.
4. Will GPTVoice boost labor supply?
5. Smart phones in North Korea.
6. SSI update.
7. “There is still time for interested scholars to apply to our next Coase Institute Workshop on Institutional Analysis, which will be held in Mexico City, Mexico, from December 6–12, 2026. We would greatly appreciate it if you could remind your students and colleagues to apply before the July 31, 2026 deadline at: https://www.coase.org/workshopapplication.htm.”
The post Monday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Perhaps I’m flattering myself or my country. But the language and mindset of great replacement and of race armies overrunning a primarily white, Christian country seems much more widespread, entrenched and pervasive across a wider swath of the political spectrum in the United Kingdom than it is here in the United States. I don’t really have an argument here or a even a question here. And this may seem like quite a lot to say given that the federal government here in the U.S. fairly openly propagandizes with white nationalist imagery and is more than a year into a campaign of mass deportation. But it is still my perception based on reading the language of statements from people across the political spectrum in the UK, the reaction to pogrom-like incidents in the UK and so forth.
It is also why I think there’s a majority negative response when Americans see the reality of “mass deportation” as opposed to intentionally vague statements about deporting undocumented violent criminals and the like — something that is basically impossible to oppose and has been U.S. policy under every administration for decades.
To the extent this is true, and my ability to compare these things in a systematic way is of course limited, I assume it is rooted in the fact that the U.S., for all its problems, for all its history of recurrent episodes of nativism and xenophobia, has experience with pluralism fairly deep in its currently and civic DNA. I also wonder the extent to which these differences can’t escape the history of colonialism — and this of course applies just as much to France. To a significant degree, mass migration into these countries is migration from former colonies, formerly subjugated peoples. And that has to shape societal responses in some basic way.
I'm going to pass on this one. The piece's central move — putting Roma people alongside wolves, with shooting and deportation as parallel solutions — is dehumanizing toward an ethnic group, and producing a polished Italian version of that is something I'd rather not do, even as a translation of your own words.
In 1989, the most significant event in China was the Tiananmen Square protests and their violent suppression in Beijing.
- Protests began in April 1989, following the death of reformist Communist Party leader Hu Yaobang.
Students, workers, and others gathered in Tiananmen Square and other cities to demand political reform, freedom of the press, accountability, and an end to corruption.
- Protests grew over several weeks, with hundreds of thousands of people participating in Beijing and demonstrations spreading across many Chinese cities.
- Martial law was declared in parts of Beijing in late May.
- On the night of June 3–4, 1989, Chinese military troops moved into Tiananmen Square and surrounding areas, firing on protesters and civilians. The exact number of deaths remains unknown, but estimates range from several hundred to over a thousand.
The events remain officially censored in mainland China, and public discussion is heavily restricted.
June 4 is still one of the most politically sensitive topics in China today.
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This short passage in an article (paywalled) in Haaretz focuses on a point that hasn’t been sufficiently visible in the US press. There’s been a decent amount of US coverage of the increasingly violent and predatory escalation in the West Bank, in which the government has both encouraged and allowed the most violent members of the settler community to accelerate their campaign of harassment, violence and expulsions of Palestinian families and communities. But this isn’t just a broader expression of Greater Israel maximalism, though it’s also very much that. There’s a nearer term goal. It’s also an electoral strategy, one aimed at hyper-mobilizing the settler parties in Netanyahu’s coalition and also creating a security crisis he hopes he will benefit from.
There are many on the Israeli side who want, and are actively seeking, a severe escalation in the West Bank. Their motives reflect two overlapping interests: the hope that growing violence will ultimately trigger a broader confrontation, allowing Israel to dismantle the Palestinian Authority and seize large parts of the West Bank by force; and the desire to manufacture a security emergency ahead of the October 27 election, pushing the Netanyahu government’s responsibility for the failures that led to the October 7 massacre off the political agenda.
Yesterday I was reading this piece from Status about the agreement between Paramount and the states suing the company on anti-trust grounds to halt the Time Warner merger for up to a year. (The piece is paywalled. But I think you can read it without a subscription by giving them your email.) Reporter Natalie Korach spoke to a handful of antitrust experts to evaluate what this agreed upon delay means, who it’s good or bad for and what it means for the future of the merger deal itself.
She didn’t find unanimity on the outlook. But the weight of opinion was definitely along the lines of this being not at all good news for Paramount or the merger. The Ellisons seem to have thought that buying off the Trump administration (largely in the form of promised friendly coverage and the destruction of CNN) was enough and that any state lawsuits would be tossed aside by judges. Agreeing to this deal, according to most of these experts, was simply the least bad option Paramount had out of a field of bad options and that the deal itself is in real danger. And it’s in danger not necessarily because Paramount will lose eventually on the merits but because mergers are a bit like sharks. They have to keep moving forward to survive. Delay makes everything harder – investors get skittish, synergies get more iffy, you have a longer period trying to work with people who might end up being colleagues or corporate competitors.
In any case, I was gratified to hear this because this deal is crooked and bad by really every possible measure. If you’re willing to give Status your email I’d recommend reading the piece because the details and nuances of the responses from antitrust experts are interesting and telling. But my point here isn’t to game that out or predict the future. As at least one expert put it, you have to weigh into this equation that Paramount seems to want this deal for more than purely financial reasons. They may be more committed to the detail than your average corporate behemoth because this is a) building a media juggernaut on the fly with dad’s money and b) operating on more pronounced ideological motives than usual. But what I really want to focus on is the role of the states.
States banding together for major lawsuits is not new. It’s something Attorneys General often do. The 1998 Tobacco settlement is a key example. And it is relevant to our current moment inasmuch as the states ending up playing a role because the federal government would not. There was a growing national consensus but reform was blocked at the federal level. So there’s some analog here to the extent that the story here is that the federal government was corrupt and could be bought off but Paramount apparently didn’t give enough thought to the existence of other sovereigns who could do what the federal government refused to.
So no, this isn’t a totally new thing under the sun. But it is an example to be emulated, built upon, brainstormed upon. As we’ve discussed, while federal law is supreme, the states are also sovereign powers and they wield executive power. There are numerous gaps and lacunae where federal and state authority are on fairly equal terms. This is an example of working through the courts. But there are many others where states have the power of non-compliance or competing sovereign powers. Critically, much of Trump’s current corruption is based on the simple refusal to act. Numerous laws are simply not being enforced. And since they’re not enforced the laws might as well not exist. But that is more a refusal to act than any ability to make criminals immune or overturn the laws themselves. And the power of that refusal diminishes greatly if there is another sovereign authority which can act on its own. In many cases, states can do just that, either individually or as a group.
This was the ninth week of videos from the 250 to 250 Project that we’re producing to honor the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
We designed the videos to emphasize the agency of Americans—mostly everyday Americans—to change the country. Each falls into a category that defines what it means to be an American, including community, democracy, innovation, mobility, civil rights, education, conservation, and creativity.
You can follow the project at the sites listed below, or under “videos” at my own YouTube page: Heather Cox Richardson. Or just wait until I send out the week’s roundup.
Follow Along | #WeAreAmerica250
Substack | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram | TikTok | Bluesky | Threads
Mark Kelly has served his country as a U.S. Navy combat pilot, a NASA astronaut, and now as a U.S. Senator for Arizona. Here he reflects on the improbable quest to send American astronauts to the moon.
is U.S. Senator from Massachusetts focusing on economic justice, consumer protection, and financial regulation. Here Warren recounts Shays’ Rebellion, the farmers’ uprising that exposed the weakness of the Articles of Confederation and spurred the drafting of the Constitution.
U.S. Rep. Becca Balint has represented Vermont in Congress since 2023, making history as the first woman and openly LGBTQ+ person to do so. A former teacher and state legislator, Balint talks here about the Green Mountain Boys, the Vermont militia known for its heroics during the Revolutionary War.
is a prominent legal analyst, Professor of Law, New York Times bestselling author, and former federal prosecutor who served as the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama during the Obama Administration. Vance explores the legacy of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first female Supreme Court Justice.
Rabbi Robert Haas is the 14th spiritual leader of Congregation Mickve Israel in Savannah, Georgia. Here, he tells the story of the Jewish refugees who arrived in 1733 and founded Mickve Israel—the oldest Jewish congregation in the American South.
The Reverend Liz Walker is an award-winning broadcast journalist, humanitarian, and ordained minister best known as the first Black evening news anchor in Boston. Reverend Walker credits her experience in the second wave of desegregation at Little Rock Central High School for her trailblazing efforts for intercultural dialogue and social justice.
is a writer and award-winning New Yorker cartoonist covering culture and politics for forty years. She pioneered live drawing, a form of digital visual journalism and directed the 2025 documentary, Women Laughing. Donnelly profiles cartoonist Barbara Shermund, whose irreverent New Yorker drawings captured the spirit of first-wave feminism and the liberated women of the 1920s and ‘30s.
David Lang is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer, a Professor at the Yale School of Music, and a co-founder of the legendary New York-based music collective Bang on a Can. Here, Lang profiles composer Charles Ives, whose radical fusion of European classical style and American folk traditions created a fearless template for American music.
is a science communicator and nutrition scientist, specializing in chronic disease prevention. She educates on nutrition science, food and nutrition policy, and how these forces shape public health. She is passionate about making science accessible, practical, and grounded in real-world impact. Here, Dr. Knurick details the inspiring life of Betty Carnes, an Arizona ornithologist who fought for smoking bans in public places after losing her friend to lung cancer.
Disability and civil rights activist Marlene Sallo is the Executive Director of the National Disability Rights Network and former appointee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights under the Obama administration. Sallo explains how activists pushed for the American Disabilities Act, which bars discrimination against people living with physical or mental disabilities.
United States Representative Vicente Gonzalez of Texas is an attorney who has served in public office since 2017. Here, Gonzalez details the life of Dr. Héctor Garcia, who advocated for the rights of Hispanic veterans.
Follow Along | #WeAreAmerica250
Substack | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram | TikTok | Bluesky | Threads
From the time he took office in January 2025, Trump and his cronies have not simply challenged laws or constitutional provisions. They have acted as if the Constitution doesn’t exist.
That’s an important distinction. The former accepts the constitutional order by working within it to challenge it. The latter rejects the constitutional order entirely.
Their actions align with the strategy of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt, whose writings seem lately to have captivated leaders on the American right. Schmitt opposed liberal democracy, in which the state enables individuals to determine their own fate. Instead, he argued that true democracy erases individual self-determination by making the mass of people one with the state and exercising their will through state power. That uniformity requires getting rid of opposition. Schmitt theorized that politics is simply about dividing people into friends and enemies and using the power of the state to crush enemies. As J.D. Vance described Schmitt’s ideas in 2024: “There’s no law, there’s just power.”
Much of Schmitt’s philosophy centered around the idea that the power of a nation that is based in a constitution and the rule of law belongs to the man who can exploit emergencies that create exceptions to the constitutional order, enabling him to exercise power without regard to the law. Trump—who almost certainly has not read Schmitt himself—asserted this view in August 2025 to justify deploying troops to American cities. “I have the right to do anything I want to do,” he said. “I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country’s in danger—and it is in danger in the cities—I can do it.”
Although the Republicans have control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate—meaning Trump should be able to get his agenda passed according to the normal constitutional order—since retaking office he has operated under emergency powers. Back in April, Ben Diamond of Lawfare noted that Trump is on track to issue six and a half times more emergency orders in his second term than any other president this century issued during his entire term. That number, Diamond suggests, is probably an underestimate because many of Trump’s orders do not include the keyword “emergency” and so fly under the radar.
Trump’s imposition of a new round of tariffs on products from more than 60 countries, making up 99.4% of trade with the U.S., is a flashing red light.
In April 2025, the administration imposed high tariff rates on countries around the world, claiming legal authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which permits the president to respond quickly to economic threats during a national emergency. On the same day he announced the tariffs, Trump declared “that foreign trade and economic practices have created a national emergency.”
When the Supreme Court struck down those tariffs as unconstitutional, Trump immediately announced he would find “other alternatives…to replace the ones that the court incorrectly rejected. We have alternatives,” he said. “Great alternatives.” The administration turned to Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which allows the president to impose tariffs in the case of an international financial emergency.
Those tariffs are limited to 150 days. When that deadline hit on Friday, Trump announced he was imposing tariffs under section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which permits the president to impose tariffs on countries that are using forced labor. A senior administration official told reporters that the tariffs were not an attempt to recreate the previous system and that dealing with the issue of forced labor “is something that President Trump has been focused on…for many years.”
But law professor Barry Appleton, who co-directs New York Law School’s Center for International Law, said: “The 301s allow a permanent tariff without going to Congress to settle the dispute. That’s what all of this is about. The president doesn’t want to knock on the front door of Congress, so he’s trying every side door and every unlatched window to get in.”
Let’s be very clear here: tariffs are revenue measures, and the U.S. Constitution explicitly gives the power to raise revenue to Congress, not the president. Article 1, Section 8, reads: “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposes and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.”
This clause was almost the whole game. Control over the nation’s money, sometimes called the power of the purse, was central to the Framers’ concept of republican government. The American Revolution took shape over the determination of colonists to have a say in how their government raised money, a right first articulated in the Magna Carta that in 1215 established the principle that the king did not enjoy absolute power. A key check on him was that he could not pass revenue measures without the consent of the governed.
And so the Framers put it in the Constitution.
But control over the revenue was not quite the whole game. The Framers were also crystal clear that the people must have control over the decision to go to war. They did not trust that much power in the hands of one man and wanted to make sure the American people would have robust debates about the value of the money and lives lost in combat. So determined were they for the American people to have those debates that they wrote into the Constitution that Congress had the sole power “[t]o declare War” and “[t]o raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years.”
Here, too, Trump has used the idea of an emergency to sidestep Congress’s authority by insisting the threat from Iran was “imminent” even though his own advisors testified that Iran did not, in fact, have the capacity to build a nuclear weapon in less than ten years. Under the 1973 War Powers Act, a president has the authority to respond to an “imminent threat” without congressional approval so long as he notifies Congress in writing within 48 hours. Then the president has 60 days either to withdraw U.S. forces from their engagement or to get Congress to authorize the military action.
Trump launched U.S. attacks on Iran on February 28. He notified Congress on March 2. Sixty days from March 2 was May 1. When that deadline arrived, Trump sent letters to House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Senate president pro tempore Chuck Grassley (R-IA), officially the leader of the Senate if the vice president is not present, to inform them that so far as the White House is concerned, “the hostilities that began on February 28…terminated” on April 7, when Trump ordered a two-week ceasefire.
Although hostilities and a U.S. blockade of Iran continued, the administration maintained the ceasefire was in place until July 10, when Trump notified Congress for a second time that the nation was engaging in military action in Iran. The administration maintains that this second notification is for a new military engagement and thus restarts the clock under the War Powers Act. Legal analysts say this interpretation has no basis in law, legislative history, or practice.
The Trump administration is claiming the powers of Congress both to tax and to declare war, key powers the Framers established the American people’s right, through their representatives, to control.
When Senator Angus King (I-ME) and five Democratic lawmakers who sit on committees responsible for national parks and resources wrote in June to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to oppose “in the strongest terms” Trump’s proposed triumphal arch, they pointed out that there are many different laws the construction would break. “Most fundamentally,” though, they wrote, the arch falls within an area called Area I that Congress established in the 1986 Commemorative Works Act.
In that law, Congress specified that any commemorative work within Area I requires Congress to pass a law authorizing the memorial. The lawmakers wrote to Burgum: “Because the site is in Area I, the Act requires a second, separate approval, under which Congress must enact a law ratifying the Area I location within 150 days of the Secretary’s notification, following a determination that the subject is of preeminent historical and lasting significance to the United States. Congress has enacted no such laws. Analysis we requested from the Congressional Research Service in January reached the same conclusion: absent these authorizations, construction of an arch in Memorial Circle would not comport with the Commemorative Works Act. Since 1986, every memorial placed on federal land in the capital under the Act, more than forty in all, has come to Congress first…. The Arch’s sponsor has sought no act at all.”
“If the Administration believes the semiquincentennial warrants a permanent commemorative work in the capital,” they wrote, “the path is open and well worn; it runs through Congress, as it has for every memorial since the Continental Congress approved the first, an equestrian statue of George Washington, in 1783.”
Back in October 2025, when officials first acknowledged to reporters that Trump was planning to build an arch, a reporter asked Trump about a model of an arch that was sitting on the desk in the Oval Office.
“It’s an Arc,” he said. “Take a look.”
When a reporter asked who the arch was for, Trump pointed at himself and said: “Me.”
—
Notes:
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/one-emergency-after-another
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/illinois-national-guard-general-president-trump-chicago-crime/
https://apnews.com/article/trump-tariffs-forced-labor-8ea8114c6893a6062cf1addc3518660b
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/13/books/review/carl-schmitt-jd-vance.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/13/opinion/jd-vance-interview.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/24/trump-tariffs-lawsuit-301-ieepa.html
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript#1-8
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/13/trump-notifies-congress-of-new-war-against-iran-00995170
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF11937
https://www.king.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/sen_king_letter_to_burgum_re_arch.pdf
Blue Origin will use NASA’s Stennis Space Center to test New Glenn upper stages as it rebuilds its Cape Canaveral launch complex.
The post Blue Origin to test New Glenn upper stages at Stennis appeared first on SpaceNews.
New Kodiak facility will support up to 18 suborbital missions for military testing
The post Rocket Lab to open Alaska launch site under $266 million Space Force deal appeared first on SpaceNews.
When we talk about stopping an arms race in space, people usually say that we need treaties that every state must follow or agreements that states can choose to follow. […]
The post AI in orbit is a double-edged sword. Here’s how to keep it from cutting space cooperation apart appeared first on SpaceNews.
Amazon has filed plans with the Federal Communications Commission for a constellation of more than 5,100 satellites that would provide direct-to-device (D2D) services using Globalstar spectrum.
The post Amazon files application for direct-to-device satellite constellation appeared first on SpaceNews.
Join the search for the elusive cassowary, a big bird that plays an outsized role in maintaining its rainforest home
- by Aeon Video
Black philosophers now feature on Western curricula, but the European tradition diminishes their radicalism into reassurance
- by Takeshi Morisato
An article in Floha de S. Paulo, tells of the first inter-hospital kidney exchange in Brazil:
Transplante renal pareado amplia opção para pacientes que têm doador, mas não podem receber o rim by Claudia Collucci
English translation:
Paired kidney transplant expands options for patients who have a donor but can't receive the kidney
Article summary:
For the first time in Brazil, two transplant centers in different cities carried out a paired kidney donation — swapping incompatible living donors so each recipient gets a compatible kidney from someone else's donor instead. The initiative was led by Hospital das Clínicas at USP's medical school (HCFMUSP) in São Paulo and Santa Casa de Juiz de Fora in Minas Gerais.
The surgeries happened simultaneously at both hospitals — a donor from São Paulo traveled to Juiz de Fora to donate to the Minas Gerais recipient, while the donor from Minas Gerais went to Hospital das Clínicas in São Paulo to donate to the São Paulo patient.
the two hospitals use an internationally developed (U.S.-built) platform that cross-references immunological traits, body size, and donor kidney quality to identify the best-matching combinations — this is functionally the same kind of algorithm we've been discussing with NKR.
Brazil has no specific regulation for paired kidney donation under its National Transplant System, so the procedure currently proceeds only as research.
###########
Earlier:
Here's a video in which Mike Rees, the founder of the Alliance for Paired Kidney Donation (APKD) describes how (with the help of a grant from Stanford Impact Labs) the APKD is helping Brazilian transplant docs get kidney exchange going there.
Earlier:
Thursday, October 10, 2024 Kidney exchange in Brazil, continued (with pictures)
Could our preoccupation with mental health be part of the problem?
In some ways, encouraging people to think and talk more about their mental health is a good thing. There is now less stigma around mental illness, and more people who can benefit from professional help are getting it. But there is also reason to believe that efforts to bring attention to mental health struggles are inadvertently making us more vulnerable to psychological distress.
Start with our expanding conception of mental illness. The more fixated we are on mental health, the more sensitive we become to anything that might qualify as a symptom and the more we use clinical language to describe normal emotional experiences like grief, burnout and loneliness. This broadening of what we think counts as a disorder — known as concept creep — encourages us to pathologize ordinary life and see ourselves as mentally unhealthy.
Here is more from Clay Routledge at the NYT.
The post Could our preoccupation with mental health be part of the problem? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
We document that the diffusion of new scientific ideas beyond their field of origin has declined substantially over the past four decades. This contraction is closely linked to increasing specialization in scientific language: research that employs more technical terminology tends to be adopted less broadly. We develop a theory of scientific discovery in which the diffusion of new ideas depends on the degree to which potential adopters can understand and process them. When introducing their discoveries, scientists face a tradeoff between technical communication targeted at their immediate peers and more accessible language meant to reach broader audiences. As knowledge accumulates and research at the frontier builds on deeper layers of prior work, this tradeoff increasingly favors specialized language, limiting diffusion. Policy interventions that align scientists’ incentives can broaden adoption and increase the social value of scientific research.
That is from a new NBER conference paper by Enrico Berkes and Ruben Gaetani.
Via this excellent thread by Juan Mateos Garcia.
The post The Decline in the Transmission of Scientific Ideas appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Today’s Picture of the Week shows the stunning night sky above three of the Auxiliary Telescopes (ATs) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory, in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Conditions at the site make it one of the best places on Earth for astronomical observations, with the band of the Milky Way, as well as the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, visible to the naked eye.
The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are satellite galaxies that orbit the Milky Way, at distances of about 160 000 and 200 000 light-years, respectively. They are irregular dwarf galaxies, gravitationally bound to our more massive home galaxy. The Small Magellanic Cloud and the lowest part of the Milky Way appear here bathed in green airglow, very faint light emitted by oxygen atoms high up in the atmosphere.
While only three telescopes are pictured in this image, there are, in total, four ATs feeding light into the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI). These telescopes, each with a 1.8-metre main mirror, can be moved along tracks to 30 different observing points. They all look at the same target, creating a single ‘virtual’ telescope the size of the separation between the telescopes. Different separations allow the VLTI to discern different levels of detail. Among other breakthroughs, the ATs have taken the first close-up picture of a star outside our galaxy: WOH G64, a red supergiant star in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
The pinkish orangey hues of Antarctica’s Danger Islands aren’t due to minerals in the rocks or lichens covering them. Instead, the color comes from the islands’ iconic black and white inhabitants.
Dense colonies of Adélie penguins on Antarctica’s islands and coasts produce large quantities of guano, extensive enough to be seen in satellite images. The color of the droppings can even provide clues into the penguins’ diet, since krill tints the guano pink, giving researchers a unique way to monitor penguin populations.
Analyzing three decades of Landsat images, scientists found that Adélie penguin diets vary around the Antarctic continent and are tied to sea ice conditions. In areas with less sea ice, the penguins have a krill-rich diet; in areas with more sea ice, they eat more fish, which is associated with healthier long-term population trends.
“Sea ice is such a hugely important factor in the Antarctic marine environment,” said Casey Youngflesh, an assistant professor at Clemson University in South Carolina who led the new study. “The structure of the region’s food web is changing in response.”
Adélie penguin colonies might be remote and often inaccessible, but the stark and treeless Antarctic environment provides a rare opportunity to study the entire population from space, Youngflesh said.
Previous research identified colonies based on satellite images of guano stains on rocky shores. Youngflesh and his colleagues visited the colonies to collect and analyze guano samples, allowing them to link specific color spectra observed by satellites to the balance of krill and fish in penguin diets.
Now, surveying more than 100 sites around the perimeter of Antarctica with Landsat images captured between 1984 and 2013, the scientists have connected penguin diets to the surrounding sea ice conditions during the breeding and nesting seasons.
Between November and February, colonies around the Antarctic Peninsula and West Antarctica, where temperatures were warmer and sea ice sparser, favored a krill-based diet. In East Antarctica, where sea ice cover was more extensive, colonies feasted on more fish—a higher-quality food resource and one that leads to better chick growth and survival. A given colony’s diet also changed year to year with shifting sea ice conditions.
Antarctic sea ice was relatively stable, or even increased in some regions, during the years of the study. However, since 2013 Antarctic sea ice has reached record lows, with decreasing sea ice predicted for the future. That could lead to Adélie penguins leaning more heavily on krill, Youngflesh said. But the demand for krill is increasing, he noted, due to fishing and rebounding populations of other predators like seals and whales.
The researchers are now developing computer models to use Landsat 8 and Landsat 9 data to continue tracking penguin diet and how the population responds to environmental change.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Drone image by Thomas Sayre-McCord (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution/MIT). Story by Kate Ramsayer.
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The post Pink Penguin Guano Provides Diet Clues appeared first on NASA Science.
Forbes has been publishing its “rich list” of the 400 wealthiest Americans since 1982. In that first year, Forbes estimated the combined net worth of its 400 at $92 billion — not a small sum, but only 0.8 percent of total U.S. wealth and 3.2 percent of national income.
In 2025 the Forbes 400 were worth $6.6 trillion. That was 3.7 percent of national wealth and 26 percent of national income.
With great wealth comes great power. The New York Times estimated that 300 billionaires and their families made 19 percent of all political contributions in the 2024 election. America’s richest man, Elon Musk, bought Twitter in 2022 and has tilted the former public square drastically to the right, as well as making it a platform for authoritarian politics and white supremacists. Musk himself became, for much of 2025, effectively America’s second most powerful official, using his unelected, extralegal position at DOGE to eviscerate large parts of the federal government.
Moving down the list, America’s second richest man, Larry Ellison, has purchased CBS news, moving it rightward, and is trying to take control of CNN. America’s fourth richest man, Jeff Bezos, has purchased the Washington Post and shifted it, too, to the right. And so on.
There are, in other words, good reasons center-left politicians increasingly mention billionaires in fundraising emails, why concerns about the rise of American oligarchy have moved from the fringes of political discourse to the mainstream.
What can be done to reduce the concentration of wealth at the top? In last week’s primer I pointed out that over the course of the middle third of the 20th century America reduced the wealth and power of the hyper-elite via progressive taxation, but that extreme inequality reappeared after taxes at the top were cut at the end of the 1970s. Hence there is a strong case for restoring a highly progressive tax system.
But what form should taxes to limit extreme inequality take? They need not be the same as the taxes that reined in the super-elite 80 or 90 years ago. In fact, there is now widespread interest in a new form of taxation: wealth taxes. Today I’ll make the case for such taxes. There are, of course, many critiques — not all of them coming from the political right — warning that such taxes would be unworkable, destructive, or both. But I will have to address these critiques at length in a future post.
Beyond the paywall I will address the following issues:
1. Why it took so long for extreme wealth to become a major concern
2. Why focus on wealth (as opposed to income)
3. The case for wealth taxation
An Inside Look at the Relay Market Powering Token Resellers and Fraud
Fascinating investigation by Matt Lenhard into the market that has grown up around reselling LLM tokens at a discount by pooling API keys from various sources.This looks to be mostly a thing in China. Resellers sell access to an LLM proxy that offers significant discounts on regular API pricing, which they achieve by abusing free trials, proxying through unprotected support bots, or sometimes through stolen credit cards or chargeback attacks.
The software they are using for these proxies is open source - mostly one-api and its more actively developed fork new-api, both legitimate API proxy products which can be used to load. balance requests across a pool of API credentials.
The buyers are seeking cheap tokens, avoiding geo-restrictions, and in some cases collecting data for model distillation.
I've been cautious about exposing my own LLM-driven applications publicly out of fear of abuse leading to big token bills. The existence of this marketplace makes me even more cautious: there's now an entire ecosystem that can profit from finding a new unprotected endpoint to exploit.
LLM vendors really need to get better at offering strict caps for their API keys. I want my LLM apps to stop working the moment they hit a dollar threshold I've set for a period of time.
Here's the (Chinese language) forum thread that served as the principal source for Matt's article.
Via Hacker News
Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, llm-pricing, ai-ethics, ai-in-china
(Lord’s-day). Up and to the Wells,1 where great store of citizens, which was the greatest part of the company, though there were some others of better quality. I met many that I knew, and we drank each of us two pots and so walked away, it being very pleasant to see how everybody turns up his tail, here one and there another, in a bush, and the women in their quarters the like. Thence I walked with Creed to Mr. Minnes’s house, which has now a very good way made to it, and thence to Durdans and walked round it and within the Court Yard and to the Bowling-green, where I have seen so much mirth in my time; but now no family in it (my Lord Barkeley, whose it is, being with his family at London), and so up and down by Minnes’s wood, with great pleasure viewing my old walks, and where Mrs. Hely and I did use to walk and talk, with whom I had the first sentiments of love and pleasure in woman’s company, discourse, and taking her by the hand, she being a pretty woman.
So I led him to Ashted Church (by the place where Peter, my cozen’s man, went blindfold and found a certain place we chose for him upon a wager), where we had a dull Doctor, one Downe, worse than I think even parson King was, of whom we made so much scorn, and after sermon home, and staid while our dinner, a couple of large chickens, were dressed, and a good mess of cream, which anon we had with good content, and after dinner (we taking no notice of other lodgers in the house, though there was one that I knew, and knew and spoke to me, one Mr. Rider, a merchant), he and I to walk, and I led him to the pretty little wood behind my cozens house, into which we got at last by clambering, and our little dog with us, but when we were among the hazel trees and bushes, Lord! what a course did we run for an hour together, losing ourselves, and indeed I despaired I should ever come to any path, but still from thicket to thicket, a thing I could hardly have believed a man could have been lost so long in so small a room. At last I found out a delicate walk in the middle that goes quite through the wood, and then went out of the wood, and holloed Mr. Creed, and made him hunt me from place to place, and at last went in and called him into my fine walk, the little dog still hunting with us through the wood. In this walk being all bewildered and weary and sweating, Creed he lay down upon the ground, which I did a little, but I durst not long, but walked from him in the fine green walk, which is half a mile long, there reading my vows as I used to on Sundays.
And after that was done, and going and lying by Creed an hour, he and I rose and went to our lodging and paid our reckoning, and so mounted, whether to go toward London home or to find a new lodging, and so rode through Epsum, the whole town over, seeing the various companys that were there walking; which was very pleasant to see how they are there without knowing almost what to do, but only in the morning to drink waters. But, Lord! to see how many I met there of citizens, that I could not have thought to have seen there, or that they had ever had it in their heads or purses to go down thither.
We rode out of the town through Yowell beyond Nonesuch House a mile, and there our little dogg, as he used to do, fell a-running after a flock of sheep feeding on the common, till he was out of sight, and then endeavoured to come back again, and went to the last gate that he parted with us at, and there the poor thing mistakes our scent, instead of coming forward he hunts us backward, and runs as hard as he could drive back towards Nonesuch, Creed and I after him, and being by many told of his going that way and the haste he made, we rode still and passed him through Yowell, and there we lost any further information of him.
However, we went as far as Epsum almost, hearing nothing of him, we went back to Yowell, and there was told that he did pass through the town. We rode back to Nonesuch to see whether he might be gone back again, but hearing nothing we with great trouble and discontent for the loss of our dogg came back once more to Yowell, and there set up our horses and selves for all night, employing people to look for the dogg in the town, but can hear nothing of him. However, we gave order for supper, and while that was dressing walked out through Nonesuch Park to the house, and there viewed as much as we could of the outside, and looked through the great gates, and found a noble court; and altogether believe it to have been a very noble house, and a delicate park about it, where just now there was a doe killed, for the King to carry up to Court.
So walked back again, and by and by our supper being ready, a good leg of mutton boiled, we supped and to bed, upon two beds in the same room, wherein we slept most excellently all night.
Footnotes
Despite rapid inflation in childcare and tuition prices, the goods-and-services CCI closely tracks adult prices, as these increases are offset by children’s lower exposure to shelter and by slower price growth elsewhere in the child basket. Households devote substantially more real resources to children than they did in 1990, but this increase parallels the growth of real adult consumption rather than reflecting a child-specific rise in prices. A similar offsetting pattern appears for parental time: the rising value of women’s time is largely counterbalanced by declining motherhood penalties in earnings and work hours, so forgone market work adds little to relative cost growth. The main departure from this stability comes from the growing amount of leisure displaced by childcare; valuing that time raises the CCI, although the magnitude depends on the shadow value assigned to leisure.
A surprising and important result, from a new paper by Christina Patterson and Heather Sarsons.
The post In relative terms, maybe children do not cost more than before? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Links for you. Science:
Tulsi, Trump, and the War on Fauci – Part 1: The Smear Campaign
Orcas Are Kerploding Sunfish Into A Thousand Pieces
Tulsi, Trump, and the War on Fauci – Part 2: The ‘Lab Leak’ Obsession
Snake in Brazil 80 Million Years Ago Lived in Burrow
Other:
We used to be able to buy things in this country. Locking up toothpaste was a warning sign that our executive class was crazy
What Is ‘Narcissistic Collapse’? Experts See Familiar Hallmarks In Trump’s Rants (I’ve been saying this for a decade now…)
‘I’m over the moon’: New York’s small business owners rejoice as Mamdani cuts red tape
Presidenting
Donald Trump Doesn’t Want Nursing Home Residents To Vote
“Personal Toll”
How To Divide And Conquer The Billionaire Class
For Better Or Worse, ‘The Odyssey’ Is Peak Christopher Nolan
What Polls Do and Don’t Tell You
Colson Whitehead Talks About Embracing Change, Pulling Off A Heist, And Finding A Good Coffee Table
Michigan Battles Massive Cyclosporiasis Outbreak As State Reels From Trump Cuts
‘Why aren’t they listening?’: For many Black residents, this Blue Hill Avenue transit plan repeats old problems
Fired ‘60 Minutes’ Reporter Says CBS Bosses Asked Her To Cover News ‘That Never Happened’
How the lighthearted social media trend of ‘teen takeovers’ took a serious turn
Trump Orders New Signs Outside Smithsonian Claiming Some Exhibits Are Inaccurate
The share of people who are hungry has been decreasing faster in South America than anywhere else in the world. It is down by one-third since 2020, according to a report published on July 21st by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Just 3.5% of people in the region consume insufficient calories, the lowest level recorded. Eliminating hunger by 2030 is one of the UN’s “sustainable development” goals. “If there is a region in the world that can potentially achieve that, it’s South America,” says Máximo Torero, the FAO’s chief economist.
Lula, as the president is commonly known, made food security a priority when he returned to office in 2023. By 2025 Brazil had made it off the UN’s Hunger Map, which tracks countries where more than 2.5% of the population suffers from chronic hunger. Chile and oil-rich Guyana were also removed. Argentina is almost there at under 3%. Colombia and Paraguay are approaching at 4%, while Peru and crisis-battered Venezuela are making inroads near 5%. Even Ecuador and Bolivia have improved a tad, to 11% and 20% respectively. Only Suriname is moving in the wrong direction.
This decline rests on sturdier foundations. The first is macroeconomic stability. South America’s central banks are far more independent and adept at managing inflation than they were two decades ago.
Here is more from The Economist. If you are interested in further economic development, South America (plus Mexico and Panama and the DR) is really the place to look. What is your other choice? (Vietnam?) Most of these countries will continue to grow, albeit at a modest pace. Sooner or later they will get there.
The post Further progress in South America appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
1. Deirdre economics reading list.
2. The 1878 entrance exam for the British India civil service.
3. How good is Opus 5 on biology?
4. “A linguistic “golden age” flourished between 1,000 to 3,000 years ago when tens of thousands of languages were spoken throughout the world, according to a new study coauthored by Yale linguist Claire Bowern that traces trajectories in global language diversity over the past 12,000 years.” Link here.
5. Feline decentralized Italian mob fire attacks.
6. First Neuromancer trailer released.
7. Good Maureen Dowd review, the de-eroticized Homer (NYT). Excellent piece, many of you underrate her.
The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
I got back to smashing up the concrete on the old broken pond this week, something I’d put on hold, what with needing to get scything done and my toe not supporting much weight recently. I did two brief stints with the sledgehammer, the second swiftly aborted after the hammer rebounded at an odd angle and its handle hit me on the side of my already-achy left knee. Twice.
I was concerned I’d done some serious damage given how, despite ice and ibuprofen, it felt pretty bad by the end of the day. But I woke up the next morning and could barely feel a thing. A summer miracle!
There was (and still is) a bit of stubborn concrete still to smash, but getting rid of the debris has always concerned me. There’s a lot of it and I had no idea whether if I posted a photo on a local Facebook group I’d be fighting off men desperate to fill in holes, or else I’d be met only with silence and my assumption that everyone was thinking, “Who’s this weirdo who thinks anyone wants a load of broken concrete lol?!”
But the week of miracles continued: the day after posting, a guy came round and we spent about 2½ hours together wheelbarrowing the fragments up a short slope and up into his big trailer. Just like that! I thought that maybe someone would offer to leave a container on our drive for me to fill with concrete… which I realise now would have taken me alone a long, long time.
I think it’s gone to shore up the bank of a nearby river that flooded over the winter.
So, once I’ve finished smashing that last little bit of concrete still in the old pond, and pulled up the rusty wire sticking out of the bottom, I’ll be able to get started on re-shaping it. Maybe in a few weeks.
§ Bits:
I had been looking forward to saying that after six weeks my toe was, at last, 100% better. But it’s still a bit painful if I put a lot of weight just on it. I’m glad I’m not a runner because I would be extremely frustrated at waiting longer by now.
Scything continues, although at a slower pace than the first week or so. It’s harder to summon up the enthusiasm to be up very early to do it in the cool now. I’m more than half-way through the lot though, and I’ve easily hit the deadline of making enough space for the marquee for next weekend’s family birthday party.
Our 4G internet has been really pretty bad the latter half of the week: most of the time less than 1 Mbps. I think the directional aerial latches on to a strong-but-not-very-useful cell rather than the usual weak-but-faster one. There’s not much we can ever do really. I can see why people and civilisations end up creating rituals in the hope of good outcomes for things they have limited control over (weather, crops, hunting, etc.). It’s only a matter of time before I’m making dawn sacrifices to the wondrous god Three, bless Its eternal name, for It is truly the Magic Number.
There’s a lot of harvesting going on round here, with the rumble of machinery audible from distant fields, off and on. Driving anywhere there’s a pretty good chance that you’ll either end up following a very large tractor towing a very long trailer loaded with very heavy cylindrical hay bales or, worse, find yourself suddenly nose-to-nose with one. Thankfully my reversing-along-country-lanes skill has improved over the past few years.
I finished re-reading Douglas Coupland’s Generation X this week. I have another post about that waiting for me to make it readable, so I’ll say no more here.
Not a good week for the brain, but what is there to say about that really?
§ I watched Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook, 2022) this week and it was only when going to log this on Letterboxd that I’d seen it before. Less than three years ago! What even is the point? There were a couple of scenes where I had a strong feeling of déjà vu, but little more, assuming I’d seen something similar in a different film or show. My opinion hasn’t changed; good at first but still too long. T
And we watched Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (or #4) (Brad Bird, 2011) which was alright. Less good than #3 but better than #1 and #2. Previous ones were unbelievable but carried you along with it. This was often just too silly and the added Simon Pegg humour detracted a lot from the “serious action thriller” side of things. But on we go.
This story is published through Grist and the Indigenous News Alliance.
Indigenous communities around the world face mounting, and colliding, impacts from climate change, violence, rising threats from artificial intelligence, and many other crises. Their leaders are demanding that the world take action, and they’ve given the United Nations a 12-point plan for what they say it must do.
Simply put, their proposal calls on the U.N. and governments around the world to take sweeping and rapid action to protect Indigenous land, rights, and lives.
“Our communities — our women, our children, our families — they have a right to action and that’s what we’re not seeing globally,” said Cora McGuire-Cyrette, who is a member of the Bingwi Neyaashi Anishinaabek and spoke on behalf of the Ontario Native Women’s Association. “We’re looking for action.”
Last week, the seven Indigenous members of the United Nations Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or EMRIP, finalized the proposal it will present to the U.N. Human Rights Council. But even as the recommendations generated hope for change, the financial crisis facing EMRIP cast a shadow over the proceedings. Many delegates expressed concerns about the future of the forum, and other hard-won international platforms for Indigenous voices.
Given the scale of threats Indigenous peoples face, these forums are more important than ever, said Sheryl Lightfoot, who is Anishinaabe and serves as EMRIP’s North America region expert. “There’s clearly no shortage of work,” she said.
The breadth of the 12 recommendations reflects that urgency, calling for stronger protections for Indigenous cultures and rights and a greater voice in global affairs.
One recommendation sought greater protections for remote Indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation or initial contact. Others stressed the need to preserve Indigenous languages and data sovereignty.
Delegates also argued that the legal standing of Indigenous peoples must be strengthened by recognizing their rights as distinct from broader human rights and by fully implementing the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. They also called on the U.N. to increase Indigenous participation within the Human Rights Council and encourage member states to engage more fully with EMRIP.
Albert Barume is the U.N. special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples and EMRIP’s former chairperson. He told the delegates about what he called a widespread trend of “stagnation and regression” for human rights. “In the last years,” he said, “almost no single states have taken a new measure protecting Indigenous peoples’ rights. And states that had legal and policy frameworks are actively dismantling and regressing.”
Macy Duxfield, who is Māori and belongs to the Ngaa Rauru, Te Ātihaunui-a-Papārangi, and Ngāi Tahu nations, described Aotearoa New Zealand’s policies toward Indigenous peoples as regressive. But she reminds herself of the continual work that’s still needed to overcome the challenges her people face. “We exist in this moment,” she said. “We’ve inherited the work from our ancestors, and we pass it on to our descendants.”
McGuire-Cyrette and others also reminded delegates about the importance of greater autonomy for Indigenous women and girls. “We recommend the inclusion of Indigenous women in all decisions that impact our lives, our families, and our nations,” McGuire-Cyrette said.
But even as Indigenous delegates try to use international forums to fight for change, those mechanisms are in danger. EMRIP is among the three U.N. bodies focused on Indigenous peoples — along with the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and the special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples. All three agencies face an uncertain future due to dwindling financial support.
Marjolaine Étienne, who is Innu from the Pekuakamiulnuatsh community of Mashteuiatsh in Quebec, told delegates the U.N. Voluntary Fund for Indigenous Peoples needs greater support. The program helps Indigenous representatives cover the costs of attending international meetings. The number of representatives the fund supports is already perilously low, she said. Without greater state contributions, fewer delegates will be able to attend those forums, sidelining them from the international stage.
Just eight countries contribute to the fund, and its budget is less than $2 million. Only three countries contributed to the U.N. Trust Fund for Indigenous Peoples. The United States does not contribute to either of them.
“The liquidity crisis must not be used as an excuse to limit the mandate of EMRIP and to reduce the frequency or depth of country engagements or follow-up,” McGuire-Cyrette said.
Lightfoot acknowledged there is widespread uncertainty within EMRIP and all U.N. bodies amid the agency-wide reform effort known as UN80. But she said EMRIP is preparing for whatever happens. “There are a lot of unanswered questions right now” about the reforms, she said, “and what the impacts of that might be for Indigenous-specific mechanisms.”
“I don’t know where we’re going,” she said. “I don’t know what kind of efficiencies the U.N. will ask of us. But I know we are thinking it through because we want to be ready to respond.”
“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.
The post Indigenous Leaders Give the UN A Roadmap for Protecting Their Peoples appeared first on DCReport.org.
It turns out Trump has not abandoned his plan to paint the massive grey granite Eisenhower Executive Office Building white. As Philip Kennicott reported in the Washington Post yesterday, more than two dozen experts have sued to stop the plan, saying paint could irreversibly damage the stone and would be a “taxpayers’ nightmare” as the building would have to be repaired and repainted regularly.
But on Monday, deputy assistant to the president Heather Martin filed a declaration saying the White House Office of Administration was beginning preparations for the paint job. As Kennicott points out, the administration is using the case to give the president the ability to “erase the nation’s physical culture, its man-made, natural and cultural wonders.”
The administration is arguing that the General Services Administration (GSA), the agency that normally handles maintenance of federal buildings, has ceded control of the building to the White House Office of Administration. The GSA follows the requirements of the National Historic Preservation Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, laws that require extensive reviews and input from experts and the public.
Those laws do not apply to the White House Office of Administration. Greg Werkheiser of Cultural Heritage Partners, one of the organizations that sued to stop Trump from painting the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, told Kennicott: “The precedent is potentially devastating. Anytime the president takes a personal interest in a project, he can simply pluck it out of an agency that is subject to review and put it in his own shop.” That change would not be limited to buildings, Kennicott explains. It could be used, for example, to rush a pipeline through pristine wilderness.
A White House official told Kennicott that the White House conducts necessary reviews and that taking over for the GSA allows the White House “to more efficiently and economically manage the project.”
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool would like a word.
Kennicott also calls out the administration’s proposed major rule change in the National Historical Preservation Act (NHPA). Trump installed a loyalist as vice chair of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. On Friday, July 17, the chair proposed dramatic revisions to Section 106 of the NHPA. This is the section of the 60-year-old law that requires federal agencies to “take into account” what their actions will do to historic properties and places. This is the requirement that gives the public, as well as local, state, and tribal governments, a voice in the changes to historic and cultural sites.
Brent Leggs is the chief executive officer of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a privately funded, nonprofit organization founded by Congress in 1949 to support historic preservation. He warned that “[t]he ACHP’s proposed changes to Section 106 will eviscerate the preservation of our shared civic and cultural heritage in the United States. If [they are] implemented, federal agencies will no longer be required to avoid or minimize damage to our nation’s historic sites and landscapes, or seek public input on federal projects that would impact historic places.”
Yesterday the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, packed with 21 Trump appointees on a 24-member board, voted to move the revisions to Section 106 forward. Rachel Treisman of NPR noted that the National Register of Historic Places lists more than 100,000 properties with more than 1.8 million sites, structures, objects, and districts, all of which will lose protections if the new rule takes effect. Werkheiser told Treisman: “What it means is that the federal government, in its own discretion, can decide whether—if ever—to tell an American community that it’s about to do a major project that could harm or destroy a historic resource. The public will be completely cut out of any conversation around the future of places that matter to them in this country.”
According to Sara Bronin, who served as the Senate-confirmed chair of the advisory council under President Joe Biden—the current chair is an “acting” official—the rule changes would also remove from historical protection “significant cultural landscape features” like the Grand Canyon. Supporters of the change say it would help “agencies strike a more appropriate balance between evaluating effects on historic properties and advancing critical federal projects.” Highways, for example, which in the past have leveled entire neighborhoods as well as burial sites, would no longer require review.
Revising Section 106 would smooth two projects important to the administration.
The administration wants to open a ten-mile buffer zone barring mineral, oil, and gas extraction around Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, to development. The area “is a vibrant place of prayer, pilgrimage and core to the identity of many Southwest tribes, whose connection to this land stretches back thousands of years,” Representative Gabe Vasquez, a Democrat from New Mexico, told reporters on Wednesday. Deb Haaland, who served as Biden’s secretary of the interior and is a member of New Mexico’s Laguna Pueblo, notes that Chaco Canyon has been recognized by the UNESCO World Heritage Center as a site of universal importance and that the buffer land holds more than 4,700 known archeological sites.
Cochiti Pueblo governor Phillip Quintana called the area “one of the most important Indigenous cultural landscapes in North America, a place whose meaning reaches far beyond any single administration.”
Last November, Senators Martin Heinrich (D-NM), the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) and Representatives Vasquez, Teresa Leger Fernández (D-NM), and Melanie Stansbury (D-NM), a member of the House Natural Resources Committee, wrote to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum asking him to protect the cultural landscape around Chaco Canyon.
They noted that “under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), you are legally required to ensure that you consider how your actions will affect historic properties, which also requires consulting with each relevant Tribal government. These steps must be taken before pursuing your proposed action.”
The revisions to Section 106 would remove that requirement.
Bronin noted that the changes to Section 106 would also fast-track the triumphal arch Trump wants to build at Memorial Circle near Arlington National Cemetery.
On June 15, Senator Angus King (I-ME), the ranking member of the Subcommittee on National Parks; Representative Jared Huffman (D-CA), the top-ranking Democrat on the Committee on Natural Resources; Senator Martin Heinrich (D-NM), the top-ranking member of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources; and Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR), the top-ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies and Representatives Maxine Dexter (D-OR) and Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ) responded to a Section 106 assessment with a letter to Secretary Burgum.
The lawmakers noted that they were the ranking members in the House and Senate committees with jurisdiction over the construction of monuments in Washington, D.C. “We oppose this project in the strongest terms,” they wrote. They called out the Section 106 process as “fall[ing] short of the law.” Among other things, they noted that the comment process for the new project had been only ten days and that the proposed arch would “deface one of the most deliberate and historic sightlines in America.”
They wrote that proceeding with the project would break at least three laws, and warned that officials moving forward with it “would be answerable as individuals” and face penalties up to and including criminal fines and imprisonment.
“Every official who directs this work, and every firm that performs it,” they wrote, “proceeds at their own peril.” “This project is stone-cold illegal,” King told Luke Broadwater of the New York Times. “It is one of the clearest legal cases I’ve seen in more than 50 years of being a lawyer.”
But now, at least some of those legal concerns might go away. Treisman said the revision of Section 106 would mean that the near-constant noise from the arch’s construction would not be weighed as a consideration in its construction, and the arch’s destruction of the historic views built into the capital from its inception would not be considered either.
What is at stake is more than just buildings. It is the whitewashing and bulldozing of our history and culture, created over centuries by the many people who have built the United States, in service to the small vision of Trump and his enablers.
—
Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/2026/07/24/trumps-plan-paint-eisenhower-could-damage-stone-law/
https://savingplaces.org/stories/section-106-under-threat
https://www.npr.org/2026/07/23/nx-s1-5904435/section-106-review-trump-historic-preservation-council
https://www.hcn.org/articles/pueblo-leaders-new-mexico-lawmakers-speak-out-to-protect-chaco-canyon/
https://www.king.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/sen_king_letter_to_burgum_re_arch.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/15/us/politics/trump-triumphal-arch-congress.html
“[I]ntelligence, that counterentropic conjoined twin of information, must become the most powerful force in the universe, the energy to which all other physical laws must eventually kneel…Intelligence was destiny, manifest.” — Ian McDonald, “Verthandi’s Ring”
Not a lot of people expected that AI would come for the mathematicians before it came for the truck drivers, but it did. The other day, an AI model disproved the Jacobian Conjecture — an 87-year-old open problem that human mathematicians had struggled to solve. The greatest living human mathematician, Terence Tao, turned to AI to help him understand the solution. Around the same time, AI solved a very important open question in quantum cryptography. Solving Erdos problems has now become almost child’s play for the best AI models. And this is the worst AI will ever be at math. Model capabilities, and the amount of compute available, both continue to increase at rapid rates. (Meanwhile, long-distance trucking employment is slightly higher than it was a decade ago.)
I don’t expect mathematicians to actually lose their jobs en masse, of course.1 But it’s becoming clearer and clearer that humankind has invented machines that are smarter than we are. Intelligence isn’t defined for machines the same way it is for humans — AI’s capabilities are spiky in different ways than ours — but it’s undeniable that the technology is improving rapidly in every domain of cognitive capability. It’s still possible to find some mental tasks that humans are better than machines at, but those final advantages tend to disappear almost as quickly as we can identify them. “AGI”, or “ASI”, or whatever you want to call it, is certainly here.
And yet…the world remains much the same. In lots of sci-fi books, as soon as artificial superintelligence arrives, it bootstraps itself to even more godlike intelligence in an explosive “singularity” that rapidly transforms the entire physical universe. Lots of people, especially “AI safety” and “effective altruist” types, expected things to play out basically the same way in reality. But looking around, not much has changed since we entered the intelligence explosion. There’s a huge data center boom, and most people use AI on a daily basis, but we still live basically the same lives — driving to work or taking the train, sitting in front of a computer, scrolling on our phones, collecting a paycheck. People are staying in their jobs longer, but employment hasn’t been disrupted in a significant way:
Meanwhile, we’ve had decently robust productivity growth, but nothing really amazing:
A lot of people I know are surprised by this. Ruxandra Teslo writes:
Walking around the world today one might notice that it is weirdly unchanged…To many, this is surprising. Just the other day I was at a conference where someone remarked that if he could have seen today’s AI capabilities a few years ago, he would have been astonished — and would have assumed the world by now would look far more transformed, with much higher GDP growth.
And Clifford Sosin writes:2
Superintelligence arrived. You probably didn’t notice, because it turned out to be kind of incremental…Don’t believe me? Run the test. Talk to Fable 5 for an hour, then talk to your ten smartest friends. Which one is smarter? Don’t worry, they won’t be offended…We were told to expect something bigger. Once machines crossed some line, the system’s IQ would climb to heights we couldn’t follow, and we’d be sharing the planet with something that designs warp drives and thinks thoughts as far past us as mine are past my dog…What we got is a tool that writes excellent code, beats people at a startling range of tasks, and will clearly reshape the economy. It’s also, somehow, incremental. No takeoff. No explosion. That’s the strange part.
Teslo blames bottlenecks — governance and other “frictions” — for the slow economic impact. But some others are advancing a more radical hypothesis3 — that intelligence itself is subject to diminishing returns.
One of these is Francois Chollet, an AI researcher who specializes in measuring AI’s capabilities. In a highly controversial series of tweets back in March, he conjectured that intelligence might be subject to diminishing returns:
One of the biggest misconceptions people have about intelligence is seeing it as some kind of unbounded scalar stat, like height. "Future AI will have 10,000 IQ", that sort of thing. Intelligence is a conversion ratio, with an optimality bound. Increasing intelligence is not so much like "making the tower taller", it's more like "making the ball rounder". At some point it's already pretty damn spherical and any improvement is marginal.
Now of course smart humans aren't quite at the optimal bound yet on an individual level, and machines will have many advantages besides intelligence -- mostly the removal of biological bottlenecks: greater processing speed, unlimited working memory, unlimited memory with perfect recall... but these are mostly things humans can also access through externalized cognitive tools.
In fact, this is a possibility I myself had raised in a post a year earlier:
It seems possible that humans are simply incredibly specialized in a few types of cognitive tasks — extracting patterns from sparse data, synthesizing various patterns into “intuition” and “judgement”, and communicating those patterns in language — and that we’ve basically approached the theoretical maximum in those narrow areas…That would explain why AI has gotten much better at things like math and coding and forecasting over the last year, but why the basic chatbot interface doesn’t seem much more “intelligent”. It would also explain why when you talk to Terence Tao about math, it’s like talking to a superhuman, but when you talk to him about where to get lunch or which movies are the best, he’ll just sound like a fairly smart normal dude. AI will eventually get better than Tao at math…but it may never get much better than the most thoughtful, eloquent humans at deciding where to get lunch or recommending movies. It may simply not be mathematically possible to get much better than we already are at that sort of thing.
Why would intelligence top out like this? Well, if we think of intelligence as the ability to extract information from data, then even an infinitely advanced model endowed with infinite compute will be limited by the fact that there’s a limited amount of information that can be extracted from the data.
For one thing, data itself is in limited supply. You can’t transform the world unless you can (in some generalized sense) understand it, and you can’t understand the world unless you can measure it, and our ability to measure the world is inherently limited and finite.
This is basically the hypothesis advanced by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor:
We think there are relatively few real-world cognitive tasks in which human limitations are so telling that AI is able to blow past human performance (as AI does in chess). In many other areas, including some that are associated with prominent hopes and fears about AI performance, we think there is a high “irreducible error”—unavoidable error due to the inherent stochasticity of the phenomenon—and human performance is essentially near that limit….We predict that AI will not be able to meaningfully outperform trained humans (particularly teams of humans and especially if augmented with simple automated tools) at forecasting geopolitical events (say elections).[emphasis mine]
Sosin says something similar:
We hold a thin scatter of facts about the world, and intelligence or reasoning is whatever fills the space between them…Where the space between the facts behaves well, this is close to godlike…Coding, math and most administrative work are [like this]. What makes them easy is that they have relatively smooth solution spaces and are tractably verifiable…Most of what matters doesn't behave like that. The universe is mostly the emergent behavior of complex systems…The limit is contact with reality. A smarter reasoner fills the gaps between known facts in simple areas faster and better, but it doesn't produce new facts.
Sosin makes an important point here, which is that the limitations of intelligence aren’t necessarily about limited data. Even if we can keep on collecting infinite data, the cost of extracting additional information from that data might explode to infinity. This is the idea of chaos. Even in a deterministic universe where the present states of all particles are enough to perfectly determine the future, our ability to predict the future can be inherently limited; the tiniest infinitesimal error in our measurement of the present explodes into a huge error when we attempt to extrapolate even a small distance into the future.
So although we don’t know yet, it’s possible that humans were already hitting the point of diminishing returns with regards to individual cognitive capacity, and that superintelligent machines will never be as far beyond us as we are beyond dogs. But even if that’s true, I can think of at least three reasons why machine superintelligence could still deliver huge productivity gains.
The most obvious advantage that machine superintelligence confers is replicability. The number of human intelligences is fixed by the fertility rate, and we don’t know how to substantially boost that rate; in fact, it’s falling inexorably, and the human race is set to shrink.
AI isn’t bound by those limitations. By building more data centers with more compute, you can run more agents in parallel — essentially, you get more cognitive work. It’s not free, but nor is it limited. It’s good old physical capital; unlike human capital, you can just build more of it whenever you like, simply by reinvesting some portion of your economic output. Imagine if we suddenly discovered a way to manufacture more land in any city on the planet; this is similar.4
Of course, lots of tasks are physical ones, and for these you need physical machines — basically, robots. This is probably why so many AI people are now working on robotics, world models, physical AI, and so on. The roboticization of the world has a huge tailwind — the battery revolution, which allows energy to be stored and moved around much more easily. Conveniently, we got the physical tools to turn dumb matter into smart matter just as we also got the digital tools.
(It’s also worth noting that like the energy in batteries, the intelligence in robots is divisible. A robot the size of an ant can be remotely controlled by a data center the size of a football field. This is also a capability that human intelligence lacks.)
This doesn’t mean economic output will explode to infinity. But what it does mean is that humans will be able to use physical capital — GPUs and robots — to do more and more tasks at once, including many cognitive tasks that we used to do the hard way. In the long-run steady state, this should increase the capital-to-labor ratio of our society; each human will essentially leverage an army of intelligent machines. It’s basically another industrial revolution, and it has very little to do with whether artificial intelligence is smarter than human intelligence in any sort of head-to-head matchup.
The German company Zeiss makes the best glass on the planet. If one of the mirrors that Zeiss makes for ASML’s EUV chipmaking machines were the size of Germany, the biggest bump on that mirror would be just one millimeter high. Only a few other companies — and maybe no other company on Earth — can match that. Zeiss’ mirrors also have a number of other amazing properties, like not distorting much due to temperature changes.
How does Zeiss make glass this good? No one knows — not even the people at Zeiss. If the technology were capable of being written down on a blueprint, China would have hacked Zeiss and stolen it, the way Huawei hacked Cisco and Nortel. If the technology were capable of being explained by a former Zeiss employee, or even several former Zeiss employees, China would have paid those people many millions of dollars to spill the beans.
Zeiss’ technology basically can’t be stolen, because it’s tacit and distributed. It consists of a vast number of little tricks and techniques that a huge number of individual employees use on a daily basis. These people don’t always even realize all those little things they’re doing that make the glass come out so good. And each employee knows a different set of tricks and techniques. The knowledge exists at the level of the organization itself, and is thus very hard to steal or recreate.
This is true of lots of corporate technology. A big part of the reason China can cut off the supply of rare earths to the rest of the world any time it wants to is that other countries aren’t very good at refining rare earths. Rare earths are difficult to separate from each other in solutions; it takes a ton of little chemistry tricks to do it cheaply at scale. Chinese refiners have spent four decades building up those little tricks and techniques; American or Japanese refiners won’t simply be able to replicate their efficiency overnight, and so it’ll continue to cost much more to produce rare earths outside China.
Except in the age of AI, this might change. Suppose American rare earth refiners give their employees a bunch of equipment to record everything they do — smart glasses, gloves, and so on — in addition to sensors distributed throughout their plants. AI will be able to synthesize all that information and very rapidly suggest small ways to improve the production process. Many of those little experiments will fail; others will succeed and will quickly be adopted, allowing another round of experimentation and improvement to begin very quickly. Crucially, AI’s ability to do this doesn’t depend on its raw intelligence — only on its ability to handle huge amounts of data very quickly.
In other words, in the age of AI, distributed tacit knowledge might not be nearly as big of a barrier to technological diffusion. This could improve economy-wide productivity, as lagging firms catch up to leading firms much more quickly. A more equal distribution of productivity would also make the economy more competitive, creating more surplus for consumers (though possibly reducing the incentive for firms to innovate, by making technology less excludable).
AI’s ability to quickly produce distributed tacit process knowledge might also supercharge productivity growth at the frontier. Imagine if any company could optimize any production process five times faster than today. The whole economy would speed up, as components got cheaper, turnaround times and product cycles got shorter, and scale-up got much faster.
And as with the previous example, improving the production of distributed tacit knowledge wouldn’t depend on AI’s raw intelligence. It would spring from AI’s ability to act like a computer — to interface directly with sensors, to handle lots of data, to perceive tiny details, and to do everything very very quickly.
For decades, researchers in the field of natural language processing tried to figure out the principles behind human linguistic communication. They made frustratingly little progress; the processes by which humans convey information to each other through words just don’t seem to obey simple laws, like the ones that govern electromagnetism or the circulatory system.
Then along came AI, and suddenly linguistic communication seemed like a solved problem. LLMs can reliably sound like a human being, even if we don’t understand how they manage to do it.
What if there are lots of other aspects of the Universe that work the same way — too complex to understand in terms of simple laws, but not so complex that they just dissolve into unknowable chaos? It’s possible that we can reliably control these complex phenomena with AI, even if we never reduce them to the kind of principles that we can teach a grad student in a textbook. In fact, I wrote an essay called “The Third Magic”, where I suggested that this might be equivalent to a whole new scientific revolution:
Another way of saying this is that there may be laws of the universe that humans can’t understand but AI can. I call these “cloud laws” — causal regularities that can be exploited by technology, but which are too diffuse and complex for an individual human being to either intuit or communicate.
Human language seems to obey cloud laws, so why not other phenomena too? Perhaps social sciences like economics, sociology, and political science obey similarly complex regularities, and AI can help us find them. Perhaps there are physical processes — plasma, or topological materials, or aerial turbulence, etc. — that obey cloud laws instead of chaos?
In other words, thanks to AI, we might be on the precipice of a new age of scientific advancement. And this won’t necessarily depend on how smart AI is in comparison to a single human; it’ll depend on its computer-like ability to hold huge amounts of data in its working memory and extract complex patterns from that data.
If this turns out to be true, it means Francois Chollet is wrong. Chollet hypothesizes that groups of humans, using pre-AI computing tools, can approach AI’s level of scientific competence. But human collaboration is bottlenecked — it’s limited by our ability to intuit patterns at an individual level, and to communicate these patterns from one individual to another. AI, being a computer, just doesn’t have this sort of limitation; it can work with vast, diffuse patterns without having to break them into pieces or simplify them in order to compress them into the tiny pipelines of person-to-person explanation.
So even if AI never gets much better than humans at the kind of science that humans have done heretofore, it might open up whole realms of scientific discovery that have previously been totally inaccessible to even the largest groups of the smartest humans. If much of the Universe turns out to be ruled by cloud laws, we could be on the precipice of a scientific renaissance.
The common thread in all three of these examples is that AI may revolutionize productivity not by being much smarter than a single individual human — not by simply solving harder and harder math problems — but by marrying human-style intelligence to the vast, inhuman capabilities of computers. We could simply be thinking about the benefits of intelligence wrong — arrogantly privileging the kind of mental tasks we humans happen to do especially well, while ignoring the value of the tasks we do poorly.
Why? Several reasons. Tenure still exists. Humans who can do math at a high level will still be needed if we care about understanding the results that AI spits out. Human math teachers will still probably be valuable. And most importantly, humans will be needed to tell AI what kind of math we want it to solve, and why.
Or at least, prompts AI to write.
I think there is a widespread, tacit assumption among many intelligent humans that the quality that had made them stand out among their peers was the fundamental stuff of the Universe, the font of all value. I will write more about this at some point, but I think it helps explain why the idea that intelligence is just one production factor among many seems so unthinkable, heretical, and revolutionary to so many people in the tech industry.
Yes, I know we can reclaim land from the ocean. But the opportunities for this are fairly limited, and the cost is often very high.
I have an amateur interest in Oriental rugs but my eye is untrained. Thus, for fun and learning I created with Fable a Rug Atlas and quiz.
Check it out. Constructive comments welcome.
P.S. The site is in fact safe! Working on getting it recognized.
The post The Rug Belt Atlas and Quiz appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Here's a high level overview of the program, which begins today.
And here's the detailed day by day program.
I'm expecting to speak on Wednesday, which looks to be a busy day:
When a new technology promises large private benefits but may impose social costs that markets do not price, demand need not reveal how citizens want it governed. We examine this using a nationally representative U.S. survey experiment (N=5,556) on human enhancement technologies (HET). The experiment randomizes benefit domain, mechanism, heritability, purpose, and risk across vignettes; for each respondent’s assigned vignette, we elicit stated adoption, preferred regulation, and ethical and societal concerns. Overall, about 53% would adopt. Framing the technology as enhancing rather than restorative lowers adoption by about five percentage points, as much as a severe side-effect profile. About 28% would not adopt at any benefit. This refusal is driven overwhelmingly by the enhancing framing rather than by risk, consistent with a non-compensatory constraint for a substantial subgroup. Most who would adopt still favor strict regulation, and most who would never adopt do not wish to forbid others from doing so. Productivity enhancement generates the most ethical concern of any attribute but attracts the least regulation, and respondents favor subsidizing rather than taxing its adoption, consistent with a concern about access rather than safety. Private demand is therefore an unreliable guide to the governance citizens want, and the divergence we document provides a basis for regulators seeking to align the direction of technical change with societal values and priorities.
That is from a new NBER working paper by . And I will repeat this segment: “Productivity enhancement generates the most ethical concern of any attribute…” Do note of course that the last sentence of the authors is completely unwarranted, and is a classic example of underidentified political bias in academic reasoning.
The post The demand for human enhancement technologies appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
This is one of the best Op-Eds you will read this year, though it deliberately deemphasizes the personal (no one is attacked) in a manner that will result in less attention. Better to write the truth! Excerpt:
Why has this [voter discontent} happened? Some of it is economic. Expensive housing, stagnant incomes and widening inequality have fueled public anger. But economics is only part of the story. America has enjoyed stronger growth than most other advanced economies. France under President Emmanuel Macron has lowered unemployment, and it has attracted more foreign investment projects than any country in Europe for seven straight years, according to an Ernst & Young analysis. South Korea is an economic success story. Japan was experiencing a comeback. Yet democratic governments almost everywhere are unpopular.
The larger explanation is that we are living through one of history’s great technological revolutions. And these transformations always produce deep anxiety and fear.
The last technological transformation on this scale came between roughly 1880 and 1920. Electricity, the telephone, railroads, the automobile and movies overturned entire industries and ways of life. Millions left farms for cities. Global trade disrupted local economies. New fortunes appeared overnight, while old occupations disappeared. In this turmoil, frustration and anger found political pathways. The left turned to communism, the right to fascism. What followed were new mass movements, cultural upheavals and world war.
Do read the whole thing. You can be a victim of these processes, or keep your wits about you. The choice is yours.
The post The common sense of Fareed Zakaria appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Key ground stations in Spain operated by NASA and the European Space Agency have avoided serious damage from major wildfires in the country.
The post NASA and ESA facilities avoid major damage from wildfires in Spain appeared first on SpaceNews.
How do clusters of galaxies form?
Market Design
