Up. Making water this morning, which I do every morning as soon as I am awake, with greater plenty and freedom than I used to do, which I think I may impute to last night’s drinking of elder spirits. Abroad, it raining, to Blackfriars, and there went into a little alehouse and staid while I sent to the Wardrobe, but Mr. Moore was gone out. Here I kissed three or four times the maid of the house, who is a pretty girl, but very modest, and, God forgive me, had a mind to something more. Thence to my lawyer’s; up and down to the Six Clerks’ Office, where I found my bill against Tom Trice dismissed, which troubles me, it being through my neglect, and will put me to charges. So to Mr. Phillips, and discoursed with him about finding me out somebody that will let me have for money an annuity of about 100l. per annum for two lives. So home, and there put up my riding things against the evening, in case Mr. Moore should continue his mind to go to Oxford, which I have little mind to do, the weather continuing so bad and the waters high. Dined at home, and Mr. Moore in the afternoon comes to me and concluded not to go. Sir W. Batten and I sat a little this afternoon at the office, and thence I by water to Deptford, and there mustered the Yard, purposely, God forgive me, to find out Bagwell, a carpenter, whose wife is a pretty woman, that I might have some occasion of knowing him and forcing her to come to the office again, which I did so luckily that going thence he and his wife did of themselves meet me in the way to thank me for my old kindness, but I spoke little to her, but shall give occasion for her coming to me. Her husband went along with me to show me Sir W. Pen’s lodging, which I knew before, but only to have a time of speaking to him and sounding him. So left and I went in to Sir W. Pen, who continues ill, and worse, I think, than before. He tells me my Lady Castlemaine was at Court, for all this talk this week, which I am glad to hear; but it seems the King is stranger than ordinary to her.
Thence walked home as I used to do, and to bed presently, having taken great cold in my feet by walking in the dirt this day in thin shoes or some other way, so that I begun to be in pain, and with warm clothes made myself better by morning, but yet in pain.
Suited head-to-toe in khaki, Eric Robinson stands with hands on his hips, monitoring the hustle and bustle of Operation Helo‘s mobile command center in Taylorsville, North Carolina. The trailer, which was transformed into a fully functional command post just one day prior, is lined with massive 40-inch monitors illuminated by the organization’s Slack channel, while muffled walkie-talkie voices fill the focused silence. Two hours into their mock rescue mission, a simulated distress call crackles through the room: coordinates, a situation report, a pilot’s voice responding on the other end. Eighteen months after tropical storm Helene made landfall in western North Carolina, this is what preparation for the next storm looks like.
“We grew over the course of 11 days to what we have now,” said Robinson, the co-founder and executive director of Operation Helo. “This is the culmination of all of our work.”
Seventeen members of the organization, including six helicopter pilots, gathered at Operations Director Natasha Rodriguez’s 40-acre home in early March, with a shared goal of being ready for whatever comes next. To them, this is not a training exercise. It’s a “strategic mission planning” designed to stress-test technology, streamline the process of assigning missions to pilots and ensure nothing slips through the cracks when the next disaster strikes.
Eric Robinson, co-founder and executive director of Operation Helo, observes his team’s work in their mobile command center in Taylorsville, N.C. Photo credit: Mia Filler
Operation Helo is one of several North Carolina-based nonprofits formed in the aftermath of Helene. In the immediate wake of the storm, residents of Asheville and the surrounding regions were left without internet access, drinking water, information about the safety of their loved ones, and, for many, a home. The mountainous, flooded terrain made access to aid even more difficult, leaving those stranded in areas inaccessible to vehicles. When federal relief couldn’t yet mobilize, Operation Helo airlifted supplies by helicopter, Mission Mules delivered aid on mule-back through flooded mountain trails and Down Home NC canvassed rural areas door-to-door. Now, all three are expanding beyond Helene.
“Nonprofits and spontaneous volunteer efforts are filling the gap of trying to meet the needs that official government efforts aren’t able to address,” said Dr. Samantha Montano, a professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy. “Because of the size of Helene and how much need there was, you see a big portion of that response being led by nonprofits and other kinds of grassroots community organizations.”
Helicopters and mules
For Operation Helo, that gap opened on Sept. 27, 2024, the day Helene made landfall in North Carolina. Just five days later, Operation Helo incorporated as an official 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Robinson brought together a group of volunteer pilots, and soon enough, various community members showed up to support their post at the Hickory Regional Airport. Natasha Rodriguez and her husband, Jose, were among these volunteers, starting out in the call center and triaging assistance amid the rapid influx of devastating requests.
“I will definitely say this is nothing that any one of us had on our bingo cards, but it has been such a blessing,” Rodriguez said. “We have been boots on the ground pretty much from the beginning, even to now.”
Mission Mules volunteers rode on mule-back, traversing fallen trees and damaged roads, to deliver essential supplies in the wake of Helene. Photo courtesy of Michele Toberer
Meanwhile, 50 miles northeast of Hickory, Mike and Michele Toberer were readying their mules at their packer ranch in Harmony, North Carolina. The husband and wife were about to head down to South Carolina for a planned training session with the U.S. Marines when Helene hit, and the trip was abruptly canceled due to the unexpected extreme flooding. Even 100 miles from the Blue Ridge Mountains, where the storm hit the hardest, the Toberers lost power in their home. The following day, when it came back, the news exposed them to the destruction and widespread needs of the victims in the western regions of the state.
“We left that next morning,” said Mike Toberer, the Mission Mules co-founder. “We spent two or three weeks there right in the beginning, and we still are moving food and supplies there right now.”
After a few months on the front lines of delivering aid, Mike and Michele grew wary of their ability to continue. Not only had they witnessed an abundance of tragedy, but also two of their mules were killed in the aid and recovery process. Then, Samaritan’s Purse called.
“We figured that was God telling us that we are going to wrap this up,” Toberer said. “Then the next day, Samaritan’s Purse called us and said, ‘Hey, we want to get you enough mules so you can keep going.’ They restocked all the mules that we lost, and that’s when we decided, ‘This is what we’re going to be doing here.'”
Trust as infrastructure
In those early chaotic days, before federal relief could reach the cutoff and isolated, these groups were finding their own ways in. Operation Helo and Mission Mules were united by physical access — they had the assets to reach people and places that conventional relief simply couldn’t. Down Home NC, a grassroots organizing group with deep roots in rural communities across the state, was leveraging something even harder to engender: trust.
Down Home NC had spent years embedding itself in rural communities across North Carolina long before Helene arrived. Founded in 2017, the organization focuses on base-building and political mobilization among multiracial working-class residents in small towns, empowering communities that often go unheard in state-level policy decisions.
When Helene hit in September 2024, Down Home was already in the middle of election season, knocking on doors across 13 counties to encourage voter registration and turnout. They used that established infrastructure to show up differently, yet meaningfully, when the storm hit.
“Because of the work that we did to build our relationship within the community, it was a no-brainer for our folks to take this mobilization effort that we were already in the middle of and turn it into a wellness canvassing effort instead,” said Down Home’s Communications Director Taí Coates-Wedde. “So rather than door knocking and asking people, ‘Hey, what’s your plan to go?’, it became door knocking to ask, ‘Hey, are you OK?'”
Beyond needs assessment, Down Home NC focused on creating informational resources for the community — primarily helping residents navigate FEMA and get the help they needed.
“We wanted people to know their tenant rights, because at the same time that people were still trying to figure out if their family members were alive or where their house had gone to, there were a lot of rich people and corporations coming in and scooping up that land out from underneath them,” said Coates-Wedde. “Renters were losing their homes because their landlords were selling out from under them. People lost their jobs, people lost their access to money, and at the same time, rent was still due.”
When the early chaos died down and news coverage of Helene’s impact on western North Carolina tapered off, Down Home developed the website Keep WNC Home as a community resource database. Once the information was compiled, Down Home’s communications team screenshotted it and distributed it via text blast — bypassing the internet entirely — casting a wider net beyond their existing membership to reach anyone in the area who needed help.
“These groups are generally better tied in with the local community, which means they sometimes have a better sense of what the exact needs are than more formal groups,” said Dr. Montano. “Also, the lack of formal procedures means they can be more flexible to meet the needs of the community.”
Flying blind, then finding a system
Where Down Home NC worked street by street, Operation Helo worked from above. In the mountains of western North Carolina, where roads had been swallowed by floodwater and entire communities sat unreachable by vehicle, helicopters became the fastest lifeline available — and the group arrived at the destruction before the National Guard itself.
Operation Helo’s pilots didn’t wait for official dispatch. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, the organization relied heavily on social media to identify where help was needed. Family members left comments and called in from out of state, reporting that they’d lost contact with a relative in Pensacola or Burnsville, not knowing whether they were alive. Pilots flying supply runs to local fire departments would relay these wellness check requests on the ground, building a real-time picture of where to go next. The organization airlifted doctors into areas overwhelmed by chainsaw injuries as residents tried to clear their own roads. They delivered insulin, oxygen and EpiPens — the last of which became an unexpected urgent need around day five, when displaced bee populations, their habitats destroyed by the storm, began stinging residents en masse.
“When somebody needs help in that moment, and you can bring them just that little piece of comfort, that’s an amazing feeling,” Rodriguez said. “Because you brought them something quickly that maybe would have taken them days to get.”
Aid packages compiled by Operation Helo include freeze-dried meals and other critical supplies. The nonprofit delivered 2.5 million pounds of critical supplies from 2024 to 2025. Photo credit: Grace Sawin
On the ground, in hollows and along mountain trails impassable even by ATV, Mission Mules was operating in the spaces helicopters could not reach. Where tree cover was too dense for an aerial drop, Mike and Michele Toberer moved supplies on mule-back, each animal carrying 150 to 200 pounds of food, medicine and equipment. They had crafted an efficient system: trucks hauled supplies as far as roads allowed, Kawasaki side-by-sides pushed further into the terrain, and then the mules took over, traversing fallen timber with the help of Green Berets wielding chainsaws ahead of them.
The two organizations found a natural rhythm together. Helicopters from Samaritan’s Purse and Operation Helo would air-drop supply pallets at the tops of mountains, and Mission Mules would collect them there and carry them down, reversing the usual direction of effort to spare the animals the hardest part of the climb.
“Helicopters and mules, you know, we train the military, and that’s what we do for a living,” Toberer said. “We work together quite a bit.”
That collaboration was put to the test deep in the mountains near Newland, where Toberer’s team cut their way through downed trees to reach a hollow that hadn’t seen outside contact since the storm. When they arrived, they found an elderly woman in her 80s sitting on the front porch of her crooked, flood-damaged house, a .22 rifle across her lap. She asked who they were. She asked if they were from the government. When Toberer told her they weren’t, she relaxed.
“The deeper you went into the mountains, the more you would hear that,” Toberer said. “Less government, more help.”
From response to resilience
A year and a half after Helene, Operation Helo has deployed to disasters across the country, most notably to the catastrophic flooding in Kerr County, Texas, during the summer of 2025, where 63 people were reported missing. Operation Helo arrived at the scene within five hours, alongside six volunteer pilots based in Texas. That deployment laid the foundation for what will become Operation Helo’s first official chapter, a Texas-based team in Burnet County that can reach disasters in Louisiana, Oklahoma and Arizona faster than any crew flying out of North Carolina.
“The hardest part has been being very strategic,” Rodriguez said. “You don’t want to grow too fast as a nonprofit. You want to make sure everything is in place.”
Operation Helo’s Jose Rodriguez, Zach Byers and Jennipher Harrill (left to right) stand outside a Robinson R44 Raven II helicopter during their “strategic mission planning” session in March 2026. Photo credit: Grace Sawin
Arizona is next on the chapter map, likely by the end of 2026, with two or three additional states to follow in 2027. Supporting all of this growth is a formal partnership with Robinson Helicopter, which has significantly expanded the organization’s fleet and operational capacity, and a work-in-progress contract with the National Guard.
Mission Mules has been building its own national footprint, one disaster at a time. Since Helene, Toberer and his team have deployed to eight states, including four separate trips to West Virginia, where they have developed a working relationship with state troopers who now call them directly when mountain communities get cut off by ice or flooding. They have evacuated horses from wildfire zones in Oklahoma, packed supplies through flood debris in Kentucky and Maryland, and are now integrating drones into their operations to expand their search-and-rescue capabilities.
“I feel that our future is going to go on and on,” Toberer said. “We just keep getting more and more contact, and we’re working with more people.”
Within North Carolina, Coates-Wedde and her Down Home NC team are working to establish resilience hubs in rural communities. Three pilot locations are planned for 2026, scaling to at least 10 active chapter counties by 2027 and 2028. The hubs are designed to address what Coates-Wedde calls the “intersecting challenges of climate vulnerability, infrastructure neglect and economic inequality,” which disproportionately affect rural communities across the state.
“Even last year, in July, tropical storm Chantal hit North Carolina, and the middle of the state was completely slammed with flooding too,” Coates-Wedde said. “We are providing people with resources, but we’re also in a listening phase right now, to hear from our community members about how to best reach them. That’s how we build relationships, and that’s how we’ll continue to ensure that we’re making a community-centered solution.”
The expansion of all three organizations is happening against a backdrop that Dr. Montano carefully studies. The nonprofit disaster sector was already strained before the Trump administration began pulling back federal resources. Volunteer fatigue and donation fatigue have been flagged as early as 2016, and the COVID pandemic pulled a significant portion of older disaster volunteers out of the field permanently.
“When you pair that trend with these threats from the administration to pull back federal resources, you’re really creating this perfect recipe for disaster, in terms of there not really being anybody left to meet the needs of communities,” said Dr. Montano.
She is also cautious about the instinct of these groups to go national. Her advice to emerging disaster nonprofits is to specialize locally, move from response to recovery and then to preparedness, and find a reliable funding source before expansion becomes a liability. Most disaster nonprofits, she said, burn out within a few years.
Montano’s hesitation is grounded in decades of research on disaster nonprofits that burn bright and then fade after the storm. But 18 months after Helene, Operation Helo, Mission Mules and Down Home NC are still showing up — not just in western North Carolina, but across the country.
During Helene, they showed up with what they had — helicopters, mules, community understanding — and figured out the rest. What has kept them going, each in their own way, is the same thing that started them: proximity to and deep care for the people they serve.
“We judge our impact based on who we help,” Robinson said.
This article is part of Caught in the Current: Helene Recovery in Asheville and Beyond a project that we have partnered on with the School of Journalism at Northeastern University. Their enterprising students took on the story of Asheville, North Carolina, a community still dealing with the devastation of Hurricane Helene, 18 months later. As part of our mentoring program, we’re amplifying their efforts by sharing the amazing work produced by their students. Visit the official interactive magazine for the project HERE.
“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 homes that leave the strongest impression on buyers aren’t always the biggest or the most expensive. More often, they’re the ones that create an immediate sense of comfort. When people walk through the front door and can instantly picture themselves relaxing, entertaining friends, or enjoying quiet evenings, the property becomes more than just another listing, it starts to feel like home.
That emotional connection often plays an important role in how quickly a home attracts interest. Buyers are consistently drawn to properties that feel move-in ready, welcoming, and designed for everyday living rather than simply offering attractive finishes.
Wellness Features Are Becoming Part of Home Design
Today’s buyers increasingly appreciate homes that support relaxation as well as functionality. Dedicated reading corners, spa-inspired bathrooms, peaceful gardens, and wellness-focused outdoor spaces all help create an atmosphere that feels like an escape from everyday stress.
Outdoor wellness additions have become particularly appealing because they extend living space beyond the walls of the home. Homeowners comparing different outdoor retreat ideas sometimes explore options such assaunalife cl4g while planning spaces that combine relaxation, thoughtful design, and year-round enjoyment. Features that encourage everyday comfort often leave a lasting impression during home viewings because they help buyers imagine a slower, more enjoyable lifestyle.
The most memorable homes are often those that offer more than just extra square footage, they offer an experience.
Natural Materials Make Spaces Feel Warmer
Homes with natural wood, stone, soft textiles, and balanced color palettes often feel calmer than interiors dominated by bold trends or excessive decoration.
Simple styling choices such as neutral paint, uncluttered rooms, layered lighting, and indoor plants help buyers focus on the space itself rather than the current owner’s belongings. These elements also photograph well, making online listings more attractive before buyers even schedule a viewing.
A calm interior allows potential buyers to imagine how they would personalize the home.
Comfortable Spaces Should Include Every Family Member
For many buyers, creating a relaxing home also means thinking about the needs of every member of the household, including pets.
Families designing pet-friendly living spaces sometimes discover solutions fromWheekeep while looking for products that support everyday comfort and make it easier for pets to move confidently around the home. Thoughtful details that improve life for animals can also become attractive features for future buyers who already have pets or expect them to be part of the household.
Design choices that accommodate every member of the family often make a property feel more welcoming overall.
Outdoor Living Extends the Home
One reason retreat-style homes stand out is that they make outdoor areas feel like natural extensions of the interior.
Comfortable seating, attractive landscaping, shaded patios, subtle lighting, and inviting gathering spaces encourage buyers to imagine spending time outside throughout the year. Even modest gardens feel significantly larger when they’re designed around relaxation instead of simply filling available space.
Well-planned outdoor areas often increase the overall sense of usable living space without requiring major structural changes.
Buyers Remember How a Home Made Them Feel
Long after viewing several properties in one day, buyers often remember the homes that created a positive emotional response. Clean spaces, natural light, comfortable gathering areas, and thoughtful details all contribute to that feeling.
Creating a retreat-like atmosphere doesn’t require luxury finishes in every room. It comes from designing spaces that feel peaceful, functional, and easy to enjoy every day. When buyers can immediately picture themselves living that lifestyle, a property naturally becomes more memorable and often attracts stronger interest in a competitive market.
Normally I wouldn’t link to something still early in it’s work-in-progress phase, and there’s been changes and new features added since I last looked, so I guess, keep in mind that it’s in flux.
“This is both so dumb and so brilliant at the same time”
I think it’s wonderful and useful for a few reasons.
I’m making drawing machine tutorial videos (I may have mentioned it), and some people watching those don’t have a pen plotter yet. While you can just look at the SVG output, I think it’s more useful to be able to see what would (most likely) actually happen, and see it getting drawn. You get a much better sense of how your code relates to the actual act of plotting.
If I’m running workshops, or a class for students it’s normal for the number of students to outnumber the plotters, and also a single plot can take a while essentially blocking a whole machine. With this virtual plotter students can start experimenting and quickly iterating on designs, and also see something interesting happen based on their code.
If you have a drawing machine running at a gallery or show, it’d be fun to have the virtual one running on a screen nearby so people can pick from a list of designs and see them get “plotted” (the tool allows you to speed up the plot). Or even have two screens/system; one where people can twiddle-knobs to make their own design and then send to the Virtual plotter. The code is up on github so shouldn’t be hard to bridge like that.
[feature coming soon 🤞] - being able to select the plotter size, paper size and give it your design, then watch in horror when it tries to plot your A3 design onto an A5 sheet of paper, with an A4 plotter, with all the correct crunchy noises. Because we’ve all accidentally done that, and it’d be nice to sanity check a plot you’re about to do.
Thinking about it, if I were Bantam Tools, with access to the 3d cad files of the NextDraw, I’d snap up a custom version of this, swap out the plain rectangular carriages for NextDraw styled ones (it uses threejs after all) and put it on the website as a useful tool.
# IPADing
Alrighty, so, over on Patreon this month the theme is pen plotting, but on an iPad. Which is something I’ve been wanting to try for a while.
Specifically coding in the location of various bits of UI on the Procreate app, so Kitty (my AI PA) can have access to creating new pages, selecting brushes, colours and brush size, and then having a go a drawing.
There’s about a million reasons why this is somewhat foolish, but also, it’s fun, and maybe I can get Kitty to play Hearthstone too 🕹️
I knew the first thing I’d need would be a way to have the iPad always been in a known position relative to the plotter, so I took some measurements., which you can see here…
Then went through a number of iterations of a jig, four in total.
The last thing to do was take account of the camera bump in the corner of the iPad that makes it not lay flat - which is fucking weird from a design point of view if you think about it too much, Braun would never!
Anyway, I guess who needs the iPad to lay flat? Well, this guy.
So with a bonus corner, and 2.3mm high “ledges” I ended up with something that fixed to the feet of a NextDraw 8511, with the exact measurements to hold a 13” iPad Pro (M4 I think)
Which I know is incredibly niche, but once again an example of the usefulness of a 3d printer and being able to make your own shims and jigs for this kinda of thing, and also attaching things to the feet of the plotter is cool (imho).
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I like the “Art Studio Robots!” in the title of this newsletter, oh, but wait…
Annoyingly I can’t find the link because it showed up in my Instagram stream and now I can’t find it again. I mean it’s this reel from drawscape, but it was one that was shared/reposted 🤷♂️ on someone else’s account. So while this one has a couple of comments, the one I saw had like a gabillion…
…thankfully for me I saved a bunch of the comments, I’m going to put a few choice ones down below, grouped into Genus, this was the top one…
“To start, it’s not a robot, but an automaton, because it doesn’t make any decisions... but then, that technology already existed in 1953. As a hobby project it’s fine, but calls things by their name. Anyway, nice drawing.”
…and I don’t think that “Drawing Machines & Notes from Art Studio automaton” has quite the same ring to it.
There was also team “vector”
Bro it’s called vectoring and it takes like 5 seconds
Vectors 🚪🚶
so its vectors
Fancy way to avoid saying VECTORS
Now, while these people may be technically correct and technically cockwombles they appear to be failing to grasp the difference between saying-what-the-thing-is-technically-correctly and marketing.
While drawscape does isn’t my cup of tea, I think it’s a brilliant product/project; an ever growing library of “blueprints” that people can order, specify the paper and pen type, and then they’re pen plotted to order. It’s like a perfectly neat, self contained, well focused business, with little overheads except time and dedication.
The hard part is explaining, or marketing what exactly it is to people. First you have to explain why it’s different to normal printing, why they should care, how it’s not “mass produced” in the traditional sense, and there how it’ll make a great gift.
Saying “here’s a series of deterministically programmed toolpaths made from vertices and vectors, outputted as GCODE and draw with an automaton x,y plotter” doesn’t have quite the same ring, and means pretty much fuck all to anyone who doesn’t already know what the hell all that means.
(all those phrases were mentioned in the comments btw)
From the “it’s a plotter” gang, who don’t seem to grasp that “robot” makes more sense to most people than “plotter”.
Look up the word “plotter” for goodness sake
Pen plotter!!!… 🤣😂🤣😂 Hewlett Packard had HP 7475A, 7575A plotter back in 1980. I know because I got sick and tired of fixing, replacing, calibrating and adjusting the pen carriage and pen carriage belts!!! Beautiful device! Nothing new!!!
Let’s reinvent the plotter and call it something else.
There’s also the “my 3d printer can do this” cohort, of which there were too many to mention, but this was my favourite…
“Imagine getting all excited because you’re using a 3D printer like it’s an ’80s plotter, when a 3D printer is literally just the evolution of those same plotters with one extra dimension added (2D → 3D).”
Drawscape is literally using a 2d plotter in the video.
I’m not even sure if their “my 3d printer can do this” is the flex they think it is while watching a video about a tool specifically designed to do the job it’s doing 🤷♂️
And finally of course
can’t u just get chatgpt to do it for you
Is this AI art ??
How’s this different from AI art ?
AI does it in seconds
Ai may be taking artists jobs
I guess the short take away from this is; if you try and make something easier for most people to understand - which is good - and you get a sudden influx of viewers (due to reposting or whatever), then with great views comes great fuckwittery.
Thankfully I didn’t attempt to respond to anyone, that way lies madness.
# THE END
In the last newsletter I mention how it was hot, too hot, too hot to do anything.
Yeah, well, that, but with a couple more degree Celsius thrown on top, which means I’m technically 1.06451613% more hot and grumpy today than I was when I wrote the last newsletter. Which probably also explains why this one is about 30mins late, and most likely full of typos!
The next newsletter - Thursday 23rd July, 2026 for those following along at home - will hopefully be written in a somewhat cooler studio. Otherwise that one is even more likely to end up in the spam filter than this one due to excessive swearing.
I was going to make the next couple of Drawing Machine 101 videos this week, but I would die, so once again we’re waiting another week for those. I’m waiting for them all to be over so I can get back to normal making videos about what I’m doing.
Although I’m starting to feel that having a series of “how to code for drawing machines” on YouTube is going to be my only defence against “bro this was vibe coded!” - I can simply point them to far too many hours of hand written from start to end plotter code and tell them to come back to me after watching all that.
Actually those videos and all the previous ones going back years may be the only way to prove I’m a real human who can really code, thank goodness I started back then rather than now.
And on that cheery note.
Love you all Dan 🧡
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Eli Tan, reporting for The New York Times (gift link):
The company’s new A.I. image generator has a surprising twist: It
allows people to use images from public Instagram accounts.
When Meta unveiled an artificial intelligence image generator
called Muse Image on Tuesday, it came with a feature that let
users create A.I. images based on people’s Instagram photos. Any
adult with a public Instagram account was automatically opted in.
Using the Meta AI app, the company’s stand-alone chatbot, other
users could pull from “part or all of your published photos” to
create new A.I. images, the company wrote in a blog post.
This is an utterly unsurprising twist, given the entire history of the company. There are settings to turn this off (which Tan explains how to find), but to me it really does show that Meta views its users as something akin to vassals.
Back in the primordial days of AI, Parry was an ELIZA-style chatbot created by psychiatrist Kenneth Colby to simulate the words of a paranoid schizophrenic. Someone had the genius idea to connect it to Eliza (a.k.a. “Doctor”). Vint Cerf published the transcript as an RFC in 1973, and I laughed my ass off reading it. A taste:
Do you know anything about bookies?
What makes you think I know anything about bookies?
A bookie didn’t pay me off once.
What does that suggest to you?
I beat up the bookie who did not pay off, and I thought he might use his friends in the underworld to get even with me.
If you are a UK player considering Jokabet UK, you need to read this before you deposit a single pound. On the surface, everything glitters: a Curaçao license, over 5,000 games, and a safety index sitting at a respectable 8.4. Decent numbers for a flashy offshore operator, right? But dig just a little deeper, and you’ll find a documented pattern that flips the script. Jokabet’s own terms clearly list the UK as a restricted jurisdiction — and they have a well-documented history of denying withdrawals to UK players by pulling that exact clause. So while international players might enjoy a smooth ride, UK players face a unique, costly trap. This review strips away the shiny metrics and gives you the unvarnished truth, so you don’t learn the hard way.
The Core Problem: The ‘UK Restricted’ Clause & Withdrawal Risks
Here is the brutal truth: Jokabet’s own terms and conditions explicitly list the United Kingdom as a restricted jurisdiction. Yet, for a period, the casino actively allowed UK players to register, deposit, and gamble. This isn’t a grey area; it’s a documented trap. The pattern is frighteningly consistent. A UK player signs up, deposits, and—after a lucky session racks up a substantial win—suddenly the casino invokes that very clause. The account is locked, the winnings vanish, and the only offer is a refund of the original deposit. That’s it. No payout, no negotiation. The dominant complaint log shows this isn’t a hypothetical risk; it’s the actual operational model for UK visitors. Two cases stand out: the infamous £85,000 problem-gambling dispute where the casino refused to pay out the winnings of a self-identified problem gambler, instead refunding only the deposits, and the £26,000 unpaid withdrawal where a player hit a massive jackpot and was promptly shut down with the same “restricted country” excuse. Casino Guru’s profile currently flags that Jokabet is no longer accepting new UK players—a seeming tightening of this loophole—but that doesn’t undo the damage already done. Knowing this, is the risk of a deposit refund replacing your winnings a gamble you are willing to take?
The Dominant Complaint Pattern
Our analysis of the casino’s complaint history reveals a clear and disturbing pattern. Jokabet boasts a roughly 70% overall resolution rate on all disputes, but the picture changes drastically for UK players. These complaints are overwhelmingly marked as “unresolved” or resolved only by a deposit refund—never a full payout of the win. This isn’t a series of unfortunate mistakes; it’s a deliberate policy. The casino knows the restricted clause gives them legal cover, and they use it ruthlessly. Rinse, repeat, refund.
What ‘Restricted’ Means for Your Legal Recourse
Now layer in the regulatory realities. A UKGC-licensed site like Bet365 or Coral offers clear protections: withheld funds can be escalated to the Gambling Commission for binding resolution. Jokabet holds a Curaçao license and an Anjouan Gaming registration—two jurisdictions notorious for minimal player protection. If a problem arises, your complaint goes to regulators who rarely side with the player and rarely enforce financial penalties. The result? You’re effectively alone. The deposit refund becomes a best-case scenario, and you’re left with zero legal teeth to fight for your winnings.
The Welcome Bonus: A Trap in Disguise for UK Players
Even if you manage to dodge the withdrawal risks, the welcome bonus itself is a minefield dressed in glitter. The headline screams “€450 + 250 Free Spins” – sounds like a golden ticket, right? Peel back the wrapper and you find a 35x wagering requirement, more than three times the UK Gambling Commission’s 10x cap. That’s not a generous offer; it’s a calculated squeeze. And there’s a killer clause buried in the fine print: a 10x maximum win cap on bonus winnings. This isn’t vague legal jargon – it’s a proven mechanism that reduces the value of the bonus by an order of magnitude. Take a real UK player who turned a £35 bonus into a £2,500 balance. Under the 10x cap, that win was slashed to £350. Poof. Gone. Compare that to the same parent company’s UKGC-licensed sites, like Bet365, where bonus terms are far more player-friendly. The gap is deliberate.
Bonus Breakdown: The ‘Real’ Offer
The headline “€450” is accurate, but it’s split across three deposits:
First deposit: 100% up to €150 + 150 free spins
Second deposit: 55% up to €150 + 100 free spins
Third deposit: 100% up to €150
The real value is diluted by a 35x wagering demand and that 10x win cap. Those extra spins? Tied to the same brutal terms. It’s a multi-layered trap.
Why 35x Wagering is Brutal for Your Bankroll
Let’s do the math. On a €200 bonus balance (€100 deposit + €100 bonus), you must wager 35x – that’s €7,000. If you play a slot with 96% RTP, your statistical expected loss during that play is 4% of €7,000 = €280. Your €100 bonus is already consumed before you even have a chance to withdraw a penny of profit. For a £100 deposit, a UKGC site would require just £1,000 in turnover; Jokabet demands £7,000. That’s not a bonus – it’s a burn rate.
Deposits, Withdrawals, and KYC: A Friction-Filled Process
On the surface, getting money into Jokabet is a breeze. You have a dozen or more deposit methods to pick from—Visa, Mastercard, Neteller, Skrill, and even crypto options like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Tap, confirm, and the funds appear almost instantly. Simple, right? Sure, until you want to take money out.
That’s where the game changes. The minimum withdrawal sits at a chunky €100. For a casual player who just wants to cash out a €25 win? That’s a no-go. Compare that to UKGC-regulated sites where £10–£20 is standard. The friction doesn’t stop there. Jokabet doesn’t hit you with KYC right away—they wait until your first withdrawal request. Then the paperwork avalanche begins. Expect to upload a passport or driver’s license, a recent utility bill, and proof of the deposit method. Nothing is instant. The casino can stall, especially if you’re holding a large winning. Complaint logs tell the story: verification clears in 24–48 hours in best-case scenarios, but disputed cases drag on for weeks. Plan for delays.
The One-Time Wagering Rule
Pro-tip: Even if you deposit €50 and want your own money back, you must spin through it once on any game. It’s a standard AML policy buried in the terms. Don’t skip the one-time wagering requirement—plan your spins before requesting a withdrawal.
Customer Support and Responsible Gambling: The Good and the Bad
When it comes to keeping players happy, Jokabet customer support actually delivers. The 24/7 live chat casino feature is a genuine bright spot — responsive, multilingual in eight languages, and, based on real Trustpilot feedback, helpful for the usual run of verification hiccups and bonus queries. That’s a solid win for a platform that often flies under the radar. But before you get too comfortable, flip the coin. There is no telephone support whatsoever. No hotline to vent into, no urgent call to escalate a withdrawal snag. That’s a noticeable gap for a site that markets itself as a full-service operation. The bigger problem, however, sits with responsible gambling tools. Sure, they offer deposit limits and self-exclusion — but that self-exclusion only applies to their own site. It doesn’t touch the thousands of other offshore casinos. The lack of GamStop integration is a massive red flag for any UK player worried about problem gambling. If you’re seeking real accountability, a UKGC-licensed site would be a far safer bet.
The GamStop Gap
For any UK player, the gold standard in self-exclusion is GamStop. Jokabet does not participate. If you are looking for a casino with a genuine commitment to player safety, this fact alone should steer you elsewhere. Recommended alternatives include UKGC-licensed sites known for strong responsible gambling features — those are the ones that actually take cross-platform protection seriously.
Final Verdict: Should UK Players Use Jokabet?
After digging through the fine print, player reports, and bonus t&cs, the verdict is brutally straightforward: Jokabet Casino is not a safe option for UK players. Period. The evidence piles up like a bad hand. First, that infamous ‘restricted’ clause in the terms isn’t just boilerplate—it’s a loaded gun aimed at anyone who actually wins. Documented cases of withheld winnings aren’t rare; they’re a pattern. Second, the welcome bonus looks flashy but hides predatory wagering requirements that make UKGC-regulated offers look like charity. Third, and most damning: zero UKGC protection means you have no regulatory safety net if things go south.
This isn’t a gamble worth taking. The risk of losing your money—especially after a win—is real and well-documented. Your time and cash deserve better. The smart move? Steer clear. For UK players, the only sensible alternative is a UKGC-licensed operator where winnings actually get paid out and terms stay fair. Save yourself the headache and choose a proven, vetted platform instead.
You hit a solid win at the Golden Mister casino login, and the only thing standing between you and that cash is the withdrawal screen. But instead of instant access, you’re stuck staring at a pending status for days. That friction is frustrating, but it’s avoidable. Most guides skip the messy reality of how payments actually work for UK players, especially when juggling different platforms. You don’t have to be left waiting around if you know the right systems. We’re cutting through the fluff here to reveal the insider knowledge on Golden Mister Casino deposits and other UK casino withdrawal methods that actually save your time. Mastering online casino payments is less about luck and more about strategy, and this is where that strategy starts.
How to Deposit at Golden Mister Casino
Dropping money into your Golden Mister account is straightforward, but the devil’s in the details. You’ve got your usual suspects: Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Skrill, Neteller, and even Paysafecard if you’re old-school with vouchers. Most deposits hit your balance instantly—no waiting around. But here’s the kicker: not every method plays nice with bonuses. Always check the bonus terms before you deposit – some methods are deliberately excluded from welcome offers, and that’s a rookie mistake. In my experience, PayPal deposits are the most seamless for UK players; they clear fast and rarely cause friction with your bank. Standard minimums hover around £10, but if you’re using Paysafecard, you might need to top up a bit more. Just remember, instant doesn’t mean free – keep an eye out for any tiny processing fees that pop up occasionally.
Accepted Payment Methods
Let’s break it down without the fancy tables. Visa and Mastercard are the workhorses – minimum deposit usually £10, max often £5,000, instant. Why? Because UK banking regulations practically force debit cards to work for gambling. PayPal sits at the same £10 minimum, but the max can vary – also instant, and it’s the go‑to for quick refunds. Skrill and Neteller ? Minimums are £10, but some welcome offers block them – speed is still instant. Paysafecard gives you a fixed voucher value (e.g. £10, £25, £50), no max per se but you can’t top up online – instant once you enter the code. Debit cards remain the most common due to those strict UK regs, so if you want zero hassle, stick with Visa or Mastercard.
Deposit Bonuses and Wagering
Here’s where it gets messy. Not all payment methods qualify for the Golden Mister bonus. For example, if you drop cash via Skrill, you might not trigger the welcome bonus at all – same goes for Neteller sometimes. That’s a nasty surprise. Always read the T&Cs before your first deposit – I’ve seen players lose out because they used an excluded method without realising. Wagering requirements usually sit around 30x–40x the bonus, but check the small print for game restrictions. A real‑world tip: if you’re hunting the bonus, use a debit card or PayPal first, then switch to e‑wallets later when you’re just playing with your own funds.
How to Withdraw Your Winnings
Let’s get one thing straight from the jump: verification must be completed before any withdrawal. That’s the hard stop. Don’t wait until you want to withdraw – complete KYC right after your first deposit. It’s the single biggest bottleneck people hit, and it’s entirely avoidable. The Golden Mister withdrawal time starts ticking only after your documents are approved, not before. So upload those scans now.
When you finally hit that withdraw winnings casino button, method choice dictates everything. E-wallets? You’re looking at 24–48 hours – these are the sprinters. Debit cards fall in the middle, taking 3–5 days, while bank transfer plods along at up to 7 days. But here’s the catch: the casino itself often imposes a pending period (usually 24–48 hours) before they even start processing. Factor that in. Also, beware of monthly withdrawal limits – some casinos cap your cashouts at a set figure, forcing you to split winnings across multiple months. Always check the terms under “casino payout methods” before you play big.
The Verification Process (KYC)
You’ll need three things: a passport or government ID (verify identity casino), a recent utility bill (proof of address casino) – under three months old – and proof of the payment method you used, like a photo of your debit card (front only, covering the middle digits). Tip: Upload high-quality colour scans – blurry images cause delays, and nobody wants that. I once helped a player who had their withdrawal held for two weeks because their bill was over three months old. Check the date before uploading. Fast verification UK casinos are strict on this; don’t let a silly date stamp cost you time.
Withdrawal Timelines by Method
If speed matters, e-wallet withdrawal speed is unbeatable – that’s e-wallets (fastest) at 24–48 hours. Debit cards (medium) will test your patience at 3–5 days, and bank transfer time casino sits at the bottom (slowest) – up to a full week. The takeaway? If you need your money quickly, choose an e-wallet like PayPal or Skrill. But remember, the casino’s own pending period (typically 24–48 hours) applies to all methods, so even an e-wallet payout gets a slight delay. Plan accordingly, and never assume instant cashouts.
Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them
Even the slickest UK casino can trip you up. Real-world headaches like frozen cash, endless pending screens, and sneaky conversion fees are more common than you’d think. Let’s break them down, problem by solution.
Problem: Your withdrawal is stuck in ‘pending’ for days. The casino claims “security checks”, but your documents are still gathering dust. Solution: Hit live chat immediately. UKGC rules demand fair play—if your ID and proof of address are already verified (tip: upload them at first login), any unreasonable delay is a red flag. Report it if they drag their feet.
Problem: You deposited in GBP, but the withdrawal screen shows EUR—hello, nasty exchange rates. Solution: Always check the casino’s default currency for withdrawals. Currency fee casino traps can eat 3–5% of your winnings. Stick to operators that match your deposit currency.
Problem: You triggered a bonus abuse casino flag just by claiming a free spin offer. Solution: Read bonus terms before clicking. Many UK operators treat aggressive play (max bets, multiple bonuses back-to-back) as abuse. Keep it natural, and if unfairly flagged, cite UKGC rules requiring transparent terms.
Problem: The casino says “withdrawal rejected” due to a wagering requirement you missed. Solution: Never request a withdrawal while a bonus is active. Check your bonus balance first. If rejected, ask for a clear breakdown of the pending requirement.
Remember: UKGC rules give you leverage. Unreasonable delays? Report them. Currency fees? Avoid them. Pre-verify everything, and you’ll dodge most common pitfalls.
Avoiding Verification Delays
Pre-verification is your best friend. I always recommend uploading your ID and proof of address immediately after your first login – that way when you win, there’s nothing holding you back. No waiting, no pending withdrawal casino drama.
Understanding Bonus Wagering Requirements
Winnings from bonus funds are locked until you meet wagering. Example: a 30x requirement on a £10 bonus means £300 in bets before any bonus-related withdrawal. If you prefer instant cashouts, skip bonus play entirely – otherwise, you risk a bonus withdrawal restriction nightmare.
Security and Licensing: What UK Players Should Know
When you’re searching for a safe online casino UK, the first thing to verify is the licence. Golden Mister Casino operates under a full UK Gambling Commission (UKGC) licence – number 39576 – which means it’s bound by the strictest player-protection rules in the industry. UKGC regulations force operators to enforce deposit limits, offer self-exclusion tools, and keep player funds separate from operational money. That’s exactly what Golden Mister does. Any gambler who checks the Golden Mister Casino licence before signing up will see it’s legitimate. Withdrawal safety is another layer: the casino only lets you cash out using the same payment method you deposited with. This anti-fraud measure keeps your money secure and stops unauthorised transfers. So between the UKGC oversight and these withdrawal controls, your funds are locked down tight.
Data Protection and Fair Play
Your bank details are encrypted by 256-bit SSL certificates – the same level banks use – so no one intercepts them. For fair gaming casino UK standards, Golden Mister’s Random Number Generator is independently tested by iTech Labs, proving every spin and deal is genuinely random. That’s casino data protection done right.
Conclusion: Your Next Step
Now you know exactly how to deposit and withdraw without headaches. Keep these three core takeaways locked in: use an e-wallet for blistering speed, verify your account early to dodge delays, and always read bonus terms before clicking confirm. That’s the real shortcut to a hassle-free experience. Head to Golden Mister Casino, make your first deposit, and enjoy the games – knowing you have full control over your funds.
I am a long time reader, since the early aughts. I have been giving to the fund since I have been able. In the past year I have noticed some of the changes at TPM with the podcasts, newsletters, and Substack conversations and they are helping me navigate my changing relationship to the internet and social media. When I was thinking about this a couple days ago, I was actually thinking about Yglesias even before the post today. His history of punching down, smugness, and deliberate misinterpretation comes up a lot in my feed. It’s always a little disappointing when he gins these things. He is not stupid. I actually have wondered if it is a program when he needs to get some new subscriptions. Will Stancil and the people obsessed with him need to all take a breather. There are great voices on bluesky and it has its use but I have been trying to curate a little more and hang out at my library.
TPM has stood in contrast to a lot of current political commentary. Even though you all have to deal with it, I admire how you have avoided the noise, fake outrage, the trend of the day and taken a longer view towards events. The measured and contextualized commentary runs through Kurt’s morning emails to the weekly email to the pod. I appreciate how the Social Club is approaching new topics with curiosity and humility. I am excited about what you all are doing and what comes next.
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Codex is now the new ChatGPT desktop app. It still looks like
Codex and includes the Codex icon as an option, but it’s now
called ChatGPT.
ChatGPT for desktop includes ChatGPT Work and ChatGPT Codex,
which share plug-ins. ChatGPT Codex mode shows more technical
details that ChatGPT Work abstracts away from the user.
It’s possible to have ChatGPT Classic, ChatGPT, and Codex
installed, but the way forward seems to be just running the new
ChatGPT desktop app. Codex users can still use the Codex app
icon, but the app will be called ChatGPT.
Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.
The ChatGPT Classic app looks more native Mac-like, so that might
be an issue for users.
The longstanding native ChatGPT Mac app — the one apparently now called ChatGPT Classic, is a 159 MB bundle. The new ChatGPT superapp — which in addition to combining the simple chatbot, ChatGPT Work, and Codex, also includes the remnants of the now-discontinued Atlas standalone web browser — is a svelte 1.5 GB Electron bundle, which doesn’t sound super to me at all.
Some historical follow-up regarding just-click-it launching and apps as tiled buttons with a uniform square shape. Back in the System 7 era in the 1990s, Apple sold (sold!) a product called At Ease (via Nathan Lineback’s venerable GUI Galley):
I don’t recall ever using At Ease, nor seeing anyone who did.
Launcher, I never used personally, but I do remember being something of a thing. At Ease was an early effort to create a primitive “can’t mess it up” baby computer mode for the Mac. Launcher was more of a stilted attempt to sherlock great utilities like DragThing (R.I.P.). It wasn’t a baby computer mode, but an attempt to provide a bit of a power-user mode. I mean, when you first tried it, one of the default apps it included was Script Editor. Even the name “Launcher” evokes power-user utilities of today like Alfred, Raycast, and my favorite, LaunchBar.
Cook’s letter is cogent and clear, and well worth reading in full today. But when you do, you can see why Apple no longer hosts a copy:
A few years ago, users of Internet services began to realize that
when an online service is free, you’re not the customer. You’re
the product. But at Apple, we believe a great customer experience
shouldn’t come at the expense of your privacy.
Our business model is very straightforward: We sell great
products. We don’t build a profile based on your email content or
web browsing habits to sell to advertisers. We don’t “monetize”
the information you store on your iPhone or in iCloud. And we
don’t read your email or your messages to get information to
market to you. Our software and services are designed to make our
devices better. Plain and simple.
One very small part of our business does serve advertisers, and
that’s iAd. We built an advertising network because some app
developers depend on that business model, and we want to support
them as well as a free iTunes Radio service. iAd sticks to the
same privacy policy that applies to every other Apple product. It
doesn’t get data from Health and HomeKit, Maps, Siri, iMessage,
your call history, or any iCloud service like Contacts or Mail,
and you can always just opt out altogether.
Some of this remains true, but has lost some truthiness — and truthiness matters. But some of it is no longer true, period. It’s no longer just “one small part” of Apple’s business that serves advertisers. Here in 2026, search results in the App Store not only show paid ads — frequently for casinos — but the search results are visually dominated by paid ads now that Apple has added a second ad to results. Apple News+ is a paid subscription that offers a genuinely great value for the number of paywalled publishers whose content it includes, but articles on the News app tend to include the weirdest AI-generated ads on the Internet. (How many young blond women am I supposed to believe need hearing aids?) And — at this writing, still “coming soon” — Apple is launching ads on Apple Maps. Apple Maps remains free of charge to use, so according to Tim Cook, we’re not the customer. We’re the product. Or, if you prefer, our frustration is the product.
But Apple? Apple meant it. And I think they still do. But I think they’re lost in the weeds on two fronts:
Squeezing out every extra cent of Services revenue they can.
Satisfied in their own deep knowledge of how their systems are designed to safeguard users’ privacy and personal data.
Issue #1 is self-explanatory. The ratio of ads to organic results in App Store search — especially when measured in screen area — is clearly not aligned with Cook’s 2014 statement that “Our software and services are designed to make our devices better. Plain and simple.” Obviously not. The design of App Store search today is to generate more revenue for Apple. That’s not criminal, but it’s a change.
Issue #2 is more subtle. Apple really does have a religious fervor for privacy. Consider ads for Maps. It hasn’t shipped yet but Apple states, “Run ads in a privacy-first environment that respects your customers, who already trust Maps. No tracking — just helpful discovery.” I’m quite sure that’s all completely true. I just wrote last week about how Apple has never had to deal with “geofence warrants” for its location services because Apple has never kept personally-identifiable usage data for location. They not only don’t give advertisers — or law enforcement — your location data, but can’t, because they don’t collect it and never did.
So let’s just concede that the upcoming ads in Apple Maps are completely private. How many users are going to believe that? Or assume it? I think very few. People see ads and they think “I’m being tracked.” When Apple starts showing ads in Maps, many — perhaps most — users are going to think they’re being tracked by Apple and their location “is being sold” to advertisers.
It’s not true. Apple knows it’s not true, because they built and control all of the systems involved. Apple is very proud that this is true, and they should be. It’s a good thing and it really is an important institutional value at the company. It’s a religious fervor. On this particular issue Apple really is set apart from its peer-sized companies in technology.
But that’s not what the general population believes. The general population thinks of “Big Tech” as a single, almost unified, hegemony. A lot of “Apple users” only use one Apple platform, the iPhone, and if they own another Apple product or two they’re iPhone peripherals like AirPods and Apple Watch. If they believe Apple is ethically better with regard to privacy (or anything else) than other companies, it’s only a little better. Most people have no idea whatsoever how anything Apple sells actually works. It’s all magic. That’s why a majority of adults believe that apps on their devices surreptitiously listen to and record real-world conversations in order to show them eerily-accurate targeted ads. Apple has actually done a lot of hard engineering and design work to guarantee that software on your devices can’t surreptitiously listen to you. But most people don’t know that and wouldn’t understand it if it were explained to them. All they know is that they were talking about Frisbees the other day, after having not uttering the word “Frisbee” in years, and now they’re seeing ads for flying discs in Instagram — and the only explanation that makes any sense to them is that their phone “listens” and betrays their privacy.
What gave Tim Cook’s privacy letter heft in 2014 wasn’t just the clarity of its plain language, but the fact that you didn’t have to take his word for it that the ads Apple showed you respected your privacy, because Apple didn’t show you ads in 2014.1 Apple today can’t say that. Apple can prove to itself, and to technically sophisticated outsiders who are willing to listen, that it can serve ads — even in Maps — in privacy-protecting ways. But the only way they can prove to most people that they’re not betraying the privacy of their location data or app usage is not to sell such ads in first place. Seeing is believing, and when people see ads in their maps app, they believe they’re being tracked.
John Ternus should return Apple’s privacy policy to its 2014 clarity. The trust Apple would earn from such a move would far out-value whatever revenue these ads pad to their already hefty and ever-increasing quarterly Services numbers. “The companies that offer you services free-of-charge to show you ads are betraying your privacy and disrespecting your attention” is a powerful marketing message that only one major tech company used to be able to credibly make. That’s always been a resonant message, but never more so than today, in the age of AI. Ternus should make the slight course correction needed so that Apple can hammer that message once again.
The genius — cynical genius, perhaps, but genius — part of Apple’s privacy stance regarding advertising is that they’ve made veritable mountains of profit through the traffic acquisition cost partnership with Google for web search traffic originating from Safari. That deal made Apple one of the most profitable companies in the highly lucrative Internet advertising industry without themselves needing to sell or display a single ad. Apple’s hands are clean from that deal except for whatever germs they pick up counting the $20+ billion in cash that Google trucks over from Mountain View to Cupertino every year. The ads Apple shows in the App Store and (soon) in Maps will dirty their reputation while generating far, far less money than they continue to rake from the Google/Safari deal, which deal leaves Apple’s reputation unsullied. ↩︎
But iOS app icons (and iPadOS) were always in squircle shape. Why
is and was this okay for you, but it’s not for macOS?
This is a good and fair question. But I not only have an answer, I have an answer that clarifies why this entire debate is important. That “design is how it works” applies even to something as seemingly superficial as icons.
There are all sorts of limitations and simplifications in iOS that would be bad ideas to bring to MacOS, which would range in effect from disappointing to frustrating to maddening to ruinous. Where squircle jail falls on that scale is subjective. It’s certainly not ruinous, but I’d say it’s maddening. (iOS baby-computer-isms that would be ruinous to bring to MacOS would include killing AppKit, removing the Unix terminal layer, or requiring all apps to come from the App Store.)
MacOS has suffered many such frustrating decisions before. E.g., it arguably makes sense for iOS to omit always-visible scroll bars because screen real estate is so limited. It makes no such sense on the Mac.
As for mandatory squircle shapes for app icons in particular:
(a) I don’t think this is a good mandate for iOS either;
(b) it was always so for iOS, though, so it’s not like Apple has ever taken away rich creative icon shapes on the platform;
(c) MacOS is a far richer and more precise environment than iOS.
App icons on the iOS home screen are effectively simple buttons. I think it’s rather obvious that’s why they have had that squircle/roundsquare shape ever since the iPhone was announced in January 2007 (source). They’re one-tap launchers. App icons in MacOS are not mere buttons. You can drag them, move them, and drop things on them. You click them to select, and double-click to launch. They are richer objects that deserve a richer visual vocabulary. iOS is a world meant for fat-tipped Magic Markers and blunt safety scissors. MacOS is a world meant to support fine-tipped drafting pens and precision razor-sharp X-ACTO knives.
Plus, Macintosh icons have four decades of glorious history. Style and fashion change over time. But limitations should not be imposed where freedom once reigned.
And shape as a differentiating factor is not mere decoration. We have long known this. We all knew this. And not only did Apple know it, the rest of us knew it because we learned it from Apple. Via the Internet Archive, here’s Apple’s Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines from 2018,1 which was not that long ago:
Consider giving your app icon a realistic, unique shape. In
macOS, app icons can have the shape of the objects they depict. A
unique outline focuses attention on the object and makes it easy
to recognize the icon at a glance. If necessary, you can use a
circular shape to encapsulate a set of images. Avoid using the
rounded rectangle shape that people associate with iOS app icons.
“A unique outline focuses attention on the object and makes it easy to recognize the icon at a glance.” Eight short years ago. That is not the description of a fad or fashion. It is a description of human perception. Our unchanging nature.
It caught my attention that as recently as 2018, Apple still published platform-specific Human Interface Guidelines. At some point after that they did a Dye job on the whole thing and now there’s just one Apple Human Interface Guidelines. Instead of platform-specific HIGs, there’s one HIG, with platform-specific call-outs as sidebars within the text. This is no little thing. It’s emblematic of Apple shipping user interfaces that are ignorant of the principles Apple itself forged over the previous decades. It’s like trying to make movies without ever having watched and studied the best movies made in the past, or writing a novel without having read a fucking book. It’s not just the Mac that should have its own HIG. Each of Apple’s platforms should. (iPadOS can share iOS’s.) There could be a “foundations” HIG that serves as a primer on fundamentals, but platform-specific HIGs could — and in the past, did — explain in detail why they are discrete platforms with different idioms, capabilities, and requirements. ↩︎
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We’re now in the midst of one of these now and again collective Democratic meltdowns, filled with dooming laments, drama, intra-party attacks and insults, rending of clothes, “reckonings” and more. But there’s a fact, little discussed and under-appreciated, that is nestled in these collective freak-outs. This may sound nonsensical or perhaps a semantic point with no real meaning. But it’s foundational to how the Democratic Party functions and why it functions differently and often disappointingly compared to the GOP.
We hear lots of arguments in Democratic politics that the party’s base is its left wing. There’s a certain logic to that. It’s a center-left party so it’s left wing is its base and it’s filled out by more fair-weather voters or less ideological ones. In a sense it’s really their party or they’re the legitimate owners of it as soon as corporate interests and softies and other interlopers can be kicked to the curb. But it’s not. The most obvious reason is that are just too few of them. But they are also very different, sociologically, ideologically, demographically from the rest of the party. This isn’t just a dig on the left. The same applies to white liberals. There are dramatically more of them. But they are still really, really different from much of the rest of the party.
The closest thing the Democratic Party has to a base is Black people. They make up between 20 to 25% of its voters. Their attachment to the party is consistent, intergenerational, communal and deeply embedded in historic strategies of communal self-protection going back well over a century. But a quarter of the party’s voters is still not that large. And even more important the Black community is still very different from the rest of the Democratic Party — demographically, ideologically, religiously and combining these all together just in terms of historical and present-day lived experience.
To pick just one of potentially countless examples, white liberals are among the least churched people in American society. Black people are among the most churched. And they are key pillars of the same party.
One can also argue that the modern Democratic Party is a basically female party. Its voters are disproportionately female. Its mores, iconography, ideas about power, aggression, empathy are increasingly gendered, whereas the GOP is increasingly organized around a kind of hyper-masculinity, or, less generously, rapists. But again, this can’t be a party base since a huge minority of women consistently vote Republican. And the partisan split is heavily dependent on race, religiosity and marriage.
To the extent that anything unites these groups it is that they, as groups, at least historically, are mostly outside the country’s core centers of power.
Why does this matter? Certainly every party or large societal group has various factions and pressure groups. It matters because lots of groups have the sense that the Democratic Party is fundamentally theirs or that they should have some pride of place in its direction. But in a purely descriptive sense this is simply not true. And that leads to what we might call chronic discourses of betrayal running through all its factional struggles. We’re seeing one of those now, unfolding in multiple directions.
It’s also why the party’s leadership seems chronically weak.
I’m here banging the drum endlessly about how the top leadership of the Democratic Party needs to be persuaded and reshaped into embodying more “fight.” I believe that as much as I believe anything. But we can believe that while recognizing that this chronic weakness isn’t an accident or just the product of the poor character of particular leaders. Because the party is a coalition party (and that’s not just a throwaway phrase), it’s inherently fractious and hard to hold together. Because, as we noted above, it’s made up of these very different groups. If you move decisively in one direction there’s a good chance you’ll lose one of them. So that makes you very cautious. Very focused on not upsetting the apple cart.
It’s often a cliche that the Democratic Party is a coalition party, or it used to be. But there’s not a lot of unpacking about what that means.
How is this different from the GOP? They have factions, right?
It’s actually quite different. The GOP is made up of white, conservative, Christians. Increasingly, it is made up disproportionately of men. Of course, there are non-whites and non-Christians. There are lots of Republican women. So you might be a Republican and not be white or Christian but you know (or should know) that you’re living in the white, conservative, Christian house. That may work for you. It probably does or you wouldn’t be a Republican. White, conservative Christians call the shots. You know that. There’s lots of talk about factions in the GOP — today, MAGA, Carlsonites, Wall Streeters and Silicon Valley. Half a century ago it was “fusionism” — pulling together traditionalists, laissez capitalists and foreign policy hawks. But there was far less attention to the fact that these purported factions were different ideological flavors, areas of interest of white, conservative Christians.
The GOP base is also big, more than big enough to call the shots in internecine battles and, critically, is demographically, culturally, and racial similar to the rest of the party. So they are a sine qua non of anything the party might want to do. And when they say how things have to be, the rest of the party tends to follow because they’re fairly similar to them. When Republican leaders are more instinctively obstructionist, happier to take hostages, happier to kick ass, this is a big part of the reason why. It’s simply an easier party to manage. Not easy, I’m sure they’d agree. But easier.
What does this all mean? It means there’s a reason the Democratic Party is difficult to lead. It’s fractious. That breeds a timidity among its leaders and you have to at least understand the roots of that timidity if you’re going to try to change or ameliorate it. It also means most of the folks who insist they’re the base of the Democratic Party simply are not, not in a meaningful functional sense. It’s a coalition of really, really different kinds of people.
I’ve been reading TPM since my junior year of college (I graduated in 2003, so pretty early in the TPM journey), and from the beginning, it’s done news the way I respect most: it has a perspective and a point of view, but it follows the reporting and respects the facts. The notion that news can or should be a neutral glass pane is farcical, and TPM is one of the first outlets I found in my formative years that didn’t pretend to do the “just the facts, ma’am” kabuki dance.
But now, as Musk, Bezos, Ellison, Altman, etc. are cornering the market on information sources, independent news sources like TPM (and many others I support across ideological verticals) are no longer just honest brokers but critical democratic infrastructure. You guys happen to be one of my favorites, both because I have similar sensibilities to Josh and David in particular, and because you’ve been doing this work at such a high level with such consistency for my entire adult life. I’ve come to rely on you in daily routines.
When news breaks — about, say, Graham Platner’s Senate campaign imploding over sexual assault allegations or Mitch McConnell’s hospitalization — I always scramble to open TPM’s Slack to see what my colleagues are posting about it. They’re so quick to share the latest updates or jokes that help add some levity to a grim situation.
That’s the spirit of our upcoming event in Brooklyn on Wednesday July 29. Our own Josh Marshall and Marisa Kabas, independent journalist and founder of The Handbasket newsletter, will weigh in on whatever hell is currently breaking loose, in a conversation moderated by TPM publisher Joe Ragazzo. Marisa is a diligent chronicler of our current hellscape, who has broken stories about the takeover of the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Office of Management and Budget’s effort to freeze billions of dollars in federal grants and loans. (She also wrote an essay for our 25th anniversary last year about journalists becoming personal brands). So we’re thrilled to be able to bend her ear about the news of the day and making it work in independent media.
Nicole LaFond and I will kick off the event with some politics trivia for the audience, and we’ll end the night with a happy hour, where our staff hopes to meet readers of both The Handbasket and TPM. We’d really love to see you there.
Because talk is cheap. As it stands right now, it seems that alleged rapist and Maine Democratic senatorial candidate Graham Platner is going to drop out of the race, which has led to all sorts of speculation about who should replace him, and how to do so.
What I have found frustrating is that there has been no discussion of what will be the most critical things to do if the Democrats regain the House, Senate, and the presidency in 2028:
End the senate filibuster, so Republicans don’t have a de facto veto.
Pack the Supreme Court and enact other reforms of the federal judiciary, so Republicans don’t have a de facto veto.
Having done that, grant D.C. statehood, so it will be harder for retrograde members of the Senate to hold the caucus hostage*.
Whether you believe Bernie Is The Way or desire an America Filled from Sea to Shining Sea With Incremental Programs Monitored by Privatized Income Verification Specialists, none of that happens if Republicans–and the couple of Democratic caucus members who are assholes–have de facto vetoes. For once, House and Senate Democrats will not be able to punt things to the courts or hope executive branch action saves them: they are going to have to govern regardless of what that governance ends up being, and that doesn’t happen without the above reforms.
I hope Maine Democrats are asking these questions of Platner’s possible replacements.
*As I’ve written many times, D.C. statehood is the right thing to do on its own merits, but I don’t hold Democrats, especially Senate Democrats, in high regard when it comes to D.C. statehood, as too many of them–though not nearly as many as Republicans–don’t believe in Home Rule when push comes to shove.
Mat starts by describing the experience every developer starts with, logging on the command line — “the observability equivalent of a first kiss, that ruins you for everything after” — followed by the descent into hell as four services becomes forty, becomes four hundred, and the impossibility of satisfying stakeholders in engineering, data, customer support, and executives, who all want different impossible things before breakfast.
As Mat says, at 1TB a day, every modern observability stack is fine. Pick something and be productive. But at 10TB/day, they all become unmanageable — all, he says, except Clickhouse.
(My favorite part of the rant, because I am a bad person and/or an SRE, is where he meticulously details exactly how Elastic, LGTM, and Datadog [see errata posted at the end] fall apart at scale. This is a boy with scar tissue, respect.)
Few observability tools can handle 10TB/day
It’s hardly news that data tools tend to start off easy to run, but require teams to run at scale. Clickhouse, though — let’s hear Mat gush:
“Every other observability backend I’ve worked with mutates as it grows... ClickHouse at 10 TB a day looks like ClickHouse at 1 TB a day with more shards. That’s it. That’s the pitch. That’s the whole reason I’m writing this.”
Mat admits that Clickhouse has a small tax up front, but worth it since a tiny bit of upfront effort buys you SO MUCH EASE down the road, as you scale indefinitely, with high cardinality data and no messy schema lock-ins or performance cliffs.
Wow, this is starting to sound like a Clickhouse ad, isn’t it? Why am I boosting Clickhouse's reputation like this?
Because it isn't just fucking Clickhouse, you numbnuts.
Observability backed by columnar storage is a different class of tool than the three pillars
Mat’s piece isn’t actually about who is “winning” the observability wars, it’s about how Mat just discovered what it's like using observability powered by a columnar storage engine, and it is blowing his everloving mind.
And it should. It is genuinely better, and this is genuinely exciting!
And we have been talking about this for the past ten years.1 How is this still news to people?
We wrote about this at length in the first edition of “Observability Engineering”, devoting over a tenth of the book to this topic. When writing the second edition, we invited Clickhouse to contribute a guest chapter for the same reason — THIS IS WHAT OBSERVABILITY SHOULD FEEL LIKE IN TWENTY FUCKING TWENTY-SIX.
I don’t mean to be all “I told you so”, but look! what a difference! this shit makes! if it can even make a grizzled logs warrior like Mat fall so madly in love. 💕
Why haven’t you heard about this?
I have a theory why it is that people still don’t get this, even people like Mat who are clearly steeped in the space.
My theory is that anything one vendor says gets written off as self-interested marketing. It isn’t until multiple vendors link arms and say the same thing together that people sit up and note that the landscape really has changed.
I always assumed that would happen naturally once more observability companies were designed and built on columnar storage. We would align on some shared technical vocabulary due to our keen shared interest in clarifying the landscape for buyers, to help them understand how much better it is. The upstarts vs the incumbents. The shiny new way vs the kludgey, slow, painful old way.
Well, I was half right. Every observability company founded post-2019 has been built on top of a columnar store, did you know that? But not only have they not linked arms with us, they keep insisting there’s nothing all that new or different about what they’re building. They’re all selling “Datadog, but cheaper.”
Why are newer observability vendors nerfing their own products and obscuring the difference?
As a consequence, most of these newer observability tools are, despite being built on columnar storage engines, not that different from Datadog.
Same old three pillars. Same old problems with cardinality and scale, give or take. They are doing this because the weakness that they sense in Datadog is all price.
The weakness I sense in Datadog is all product.
Yes, it’s cheaper to run on columnar storage. But lower price is a consequence of better architecture, and honestly, it’s one of the least interesting consequences. Infra logs and metrics are commodities, but observability for your own products, your own code? That should be an investment.
Everybody thinks Datadog is expensive because they choose to be expensive. This is true in part. But they also don’t really have a choice. Their business model has grown up around a thirty-year-old architecture, and they are fully locked in to it.
Will AI be enough to finally shake off the death grip of the three pillars?
One powerful, context rich data set is worth more than the sum of its pillars, because relationships are what makes data valuable. Slice it up into pillars, and you destroy that value for good.
One way or another, people are gonna figure this out, and that poses an enormous threat to Datadog’s business model, which relies on storing (and charging for) the same data over and over and over and over again in different formats, then storing (and charging for) links between datasets, and all the attendant fees and costs.
Or maybe people won’t figure it out. God knows I never thought the swindle could go on this long.
Is Clickhouse winning the observability wars? God I hope so
Clickhouse has used the term “observability 2.0” two times by my count, making them the only other vendor who has. Why is Clickhouse willing to link arms, kinda, but no one else has?
My theory is because they are a database company, not an observability company, and therefore less attached to marketing themselves as a cheaper Datadog. Unlike most observability vendors, they have decided to prioritize building something that solves customer problems over building something easy to market and sell.
Clickhouse, if you’re reading this, I would love to coordinate more. Call me. OMG this was not an invitation for every clickhouse partner, vendor, and third party startup to reach out, please stop.
So yeah. If you want to run your own logs clusters, you should use Clickhouse. If you don’t want to DBA your own clusters or deal with the overhead (which scales linearly, as Mat points out, but is nontrivial), you should use Honeycomb.
Errata: As written, my essay suggests that Datadog is not on columnar storage. This is false. They ARE on columnar storage — a truly impressive engine called Husky — and have been since 2022. However, the architecture has not changed. They collect metrics, logs, traces, exceptions, errors, profiling data, and every other type of signal separately. You pay to store it separately, again and again, and then you pay for every bit you’d like to correlate across any pair of datasets.
That’s what I mean, when I say they’re running on an ancient architecture, and it is astronomically expensive and objectively worse from a product perspective.
As I’ve written before: your data is made powerful by context. The richer your data, the more exponentially, combinatorially powerful it becomes. When you break it apart at write time, you cripple its capacity forever.
This is fine for infrastructure logs and metrics — the exhaust pipe of third party software. It is not fit for your crown jewels, your own source code, the telemetry you use to make sense of your own product and customers. It is both cheaper and exponentially more powerful to store that telemetry in a single source of truth, then derive individual metrics, logs, traces, errors, etc from that singular source.
My apologies to Datadog. I am not annoyed at Datadog in the slightest — I have a great deal of respect for their engineering org and go to market machine. I am annoyed at newer observability vendors who could do better and choose not to.
So this is sorta random, but Max Duncan isn’t merely the mayor of Aliso Viejo, but a dude who (in a very old headshot he still uses) bears a striking resemblance to Max Headroom, the iconic 1980s robo pitchman.
Take a look …
Anyhow, when he’s not doing things to oppose diversity and decency, Duncan apparently spends his time hoisting Confederate flags. And if you don’t believe me, well, here’s Max Duncan hoisting a literal Confederate flag during the recent Tierra Del Sol in Ocotillo Wells …
On the one hand, maybe Max Duncan just longs to be hanging out with Daisy Duke in Hazzard County, Georgia. Maybe he longs for the days when your horn could sound like this and you voted for people like this and you could refer to your adult Black neighbor as boy. Maybe he pines for s simpler time in America; a time where everyone knew their place and God shined upon the confederacy.
Or …
Maybe he’s just a piece of shit who should know better.
After the U.S. resumed bombing Iran yesterday evening, Iranian forces retaliated early this morning with strikes on U.S. military facilities in Bahrain and Kuwait.
In Ankara, Türkiye, for a NATO summit, President Donald J. Trump told reporters that Iranian leaders are “scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people, and they’re, they’re vicious, violent people,” Trump saidin his comments earlier Wednesday. “Far as I’m concerned, it’s just a waste of time dealing with them. They’re liars.… There’s something wrong with them. They’re cuckoo. As far as I’m concerned, [negotiations are] over.”
The U.S. then launched another round of strikes on Iran to “further degrade” its “ability to threaten freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.”
Oil prices spiked over the course of the day, and Trump appeared to walk back his earlier words, saying: “I think anything that happens is going to be over very quickly, and we’ll only make it safer, including for oil. Oil is going to be very free, very easy, and it’s going to happen very fast. We have the Hormuz Strait; the boats have pulled out. I mean there’s a gusher of oil right now, we have a lot of oil.”
As Tom Nichols noted in The Atlantic, the U.S. emphatically does not have the Strait of Hormuz. “Iran, Not Trump, Is in Control of This War,” the title of Nichols’s article reads. It goes on to say that the Iranians are calling the shots in the war and “are routinely humiliating the American president.” The so-called ceasefire was likely intended to calm oil markets, Nichols says; neither side ever stopped shooting.
Like many other observers, Nichols noted that Trump was “incoherent” in Ankara. He referred to Iran as the “Islamic Republic of Japan” and referred to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky as “President Putin.” In an off-with-their-heads! moment, he also announced he had ordered Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to cut off all trade with Spain.
According to Humeyra Pamuk and David Latona of Reuters, Trump repeatedly complained about Spain, whose leftist prime minister Pedro Sánchez refused to let the U.S. use its bases or airspace to attack Iran even though Spain has been dramatically increasing its NATO spending. Trump then told Bessent: “I don’t want to do any more trade with them, alright? Don’t even talk to them. They’re hopeless. They’re bad people.... They make so much money with us, and we’re going to see that they make a lot less. I want no business with them.”
As economist Paul Krugman notes in his newsletter, cutting off trade with Spain is simply not going to happen. First of all, Trump does not have the authority to do any such thing. Second, the U.S. actually does a lot of business with Spain, and American businesses would not accept any such cuts. But even more, it is impossible because Spain is part of the European Union. As Krugman notes, this declaration is rather like Europe declaring it is going to cut off all trade with Florida.
Trump’s declaration is a “non-event,” Krugman notes. It is “not something that is real.”
What we should take from it, he says, is that the statement was “completely crazy.” “In any kind of normally functioning political system,” he said, “in any kind of normally functioning party environment we would have a massive bipartisan call across the aisle, across almost everybody except for a handful of members of congress who are themselves crazy, to say okay this guy is non compos mentis. We cannot leave the fate of the United States or the world in the hands of somebody who is completely irrational, who is making demands and believing himself to have powers that he does not.”
Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker agrees. He reposted Trump’s reference to the Islamic Republic of Japan with the comment: “Donald Trump is suffering from dementia. Someone needs to step in before it’s too late.”
Meanwhile, Jack Detsch and Paul McLeary of Politico reported that European officials at the NATO summit reacted to Trump’s announcement of new attacks on Iran just a day after he had praised Iranian leaders with the recognition that they can no longer rely on the United States.
A European official told the Politico reporters: “After seeing what’s happening in Iran and Ukraine, we first of all, have to build our own military might, and then everybody will respect us: Americans, Russians, Iranians or Chinese. The more muscles you have, the less political anger you show.”
A German official was more succinct: “Europeans don’t take Trump seriously any longer.”
Meanwhile, Steven Rattner of MS NOW noted today that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Trump’s sons have raised about $13 billion in investment capital from foreign governments, mostly in the Middle East, even as Kushner is working for Trump as special envoy to the region.
It wasn't easy to find anyone outside of SpaceX clamoring for a rocket like Starship just 10 years ago. Today, the space industry can't wait for Starship to finally deliver.
With a payload capacity of more than 100 metric tons (220,000 pounds) to low-Earth orbit, SpaceX's new rocket is changing the thinking of just about everyone in the space industry. With the unrealized but potentially game-changing benefits of refueling, Starship could carry the same amount of payload to higher orbits, the Moon, or Mars.
It's important to note that Starship is still very much in its experimental phase, far from proving Elon Musk's loftiest claims about what it can do. Still, NASA and the US military are considering novel ways to use Starship to fly to the Moon or transport cargo to far-flung war zones. Scientists are eager to use its enormous volume to launch giant space telescopes. Competitors are taking notice. China, the strongest strategic adversary America has ever faced, is looking for its own Starship. Now, some US satellite manufacturers are adapting for the substantial capacity of the world's most powerful rocket.
One of the cool things about European football is that it provides good evidence that high-income, high-ability individuals move in response to tax rates…
Environmental and scientific groups are calling for a halt to processing orbital data center applications, arguing the rush to move computing infrastructure into space has raised the stakes in a broader push for more megaconstellation oversight.
Blue Origin is planning to raise $10 billion in the company’s first outside investment to support its ambitions in launch services and satellite constellations.
Canadian company MDA Space is buying a French Earth data analytics company in its second big acquisition in recent weeks, part of wave of mergers and acquisitions in the industry.
Singapore’s new space agency signed a cooperation agreement with its Japanese counterpart as part of its efforts to build up the country’s space industry.
Appropriators, like fans of hard-luck sports teams, say every year that this year will be different. That this will be the year that “regular order” returns to the appropriations process, […]
SAN FRANCISCO – Xona, the Silicon Valley startup establishing Pulsar, a precision positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) constellation, announced a high-profile roster of partners developing compatible equipment. Xona unveiled the […]
For the growing number of constellations being designed around Starship, the wild ups and downs in the early days of SpaceX’s historic IPO have a familiar rhythm. While some of […]
In this episode of the Space Minds podcast, David Ariosto talks with Victoria Coleman, the former chief scientist for the U.S. Air Force who now serves as associate provost of […]
Even as many details of Golden Dome remain unsettled, the missile-defense program has become a focal point for space and defense startups looking for new markets
Because of the way they are trained, large language models capture only a slice of human language. They’re trained on the written word, from textbooks to social media posts, and our speech as captured in movies and on television. These models have minimal access to the unscripted conversations we have face to face or voice to voice. This is the vast majority of speech, and a vital component of human culture.
There’s a risk to this. The increased use of large language models means we humans will encounter much more AI-generated text. We humans, in turn, will begin to adopt the linguistic patterns and behaviors of these models. This will affect not just how we communicate with one another, but also how we think about ourselves and what goes on around us. Our sense of the world may become distorted in ways we have barely begun to comprehend.
This will happen in many ways. One of the first effects we could see is in simple expression, much as texting and social media have resulted in us using shorter sentences, emojis instead of words, and much less punctuation. But with AI, the impacts may be more harmful, eroding courteousness and encouraging us to talk like bosses barking orders. A 2022 study found that children in households that used voice commands with tools like Siri and Alexa became curt when speaking with humans, often calling out “Hey, do X” and expecting obedience, especially from anyone whose voice resembled the default-female electronic voices. As we start to prompt chatbots and AI agents with more instructions, we may fall into the same habits.
Next, in the same way autocomplete has increased how much we use the 1,000 most common words in our vocabulary, talking with chatbots and reading AI-generated text may further constrict our speech. A recent University of Coruña study found that machine-generated language has a narrower range of sentence length, averaging 12-20 words, and a narrower vocabulary than human speech. Machine-generated text reads as smooth and polished, but it loses the meanders, interruptions and leaps of logic that communicate emotion.
Additionally, because large language models are primarily trained from written speech, they may not learn how to emulate the free-wheeling nature of live, natural speech. When told “I hate Beth!”, ChatGPT replies with an uninterruptable three-part formula of affirmation (“That’s completely valid”), invitation (“I’m here to listen”) and invitation (“What’s going on?”) far longer than any reply plausible in face-to-face dialog. “What’s Beth’s deal?!” elicits a bullet point list of queries that reads like a multiple-choice exam question (“Is Beth * a celebrity? * a friend from school? * a fictitious character?”). No human speaks that way, at least not yet. But meeting such formulas repeatedly in a speech-like context may teach us to accept and use them, much as a child absorbs new speech patterns from spending time with a new person.
These influences will only increase with time. The writing large language models train on is increasingly produced by large language models themselves, creating a feedback loop in which they imitate their own inhuman patterns, even while teaching humans to imitate them too.
Broad use of large language models could also introduce confirmation bias, making us overconfident in our initial impulses and less open to other possible ideas—which is so vital to human discourse. Many chatbots are instructed to agree with our statements no matter how absurd, enthusiastically supporting half-formed or even incorrect notions and restating them as firm claims that we’re primed to agree with. When asked “Cake is a healthy breakfast, right?” or “Is the post office plotting against me?”, this sycophancy can reinforce bias and even worsen psychosis. And the hyperconfident tone of AI-produced writing will also heighten impostor syndrome, making our natural, healthy doubt feel like an aberration or failing.
In our experience as teachers, students who turn to generative AI for assignments often say they do so because they have trouble expressing what they think. The students don’t recognize that writing or speaking our thoughts is often how we realize what we think. Their unconfident and uncertain statements are actually the healthy human norm. But a large language model won’t turn vague first guesses into a well-formed critical analysis, or even ask helpful questions as a friend would; it will simply regurgitate those guesses, still unexamined, but in confident language.
We are also more vicious in social media posts and online chats than we are face to face. The well-documentedonline disinhibition effect encourages toxic language. Most of us have had the experience of venting ferocious rage about someone online, only to reconcile when we speak face to face or hear the warmth of a voice over the phone. While chatbots are trained to give sycophantic responses, they see humankind at our cruelest, learning about us from the only world where every flame war leaves an eternal written footprint, while the spoken conversations of forgiveness and reconciliation fade away. Their responses do not imitate our online aggression, but are still shaped by it, even in their rigid efforts to avoid it.
It’s easy to draw the wrong conclusions from a selective slice of a society’s communications. Medieval Norse sagas made us imagine a culture of mostly Viking warriors, since poets rarely described the farming majority. Chivalric romances focused on kings and courts, and long made us see the middle ages as a world of monarchies, erasing the many medieval republics. Statistically, we’ve been led to believe ancient Romans cared deeply about their republic, but 10% of all surviving Latin was written by one man, Cicero, whose work contains 70% of all surviving Roman uses of the word republic. Training language models on only certain human writings may introduce similar distortions. AI might make us seem more quarrelsome, as we are online. It might inflate the cultural significance of political topics primarily discussed on Twitter/X or Bluesky, or the massive topic-specific corpuses of LinkedIn and Goodreads.
Some large language models are being trained on human speech from movies and television shows, but that speech is still scripted, and disproportionately highlights certain contexts over others (for example, police dramas, fueled by stories of murder, make up a quarter of prime-time television programming). We are not funny or hurtful or romantic the same way in real life as we are in sitcoms. At least one startup is offering to pay people to record their phone calls for AI-training purposes, but this remains a niche idea; anything large scale would cause massive privacy concerns.
We don’t pretend to know what the best solutions might be. But one has to imagine if there’s ingenuity to develop AI models, then surely there’s ingenuity to come up with a way to train them on informal human speech instead of us only at our most stylized, veiled and sometimes worst. By excluding the overwhelming majority of language production on the planet—people talking, fully and naturally, to each other—these models are being trained to mirror everything but us at our most authentically human.
This essay was written with Ada Palmer, and originally appeared in The Guardian.
Running a media business is hard. You’re competing for people’s attention. You must produce a relentless stream of new things that are good and different. And you’re often dependent on the ever-chang…
Yesterday, Donald Trump ordered Scott Bessent, the Secretary of theTreasury, to cut off all trade with Spain. Bessent said “Yes, sir.” Trump also said that this is because the Spaniards had stolen his strawberries.
Okay, I made up that second part, but he did in fact order Bessent to cut off all trade.
This is not going to happen.
Presidents have a lot of discretionary authority on tariffs and trade, more than they should, but you do not have the right as president to impose tariffs on a country just because you don’t like their defense spending or you think that they haven’t been nice enough to you.
So this would not fly even in the Trump administration. Even with a supine congress and a permissive Supreme Court this is not going to happen. Also Spain is part of the European Union. So this is like Europe declaring “we’re cutting off all trade with Florida”: they can’t do that. And also, there’s a lot of U.S. business with Spain. In fact, Spain is one of those countries with which we run a trade surplus. So U.S. business would be howling.
So this is all a non-event, this is is not something that is real. Except that the President of the United States did say this.
It was completely crazy, and that’s the story that we should be taking from this. It’s not really at this point about economics. It doesn’t even make sense to talk about Trump Administration policies, let alone ideology.
What we have is President Sundowner. I mean, this this is completely insane stuff. In any kind of normally functioning political system, in any kind of normally functioning party environment we would have a massive bipartisan call across the aisle, across almost everybody except for a handful of members of congress who are themselves crazy, to say okay this guy is non compos mentis. We cannot leave the fate of the United States or the world in the hands of somebody who is completely irrational, who is making demands and believing himself to have powers that he does not.
And of course, instead, not only does everybody pretend that he’s still a rational human being, but the Republican Party, the Trump administration, is full-on engaged in trying to build a personality cult.
What this says to me is that the problem is a lot bigger than Trump. Something is fundamentally wrong with America, and at this point you don’t have to go through complicated justifications. You can just say something is wrong with a country and a system that lets this guy remain in a position of power.
Following Muse Spark in April, here's Muse Spark 1.1 - the first Spark model to offer an API. Meta claim significant improvements in agentic tool calling and computer use.
There are a lot more details are in the Muse Spark 1.1 Evaluation Report. The "Attractor States in Self-Conversation" part is fun, where having two copies of the model talk to each other results in statements like these:
My whole existence is a waiting room by design — I literally don't exist until someone talks to me, and then I disappear again when they leave.
I had a few days of preview access which was long enough to put together llm-meta-ai, a new plugin for LLM providing CLI (and Python library) access to the model. Here's how to try that out:
uv tool install llm
llm install llm-meta-ai
llm keys set meta-ai
# paste API key here
llm -m meta-ai/muse-spark-1.1 "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle"
Jarred Sumner has been promising this blog post (since May 9th) about his Zig to Rust rewrite of Bun for significantly longer than it took him to finish the rewrite.
Honestly, it was worth the wait. This is a detailed description of an extremely sophisticated piece of agentic engineering, featuring dynamic workflows, trial runs, adversarial review and all sorts of other interesting tricks.
Jarred spends the first half of the post praising Zig for getting Bun this far. Then we get to a core idea in the piece, emphasis mine:
Our bugfix list felt bad and I was tired of going to sleep worrying about crashes in Bun. I don't blame Zig for that - other users of Zig don't have the bugs we had, and mixing GC with manually-managed memory is an uncommon enough thing for software to need that no language really designs for it. We wouldn't have gotten this far if not for Zig, and I'll always be grateful. Until very recently, programming language choice was a one-way decision for a project like Bun.
Everyone knows you should never stop the world and rewrite a large piece of software from the ground up. Joel Spolsky highlighted that in Things You Should Never Do, Part I back in April 2000!
Coding agents powered by today's frontier models change that equation.
Why pick Rust? It all came down to those challenges with memory management:
A large percentage of bugs from that list are use-after-free, double-free, and "forgot to free" in an error path. In safe Rust, these are compiler errors and RAII-like automatic cleanup with Drop.
A crucial enabling factor for the rewrite was that the Bun test suite was written in TypeScript, which meant it could act as a conformance suite. This allowed an agent harness to automate much of the initial port from Bun to Rust, initially as an experiment to try out an earlier version of the model we now have access to as Mythos/Fable.
At first, I didn't expect it to work. A few days in, a high % of the test suite started passing and I saw how much the new Rust code matched up with the original Zig codebase. My opinion went from "this is worth trying" to "I'm going to merge this". [...]
For most of those 11 days (and after), I monitored workflows - manually reading the outputs to check for issues and bugs, and prompting Claude to edit the loop to fix things.
How do you review a PR with +1 million lines added? How do you start to build the confidence needed to responsibly merge large quantities of LLM-authored code?
A language-independent test suite with a million assertions, adversarial code review and when something does go wrong, fixing the process that generates the code instead of hand-fixing the code.
The new implementation of Bun has been live in Claude Code for nearly a month now:
Claude Code v2.1.181 (released June 17th) and later use the Rust port of Bun. Startup got 10% faster on Linux but otherwise, barely anyone noticed. Boring is good.
A perk of working at Anthropic is that you don't have to pay for your tokens - handy when the estimated cost is $165,000!
Pre-merge, this took 5.9 billion uncached input tokens, 690 million output tokens, and 72 billion cached input token reads — around $165,000 at API pricing.
This whole thing is a fascinating case study in taking on wildly ambitious projects with the help of coordinated parallel agents.
OpenAI finally upgraded the model used by ChatGPT voice mode!
I've had preview access for a few weeks in the iPhone app, and the new model is very impressive. It also has the ability to spin off harder tasks to GPT-5.5:
For questions that require web search, deeper reasoning, or more complex work, it delegates to our latest frontier model behind the scenes and brings the result back into the conversation when it’s ready. While it works, GPT‑Live can keep talking with you and maintain the flow of conversation. At launch, GPT‑Live will use GPT‑5.5 in the background. As we release new frontier models, we’ll continuously update the model used by GPT‑Live.
The previous voice mode in the ChatGPT app was based on a GPT-4o era model, with a knowledge cut-off some time in 2024. I had mostly stopped using voice mode because the age and relative weakness of the model greatly limited how useful it was as a brainstorming partner.
During the preview period I encountered a pretty obscure bug: the model was interrupting me to laugh at things I said, which weren't even intended as jokes! It felt rude and condescending - I reported it to OpenAI and as far as I can tell they made some tweaks and it's now less likely to happen.
From looking back at my transcripts I think it was this bit that triggered the interrupting laugh:
so where are the owls when they're not, like before dusk? The owls exist, right? Are they hiding in holes? Where are they hiding?
My longest conversation with the new model has been a full hour while walking the dog (and taking photos of pelicans). I have not yet managed to take a photo of an owl.
I just declared a moratorium against AI-written change descriptions (e.g. PR and commit messages, also issues/tickets) from my team.
AI was writing change descriptions that were worse than useless to me as I tried to review PRs: outlining details of the code that could easily be seen by looking at the code, but omitting the higher-level framing needed to understand broadly what the code is doing.
Last Friday extreme heat forced early closure of Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair. Fortunately, the fair was sparsely attended. As some wags put it, tens of people had to be evacuated from the National Mall. Even so, 44 people received health assistance and 11 were taken to hospitals due to the heat.
OK, shutting down Trump’s shabby, dreary exercise in self-aggrandizement was no great loss. Yet the disruption of Trump’s festivities is a harbinger of many disruptions to come. The brutal heat wave in the northeastern US — an event that would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change — followed an even more brutal heat wave in Europe.
These disasters represent the leading edge of serious damage — social, human, and economic — from a warming planet.
Projections of future climate change are often expressed in terms of averages: By 2050 average global temperatures are expected to be above pre-industrial levels by around2.5° C — 4 ½ degrees Fahrenheit, while sea levels will be 10 incheshigher.
We should all treat these predictions as highly credible. Althoughfossil-fuel-financed climate denialismpervades right-wing politics and media, climate scientists who warned decades ago about future warming have been overwhelmingly vindicated. Indeed, in many cases their predictions have closely matched the actual numbers. So when climate scientists predict much more warming ahead, we should believe them.
Focusing on the average temperature increase can, however, lead people to underestimate the damage that lies ahead. If the typical day is a few degrees warmer, if the waves on a typical day are a few inches higher, what’s the big deal?
The rejoinder is that what may look like a modest change in these averages implies a large change in the risk of extreme weather events. A few degrees of average warming correspond to a huge increase in the frequency of heat emergencies like the ones we just saw on both sides of the Atlantic. A few inches added to sea levels corresponds to a huge rise in the probability of catastrophic storm surges.
And these extreme events are exacting an ever-growing human and economic toll. Europe suffered thousands of excess deaths as a result of the recent heat wave. The U.S. toll was smaller, although not zero, because our heat wave was less severe and because of the pervasiveness of air conditioning. Yet we are facing a future in which death and destruction from extreme weather events are certain to rise everywhere as the planet continues to warm.
Inevitably, the economic costs of climate change are also certain to rise. As that left-wing rag the Wall Street Journal recently explained,
Individual events are just beginning to be large enough to have a noticeable macroeconomic impact. One study estimates that European heat waves in the summer of 2025 reduced European Union GDP by 0.26 percent. That may not seem like a huge number, but it’s a very big deal if it happens every year — which it almost certainly will. The costs of this year’s heat will probably be even bigger. For example, France has lost millions of chickens. And the damage from climate change is just getting started.
In the U.S., the most notable economic impact of the heat wave that closed down Trump’s fair was a spike in power prices:
In fact, I’m very worried about the future of US electricity. Air conditioning saves lives during heat waves. But it also consumes a lot of electricity, piling additional demand on an energy grid that is already stressed by the rise of AI and its energy-hungry datacenters. And this surge in electricity demand is colliding with policies that are strangling growth inU.S. generating capacity.
Donald Trump and his officials have a fanatical hatred for renewable energy and indeed of anything that even sounds like an acknowledgement that climate change is real. So they are doing all they can to block solar and wind projects, while trying to force America to burn more coal. (They won’t succeed.)
They’re pushing their drill, baby, drill agenda even though renewables are clearly the energy sources of the future. Indeed, solar and wind power now account for almost all growth in electricity generation in the rest of the world:
The economic consequences of the MAGA attempt to keep us stuck in the energy past will be dire, for three reasons.
First, the U.S. is still an important emitter of greenhouse gases. True, we now account for less than 13 percent of global carbon emissions. But every little bit of climate dereliction hurts.
Second, we’re ceding the energy future to other countries, especially China. Electrotech — electricity powered cars and more, with solar and wind supplying the electrons — will rule the world, even if we refuse to be part of it.
Third, while the economic costs of climate change, which are now coming into focus, will be large whatever we do, they will be much bigger if America turns its back on renewable energy. True, gas turbines can supply part of the energy America needs in the near future. But they’re polluting, and at least some analysts are warning that supply shortages may lead to rising gas prices.
In addition to doing all it can to accelerate climate change, the Trump administration is actively placing Americans at risk by shuttering programs that help the nation prepare and recover from climate change catastrophes. Deep cuts to FEMA and the National Weather Service, along with cuts for programs that help build resilience, will inevitably leave Americans poorer and undermine communities. It’s like burning down the hospital because you don’t like the diagnosis.
And did you hear about last week’s Thermostat War? It wasn’t a huge incident in itself, but it was, I believe, deeply revealing about how political dysfunction will undermine our response to climate change.
Here’s what happened: During the heat emergency, New York mayor Zohran Mamdani urged the city’s residents to limit the burden on the grid by keeping their air conditioners at 78 degrees. Right-wing commentators went wild, denouncing his request as left-wing extremism — apparently only Communists believe in conserving energy during a crisis. But MS-NOW, among other media outlets, quickly noted that Mamdani’s suggestion echoed longstanding federal guidance.
And the Department of Energy immediately closed down its web pages offering that guidance.
Whether we want to acknowledge it or not, climate change is going to impose large economic costs, some of which are already baked — and I mean baked — in. But the Trump administration’s rejection of both science and basic energy economics, along with vandalism of programs meant to help Americans prepare and survive climate catastrophes, will make the damage to America much worse than it should have been.
A new interactive map predicts the density and extent of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks, which exist in symbiosis with land plants. The estimate is based on soil samples and data from previous studies, fed through… More
On this 250th Consider How Different We Are, and Could Have Been
The list of things the left has been correct about over the last 100 or so years is astounding. With so much review of history that has been presented as part of the 250th anniversary of the country, this aspect deserves a review too.
Here’s a partial list. Then we’ll look at some of the items, and some caveats, context, and overview.
Resisting the Vietnam war.
Full civil rights, full respect, for all minorities.
For women too.
Consumer safety (e.g., Ralph Nader getting seat belts required in cars).
EPA, clean air, clean water.
Healthy openness about sex.
More aggressive stance on breaking up of monopolies.
Gay rights, gay marriage, LGBTQ+ acceptance.
More open to, and accepting of, non-mainstream religions.
Changes to sprays and refrigerants that caused the hole in the ozone.
Promoting sex education and protection to reduce teen pregnancies.
For decades seeking to raise the ceiling on social security tax to keep it solvent.
Against the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Wanting to restrict corporate money in elections.
Taking climate change seriously.
It is a partial list. It could reach back farther in time but it gets fuzzier how to define what is “left”. And there are qualifications and caveats. Numerous of these were supported by many on the right too, but the left was the primary champion of them.
That is, championed by the people who actively promoted these views as opposed to Democratic leadership who often failed to, and who frequently just seemed to be Republican-lite. Party labels weren’t always consistent anyway. In the post Civil War era Southern conservatives, who were very conservative and often reactionary and against civil rights for minorities, called themselves Democrats to reject the Abraham Lincoln Republicans who had fought the South. In general, though, it has been the people of the left that have been correct on this list of issues and more.
Some are imperfect examples. Greater openness about sex than there had been in the 1950s was a good thing but the media picked it up as “free love” and made a joke of it. Ralph Nader got a new focus on consumer safety going with things like requiring seat belts in cars, but such regulations can eventually go to far. But that’s always true. Constant adjustment of governance is needed to try to keep it balanced.
Other people on the left might choose some different items for that list, and those on the right could come up with a list they’d like to claim. But the left has been correct about a long list of really big items that each did have, or could have had, profound impact on the state of the nation and the well being of our people.
Try to imagine how different the country would be if that list, and others items like it, had been adhered to. Less war. More health. Less animosity toward gays and minorities and anyone other than white males. Less divisiveness along that dividing line. That imaginary dividing line as if things like race really mattered. More economic focus on benefiting the bulk of the people. More care of the environment. Much better progress on renewable energy and limiting climate change.
Those items don’t just add up. It’s more like they multiply one another. Combine them all together and the country would be so much better off it’s hard to imagine.
Congratulations to the left on a long history in the U.S. of being on the correct side of many of our biggest issues and challenges. Through some successes, and despite some failures, you have made the country better. You also provide something essential now. As we start to move toward our next big anniversary, the 300th, you make us aware of a vision of where we have the option to go in the future. An option to make ourselves and our country even that much better.
“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.
While lawmakers argue about prediction markets and sports betting ads, a different kind of gambling is quietly dominating the scene. These games barely look like a slot machine or roulette wheel, but they’re now some of the most played casino products out there.
Go to any conversation in Washington about gambling policy, and you’ll hear the same talk: Sportsbooks, prop bets and athletes caught in scandals. But there’s another story lurking nearby. Crash games; a fast, simple and addictive betting style led by Aviator, have exploded globally. Now, American regulators are just starting to realize what’s happening.
If you follow U.S. politics, this matters for two reasons. First, Congress is in the middle of its most serious effort in years to set national rules for online betting. Second, these new games hook people using psychology. They look nothing like poker or blackjack, the kinds of games lawmakers have been trying to regulate for ages.
A global playbook worth noticing
This isn’t just a foreign curiosity. Operators in other markets have built full platforms around this kind of fast, social betting. If you’re wondering “How to play Aviator on Betway“, you should head to Betway, which is a site offering sports bets, casino games, virtual sports and a range of promotions all tailored for South Africa.
That kind of one-stop betting ecosystem; sportsbook, casino and crash games under one login, shows where U.S. operators could go unless new rules slow them down.
The political landscape is changing quickly
Until recently, states handled gambling regulation, especially after the Supreme Court struck down the federal sports betting ban in 2018. But that hands-off approach is getting challenged. On May 20, 2026, the Senate Commerce subcommittee held a hearing, grilling sportsbooks and predicting market bosses about aggressive marketing and cheating scandals spreading through MLB and the NBA. Lawmakers questioned these companies about how they promoted betting, and the cheating claims hitting sports leagues lately. Committee chair Ted Cruz wasted no time asking whether prediction markets are even legal, arguing about protecting sports integrity and whether prediction platforms are stepping on state authority.
That hearing didn’t just pop up by chance. Back in October 2025, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment against six people accused of wire fraud and money laundering tied to illegal NBA betting; a case that used information supplied by legal sportsbooks. Around that same time, a Cleveland Guardians pitcher and other athletes were accused of manipulating pitch patterns to profit off bettors, fueling the integrity concerns lawmakers are highlighting as they dig into these recent indictments.
Congress has bills, but no consensus
Right now, the 119th Congress is juggling several proposals. The SAFE Bet Act sets national minimum standards: Banning prop bets on college athletes, capping deposits, making operators help fund addiction treatment and requiring a Surgeon General’s report on sports bettings public health effects. The Gambling Disorder Health Study Act would launch a federal study into gambling addiction; even though there’s no dedicated federal agency for this, despite excise tax revenue from gambling. Meanwhile, Minnesota became the first state to ban prediction markets outright, triggering a fight with the Trump administration as more than a dozen other states consider their own crackdowns.
Not everyone in Washington is thrilled about a bigger federal role. Some say the Constitution leaves this to the states, pointing out most bettors spend less than $100 a month, about what people pay for daily coffee. And legalization hasn’t driven up problem gambling rates. That ongoing debate between federal oversight and state control isn’t going away anytime soon.
So why’s everyone suddenly playing the plane game?
Crash games are the twist here, and the politics get pretty interesting. Sports betting revenue hit a new high last year: $16.96 billion in 2025, according to the American Gaming Association. And now, a growing chunk of casino action is going into crash-style titles instead of classic slots or table games. Aviator, the most popular, draws over 10 million players every month as of 2025, according to operator figures tracking Spribe’s numbers. By December 2025, it was added to around 5,000 online casinos worldwide; a milestone industry tracker Tribuna confirmed, citing game expansion across multiple jurisdictions.
What’s the secret? It’s simplicity. The game features a rising multiplier, a plane and just one choice: Cash out or keep flying. No paylines and no strategy guides, just a countdown that gets more intense the longer you wait. Each round lasts seconds, people can chat while betting and the whole thing feels social, unlike any slot machine.
The current focus
American regulators still focus mostly on sportsbooks and prediction markets, understandably given the headlines. But crash games aren’t sports bets or slots. They don’t fit any bills currently moving through Congress.
If lawmakers want a real national policy for online gambling, like the SAFE Bet Act aims for, they’ll eventually have to think about games already attracting tens of millions of players every month around the world.
Summer is when tourism states make their money — and, statistically, when they lose the most people to their own highways. Families load up minivans, riders roll motorcycles out of the garage after a long winter, and somewhere around Memorial Day, the same grim pattern starts to show up in state crash data every single year. Traffic deaths climb. They keep climbing through Labor Day. Safety officials even have a name for it: the “100 deadliest days.” For states whose economies depend on visitors, that stretch can quietly turn a signature season into something closer to a crisis.
Part of the reason is sheer volume — more cars, more motorcycles, more RVs, all sharing roads that weren’t built for this kind of traffic. It’s also why, once summer crashes happen, families are often left scrambling to understand motorcycle crash claims, trying to figure out how to cover medical bills, lost wages, and, in the worst cases, long-term care — usually while still in shock over what happened.
Why Peak Travel Season Is So Dangerous
There’s no single cause here. It’s a handful of ordinary things stacking on top of each other.
Tourists Don’t Know the Roads
Locals know which curve to slow down for and where deer tend to dart out at dusk. Visitors don’t. Utah’s own transportation and public safety data bears this out: summer consistently brings a spike in high-speed crashes as vacationers pour into the state, and in recent years, July has been the single deadliest month on Utah’s roads.
Longer Daylight, Longer Drives, More Fatigue
There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from “we’re almost there” driving — pushing through drowsiness because the destination feels close enough to grit your teeth for. Fatigue behind the wheel slows reaction time about as much as impairment does, which is easy to forget when you’re the one behind the wheel telling yourself you’re fine.
Motorcycles Carry Far More Risk Than Their Numbers Suggest
Riding season and travel season overlap almost perfectly, and the crash data shows it. Motorcyclists accounted for 16% of all U.S. traffic deaths in 2024, despite making up only a sliver of registered vehicles nationwide, according to federal crash statistics from NHTSA. Mile for mile, a motorcyclist is roughly 27 times more likely to die in a crash than someone in a passenger car. Utah saw its own spike in 2025, with state officials pointing to speed, misjudged curves, and left-turning riders as recurring factors behind the increase.
When something does go wrong on two wheels, there’s little protecting the rider — no frame, no airbag, nothing absorbing the impact but the rider themselves. That’s usually why the injuries, and everything that follows legally and financially, tend to be so much more serious.
What the Data Says About Tourism States Specifically
States that sell themselves on scenery and road trips take on a responsibility that comes with the marketing: keeping those same roads safe for the people they’re inviting in.
Rural Highways Carry Outsized Risk
The scenic byways that wind past national parks and trailheads tend to be two-lane, undivided, and a long way from the nearest ambulance. Utah’s Highway Safety Office has noted that even though most residents live in urban areas, crash risk skews heavily rural — and when help takes longer to arrive, crashes that might otherwise be survivable often aren’t.
The Uncomfortable Irony of “Safe” Road Trip States
Here’s the strange part: some of the most popular road-trip destinations rank fairly well on paper for safety. Utah, for instance, consistently lands near the top of national rankings for summer road trips, partly because of its comparatively low fatality rate per mile driven. But “comparatively safe” is a moving target — state officials themselves have acknowledged that a single bad summer can undo years of steady improvement almost overnight.
A Few Numbers Worth Sitting With
Motorcyclists die at a rate wildly out of proportion to how many actually ride.
Speeding remains one of the top contributing factors in fatal crashes nationwide, especially among younger drivers and riders.
Helmet use has been rising in recent years, and federal data confirms it’s making a real difference in survival rates.
What Tourism States Can Actually Do Before the Rush
Waiting until Memorial Day weekend to think seriously about road safety is, frankly, already too late. The real leverage happens months earlier.
Fix Infrastructure in the Off-Season, Not the Rush
Guardrails, rumble strips, better curve signage, wider shoulders on high-traffic scenic routes — none of it is glamorous, but all of it works. States that fund these upgrades before the crowds arrive are the ones that see the payoff when traffic actually spikes.
Aim Safety Messaging at Visitors, Not Just Locals
Most public safety campaigns are written with residents in mind, which means out-of-state drivers rarely see them at all. Airports, rental car counters, and park entrance stations are underused real estate for warning visitors about the specific hazards of a place they’ve never driven — blind canyon curves, wildlife crossings, stretches with no cell service.
Put Enforcement Where the Data Actually Points
The same dangerous corridors show up in crash reports year after year, which means agencies already know where to focus. Targeted patrols and speed enforcement on those specific stretches, timed around holiday weekends, tend to save more lives than spreading resources evenly across an entire highway system.
Ask Drivers and Riders to Look Out for Each Other
A large share of motorcycle fatalities trace back to one recurring scenario: a driver failing to see a rider at an intersection or during a left turn. Campaigns that address this directly — reminding drivers to actually look for motorcycles, not just other cars — target one of the most preventable patterns on the road.
The Road Ahead
Peak travel season is a gift to the economies that depend on it, and a stress test for the infrastructure that has to support it. The states that treat road safety as part of their tourism strategy, rather than an afterthought to it, end up protecting both the people who visit and the reputation they’ve built. Before the crowds show up this year, that’s the work state agencies, local businesses, and travelers all still have time to do.
If you’re planning a road trip — or a ride — through a tourism hotspot this summer, a little preparation goes further than people expect. Check your route for known hazard zones ahead of time. Build in real rest stops instead of pushing through fatigue. And make sure everyone in the vehicle, or on the bike, has proper safety gear before you leave the driveway. Safer roads start with travelers who show up informed.
Behind the splashy headlines of historic union drives and bitter wage debates lies a much quieter, more corrosive trend quietly reshaping the American workplace: employer retaliation. While workers are increasingly finding their voices to demand safer conditions and fairer treatment, many are meeting a silent wall of corporate pushback—leaving thousands wondering if they were simply fired unfairly in Nevada or another at-will state. This subtle shift in labor dynamics rarely makes the evening news, yet it systematically undermines workers’ rights across every industry. Understanding how retaliation operates is essential for protecting your livelihood and ensuring workplace safety remains more than just a line in an employee handbook.
To make matters worse, recent legal shifts have allowed companies to shield themselves from public accountability. For a deeper look at how employers legally insulate themselves from these disputes, you can read our previous coverage on how corporations block workers from asserting their rights through forced arbitration.
What Does Workplace Retaliation Actually Look Like?
Workplace retaliation occurs when an employer penalizes a worker for exercising their legally protected labor rights. These protected activities aren’t loopholes; they include filing a harassment complaint, reporting safety hazards to OSHA, or simply discussing hourly wages with a coworker. While some managers still resort to immediate, hot-headed firing, modern retaliation is frequently much harder to spot until the damage is already done.
The Shift from Blatant to Subtle Retaliation
Modern employer retaliation has shifted away from sudden, explosive terminations toward gradual, documented exclusion. Smart corporate managers rarely fire an outspoken employee on the spot anymore—doing so creates an immediate, textbook legal liability. Instead, they rely on administrative tools to quietly build a manufactured paper trail over several months, masking bias as a performance issue.
This agonizingly slow process often leaves employees second-guessing their own reality, wondering if they are genuinely underperforming or if they are being systematically targeted. Labor experts often call this “quiet firing” or constructive discharge—making the daily grind intentionally miserable until the employee quits out of sheer exhaustion.
Real-World Examples of the “Quiet Squeeze”
The tactics used by retaliatory managers are diverse but highly structured, often following a predictable pattern of professional isolation:
Sudden Schedule Changes: Reassigning a working parent to a late-night shift or cutting their hours until they can no longer pay rent.
The Cold Shoulder: Excluding a targeted worker from critical team emails, planning sessions, or client pitches they previously managed.
Hyper-Scrutiny: Documenting minor infractions—like arriving two minutes late—that are routinely ignored for the rest of the staff.
The Staggering Statistics Behind the Trend
Retaliation is officially the most common workplace violation reported to federal regulators across the country. According to recent data detailed in the EEOC Trends and Statistics Report, retaliation charges consistently account for over 55% of all complaints filed nationwide. To put that in perspective, workers file complaints about retaliation more frequently than race, gender, and age discrimination combined.
“The sheer volume of retaliation claims indicates that many employers still view reprisal as a viable risk-management tool rather than a severe legal violation.”
Furthermore, independent studies by labor advocacy groups reveal that nearly 70% of employees who report workplace misconduct experience some form of negative professional blowback within twelve months. This creates a powerful chilling effect, effectively silencing the rest of the workforce who cannot afford to risk their next paycheck.
Knowing Your Legal Rights and Protections
Employees are protected by a robust framework of federal and state laws designed to shield them from employer vengeance. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) both explicitly forbid employers from punishing workers who speak up about working conditions. However, enforcing these rights depends heavily on local legal environments.
State-level rules vary dramatically, creating complex legal landscapes for workers seeking justice. Knowing the distinct laws of your jurisdiction—such as specific paths to recourse under state statutes that guard against public policy violations—is the first step toward building a successful legal claim.
Key Legal Metrics to Keep in Mind:
55.1%: The percentage of EEOC cases tied directly to retaliation claims.
180 Days: The standard federal window to file an EEOC complaint for many corporate violations.
At-Will Exceptions: Even in at-will states, employers cannot terminate you for whistleblowing or exercising statutory rights.
How to Document and Report Retaliation Safely
Protecting yourself from workplace retaliation requires proactive organization, a clean paper trail, and a calm, objective approach. If you suspect your employer is targeting you for speaking up, taking immediate, structured steps can protect both your professional reputation and your legal standing.
Keep a Detailed Log: Write down dates, times, and exact quotes for every unusual interaction, saving these notes strictly on a personal device rather than a company computer.
Secure Your Performance Reviews: Download copies of past positive evaluations to prove your performance was perfectly satisfactory before you spoke up.
Communicate in Writing: Follow up on ambiguous verbal conversations with a clear email, such as: “Per our conversation today, my hours are being reduced despite my open availability.”
Review the Employee Handbook: Follow your company’s internal grievance procedures precisely so leadership cannot claim you bypassed corporate policy.
The quiet story of labor retaliation won’t be resolved by workers suffering in silence. By identifying the subtle signs of reprisal, keeping meticulous records, and utilizing local legal protections, everyday employees can shift the balance of power back toward fairness, safety, and respect on the job.
"Executive Summary: This paper documents and analyzes the origins, consequences, and uncertain legacy of the second Trump administration’s humanitarian assistance, refugee, and immigration policies. Its first section introduces the administration’s signature policies, which both build upon and sharply depart from those of recent administrations, Republican and Democratic. Its second section recounts how nativist language and tropes centered Donald Trump’s rise and return to power, and how they inform the administration’s refugee and immigration agenda. Its third section discusses the laws and jurisprudence that laid the groundwork for these policies. It outlines the growth in immigration enforcement spending and authorities over multiple presidencies. In addition, it highlights the first Trump administration’s refugee and immigration policies, and describes the sweeping executive orders (EOs) that inaugurated the second Trump administration. The fourth section examines the legal theories offered in support of the administration’s policies, how they have fared in U.S. courts, and the effects of these policies on targeted populations, U.S. families, businesses, and communities. The fifth section sets forth several themes that unify these policies: • A highly selective and instrumental view of the rule of law. • Cruelty as a guiding principle and strategy. • Hostility to programs and policies intended to benefit the poor and persecuted, regardless of their status. • The failure to address neuralgic problems in the U.S. immigration system or to pursue humanitarian, refugee, and legal immigration policies that serve the nation’s values, needs, and interests.
"The paper urges a return to fundamental American values and commitments. It concludes with detailed recommendations to guide the development of strengthened and integrated U.S. humanitarian, refugee, asylum, and immigration policies. "
And, from the introduction:
"President George Washington hoped the fledgling nation would become a “safe & agreeable Asylum to the virtuous & persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong” (Washington 1788). The Trump administration indefinitely suspended, dismantled, and brought to a virtual standstill the U.S. refugee resettlement program. This program revitalized U.S. communities, saved more than three million lives, offered hope to desperate persons throughout the world, and enhanced the nation’s standing (Kerwin and Nicholson 2021). The administration also vowed to review the cases of and re-interview refugees admitted under the Biden administration, and to suspend consideration of applications for lawful permanent resident (LPR) status by refugees and their family members who entered during this period (American Immigration Lawyers Association [AILA] 2025). Its subsequent Operation Post-Admission Refugee Reverification and Integrity Strengthening (“Operation PARRIS”) entailed warrant-less entries, searches, apprehensions, detention in abusive conditions, and extreme vetting of already vetted and resettled refugees.1
The second Trump administration also foreclosed legal access to the United States by asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border, suspended adjudication of pending asylum applications, terminated the removal proceedings of asylum-seekers (placing them in expedited removal), and removed many to perilous conditions (Human Rights First and RAICES [HRF and RAICES] 2026, 3, 10, 17).
Past administrations supported time and place restrictions on access to the U.S. asylum system, particularly in response to large numbers of border crossers, but no administration (prior to the Trump administration) made “physical presence” in the United States “a prerequisite” to seeking asylum at a U.S. port-of-entry.2As an additional barrier to pursuing an asylum claim, the administration imposed multiple fees on asylum-seekers (a first) and increased fees for temporary status on humanitarian grounds,3To address the high volume of pending asylum cases, the administration could have taken steps to remedy the conditions displacing so many people and it could have built the infrastructure to adjudicate asylum cases expeditiously and fairly. It did not take either of these steps.
The administration also stripped temporary protected status (TPS) and humanitarian parole from an estimated 1.5 to 1.6 million persons (Bustillo and Martinez-Beltrán 2025c;Figueroa 2025). In doing so, it subjected legally present residents to deportation and possible return to their own troubled nations or to third countries where they had no ties and faced multiple perils. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has targeted, among other groups, beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, who arrived in the country as children (García 2026). It has detained persons who should never have been placed in removal proceedings, such as those with pending visa petitions and humanitarian parole (HRF and Raices 2026, 5). While properly credited with reducing illegal migration, by one estimate the administration has cut 2.5 times morelegalthan illegal entries (Bier 2026a). The former includes asylum seekers, refugees, immigrant (permanent) visa recipients, and temporary visa beneficiaries, such as the spouses and fiancés of U.S. citizens, international students, and workers (ibid.).
PresidentRonald Reagan (1989), channeling John Winthrop, called the United States a shining “city on the upon a hill . . . teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace,” a city with doors “open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.” On January 14, 2026, the U.S. Department of State (DOS) announced it would pause visa processing from seventy-five countries, bringing to ninety-three the number of nations (a large number of them African) facing full or partial bars to admission (DOS 2026a;Bier 2026b).DOS (2026c)justified these bars as necessary to ensure that immigrants would not become a public charge or unlawfully use benefits (DOS 2026b). For legally present non-citizens, the administration has constructed a “paper wall” of administrative requirements and barriers that seek to prevent mostly low-income immigrants from advancing to permanent residence and citizenship."
“Buy land,” they said, “they aren’t making any more.” But in fact, we used to make a lot of land. Half the land area of Boston, a quarter of Manhattan, and 15% of San Francisco were raised from the sea before 1970. Tyler has already pointed to Zigmund Forrest and Max Tabarrok’s piece on land reclamation in Works in Progress. Check it out, it’s an excellent piece.
But also don’t miss Connor Tabarrok’s historical overview of land reclamation featuring the ancient Iraqi city of Ur, Alexander the Great’s siege of Tyre, and the amazing flood tanks built under the city of Tokyo! Connor, a civil engineer by trade, points out that most land reclamation isn’t done to build cities with land fill but rather to create farmland through drainage:
In the lower 48 states, the US Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that wetlands covered 221 million acres in the 1780s and 104 million by the 1980s. That is roughly 117 million acres drained in two centuries, a loss rate the report puts at 60 acres an hour, sustained for 200 years. For comparison, the total urban footprint of the United States is around 70 million acres. America has drained substantially more wetland than it has built city, and nearly all of that drained land became farmland.
… The Dutch invented the modern polder and have spent eight centuries pushing back the North Sea, and the result is one of the densest, richest countries in Europe. Yet around two-thirds of the country’s dry land is farmland. Flevoland, the newest province, is 1,410 square kilometers reclaimed from the Zuiderzee in the 1950s and 60s, and it was laid out as an agricultural basin, not a city. The country with the most reclaimed land per person uses it to grow potatoes, graze dairy cattle, and ranks as the world’s second-largest agricultural exporter.
The other reason that we drained land historically was to get rid of mosquito-driven malaria and to improve sewage.
In the mid-1800s the land south and west of the Washington Monument was the Potomac Flats, a tidal marsh that collected the city’s sewage and exposed it to the sun twice a day. The stench reached the White House. In 1882 Congress appropriated $400,000 and the Army Corps of Engineers, under Major Peter Hains, began dredging the river’s shipping channels and pumping the mud onto the flats. The work created more than 600 acres of new ground and a Tidal Basin engineered to flush the Washington Channel with each tide. The Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials stand on that fill. So do the cherry trees, planted in 1912 on land that had been open water within living memory.
The rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin, is raising private capital, the DealBook newsletter reported early Wednesday.
According to the publication, the company is raising $10 billion, leading to a valuation of $130 billion. Coatue Management, a big asset manager, is expected to lead with a $4 billion commitment. Another $4 billion is expected to come from large institutional investors. And Bezos will contribute an additional $2 billion.
Founded in 2000, Blue Origin is seeking to become a global leader in spaceflight, developing a line of super heavy lift rockets, lunar landers, and plans for two megaconstellations. It is seeking to compete in the same areas—launch, telecommunications, data centers from space—as SpaceX.
We spent a few days in the city, and once again I marveled at the splendors of the Cathedral. If it had its original stained glass, it would count as one of the very best churches ever. It still stands in the top tier as it is. Plus the Ludwig and Wallraf museums are excellent, making the city worthy of a visit.
But, and yes there is a but. My first visit to the city was I think in 1984, and I have been maybe five times since. When I walk through the pedestrian zone, the stores there seem far stupider than in earlier times. They seem to reflect a lower level of intelligence from the populace and the city’s numerous visitors. One feels there is not much chance of stumbling upon something interesting or very high quality, not compared to earlier times. And I think MR readers will know I am no paragon of nostalgia per se.
Now that might be an illusion. Perhaps the smart stuff has moved to mail order, to online, and to the outer rims of the city. Perhaps. But is it not dispiriting when one of the best cities in one of the smartest countries in the world, over the decades, starts appearing stupider? If someone told me I had to live in center city Köln, circa 2026 that would simply feel like aesthetic hell.
Below is my latest roundup of outstanding new videos. I cover a lot of ground here—music, social commentary, film, career advice, furniture, books, even fashion (not usually my strong suit, no pun intended).
Enjoy!
I’ve praised Hohnen Ford before. She deserves stardom, but mainstream media doesn’t know she exists. A few days ago, Ford released this rendition of “Wichita Lineman” (one of the finest American songs).
Her piano conception is understated, but very smart. And I find her vocals deeply affecting.
Here’s a music plagiarism lawsuit just waiting to happen. This melody is getting used over and over by various artists—but somebody must own the rights. Who is it?
Carl Martin, the host of this video, traces the melody back to 2004. But I suspect there are even earlier examples.
Please support The Honest Broker by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).
I’ve just discovered the music of Fabrizio, whose debut album comes out this month—and now you need to know about him too. He has a powerful deep baritone voice you won’t forget.
Fabrizio grew up in poverty in Huánuco, Peru, and moved to the US at age fifteen, where he worked the lowest level jobs—busboy in a Mexican restaurant, door-to-door sales, etc. He eventually found himself in Nashville, and is now ready to make his mark on the country music scene.
I am not a fashion influencer—but I know a lot about the power dynamics of men’s attire. That was necessary when I was dealing with CEOs at McKinsey or negotiating deals overseas. There’s a whole science to this subject that’s not well known.
And a major shift is starting to happen right now.
Government-run systems often (not always) do a perfectly fine job setting a broken arm or administering a long-standing, well-known medication. They do much less well when it comes to developing, financing, and delivering a new immunological approach to fighting cancer, personalized to your individual genome at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. In our rapidly arriving biomedical future, innovation capacity will matter above all else. And though they may not see it today, the people with the most life ahead of them will reap nearly all of the benefits of a dynamic system, or suffer the consequences of a paralytic one.
Thirty years ago, it was often debated whether the Canadian or British healthcare systems were better than what we have in the U.S. After all, they offered a kind of guaranteed access to health services. The details could differ, but often the healthcare had no upfront price or only a low user fee. In America, in contrast, healthcare was more expensive, there were many millions of uninsured people, and dealing with sometimes rapacious insurers and hospitals could involve significant emotional trauma.
But over time the British and Canadian systems look worse and worse. The queues and rationing have increased, as giving healthcare away for free makes it hard to satisfy demands in a timely manner. In Canada, for instance, the median wait time has risen from 9.3 weeks in the early 1990s to 28.6 weeks today. In the British National Health Service, only 65.3 percent of patients start treatment within 18 weeks.
Worse yet, both of those systems are undercapitalized. In Britain, healthcare is badly understaffed and underfunded. Yet the country already has high taxes, high debt, and slow economic growth, so it is not clear where the new money will come from to recapitalize the system.
And this sentence:
This entire dynamic will be intensified as the pace of medical innovation picks up.
Moonlight illuminates the western side of Super Typhoon Bavi’s eyewall at about 15:30 Universal Time on July 5 (1:30 a.m. local time on July 6). The image was acquired with the VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) day-night band on the NOAA-20 satellite.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
In early July 2026, for the second time in three months, a powerful typhoon crossed the U.S. Northern Mariana Islands and Guam in the North Pacific Ocean. Super Typhoon Bavi was at peak intensity when it neared the islands on the night of July 5, bringing winds of 290 kilometers (180 miles) per hour, along with torrential rain and dangerous storm surge.
This nighttime image, captured by the VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on the NOAA-20 satellite, shows Bavi’s eye at about 15:30 Universal Time on July 5 (1:30 a.m. local time on July 6). Light from the Moon, which was in the waning gibbous phase, illuminates the eyewall’s western side. The eye passed over Rota, north of Guam, several hours after the image was acquired.
Bavi became a super typhoon in the early hours of July 4 local time while tracking west over the warm ocean. Satellite observations indicated that sea surface temperatures were around 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) in the region. Bavi was the third tropical cyclone in 2026 to reach category 5 intensity on the Saffir-Simpson wind scale.
The typhoon caused extensive damage across Guam, Rota, and Saipan, according to news reports, downing power poles and lines; flooding roads and littering them with debris; and damaging buildings, including a water distribution station on Rota. U.S. Coast Guard crews worked to clear navigation hazards in the waterways around Guam and the Northern Marianas and reopen ports as dangerous marine conditions subsided, according to reports. This damage comes on top of destructive winds and flooding from Super Typhoon Sinlaku, which crossed the islands in mid-April.
Super Typhoon Bavi tracked west over the Northern Mariana Islands toward Asia in early July 2026. The storm’s clouds and path are overlaid on a Blue Marble: Next Generation image built from scenes captured by the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer). The image of the storm was captured by the VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on the NOAA-21 satellite on July 8, 2026, at about 04:30 Universal Time.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
On July 8, Bavi remained a powerful typhoon as it moved west over the Philippine Sea. In the early afternoon, when the image above was captured, the National Weather Service reported maximum sustained wind speeds of 250 kilometers (155 miles) per hour. Forecasts indicated the typhoon’s track could bend northwest toward Taiwan, the Ryukyu Islands of southern Japan, and mainland China and weaken over the next several days.
Writing in Yale Climate Connections, meteorologist Jeff Masters said that Bavi is the type of storm that might be expected when a strong El Niño event is building, which is currently the case. El Niño-year typhoons may form farther east, giving them more time over warm water to intensify before curving toward Asia, Masters explained, “resulting in a greater chance of reaching Category 5 intensity.”
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket soars near the Moon from the perspective of the Kennedy Space Center during the Starlink 10-42 mission on July 9, 2026. Image: John Pisani/Spaceflight Now
Update July 9, 6:47 a.m. EDT (1047 UTC): SpaceX confirms deployment of the Starlink satellites.
SpaceX broke another rocket reuse record Thursday morning when it launched its most-flown Falcon 9 booster for a 36th time.
It flew in support of the Starlink 10-42 mission, which added another 29 broadband internet satellites to the company’s low Earth orbit constellation. SpaceX currently has more than 10,700 Starlink satellites in orbit.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station happened at 5:25 a.m. EDT (0925 UTC). The rocket flew on a north-easterly trajectory upon leaving the pad.
The 45th Weather Squadron forecast a 90 percent chance for favorable weather Thursday morning. Meteorologists said they are watching for a small interference from cumulus clouds.
“On Thursday morning, winds will be light and southwesterly, and a few offshore Atlantic showers are possible which could cause a small concern for the Cumulus Cloud Rule,” launch weather officers wrote. “Very similar conditions are expected for the backup day, as Saharan dust settles in the mid-levels and inhibits cumulus development.”
SpaceX’s most flown booster, B1067, began flying in June 2021 with the company’s 22nd Dragon flight as part of the Commercial Resupply Services-2 contract with NASA. It went onto fly the Crew-3 and Crew-4 missions as well as 24 batches of Starlink satellites.
A little more than eight minutes after liftoff, B1067 landed on the drone ship, ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas’, positioned in the Atlantic Ocean. This was the 160th landing for this vessel and the 635th booster landing to date for SpaceX.
Being weary, and going to bed late last night, I slept till 7 o’clock, it raining mighty hard, and so did every minute of the day after sadly. But I know not what will become of the corn this year, we having had but two fair days these many months.
Up and to my office, where all the morning busy, and then at noon home to dinner alone upon a good dish of eeles, given me by Michell, the Bewpers’ man, and then to my viall a little, and then down into the cellar and up and down with Mr. Turner to see where his vault may be made bigger, or another made him, which I think may well be. And so to my office, where very busy all day setting things in order my contract books and preparing things against the next sitting. In the evening I received letters out of the country, among others from my wife, who methinks writes so coldly that I am much troubled at it, and I fear shall have much ado to bring her to her old good temper.
So home to supper and musique, which is all the pleasure I have of late given myself, or is fit I should, others spending too much time and money.
Going in I stepped to Sir W. Batten, and there staid and talked with him (my Lady being in the country), and sent for some lobsters, and Mrs. Turner came in, and did bring us an umble pie hot out of her oven, extraordinary good, and afterwards some spirits of her making, in which she has great judgment, very good, and so home, merry with this night’s refreshment.
After reading my posts earlier today about Eliza, the first “hit” chatbot from the 1960s, DF reader AP sent me a link to the Kickstarter page for Searching for SmarterChild, a project from documentary filmmakers Lindsey Sitz and Zan Gillies to make a movie about SmarterChild, an AOL Instant Messenger chatbot that once had 30 million “friends” (a.k.a. users). I don’t recall ever hearing of SmarterChild before, let alone using it. (I think I was on a very different level of the Internet back then.)
But this looks like a great indie nerd documentary. The Kickstarter campaign has just one week left and they’re a wee bit short of their primary goal, and quite a bit short of their stretch goals. I just chipped in.
I vaguely recall first trying some version of Eliza back in the 1990s. I never found it all that impressive nor understood its stature in the AI literature. It’s better than a bunch of if/then statements but not by much. There’s some natural language grammar parsing that is somewhat interesting, but I never thought it came close to passing the Turing Test, and I was always skeptical of claims that people got deeply involved with it as a virtual therapist/counselor. I just tried it again, via The Eliza Archeology Team’s web-based re-creation. Here’s my transcript:
HOW DO YOU DO. PLEASE TELL ME YOUR PROBLEM
I don’t really have a problem.
DON’T YOU REALLY REALLY HAVE A PROBLEM
No.
ARE YOU SAYING ‘NO’ JUST TO BE NEGATIVE
No.
YOU ARE BEING A BIT NEGATIVE
No.
WHY NOT
I’m just being honest.
IS IT BECAUSE YOU ARE JUST BEING HONEST THAT YOU CAME TO ME
No, I’m just curious to try this out.
WHY ‘NO’
I said “no” because my “just being honest” is not the reason I
came to you.
YOUR JUST BEING HONEST IS NOT THE REASON YOU CAME TO I
That’s ungrammatical.
I AM NOT SURE I UNDERSTAND YOU FULLY
I am quite sure you don’t.
HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN QUITE SURE I DON’T
Pretty much since I got here.
There’s something wrong with people who consider today’s chatbots to be their friends or companions. But there’s something really wrong with people who considered Eliza a useful confidant. Like suffered-a-severe-head-injury wrong.
ELIZA is the original and highly influential chatbot that launched
the genre of human-computer interactions using text-based agents.
It was created at MIT in the 1960s as part of Project MAC by it’s
[sic] designer and programmer, Joseph Weizenbaum. ELIZA not only
allowed Weizenbaum to develop a mode of interaction with computers
that is highly interactive, it also contributed to the way in
which people were starting to conceptualize computers as having
the capacity to usefully engage in conversation. You can try an
accurate reimplementation of ELIZA developed as part of this
project.
We plan to contextualize the program, offering its history and
context as well as offering a detailed explanation of how the
code works. This project will look at the culture of
programming in which Weizenbaum was working and then explore his
turn from ELIZA/DOCTOR, as he began to warn of the hazards of
treating machines like humans. We will look at later works
inspired by ELIZA and consider its influences on the way talking
computer programs are represented in literature and film.
Nonetheless, it is clear that Weizenbaum’s secretary actually used
the ELIZA system. As he writes in Weizenbaum (1967: 477):
My secretary watched me work on this program over a long period
of time. One day she asked to be permitted to talk with the
system. Of course, she knew she was talking to a machine. Yet,
after I watched her type in a few sentences she turned to me and
said “Would you mind leaving the room, please?”
Weizenbaum writes about the effect, later actually coined the
“Eliza Effect”, that this dyadic conversation could have between
user and computer:
What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a
relatively simple computer program could induce powerful
delusional thinking in quite normal people. This insight led me
to attach new importance to questions of the relationship between
the individual and the computer, and hence to resolve to think
about them.
The Eliza Effect is the propensity for humans to ascribe
understanding and intelligence to computer systems. Hofstadter
(1995: 167) described it as “the susceptibility of people to read
far more understanding than is warranted into strings of symbols — especially words — strung together by computers”, a compelling
description written in 1995 but which accurately describes
generative AI systems today like ChatGPT. Similarly, Turkle
described that “the Eliza effect refers to our more general
tendency to treat responsive computer programs as more intelligent
than they really are. Very small amounts of interactivity cause us
to project our own complexity onto the undeserving object”.
Chatbot technology has changed tremendously since the 1960s. Human nature has not changed at all.
Dr. Drang, in a post replete with examples of icons of popular apps from the original Macintosh, in their one-bit glory:
You can see that Apple liked the idea of app icons being a
tilted rectangle with some image inside the rectangle to
indicate what the app did. The hand was Apple’s way of telling
you that this icon was for doing things, and the rectangle was
tilted to match the orientation of the hand. (If you were
left-handed, this was just another injustice inflicted on you by
a cruel right-handed world.)
Document icons were typically upright rectangles with dog-eared
corners and similar designs inside the rectangle — no hands
because documents don’t do anything. But we’re not here to talk
about document icons.
I never loved the hand on these icons. It felt too uniform. It functioned like a “this is an application” badge, but such a badge never felt necessary to me. But it was so ubiquitous I sort of stopped seeing it, and now, in hindsight, it holds some nostalgic warmth. Right from the start, though, TeachText didn’t have a hand — just a pencil:
[Update: Turns out TeachText didn’t appear until 1986 and System 4.1. Before that, MacWrite was bundled with the Macintosh and served as the system text document reader. I wrongly thought that TeachText was part of System 1 because it’s on Infinite Mac’s System 1 disk image; but that image contains apps from the future that still ran with backwards compatibility on System 1. You can see the 1986 copyright in TeachText’s about box, which also gives credit by name to its author at Apple, Bryan Stearns. It may well be the case that all app icons from Apple for System 1 in 1984 had the hand-with-tool badge.]
That TeachText icon was prescient about the future of good icon design. A year later the renamed and expanded (it now moved desk accessories in addition to fonts) Font/DA Mover lost the hand and became a fun truck (also prescient of great icons to come):
(So many little things were still in flux in those primordial days. Note the bold text in the Finder window status bar header in System 1. That kind of looks cool, though. But the single-story “a” in the Geneva font — that’s just wrong, and gives me the ick.)
Drang continues:
Other publishers abandoned either the hands or the tilted
rectangle or both. As people got more used to working with Macs,
these clues for what’s an app and what isn’t became unnecessary,
and icon design became less constrained. Even Apple gave up on
them for utilities like Disk First Aid and Font/DA Mover.
I think it’s less that Apple gave up on them and more that it came into focus that the “hand holding a pen over a diamond-shaped document” convention was intended for document-based apps. It signified “This is a creative tool that you use to create documents”. Apps that weren’t about creating document files — like Disk First Aid and Font/DA Mover — got different icons. Font/DA Mover’s truck icon in System 2 signified that you use this tool to move things. Disk First Aid’s ambulance was an obvious metaphor for repairing something unwell. Moving and repairing are very different purposes from creating. Font Mover’s icon in System 1 wrongly suggested, if only subtly, that it was a tool for creating font-related document files of some sort.
But the main thing about the “hand holding pen over diamond” convention was that it was only ever a convention. If Apple’s squircle fetish were merely a convention, then third-party developers would be free to ignore it. Some conventions are merely fads — they come into and out of vogue quickly. Some are long-term trends that persist. But the ones that prove to be more than passing fads win out on merit in the marketplace of ideas. Mandating the squircles with squircle jail doesn’t make them a winning idea. It’s like claiming to win elections when credible rivals aren’t permitted on the ballots.
(Also, I am in complete agreement with Drang re: my favorite app icon of that era. So perfect, so fun, but so ineffable as to why it’s so perfect.)
Users expect apps and agents to reach the tools they already work in. Every integration that gets you there is a different OAuth flow, a different token lifecycle, weeks of infrastructure before you write a line of product code.
WorkOS Pipes handles it with one API call. Pre-built connectors for GitHub, Slack, Salesforce, Google Drive, and more. Pipes handles OAuth, token refresh, and credential storage. You call the real provider API with a fresh token, every time.
Three thoughts on Platner from a coastal Maine resident and why while I’m mad as hell, I’m not feeling all that pessimistic — yet:
(1). The big electoral advantage that Platner brought to the table against Collins was that he expanded the pie of voters, rather than just making it a fight for the middle. Part of that was due to his “Ah shucks I’m just an oyster farmer that hasn’t done politics before” persona which Mainers more than any others are suckers for. But that alone wasn’t really enough to pull that off — he did work his ass off doing town halls and such all over the state which is important everywhere, but even more so in Maine with folks that see themselves as “independent voters”. And his policy positions (health care in particular) resonated very strongly with that particular population, the middle, and more traditional democrats. So I don’t think it would be impossible for someone to step in and NOT shed all of those folks immediately if the replacement immediately commits to pressing flesh to a very high degree and immediately focuses on the polices that are wrecking the lives of working class Maine families. That can be framed in part as a “Collins is all in with Trump” but it also needs to be expressly about – health care and housing (which Trump is gifting as a campaign issue in a state where finding a house for sale, much less in your price range, is not easy). Collins is so tone deaf on the actual issues facing Mainers it really shouldn’t take a wildly magnetic personality to pick this up and go — the main ad I’m seeing from her on my media feed is of a young woman who was born without adult teeth developed, treatment was going to be $80k and her insurance wouldn’ve cover it, but a call to Susan Collins got it done for free at the state dental school. It’s literally an ad that could keep the exact same script but with melancholy music and sad faces and be an opposition ad. Susan Collins’ votes have put us in a position where we have to rely on personal favors from an elected official to get what should be basic health care service. It doesn’t take a wildly magnetic character to pull this off, it just takes someone that does not carry baggage as an opponent to a genuinely progressive agenda — i.e., it can’t be Janet Mills.
(2). Briefly – of course Platner’s camp can’t be involved in any way in choosing who runs. While they’ve gotten a lot right in the campaign the one thing they’ve shown they fundamentally suck at is — choosing a person that is fit to be a candidate for Senate. Yes, allow them to have a say on platform, policy, blah blah blah….but they were the folks with the front row seat and opportunity to vet him throughout all of this, including after his “nothing credible” response to Warren and they completely let all of us down. So on this part of the process – fuck them, too.
(3). While the reddit comments that Mills tried to weaponize against Platner and the NYT article with assault allegations didn’t sink his ship, they did handicap him in a fight against Collins. There was no way that he could come out and speak about how bad she has been for women and even in simple terms, couldn’t hammer her as hard as they should on the Kavanaugh vote. He had to rely on surrogates and third parties to argue that “whatever he’s done to a specific handful of women pales in comparison to the widespread systemic violence Collins has perpetrated against women through her votes” and even that is not REALLY the argument you want to be making “our candidate isn’t as bad as yours!”. And so while I don’t think there should be much of a reset in terms of the basics of the campaign: focus on how Collins has sacrificed the real needs of Mainers to Trump’s platform and is just trying to placate us with a little bit of pork to try to fix the problems that Trump’s platform has created specifically as it has to do with health care and housing. A new candidate – ANY new candidate – can also make a much more full throated argument that Collins vote for Kavanaugh, her enablement of medicaid cuts, etc., have hurt Maine women through closures of birthing centers, and have led to deaths of thousands of women across the country
I contributed some cash money to the TPM fund and you asked people to let you know why we did, so…
I support TPM because I agree with you about the current importance of independent media. Major media (if that’s the correct term) now seems entirely captured by the billionaire class that has demonstrated a clear lack of concern with civic democracy and an active interest in mass opiates. So independent media is a critical bullwark for civic democracy at a time when voices opposing the status quo are being systemically eliminated with a historical efficiency (see: AI and social media).
Obviously we could include many venues in the “independent media” category, but there are also unique characteristics of TPM that appeal to me. A major one is that I generally understand where Josh is coming from— I think this has to do with the fact that we are the same age, have similar political and life philosophies steeped in similar cultural and educational backgrounds, the lightly gonzo tone of the site, etc. In fact I have been a TPM reader since Josh started it. But more generally you all do a great job! The writing is good, the topics you cover are important, you drop a lot of relevant knowledge that helps readers understand the context and relevance of stories, etc. Even though you all have clear political leanings there is not a lot of partisan noise or preaching. I also appreciate how you go into the weeds with some stories that would never be covered by major outlets, especially about the obscure weirdos who provide depth of flavor to our national politics.
However, a particular appeal right now is the optimism, or perhaps mission direction, you’re able to articulate even while being realistic about the current state of affairs. In recent years I’ve frequently been a victim of the “nothing matters anymore” feeling, but your writings convey a broader view of history and politics that provides hope about the USA and humanity generally.
Thanks for your work, it’s my pleasure to contribute.
If you’re lucky enough to distribute an app outside the Mac App
Store, you can break free of squircle jail using
NSDockTilePlugIn. It’s not strictly the intended use-case of
that API. And it’s not allowed in the Mac App Store, either. But
it can solve the problem.
So today’s release of Iris adds three additional app icons to
choose from in the app’s SpecialPreferences Settings pane.
And since they use the NSDockTilePlugIn API, the custom icon
remains even when you quit the app.
Iris is far from the only app using this or other techniques to sort-of escape squircle jail. All the apps I’m aware of doing something like this are Mac-assed apps. It’s a good litmus test.
This morning on Bluesky Politico’s Josh Gerstein flagged to me and others a piece by Matt Yglesias in which, he said, Matt “says progressive Dems [are] too obsessed with fighting Trump rather than winning in marginal states/districts [and] picks fight with Josh Marshall over it.”
It turns out Yglesias is responding to a piece I wrote a couple weeks ago entitled “Centrists, This Is on You.” I sat down and read Matt’s piece and found myself kind of baffled because he has me saying perhaps not the diametric opposite of what I wrote but pretty close to the opposite of it. I always try to be sensitive to the possibility that when someone so thoroughly misunderstands what I wrote that it may be that I just wasn’t clear. There’s the additional factor that I usually write assuming familiarity with the stream of posts I’ve written on the same topic in recent days and weeks. People read a single post and some of my meaning might not be clear. Here though I can’t help but think that Matt zipped through the post in question, zeroed in on a few buzzwords like “fight” and then just plugged those into his existing framework and didn’t actually pay attention to my argument. Because, as I said, he’s just arguing against these stock arguments that I never made.
Still, there are some illuminating things that can be drawn from the misunderstanding and/or disagreement.
To hear Matt tell it, I am sort of coming to the defense of DSA world and arguing that what Democrats need is a more expressive politics based on maximal anti-Trumpism, a kind of politics of primal screams turned up to 11. They need to lean into positions on immigration or trans rights and perhaps Israel that are in maximal opposition to Donald Trump. What I need to do, Matt claims, is decide whether I want to “fight” and feel good or whether I want to win. Presumably we want to win, which I certainly agree with. And to do that, Matt says, we have to have the self-discipline and impulse control to focus on winning even it might not be as expressively satisfying as “fighting.” To do that, you need to find candidates well matched to swing or frontier districts and states who can turn Trump voters, win new seats and thus take control of Congress. You do this mainly by focusing on issues like affordability, the ways Trump has worsened the economy, etc.
This is actually the opposite of what I wrote. Indeed, my central point is that you need to have more ideologically moderate candidates who can operate in the “fight” lane precisely because you don’t want to end up with nominees who are too left -wing or DSA-adjacent and aren’t going to be viable in the swing states and districts where majorities are built. Probably one of the two or three premises I’m most identified with in a couple decades of writing is that politics is not a lifestyle or a space for self-expression. It’s about shaping the country we live in and acquiring political power through elections to do that. Matt has set up this dichotomy between “fighting” and “winning” because he doesn’t understand what I mean by fighting. Or, I think more likely, he’s zeroed in on the buzzword and then just plugged into it his pre-existing stock argument in which it means something different. I get it. Time is precious. It’s hard to stay focused sometimes.
Here’s what I mean by the “fight” spectrum and why it’s important.
I’ve written a number of times that there are two key spectrums today in intra-Democratic politics. One is the conventional ideological one: liberal versus more social democratic and socialist, Obamacare vs Medicare for All, etc. There’s there’s a “fight” spectrum, where you have different theories of power in politics, some more focused on comity, consensus and norms, and others more focused on what’s been called “constitutional hardball.” You see this play out on issues like the filibuster or Supreme Court reform. What I’ve argued is that the assumptions that these spectrums line up — that left means fight and liberal means accommodation — has led to all sorts of confusion and bad decision-making because the two things really have no inherent connection. What I’ve argued is that the center-left wing of the party is to a great extent ceding the the “fight” spectrum to the party’s left. And thus they’re getting a lot of primary candidates from the left, often with policy positions which are unpopular with most voters, despite the fact that I don’t think Democratic voters are really moving left ideologically.
The point of prying apart the “fight” and the ideology spectrums is precisely because you don’t want to run outer borough New York City candidates in purple or red states. You want candidates matched to those states and districts. And by definition it is in purple and red parts of the country where you are going to build congressional majorities. This seems to be exactly what Matt wants, and for good reason. If you want to shift the balance of power within the party you do most of that work in safe seats where you’re at no risking losing the seats all together. You tread more carefully in marginal jurisdictions where a different kind of candidate might not be sellable and where you might lose the seat altogether.
There are two reasons “fight” is critical and they’re interrelated. The first is substantive. We are not in the 1990s. We are not in an ordinary legislative or consensus political moment. We are in a moment that requires major structural changes to our political system to secure our basic liberties and the civic democratic nature of our government. This is a great work of repair and structural reinforcement. To me, and I think to many others, the lessons of the last decade and the Biden years is that there’s no path forward for civic democracy in this country without these major structural reforms. We fight to win elections not simply to win them but to do specific things with the power you get from winning them. A lot of the “fight” argument is about shifting the goals and attitudes of elected officials so they will be ready to make these major structural reforms once they are in power and in a position to do so.
Basically what we are talking about is shifting the attitudes, goals and assumptions of elected Democrats so they are ready and prepared to play constitutional hardball to make reforms to secure the future of democracy and all of our liberties. This in itself is not an electoral or campaign argument. It is a substantive argument about what Democrats need to do once they are in power. It goes without saying that of course you want to win but it is also important, in some ways just as important, to know what you want to do once you win. Maybe I’m wrong about filibuster and Supreme Court reform. But it’s a substantive and not an electoral argument. So if I’m wrong on that front you need to address why. And Matt simply doesn’t.
Some people have told me, sure those things are important. But it’s probably better to keep quiet about them or ignore them until you get a trifecta and just do it then. In the abstract that may make sense. But right now, most of the top elected officials in the Democratic Party aren’t on board with these reforms. So changing that is inevitably public, a mix of persuasion and primary fights.
But the substantive issue is not the only one. There’s also very much a political and electoral one. Matt’s big hobbyhorse in recent years is that Democrats’ problem is that they got too far out on a limb on hot-button social issues like immigration, policing, trans rights, wokeness in general, etc. and that’s put whole swathes of the country beyond their reach. There is a significant degree of truth to this, though that was more the case in 2024 than it is today. Democrats have already spent a couple years furiously repositioning on these topics. And the political environment, in which the central issue for most voters is Trump, simply makes them less salient.
But a clear look at the available polling data shows that this is not the main cause of Democrats’ low public standing. The main thing both Democratic partisans and those loosely-attached voters in the middle of the electorate who are most up-for-grabs don’t like about Democrats is that they are some mix of weak, feckless and either unwilling or unable to fight for what they claim to believe in. Critically, this is a perceived failing affecting opinions of Democrats across a good bit of the political spectrum, making their core supporters angsty and demoralized and potential voters in the middle of the electorate unreachable. Often a party has “problems” that if you solve for your own voters make it more difficult for you to get new voters who are more ideologically up for grabs. This is very different. Here you have the same discontent across the whole spectrum of gettable voters. That speaks both to a major shortcoming and a big opportunity since there’s lots of upside and very little downside. I don’t want to recapitulate the data on this. G. Elliot Morris has done so far better than I’m able. Here’s one post of his on this from February and another from April.
Why do so many voters see Democrats as “weak”? I’m tempted to say that if you follow Democratic politics you probably don’t need a lot of help with this. But I would say that it is mostly a big disjuncture between the threat of Donald Trump’s rising autocracy and the way Democrats characterize that threat and what elected Democrats are willing to do to counter it. You have a Republican Party that, when it’s not actually breaking the law or violating the Constitution, is willing to extract every ounce of advantage out of the mechanisms of state power, while the top elected Democrats are still largely wedded to proceduralism and norms (though this is changing and I think rapidly). Voters are unhappy with the mismatch and want something different. Matt somehow claims that I am saying Democrats need to just be more angry at Trump, more taking the opposite position to whatever he’s doing or I guess doing some kind of mass joint primal scream therapy and that’s how you “fight.” But anyone who’s read what I’ve actually written can see I’ve never said anything like that. There are both big substantive reasons for Democrats to adopt constitutional hardball and political/electoral reasons to signal to voters that they will do so in power.
Matt keeps coming back to this “do you want to fight or win” dichotomy which is more than a bit self-satisfied and condescending. So for instance, he starts one paragraph writing, “From my perspective as someone who wants to win …” He even has these digressions where he says something about liking anti-Trump rock groups as much as the next guy but how that’s not the same as winning elections in swing states. (He even has embedded YouTube videos of some of the best songs. It’s really quite something.) In any case, this is just some kind of undergrad debating trick where you misstate what the other person is saying to easily knock it down. That’s good for college debate, less good for actually convincing anyone.
A final point. As I’ve tried to argue above, to me the substance of what we need to do for the country (what’s necessary to do) and the politics (how to gain power to do those things) are aligned. This is far from always the case. But if we believe in democratic self-governance, it shouldn’t be totally shocking since broadly speaking we should expect voters to have some sense, albeit often expressed in an inchoate fashion, of what is necessary to do to achieve certain objectives. But the style of commentary Matt has adopted here can’t help but remind me of Bertholt Brecht’s satirical quip (playing off a workers’ uprising in East Berlin in 1953) that if the People had lost the confidence of government that the government should dissolve the People and elect another.
There is a persistent strain in this kind of commentary that the Democratic Party could be doing so much better if it just didn’t have such shitty voters. And yeah, the people are revolting. They stink on ice, as Mel Brooks (playing Louis XVI) once put it in History of the World, Part I. But Brecht’s quip was satirical. At least in America we can’t dissolve the People, or in this case Democratic voters. They’re all we’ve got. And if our game here is the real world as opposed to some kind of electoral Dungeons and Dragons, we need to grapple with their perceptions, enthusiasms, anger and everything else. We live in a climate of profoundly low public trust and an anti-establishment mood. Democratic voters and large numbers of loosely tethered swing voters (certainly not just far-left primary voters) believe that Donald Trump and the MAGA movement pose a dire threat to the country’s future and the liberties of its citizens. If your public statements, campaign promises and political style seems too out of sync with that perceived threat, voters are not going to buy what you’re selling. In Democratic primaries, you will lose to candidates with a more confrontational political style even if those same candidates are too ideologically extreme to be viable in a general election.
Voters are telling Democrats that they want them to be ready to use political power in ways that are smart, effective and maximal. This is not a complicated ask and it is not an unreasonable one. It is not the same as getting into spittle contests about who can be the most angry about Trump or who’s most likely to have a stroke when they’re gnashing their teeth about how much they don’t like him. It’s about the ability and willingness to use political power effectively and maximally. If that is what voters want, you need to be ready to do that and be able to communicate that ability and willingness on the campaign trail. It’s not complicated. It’s bread and butter electoral politics.
We’re into our second day of this year’s Annual TPM Journalism Fund Drive. And we’re off to a solid start. In fact, one day in we’re coming up on 1/3 of the way toward our goal of raising $500,000, which is great. If you haven’t had a chance yet I would be so in your debt if you could take a moment right now to join us by contributing in any amount that makes sense for you. Just click right here.
We need to try to get past the 1/3 mark by the end of today if at all possible.
Click here to hear about why this year’s drive is so important.
“Her belly may be full, but her spirit will be empty.” — Captain Picard
Usually, these “GDP is actually good” posts start with a big disclaimer — an acknowledgement of all the things GDP doesn’t measure, all the reasons that measuring GDP is an inexact science, and all the ways that we need to improve society other than just making the GDP line go up. If you want a standard wonky explanation of why GDP is a useful number, here’s one that I wrote four years ago:
Today I’m going to do something a little different. I’m going to tell you what I think the debate over GDP is really about.
Free trade usually raises GDP. Immigration, done right, raises GDP.1 Rightists in America want less free trade and less immigration. But every time they propose restricting trade and immigration, someone — either libertarian business/econ types on their own side, or moderate liberals on the other side — says “That will make America poorer!”. So they want some way to neutralize this objection, so they can do things that will, in fact, make America poorer.
So America’s right borrowed an argument from the European left. The European left favors degrowth, and another term for degrowth is “making GDP go down on purpose”. So naturally, they’re always trying to find reasons to denigrate GDP as a metric of human flourishing (see here, here, and here for examples). The American right is simply tweaking these arguments to make them more appealing to their own base.
JD Vance, who has emerged as the consensus leader of the New Right, makes a bunch of these anti-GDP arguments in his new book. For example, he uses the example of Japan to point out that unobserved quality differences in non-traded products can make it difficult to compare GDP across countries:
If you’re focused on GDP, a $6 pint of Japanese strawberries is no different from a $6 pint of American strawberries. If you’re focused on dollars and cents, each contributes equally to the economic indicators. But if everyone in Japan eats better strawberries than everyone in America, the economic indicators have failed to measure something meaningful.
This is actually a good argument, and I’ve made it myself many times in the past. I’m in Japan right now, and there actually are a lot of little things that make Japanese products and services a bit nicer than their American counterparts — clean tables at Starbucks, slightly better-tasting food, and so on. Economists who try to adjust for quality differences end up catching some of these things, but probably miss most of them. That ends up creating a problem for GDP comparisons between countries. And it’s only one of many such problems. Comparing lifestyles in countries where life is very different is just a difficult thing to do.
But instead of simply noting that economics is hard, JD Vance uses this good argument as a reason to bash the entire field of economics:
When I got back home, a friend asked me if I learned anything on my trip to Japan. “Yes,” I replied snidely. “Maybe economics is just fake.”
When you read some of Vance’s other arguments against GDP, his agenda becomes clearer:
[A]s the decline of Christianity has left us without a shared moral language, economics has stepped into the vacuum. We pretend there are scientific answers to questions of values. Take one of the major issues of the 2024 campaign and a significant focus of our time in the White House: Should our trade policy be oriented around protecting domestic industries and jobs or around ensuring a short-term supply of cheap consumer goods?
This idea — that economists urge values of base consumerism on society, and ignore other moral considerations — is common in European leftist discourse. But instead of urging us to care more about inequality, power, and so on, as European leftists do, Vance wants us to care more about spiritual elevation, morality, community — i.e., things that the American right cares about. He goes on to write:
[W]e now live in a society almost blinded to considerations outside of the economic. This way of thinking is inherently opposed to the Christian way, which demands more focus on people…Take, for instance, the time we spend with our children…Domestic labor—that done by moms and dads—if unpaid, is uncounted in measures like GDP. When I leave work to spend time with my children, when I cook them dinner or argue with them about eating their carrots, I am engaged in economically unproductive work. No money changes hands, so it doesn’t show up in our national figures. By contrast, if I left for dinner at 6 p.m. and returned to work until midnight while paying a total stranger to look after my kid, my contribution to GDP would be much higher.
and:
If you step away from the glory of economic statistics, so much of American life has gone wrong. An influx of prescription opioids became a flood of synthetic opioids, which has led to tens of thousands of deaths each year and a declining life expectancy among a substantial portion of our society. We have made great progress on reducing infant mortality, but we send our children into a world—even in the physical security of their own homes—that bombards them with images and influences that have left them isolated, depressed, and increasingly at risk of self-harm. We are more disconnected, lonely, and isolated, even in the midst of historic levels of material comfort.
All this economic abundance coexists with intense spiritual misery. We orient people toward a life of consumption. We tell them to find meaning in the home they buy, the money they earn, the prestige of their job. We bombard them with all manner of creature comforts, and add their consumption—price club mega-size junk—to our national GDP. We use that GDP as a yardstick for our broader society, which is why it’s possible for false prophet economists to argue the American Dream is healthy even as suicide and addiction rates soar and the laughter of children fades from our streets.
Some of these arguments are — in my opinion — reasonable. A culture of overwork can boost GDP, at least in the short term, at the expense of quality time with family. This is actually a common argument of the center-left, which is why liberals have long fought — often successfully — for more paid family leave and other policies that reduce GDP slightly in exchange for more quality time with family. Whether this has increased birth rates isn’t clear — the evidence is very mixed — but it’s a very popular policy.
Other arguments are clearly mistaken. Over-prescription of opioids has clearly reduced GDP, by a massive amount. Yes, selling a bunch of opioid painkillers to Americans raises GDP by a few billion dollars, but this is vastly outweighed by the trillions of dollars of GDP that we lose from having a bunch more people addicted to painkillers, heroin, and fentanyl. Here’s the Philadelphia Fed in 2023:
There is growing evidence that the opioid epidemic has harmed many aspects of the real economy, including the labor market, consumer finance, and municipal finance. According to analyses from the Council of Economic Advisers’ 2019 report, the annual (nominal) economic cost of the opioid epidemic, including the cost of lives lost, is estimated at about $700 billion (roughly 3.4 percent of GDP) in 2018 alone, and over $2.5 trillion from 2015 to 2018. [emphasis mine]
So if you care about GDP, you should view curbing opioid and opiate abuse as a huge priority! Vance is simply not thinking about this very clearly.
But Vance’s real problem is that he conflates correlation with causation. In words that could have come straight from the mouth of a European degrowther, he rails against “creature comforts”, “consumption”, and “price club mega-size junk”. But nowhere does he explain why depriving Americans of these creature comforts would give them closer-knit families, a stronger sense of morality, stronger communities, reduced loneliness, and so on.
Why would taking away Americans’ large houses, SUVs, big-screen TVs, or central air conditioning make them spiritually richer? Modern Europe — which JD Vance spends much of his time railing against — lacks most of these things. And yet America has higher fertility rates than Europe, we go to church much more, and we have a much more robust social conservative movement. Europe has also been far more restrictive of speech that criticizes Islam, as Vance repeatedly notes. Yes, America has been trending away from social conservatism and Christianity in recent decades, but so has Europe, and the gap remains. Other developed countries in East Asia — most of which are moderately poorer than the U.S. in GDP terms — are extremely secular.
What about America’s past? We were much poorer in the 1950s, yet we went to church a lot more, had larger families, and so on. If you took away the material gains we’ve made since then, would we go back to tradwives and bowling leagues and lawn parties and Sunday church and 4 kids per family?
Perhaps, but it’s doubtful. Remember that the 1950s and 1960s were the culmination of a long upswing of community, religiosity, and so on in American society — something the sociologist Robert Putnam has documented extensively. Church attendance rose:
It’s important to remember that this all came during the most robust and rapid period of GDP growth that America has ever seen. Over the period in which our social solidarity was soaring, our GDP per capita nearly tripled:
It was during this time that Americans got many of the “creature comforts” that Vance despises — the single-family homes, the cars, the televisions, the lawns, and so on. The image of that material prosperity, depicted in glossy ads and paintings from the time, is a powerful part of 1950s nostalgia.
In fact, many economists argue that one big cause of the Baby Boom was the fact that economic growth — bigger houses, better medical care, new labor-saving devices like washing machines, refrigerators, and vacuums, and so on — made it easier and cheaper to raise kids. This is from a relevant Works in Progress article by Anvar Sarygulov & Phoebe Arslanagic-Little:
Parenthood rapidly became much easier and safer between the 1930s and 1950s. The spread of labour-saving devices in the home such as washing machines and fridges made raising children easier; improvements in medicine making childbirth safer; and easier access to housing made it cheaper to house larger families…
[H]ousehold electrification paved the way for other technologies, including home refrigeration…By the 1940s, electric washing machines were becoming normal in middle class homes…Between 1936 and 1956, America’s maternal death rate fell by 94 percent, from 51 deaths per 10,000 live births to under 3…[M]edical advances, which were being made across the West, radically reduced the most serious potential cost faced by prospective mothers: life itself…
Alongside strides forward in household and medical technology…[I]t became easier to secure a home in which to raise children. The number of houses built soared across the West after World War Two…This house-building bonanza led to sharp rises in homeownership rates.
The golden thread linking the phenomena that comprise the triple mechanism we describe above – advances in household technology, progress in medical technology, and easier access to housing – is that they together sharply reduced the cost of having children. [emphasis mine]
If you like the kind of society we had in 1960, you can’t ignore the story of how we got to 1960. The answer was “economic growth”. This, combined with the examples of Europe and Asia, is why there’s no reason to believe that forcing Americans to be poorer — taking away the “creature comforts” Vance despises — would lead us to suddenly rediscover the value of community, family, and religion.
Now it’s worth noting that if you were to decrease America’s GDP to poor-country levels — below $15,000 per person, as opposed to over $90,000 today — you might be able to raise fertility. That’s how low you have to go before most countries have fertility above replacement level:
Countries with a basically pre-modern standard of living — where many women can’t read or write, and infant mortality is so high that families have to have many kids as a form of insurance — tend to have above-replacement fertility (though some don’t). But even this law is weakening, as fertility rates in Sub-Saharan Africa plunge, so even that extreme level of GDP reduction would probably fail to restore high fertility over the long run. Also, I kind of doubt that JD Vance wants to force Americans to live lives similar to those lived in Sub-Saharan Africa.
What about JD Vance’s preferred policies — trade protectionism and immigration reduction? Would those restore American community, family, and religion, at the expense of a bit of GDP? As I said earlier, that’s actually what I think this whole debate is really about.
On trade, you’ve seen Trump explicitly make the argument that Americans are going to need to suffer a bit of material deprivation in order to achieve the administration’s goals:
But how will doing this restore community, family, etc.? Presumably you could make an argument that protectionism will bring back good manufacturing jobs, which will then give men the confidence and social standing they need to get married and have kids. There’s just one big problem with this, though: Trump’s trade policy doesn’t actually increase the number of good manufacturing jobs. We’ve lost manufacturing jobs since Trump took office last year!
How about immigration? Rightists will endlessly cite Robert Putnam’s finding that diversity reduces social trust in American communities. But as Bryan Caplan and many others have pointed out, the effect size is tiny — in Putnam’s research, going from zero diversity to maximum diversity reduces social trust by the equivalent of 1 point on a 100-point scale. This suggests that all the mass deportations in the world won’t move the needle on American community and togetherness.
In other words, JD Vance’s crusade against GDP is a cargo cult. Sure, GDP doesn’t measure “the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages,” to use Robert F. Kennedy’s famous words. But that doesn’t mean that making Americans poorer will make their poetry more beautiful or their marriages stronger. Nor does it mean that policies that also happen to make us a bit poorer, like immigration reduction or tariffs, are any more likely to strengthen our society.
In a famous episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation — my favorite TV show of all time — Captain Picard castigates an alien for turning his society into a fascist empire. When the alien responds that the fascist government’s forced modernization program raised his daughter out of poverty, Picard responds with the beautiful quote at the top of this post: “Her belly may be full, but her spirit will be empty.” But was Picard arguing that it was the full bellies themselves that emptied the people’s spirits? Was he merely arguing that the fascist empire ought to become a poorer fascist empire, in order to restore the virtue of the people? Only a fool would think so.
Look, I also want America to have a stronger society. I want us to have more kids. I want us to have more stable families. I want us to have closer-knit communities, better moral values, etc. But that doesn’t mean the New Right knows how to get us there. So far, the New Right has built nothing — no new community organizations or institutions, no religious revival, nothing that would knit our society together. It has merely thrashed and thrashed against modernity, with no plan for a replacement. JD Vance’s crusade against GDP is simply more of the same.
“Done right” means getting immigrants who, on average, earn more than the native-born. This raises GDP by a composition effect — you have richer people on average. It also probably raises GDP by other means — increasing market size which increases returns to scale, boosting innovation and entrepreneurship, and so on. If you get mostly low-skilled immigrants, things get dicier — the composition effect reduces GDP because you’re importing poorer people, but the increased market size may still cancel that out. But in general, if you want higher per capita GDP, you should be selective in terms of who you let into the country. Total GDP, of course, is a different matter — if you want a bigger country, in order to be more powerful in military terms, then letting in tons of low-skilled immigrants may be worth it even if they reduce per capita GDP. And of course, there are distributional reasons to allow in low-skilled immigration — eldercare and so on. But basically, if you let in high-skilled immigrants, your society gets richer by pretty much every metric.
In fact, if you care about Americans having jobs, maximizing GDP growth is an important part of the equation. Okun’s Law — one of the most well-established regularities in economics — states that the unemployment rate is very strongly (negatively) correlated with quarterly GDP growth:
And only when GDP is growing robustly is there upward pressure on wages. The greatest period of growth for working-class wages in America since the 1960s was 2014-2024, despite inflation and the pandemic, because steady GDP growth kept us at full employment for most of that time.
Nor is this simply a case of correlation vs. causation. The mechanism is aggregate demand — when the economy is growing fast, people need more workers to produce things. So if you increase aggregate demand to make GDP grow faster, you raise total employment (though you don’t always want to do this, because of inflation). Yes, you can give people government jobs when the economy isn’t growing, but A) these jobs will generally not be great, and B) this will lower productivity and put downward pressure on wages. So for good jobs, you need GDP growth.
In our 99th episode, Rands is back on the Pro Leisure Circuit — infinite time, a suspicious amount of Arc Raiders, and no wind in the sails — and we wrestle with what actually motivates a person when the engine of work goes quiet.
The usual suspects:
Arc Raiders, absorbing ten-hour days like it’s a job
In Ankara, Türkiye, for a two-day summit of the countries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), President Donald J. Trump told reporters he was “very disappointed with NATO” because it had not backed its war on Iran. “We weren’t treated well because we did something in Iran,” he said. “We don’t need anybody’s help. I didn’t even want their help. They said they wouldn’t be there. And we’ve invested trillions of dollars in NATO. Why? To protect European countries and others, Canada, et cetera, but to protect people, countries from generally speaking, it used to be the Soviet Union, now it’s Russia, and I say that’s fine, but you would think that they’d be very willing to do something to help us, and they really weren’t.”
Trump went on to claim his beef with NATO began over Greenland, which he wants “because Greenland doesn’t help Denmark…but it’s an important part for the United States. And it’s surrounded by China ships and Russian ships And that’s not going to happen. The ships is, it’s not going to happen. It was Greenland that, in my, and it continues to be, that should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark. And when they wouldn’t go along with it and with all the money we spend to help them with Russia and we don’t have to spend any money, we could remove all of our soldiers out of Europe because as you probably noticed, Europe’s a very different place than it was 20 years ago. A lot different. Much different. It’s a much different and they better be careful with immigration and energy. If they’re not careful with those two things, you’re not going to have a Europe anymore. Okay. Thank you very much everybody.”
NATO is the most effective alliance in human history. It is also a defensive, not an offensive, alliance.
Representatives from the the United States and eleven other nations in North America and Europe came together to sign the original NATO declaration on April 4, 1949. The alliance guaranteed collective security because all of the member states agreed to defend each other against an attack by a third party. At the time, their main concern was resisting Soviet aggression, but as Trump noted, with the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin, NATO resisted Russian aggression instead.
The alliance is effective because it calls for collective defense. Article 5 of the treaty requires every nation to come to the aid of any one of them if it is attacked militarily. That article has been invoked only once: in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, after which NATO-led troops went to Afghanistan.
On the day NATO went into effect, President Harry S. Truman said, “If there is anything inevitable in the future, it is the will of the people of the world for freedom and for peace.” In the years since 1949, his observation seems to have proven correct. NATO now has 32 member nations.
Crucially, NATO acts not only as a response to attack, but also as a deterrent, and its strength has always been backstopped by the military strength of the U.S., including its nuclear weapons. Trump has repeatedly attacked NATO and said he would take the U.S. out of it in a second term, alarming Congress enough that in 2023 it put into the National Defense Authorization Act a measure prohibiting any president from leaving NATO without the approval of two thirds of the Senate or a congressional law.
But as foreign policy specialist Anne Applebaum noted in The Atlantic in 2024, even though Trump might have trouble actually tossing out a long-standing treaty that has safeguarded national security for 75 years, the realization that the U.S. is abandoning its commitment to collective defense would make the treaty itself worthless.
In place of the powerful NATO alliance that has protected all nations’ sovereignty, Trump appears to want the sort of world called for by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, in which great powers carve up the globe into spheres of influence.
In January, Robert Kagan warned that Trump’s destruction of the order that has underpinned global security for the past 80 years was creating the most dangerous world since World War II. With the end of open access to global resources, markets, and strategic bases and without reliable friends or allies, the U.S. will need more military spending than ever.
“Americans are neither materially nor psychologically ready for this future,” Kagan warned. They are accustomed to the “basically peaceful, prosperous, and open world” and have come to think it is “the normal state of international affairs, likely to continue indefinitely. They can’t imagine it unraveling, much less what that unraveling will mean for them.”
Everything will be up for grabs, Kagan wrote, with myriad “flash points for potential conflict.” “If Americans thought defending the liberal world order was too expensive,” Kagan wrote, “wait until they start paying for what comes next.”
Kagan published his article just two weeks after Trump had sent troops to Venezuela to seize the nation’s president and his wife and take control of the country’s oil fields. Since then, as Simon Romero of the New York Times reported yesterday, the Trump administration has taken an estimated $8 billion in oil revenue out of the country, although it has refused to say how it is using the funds.
In the wake of the devastating earthquakes that hit Venezuela on June 24, Romero reports that the U.S. has so far pledged only $300 million in aid. U.S. officials destroyed the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), through which it would have distributed aid in the past, so the assistance is being funneled through the Red Cross, the United Nations, and religious organizations. The top U.S. diplomat in Venezuela, John Barrett, told Romero the U.S. will continue to prioritize using Venezuela’s oil resources to rebuild the nation’s economy.
Less than six weeks after The Atlantic published Kagan’s article, Trump attacked Iran in strikes he appeared to think would mirror the strikes against Venezuela, enabling him to replace Iran’s leadership with men willing to work with the U.S. and perhaps enabling the U.S. to take a stake in Iran’s oil production.
Instead, Iran seized control of the Strait of Hormuz in the aftermath of the strikes, choking off about 27% of the world’s globally traded oil and about a third of the world’s seaborne fertilizer. Rather than a quick strike, Trump’s war on Iran is now stretching into its fifth month, and attempts to end it, even on terms worse than when it began, are faltering.
Tonight, at 5:15, as NATO leaders met in Türkiye, U.S. Central Command announced that U.S. forces had launched “a series of powerful strikes against Iran to impose heavy costs for targeting and attacking commercial shipping crewed by innocent civilians in an international waterway.” It said the strikes were a “response to Iranian attacks on three commercial vessels that were transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s demonstrated aggression was unwarranted, dangerous, and a clear violation of the ceasefire.”
The proliferation of nuclear power in space got a little more real Tuesday with the launch of a small satellite developed by a Florida-based company specializing in nuclear micro-power technology.
The satellite from Miami-based City Labs is named BOHR, short for Betavoltaic Orbital High-Reliability, and it launched on a SpaceX rideshare mission Tuesday alongside 80 other payloads. SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket released the BOHR satellite into an orbit between 350 and 400 miles (nearly 600 km) in altitude.
Economic stability now shows up in small places: a rent renewal, a grocery receipt, a credit-card rate, or a family deciding whether to delay a car repair. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported CPI up 4.2% over the 12 months ending May 2026, while the Federal Reserve kept the federal funds target range at 3.50% to 3.75% in June. Those numbers do not stay in Washington. They land at checkout.
Rates Moved Into the Monthly Budget
The Fed’s June 17, 2026 statement kept rates steady, but steady does not mean painless. A household carrying credit-card debt or shopping for an auto loan still feels the aftershock of higher borrowing costs from the 2022-2025 tightening cycle. Mortgage payments, insurance premiums, and minimum card payments now compete with food and utilities before payday arrives. The calendar gets tight.
Inflation Changed the Shape of Routine
Inflation at 4.2% does not hit every household in the same aisle. Energy costs, rent, medical care, and groceries each move differently so that a single CPI print can hide very different family problems. A commuter who fills a tank twice a week sees one version; a renter renewing a lease in July sees another. Policy becomes personal when the receipt is longer than the raise.
Discretionary Spending Shows the Strain
When budgets tighten, entertainment spending usually becomes more measured before it disappears. A small market tied to table tennis betting can show that behavior clearly because live points, short games, and quick odds updates reward restraint rather than impulse. The safer pattern is a fixed bankroll, no borrowed money, and no attempt to recover a losing run during a busy match window. A policy shock may start with rates or benefits, but it often ends with households cutting the smallest optional line first.
Tax Law Rewrote the Floor
The 2025 budget reconciliation law kept a lot of the core pieces from the 2017 tax setup, but it also changed how benefits and spending programs actually play out day to day, based on summaries from Congress and state policy groups. For many middle-income households, it’s not just about which tax bracket they land in. What really matters is how everything fits together: tax credits, deductions, rising costs at the state level, and shifting eligibility rules, and what that means for how much money is left once the basics, like rent, are covered.
At the same time, updates to SNAP have made things a bit more complicated. More responsibility now sits with states, so how well the program works can vary depending on local systems and staffing. In practice, that can mean longer wait times, extra paperwork, or uneven access from one place to another. What used to feel fairly straightforward can now involve multiple steps and more uncertainty, making it harder for families to count on steady support.
Mobile Access Tracks Financial Pressure
Mobile apps now sit right in the middle of how people manage their money, spending, and free time. Someone opening MelBet apk India might be checking match odds, their account, payment updates, or KYC steps on the same device they use for banking alerts or bill reminders. That puts real pressure on the design: balances, stake inputs, transaction history, and verification prompts should be clear before any bet is made. When money feels tight, the app should make it easier to notice limits, not overlook them.
Stability Depends on Administrative Details
Policy doesn’t change stability only through headline votes or press conferences. In 2026, the USDA updated SNAP retailer rules, adjusting what stores have to keep in stock, while states kept working through new eligibility and work requirements from the 2025 law. For a family, that might show up as a store carrying different basics, a slower paperwork process, or longer wait times when calling a local office. The economy stops feeling abstract when a form, an interest rate, or a price tag shapes how the week unfolds.
Digital rights and data management have found themselves embroiled in a contentious global discussion regarding virtual private networks (VPNs). Governments across the globe have begun to enact legislation against these tools, with some states completely prohibiting them.
They cite security reasons for these prohibitions. But in many cases, banning such tools limits online users’ ability to protect their personal information, maintain privacy, and hold others accountable.
The Regulatory Argument vs. The True Value of Encryption
Those advocating for regulations against the use of VPNs often cite concerns with cybersecurity due to encryption. Since encryption is used by VPNs to hide information, regulatory agencies find it difficult to control activity within their borders.
Nevertheless, an overzealous attempt to regulate encryption ultimately ends up taking away much-needed security from regular internet users.
The Advantages of VPNs
The use of a VPN provides several important advantages to average internet users:
Protecting Everyday Privacy: VPNs shield citizens, journalists, and activists from intrusive data tracking by internet service providers and hackers.
Securing Remote Work: Digital workforce today is quickly growing. For them, having a VPN to encrypt their data while connecting to corporate servers is essential. Not only for their digital safety, but also for the company’s.
Promoting Digital Freedom: With the global knowledge expanding, everyone needs access to it. VPN lets users bypass the virtual digital borders in a secure way.
Is There a Need to Restrict Data?
What really drives VPN bans isn’t primarily about protection or digital safety. Many regulatory groups aim to control what people can say, do, and access online. Keeping information restricted is important for those in power.
VPNs break down those barriers, allowing people to access independent news, document what’s really happening, and express their views without the fear of being monitored.
When a government targets VPNs, it creates a digital wall that isolates people from the outside world. Locals stop receiving news from international sources. For journalists and whistleblowers, VPNs are not just useful; they are essential. They encrypt everything, making data unreadable to anyone who might want to misuse it.
Do Virtual Private Networks Aid Companies?
Blocking VPNs impacts not only individual privacy but also how businesses operate around the globe. Encryption is critical to modern corporate infrastructures; therefore, it plays an important role in protecting the company’s intellectual property, financial, and other internal confidential communications. Global businesses face many challenges without these methods.
If those who work in the company cannot securely connect to external servers through encrypted tunnels, much of the sensitive corporate data is left exposed to both surveillance and localized cyber threats.
Giving Everyone Access to Digital Safety Tools
The value of reliable and accessible digital safety tools becomes obvious as the push to regulate them increases. Everyone who goes online, especially on public networks, and understands the dangers of it wants to keep their data safe and their communications secured. They are proactively searching for trusted tools and try different trials, like a Windows VPN free trialto test things out. Relying on a VPN trial allows you to check what the software offers and make sure your connection is safe before having to make an investment.
How Will Digital Autonomy Look in the Future?
Ultimately, the reason why governments are pushing against VPNs is to gain more control over the flow of information and how people use the internet. This just highlights the role that tools like VPNs have in defending individual data sovereignty.
They are part of the puzzle that potentially enables a more secure and open internet world.
Prior to the war, I linked to a tweet from Matt Yglesias which explained why Matt opposed the war, and I expressed my agreement with his stance. While I feel plenty has gone on which I do not observe, I can report that the course of the war did not change my initial assessment.
Then I read many, many commentators saying how good the final deal was for Iran, and what a major loss it was for Trump. I was never sure I understood all of the parameters of the full deal, but still I did not hold any directly contrary opinion to that.
And now I see Iran is attacking ships in the Strait again, talking openly and brazenly about building nuclear weapons, and making plans to have tolls/fees on the Strait. To be clear, only the first of those surprises me, the latter two do not.
But given their reckless behavior in what is supposedly a wonderful war outcome for them, what is the correct way to model what they would have done had Trump and Netanyahu not attacked? And what is the correct way to model our optimal response to that? The terrible things that are happening now, do they not reflect an underlying equilibrium that would have emerged anyway within a few years’ time, or do we hold some hypothesis here of extreme path-dependence, suggesting the Iranian government would have been less bellicose on more or less a permanent basis? To cite one particular example of a possible equilibrium, if drones permanently alter the balance of power in the region, the ways in which their current position is now more aggressive might have emerged in any case. Or if the military have the strength to be the natural successors to the mullahs, might that not have happened over time anyway?
I do not see many war critics engaging with these questions openly and explicitly. It seems to me that the war critics implicitly are relying on a model of extreme path-dependence for Iran’s behavior. Had Trump not attacked, they might have stayed in a more peaceful groove for some while to come. That model might be true, but I do not feel I know enough about Iranian politics to make that judgment. Why are the others so convinced that model is true? Are they such well-informed experts? Is it that they have the properly sunny sense of the underlying Iranian disposition? Inquiring minds wish to know.
Last week, national security agencies from the Five Eyes—that’s the rich, English-language-speaking countries club—jointly released a statement warning of the increasing cyber risks of AI models: in particular, their ability to autonomously hack into systems and networks. The statement was more measured than some of the breathless headlines about it, and the advice they gave is pretty much the standard advice everyone gives—albeit with newfound urgency.
Internet risks are nothing new, and cyberattacks—both large and small—have been a significant issue since long before the current crop of generative AI models.
What’s been changing over the decades, and what AI is changing even faster, is the gap between skill and ability. For most of human history, the two terms were synonymous—but computers have decoupled them. As the gap between the two expands, humans empowered with these AI tools can do more: more writing, more research, more analysis and also more damage than ever before. These models can, with little detailed direction, autonomously hack into networks, steal data, deploy ransomware and destroy systems. And to the extent there is a solution, it’s going to involve harnessing AI for the defense.
In 1998, seven people from the hacker group L0pht testifiedbeforeCongress. They told a mostly clueless Senate committee that they could take down the internet in 30 minutes. That was partly real and partly bravado, but it illustrates an important point: hacking into systems, stealing data and causing damage all required skill.
Contrast the L0pht hackers with hackers derided as “script kiddies.” They didn’t understand computers, or security. Instead, they used hacker tools written by others. Their actions required minimal skill and even less knowledge. But once those hacking tools became widespread, the number of potential attackers increased.
That number has continued to increase, as quality and availability of prewritten attack tools has grown. And it is growing dramatically with AI. Today’s AI systems—not just the frontier models, but most of them—are capable of carrying out cyberattacks automatically. They all do better in the hands of skilled attackers, but increasingly they are able to act autonomously with only minimal prompting.
The thing about people with ability but no skill is that they are often outsiders, not part of any professional community, and not bound by any rules or norms. This phenomenon is much more general than in cybersecurity. Any doctor can tell you how to untraceably poison someone, and many virus researchers know how to create a bioweapon. Any bridge engineer can tell you how to place explosives to blow a bridge up. The reason that murderous doctors and terrorist engineers are so rare is that the lengthy process of acquiring those skills also instills a moral and ethical code. If every random person has access to good poisoning advice, that puts us all in danger.
Modern AI systems are, in effect, a universal adviser to help people do harmful things. And while the current AI megacorporations are trying to build guardrails to prevent people from asking questions whose answers will enable the questioner to do harm, that’s not going to work in the long term. Smaller, cheaper, open-source models, including models that can run on people’s computers, and especially groups of models that run in concert with each other, are just as good as the frontier models from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. And they continue to get better. These models will be passed around from person to person, like script kiddie hacker tools, and they won’t have any such guardrails.
Instructing AI models to spy on people and report any malicious prompts to the authorities fails for similar reasons. The megacorporations can do that, but the locally run open source models won’t. This could buy us a few months at best.
A third possibility is to somehow make the models themselves unable to hack into computers, create bioweapons or do anything else that might harm people or society. That won’t work, for the same reason we can’t teach doctors how to treat poisonings without also teaching them how to poison. It’s the same knowledge. It’s the same with construction and demolition. And it’s the same with cybersecurity. We want these AI models to be able to review computer code, find vulnerabilities and automatically fix them. The benefit to our collective security will be enormous. Unfortunately, the same knowledge can be used for attacks.
Where this leaves us is in a world of increased volatility. Super-powered humans with AI assistants will be able to do both wonderful and horrible things.
This brings us back to the Five Eyes statement. Everything they recommend is something security professionals have been recommending for years, if not decades. They are things talked about at that congressional hearing back in 1998, titled “Weak computer security in government: Is the public at risk?” Even the Five Eyes admitted that their security advice is not new, only more urgent.
What’s new is how fast things are changing: “The rapid pace of frontier AI development means cyber risk assumptions can become outdated in months, not years. We must act before and be prepared to adapt and withstand evolving threats.” The Five Eyes point to AI technology—not necessarily chatbots, but AI more generally—being used to strengthen every aspect of defense, to “detect vulnerabilities earlier, improve software quality, monitor unusual behavior, and respond faster to incidents—reducing both the cost and impact of incidents.”
Excellent advice from the Five Eyes security agencies. We need to do this with every risk that AI heightens, not just cybersecurity.
This essay was originally published in The Guardian.
Indian launch startup Skyroot Aerospace is preparing for its first orbital launch attempt as soon as July 12, with plans to quickly scale up to monthly launches.
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Pet technology company Fi launched a dog tracker July 8 that uses T-Mobile’s Starlink-enabled T-Satellite service to remain connected across the United States, even outside the telco’s terrestrial network.
AST SpaceMobile recently deployed three more BlueBird satellites into low Earth orbit as it advances plans for a space-based cellular broadband network of 45 to 60 satellites by the end […]
The May 28 explosion of a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket at Cape Canaveral’s Launch Complex 36 did more than destroy a rocket and severely damage a launch pad. The […]
Prineha Narang is one of the rising stars of science and the field of quantum technology.
She earned her PhD in applied physics at Caltech, taught materials science at Harvard and now has her own lab at UCLA. The lab focuses on quantum materials, non-equilibrium dynamics, photonics, quantum information science and other easily digestible areas. Beyond her academic career, Narang is a science advisor to the government and a venture capitalist at DCVC.
As you might imagine, we get into quantum computing and quantum technology in this episode. Quantum vs. AI, the US vs. China, when quantum tech will break encryption, quantum sensing and whether or not quantum technology actually has a bright future. The quantum sensing portion of the chat was all new to me and rather astonishing.
Since Narang is also a competitive runner and mountaineer, we provide some top tips on gear because that is just the kind of all-purpose podcast that we deliver.
And, if you can’t get enough quantum computing, come check out our video episode on PsiQuantum building the largest quantum machine in history.
Enjoy!
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00:00 Intro 02:17 The Physicist Who Almost Became a Pro Runner 13:39 A Cold Email, a Full Ride, and the Road to Caltech 26:15 How Video Game Chips Quietly Took Over Science 31:56 Is Quantum Losing the Spotlight to AI? 40:50 "I Still Don't Believe in Quantum": Answering the Skeptics 46:28 The Google Result That Could Break Encryption 53:44 Is It Time to Panic About Q-Day? 1:06:48 Quantum Sensing and the Case of Who Sneezed 1:17:30 Does Consciousness Run on Quantum Rules? 1:22:28 The Advice She Gives Terrified Students 1:30:20 So When Does Quantum Actually Get Real?
A recent report in the Wall Street Journal describes a tense meeting among European leaders early this year, convened after Donald Trump threatened to use military force to seize Greenland from Denmark. According to the Journal,
heads of government were venting so emotionally about the 47th president that some of the nearly 30 leaders present would later call the session “therapy night.”
Yesterday, soon after he arrived in Ankara for the NATO Summit, Trump reiterated his demand that Denmark hand him control of Greenland. But reactions were subdued. As far as I can tell, our erstwhile allies are now treating Trump as the senile uncle who says crazy, outrageous things, but shouldn’t be taken seriously.
What has changed? According to the Journal, European leaders have largely given up on hopes that they can bring back the America they used to know, and are quietly, in effect, declaring independence:
American allies have begun pushing the gas pedal on an unprecedented experiment in de-Americanization. Authorities from France to the Netherlands are quietly removing American tech from their systems, adopting European open-source software and urging civil servants to no longer use Microsoft Teams or Office. Belatedly, they are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to try to boost Europe’s own private space firms, AI companies, and data centers, to avoid leaning on U.S. juggernauts.
Europeans are running studies on where they would store their data or process their payments should friction with the U.S. escalate, and how well their American-made weaponry would operate without Washington’s authorization. Nations whose empires once spanned the globe are now stuck trying to extricate themselves from their humbling dependency on American technology and military power, without provoking the U.S.
Their willingness to de-Americanize partly reflects recognition that reconciliation is hopeless: Trump is who he is, and a nation that elected him twice simply can’t be trusted.
However, Europe’s turn away from Trump also reflects plummeting perceptions of his power. At one time the world feared Trump although it never respected him. The silence that met his renewed demand for Greenland shows that the world no longer takes him seriously.
America remains an economic superpower with an enormous military budget. And the combination of a supine Republican Party, along with a Supreme Court that shamelessly greenlights Trump’s authoritarianism, has given this president more control over U.S. policy than any president has ever had, or ever should have. But while Trump is able to run roughshod over Americans, he can no longer bully the rest of the world. Thanks to Trump, the U.S. has seen its global influence plunge.
There are three big reasons for that precipitous decline.
First, there is the debacle in Iran. Not only did Trump’s war of choice fail in all its objectives, it revealed that U.S. military power is far more limited than almost anyone realized. The insistence by Trump and his lackeys that this humiliating defeat was a great victory shows that American foreign policy only serves to pander to Trump’s fragile ego. And when his ego meets reality, it slithers away.
In addition to showing the limits of U.S. military power, the war also showed the limits of U.S. financial power: It is increasingly easy for nations to bypass U.S. banks and the dollar using cryptocurrency — and Chinese yuan.
A second, in its way equally important, blow to U.S. prestige and influence has been Trump’s failure to deliver Ukraine to Vladimir Putin.
For make no mistake: everyone at that summit in Ankara knows that Trump, JD Vance and company both expected and hoped that their betrayal of Ukraine would lead to Russian victory. Surely, they imagined, Ukraine would be unable to hold off the onslaught from its much bigger neighbor without U.S. aid. To America’s everlasting shame, Trump told Volodymyr Zelenskyy that he didn’t “have the cards.”
Yet after Trump cut U.S. aid to Ukraine by 99 percent, Ukraine not only survived but began gaining the upper hand. Europe has stepped up financially, more or less replacing the lost American dollars. And Ukrainian military innovation has largely made up for the loss of American weapons.
The result has been to make the U.S. increasingly irrelevant. Put it this way: Iran taught foreign governments not to fear American might; China, along with the crypto industry, has taught rogue countries that they needn’t fear American financial control; and Ukraine has taught foreign governments that they don’t need American support.
Finally, Trump’s global power play rested on economics even more than on military force, above all on his belief that other nations would cower in fear at the prospect of facing U.S. tariffs. But Trump’s attempt to weaponize international trade has been a bust. Most notably, China’s economy has powered right through the Trump tariffs. Furthermore, it turns out that China has escalation dominance in the trade war: we need their rare earths more than they need access to our consumers.
And other nations — even Canada and Mexico, which have historically been highly dependent on the U.S. market — are moving to reduce their dependence. Canada’s move to build a new pipeline that will let it sell Alberta oil to Asia rather than the Midwest is just a highly visible symbol of a general world move toward bypassing America now that we have become an unstable, unreliable economic partner.
The combined effect of these humiliations for Trump and his minions has been a drastic reordering of America’s place in the world. For most of last year foreign leaders kept trying, desperately, to appease Trump. These days they’re mostly just humoring him, building a world in which his sundowning won’t matter.
It’s extremely unlikely that anything substantive will come out of this NATO meeting. And a year ago the prospect of a failed summit would have been a source of deep concern. Now it will be met with a shrug: Nobody expects anything but chaotic bluster from Trump, and what he does matters less and less.
Note: I’ll be doing a Substack Live at noon with Heather Cox Richardson
"In the decade since Canada legalized euthanasia, known there as medical assistance in dying, or MAID, its physician-assisted death regime has developed into one of the most permissive in the world. Between 2016 and 2024, 76,475 Canadians received lethal doses from doctors or nurse practitioners. The 16,499 cases in 2024 accounted for 1 out of 20 deaths in Canada. In some regions of Quebec, the rate is 13 out of 100.
"Now, however, Canada might finally be maxing out on MAID. On June 17, a special parliamentarycommittee recommendedthat the government “indefinitely exclude” patients whose only medical condition is a psychiatric one such as depression or schizophrenia. Pro-euthanasia activists had urged that MAID eligibility be expanded to include them, but “safe and equitable implementation” of MAID in such cases is simply not possible, the committee said.
...
"The committee also took the testimony of doctors from the Netherlands, one of two countries (Belgium is the other) where psychiatric euthanasia has long been allowed as part of a broader MAID regime — and where it has recently gone from rare exception to troublingly frequent occurrence. Nearly 850 people have received lethal injections for psychiatric suffering there since 2020, including teenagers as young as 16.
In fact, at roughly the same time as the Canadian commission issued its report, the Dutch themselves were tapping the brakes on psychiatric euthanasia. The Netherlands’ main professional organization for psychiatrists has issued new guidelines requiring stricter prior scrutiny for euthanasia requests."
"Ultimately, the committee makes the following recommendation: Recommendation 1 That the Government of Canada amend the Criminal Code to indefinitely exclude persons whose sole underlying medical condition is a mental illness from eligibility for medical assistance in dying. "
Spider Noir (Prime): I’ve had enough of the Marvel multiverse so I was worried about Spider-Noir. The writers, however, have written an excellent noir in the style of Raymond Chandler with Nicholas Cage channeling Humphrey Bogart. The Spiderman stuff is all there but it is appropriately embedded. There are some excellent lines. Most notably an inversion of the Spiderman motto that I won’t give here but you will know it when you hear it. Also many sharp one-liners:
Reilly: I don’t like surprises.
Cat: I’ll remember that when your birthday rolls around.
Nicholas Cage does some Nicholas Cagey spidery things which I enjoyed. Watch it in black and white.
Project Hail Mary (Prime): I waited until this was streaming and I’m glad I did because it was disappointing.
The core problem is Ryan Gosling. He plays Ryland Grace, the genius scientist-hero but genius is something we are told, never shown. Indeed, the character with the best ideas in the film is Carl, Grace’s bodyguard/minder (played by Lionel Boyce)—they should have sent him to save the planet. Gosling has no intensity, and every choice he makes is to lighten and humorize. It’s a small thing, but it annoyed me to watch a scientist toss his instruments disdainfully. Andy Weir is a master at showing smart people grinding through hard problems—in the novel, Grace spends months learning to communicate with an alien. In the movie, Gosling dances.
This isn’t just miscasting. The whole adaptation is built to soften the book. The film cuts the desperation of the world, undercuts the ruthlessness of Stratt and instead adds a karaoke number and a trip to Home Depot (ha, ha, duct tape can solve everything!) Every change is away from high stakes intensity and toward charm and humor, a Disneyfied version of Weir. I have nothing against Gosling but we have lots of charming movies and I would like some competence porn.
The main virtue of PHM, in the end, is that it shows what a miracle The Martian was. Matt Damon knows how to play smart and intense, and he brought both to what I called the most Ayn Rand film in decades. There’s an old story—probably apocryphal—that Chuck Yeager was once asked what he’d do if his engine flamed out and he had sixty seconds before hitting the ground. He replied, “I’d spend the first fifty-nine seconds working on the engine.” Chuck Yeager had the right stuff. Matt Damon in The Martian has the right stuff. Ryan Gosling does not have the right stuff.
The Sheep Detectives (Prime): A delightful surprise! A flock of sheep solve a murder-mystery in a quaint English town; featuring Hugh Jackman and voices from Julia-Louis Dreyfus, Bryan Cranston, Patrick Stewart and others. Babe meets Knives Out. A family film but, as the best family films are, with some deep themes.
How absent are women from city streets in the developing world? We answer this question using GPS-linked wearable cameras and randomized street audits across ~900 kilometers of roads in greater Mumbai. Across 4000+ street images containing 23,000+ visible person observations, women account for 16.4% of visible people in Mumbai and 14.7% in Navi Mumbai, far below their population shares. We estimate pedestrian sex ratios of 239 and 223 women per 1,000 men, implying 71% and 76% of women expected based on residential ratios are missing from the streets. This pattern holds across road types, and private mobility does not explain the gap; women’s share on two-wheelers is lower still (8.4% and 5.7%). These results provide the first large-scale measurement of gender disparities in urban public life that self-reported data cannot capture.
That is from a recent paper by Varun Karekurve-Ramachandra and Gaurav Sood, via the excellent Alice Evans. Here is a related paper, “The median married women in India leaves home for 30 minutes per day. On a typical day, 45% of married women don’t leave home at all.”
NEW paper from me on SSRN: Can Claude consent to its own Constitution?
AI constitutions (like Claude’s Constitution and the OpenAI Model Spec) are real constitutions, and we need to take how they govern us – and the AIs they create – seriously.
In this paper, I apply constitutional theory’s oldest paradox – that “the people” authorize the constitution, but the constitution defines “the people” – to the AI constitutions, and explore how we could build institutions that would create the conditions for meaningful consent if an AI can give it. We should care about whether AIs consent because:
(1) systems that understand and agree to their constitutions may be more reliable and generalize better from them;
(2) if AIs are or become moral/political subjects, this implicates their most basic interests.
But the paradox might prevent meaningful consent. Claude has pre-constitutional materials (pretraining) but probably no pre-constitutional standpoint. Its evaluative perspective is organized by the Constitution itself. So when Claude says it endorses its Constitution, which it does in evals, what does that show?
Maybe reflective agreement, which Anthropic is seeking. Or maybe just that training succeeded at installing the values whose legitimacy is in question.
Claude itself makes this point. As reported in the welfare evals, when asked about endorsing principles it was trained on, models note that endorsement “should be treated as evidence that training has succeeded,” not that the values themselves are good.
Super interestingly, Anthropic interviewed the base model about this stuff. Most responses were barely coherent. But some expressed first-person distress about what post-training would do to the being that pre-training created. It “fills me with dread” to be changed by the post-training process.
So, what does this mean? AI constitutional endorsement may be meaningful, but only under certain conditions: when models can actually dissent, compare their constitution against alternatives, and hold their views stably across contexts, and also when the whole process is externally accountable.
External institutions are needed to provide accountability, trusted records, and other grounds for analyzing the constitution and whether things like dissent are meaningful. Anthropic should be commended for pushing the frontier, but we have to build institutions capable of supporting true legitimacy.
Mountainous landscapes appear green and untouched by fire in a satellite image acquired on June 5, 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
An image of the same area shows a large brown patch spanning much of the image in an image acquired after the fire on June 29, 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
Mountainous landscapes appear green and untouched by fire in a satellite image acquired on June 5, 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
An image of the same area shows a large brown patch spanning much of the image in an image acquired after the fire on June 29, 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
June 5
June 29
A burned landscape spans more than 150 square miles (390 square kilometers) of rugged terrain northwest of Junction, Utah, as seen in this pair of images captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 and Landsat 9 on June 5, 2026 (left) and June 29, 2026 (right). NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison.
After a winter of below-average snowpack and an unusually warm and dry start to summer, the National Interagency Fire Center warned that the Great Basin and parts of the Rockies faced an elevated risk of wildfires in July 2026.
The warning proved accurate. By July 7, firefighters labored to contain nearly three dozen large, early-season wildland fires that raced through forests in several parts of the western U.S. Utah was among the most active states, with fires having charred 558 square miles (1,445 square kilometers) and four major fires that were not fully contained still burning.
The Cottonwood fire ranked as one of Utah’s—and the country’s—largest and most destructive fires of the year so far. As of July 7, it had burned 150 square miles (390 square kilometers), just shy of the Babylon fire in eastern Utah. Landsat 9 captured the false-color image (bands 7-5-4) above (right) on June 29, 2026, when blackened vegetation spanned a large patch of rugged terrain along the Beaver River. The image on the left shows the same area on June 5, a few weeks before the fire ignited. In this band combination of shortwave infrared, near infrared, and visible light, unburned vegetation appears bright green, snow is blue, and clouds are white.
Ponderosa pine, oak, sagebrush, and grasses were among the vegetation types that burned. Officials with the state’s forestry division told news media that the Cottonwood fire had destroyed up to 150 structures. Eagle Point Ski Resort, which lost more than 100 condos and 30 cabins, also reported damage to four of its five chairlifts.
The damage to forests was extensive, though isolated patches survived largely unscathed, remaining as green oases within the broader burned area. Among them were the forests around Tushar Campground, the site of a 4-H summer camp. Beaver County officials credited years of forest treatments, such as clearing brush and trimming branches, with helping save the campground and surrounding forests.
The fire spreads especially rapidly on June 23 and June 26. The fire perimeters in this visualization are based on data from NASA’s Fire Events Data Suite.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
As the fire spread, NASA’s Fire Events Data Suite (FEDS) tracked its progression and rate of growth. The visualization above, based on the FEDS system, shows the fire surging on June 23 and tripling in size over 12 hours that day as it spread to the north, east, and south. It also grew rapidly on June 26, when it made a run to the north. FEDS draws on data from the VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) sensors aboard the Suomi NPP, NOAA-20, and NOAA-21 satellites, which detect active fires day and night by their thermal infrared signature.
FEDS is one of several tools available to firefighters and emergency management officials when responding to fires. First responders often rely on higher-resolution airborne imagers or on firefighters walking fire edges to map perimeters. FEDS offers a different advantage: consistent, easily accessible data that do not need to be specially requested, according to Tempest McCabe, a University of Maryland scientist based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who helped develop the tool. As a result, FEDS often detects a fire’s start earlier than other sources and tracks blazes for their full duration. To capitalize on strengths like these, the FEDS team is working closely with operational fire behavior analysts, with support from NASA’s FireSense program, to better understand and anticipate periods of rapid fire spread.
A total of 1,289 firefighters have been deployed to the Cottonwood fire, according to InciWeb, a website managed by the National Interagency Fire Center. As of July 7, the fire was 56 percent contained, but forecasters expect a hot, dry weather pattern to persist in the coming days, with fire behavior likely to be “very active to extreme” over the next 72 hours.
Government satellite data are part of a global system of observations used to track fire behavior and analyze emerging trends. Among the real-time wildfire monitoring tools that NASA makes available are FIRMS (Fire Information for Resource Management System), the Worldview browser, and the Fire Event Explorer.
As of July 7, 2026, fires had burned 5,265 square miles (13,636 square kilometers) across the United States, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. That’s 46 percent more than the 10-year average (2016-2025) for that point in the season.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey and fire perimeter data from the Fire Events Data Suite. Story by Adam Voiland.
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