A spot of good news for Britain. Next has won its appeal and may go on paying warehouse workers more than “equal value” retail workers. I’ve written about this case in Equality Act 2010, The Equal Pay Madness Just Got Madder and The Apples and Oranges Tribunal, and discussed it at length on the CapX podcast.
Note how crazy the headline is:
The landmark ruling allows the retailer to pay warehouse workers more than shop staff on the basis it costs more to recruit and retain them.
Pay more to recruit and retain people? A landmark! Eight years of litigation to establish that wages have something to do with supply and demand.
Some of the crazy has been disciplined. The Leeds tribunal had asked why Next failed to raise the pay of retail workers to the warehouse level. Wrong question, said Mr Justice Bourne on appeal. The right question is why Next needed to pay the warehouse workers more. It did so, he found, for sound business reasons, and those reasons did not apply to retail. Hilariously, he also noted that Next’s warehouses were 47.2% female as opposed to the retail workers who were 77.5% female. In other words, there was more gender equality in the warehouses.
Don’t celebrate too hard. Eight years of litigation isn’t over, Next lost on the basic finding of equal value, and everyone is appealing. Meanwhile the government is moving to replace market wages with committee wages. The consultation closing in October would extend equal-value comparisons to race and disability and it would extend the law up the supply chain so Next’s potential escape route of contracting-out warehouses would be foreclosed. In short, Bourne’s reason is lawful today. Whether it survives the future is another matter.
Hat tip: Stephen S. and Robert W.
The post Next Wins Appeal appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Indigenous knowledge and art overwrite colonial cartography to correct the historical record in Central Australia
- by Aeon Video
On Sunday evening, the White House posted to its official X account an AI-generated video of President Trump as the superhero Green Lantern. While much of the slop they post to social media is just about trolling, it’s also a revealing window into the president’s beliefs and desires. Take a look:
The irony is that Trump’s greatest failure and source of frustration lies in the very fact that he is most definitely not Green Lantern. Putting that video up is the equivalent of a wide receiver who dropped a last-second pass in the end zone and cost his team the Super Bowl posting an AI video of himself making the catch after all. It doesn’t make him look heroic, it just makes him look like a loser.
If you are unfamiliar, Green Lantern gets his power from that ring, which allows him to translate his will into reality. All he has to do is think of something, focus his will, and it becomes real. This is, in fact, how Trump has long seen his role in the world — though in his case it’s a combination of his will and his words. His voice serves the function of Green Lantern’s ring; he believes he can speak reality into being.
Now look at the three things Trump magically makes happen in that video. The first is that he raises a border wall and keeps all the foreigners out. In reality, he has been trying from his first days in office in 2017, with only limited success, to complete a wall along the southern border (though he has certainly succeeded in reducing immigration to America, much to the nation’s detriment). Next, he makes manufacturing thrive in America again. In reality, the number of Americans employed in manufacturing is lower now than it was when he took office. Finally, he sends American planes off, presumably to war. And we know how that has worked out.
As a younger man, Trump concluded that if he told everyone he was rich and successful, he would become rich and successful. In that case it was true, with the asterisk of his occasional bankruptcies. He created an image, and people who were attracted to that image became the suckers who bought into his buildings or let him fleece them in cons like Trump University.
This goes all the way back to his childhood. When Trump was six years old, Norman Vincent Peale’s book The Power of Positive Thinking was released, advising that the key to success in life is relentless self-confidence even in the face of failure; it became a huge bestseller and the centerpiece of the Trump family worldview. “His parents, Fred and Mary, felt an immediate affinity for Peale’s teachings,” writes Gwenda Blair, who wrote a book about the Trump family. “On Sundays, they drove into Manhattan to worship at Marble Collegiate Church, where Peale was the head pastor. Donald and both his sisters were married there, and funeral services for both Fred and Mary took place in the main sanctuary.”
Peale’s lessons are foundational to Trump’s psychological makeup, the way he looks at the world. Whether Trump has any idea who Green Lantern is, the superhero is a kind of intergalactic manifestation of Peale’s book: Merely by willing it, he can achieve anything.
One can see how Trump could come to believe that Peale was right, and that he himself is a kind of Green Lantern figure with a unique ability to manifest his desires. He created the image he wanted to, he got rich and famous, he banged a bunch of broads, he broke laws with impunity, he went bankrupt and left others holding the bag, he barely paid taxes, and eventually he was elected president.
But it’s when he’s in office that things get complicated. Way back in 2009, Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan identified the “Green Lantern theory of the presidency” in response to liberal disappointment with Barack Obama; they were angry about the compromises Obama made as he struggled to pass his early legislative priorities (including a stimulus and the Affordable Care Act). As Nyhan wrote, those disappointed Democrats “created a narrative in which all failure and compromise is the result of a lack of presidential willpower.” If only Obama would try harder, some believed, he could get everything he had promised during the 2008 campaign.
Obama made plenty of mistakes, but it wasn’t just about not trying. The president is surrounded by forces constraining him in one way or another — 535 members of Congress with their own needs and desires, other nations pursuing their own goals, a sometimes pesky news media, immovable economic forces, laws and regulations, the courts, and public opinion itself.
Those constraints have frustrated Trump to no end, and one way he has dealt with that frustration is to retreat to his construction projects, where he is much better able to make things happen. He can cry “More gold in the ballroom, I want more gold!” and so there will be more gold. As the New York Times recently reported, working on those projects is Trump’s happy place precisely because it’s where he can realize his will:
Making changes to a project there requires hours of sitting in community meetings listening to complaints from residents, and getting sign-off from city officials. Projects like helipads, Mr. Trump has complained, are next-to-impossible to get approved. But in his second term as president, he said, he realized he could barrel over many of those impediments. He stocked review panels with White House appointees. Court challenges have failed to keep pace with the administration’s rapid construction. He can finally just have fun.
“You mean I can actually do something that I really want?” Mr. Trump told a room full of donors to his White House ballroom last year, describing what it had been like overseeing construction projects as president.
“‘You’re the president of the United States. You can do anything you want,’” Mr. Trump has said he has been told.
The Power of Positive Thinking spent 48 weeks at #1 on the nonfiction New York Times bestseller list and sold 5 million copies. Throughout the history of the self-help industry, variants of its core idea emerge and reemerge, always finding a ready audience. For instance, one of the most successful entries was The Secret, which came out in 2006 and has reportedly sold a stunning 30 million copies around the world (in no small part thanks to an endorsement from Oprah Winfrey). The Secret posits something called the “law of attraction,” which states that your desire for something — wealth, success, love — sends signals out to the universe, which then delivers that thing to you. “Your thoughts become things,” the book says. “You are like a human transmission tower, transmitting a frequency with your thoughts.”
However idiotic you think the book sounds, it’s a hundred times worse. And yet, it sold millions of copies. They made multiple movies out of it, both documentaries and this romance I just discovered:
What this tells us is that people want to believe that their fate is in their hands, that in an apparently unfeeling universe they can get what they want if they want it hard enough and have faith in themselves. Trump still believes this.
And for him, mere belief is not enough — he must not just believe in the reality he is trying to create, but speak it out loud, again and again. If he just describes the world as he wants it to be often enough, it will become what he describes. Just as he said he was a billionaire when he wasn’t but eventually became a billionaire, if he says he has achieved victory in Iran, victory will be his. If he says this is the best economy in history, that’s what it will be. If he says the polls show him to be spectacularly popular, then he is spectacularly popular.
For his most devoted cultists, it’s all true. Trump is their transmission tower; if he says this is the greatest economy in history, then it is — or at the very least, it will become so, if they only maintain their faith in him. But most Americans are not Trump cultists. They see reality with at least some clarity, and his hyperbole and lies no longer persuade them. They want the president to actually do worthwhile things, not just spend his time wishcasting.
After the midterm elections, the constraints on Trump are only going to increase, not only from Democrats if they take control of one or both houses of Congress, but from all the other people and institutions who fear him less than they did before. If he responds just by obsessing more and more about his ballroom and his arch without doing anything even more destructive, we’ll count ourselves lucky.
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There are good Elle Cordova videos, and there are great ones. (Last mentioned here for her “Fonts Hanging Out” trilogy.)
I have mentioned and recommended Shirt Pocket’s Mac backup app SuperDuper quite a few times over the years, and for good reason: it performs very important functions very well. Version 4, which shipped just over a month ago, is an extraordinary update to an extraordinary app.
Visually, the interface is all new. That took some getting used to, but not much. It didn’t take long for me to see how the new UI is better in every way. The style of presentation is new and modern, but the core idea remains the same: the interface of SuperDuper is self-explanatory. It explains what, exactly, is going to happen. It remains a marvel of clarity, especially when you consider the complexity of what it does.
Functionally, SuperDuper 4 is also much improved. SuperDuper has never been slow, but now some copy operations are over 2× faster. Scheduling options are more powerful. You don’t need to worry about the details to use SuperDuper, but the details are there for your inspection.
Shirt Pocket’s Dave Nanian designed it, implemented it, and thoroughly documented it. I don’t know how that’s possible. SuperDuper feels like impossibly good software. Read his post announcing version 4 to start, then catch up on the rest of the blog to get a feeling for how much work he’s put into SuperDuper 4. Just extraordinary.
In the 22 years since SuperDuper first shipped, Shirt Pocket has never charged for updates and never raised the price. (This too seems impossible, at least for a company that remains in business.) Version 4 costs $44 — an astonishing value — and discounts are available for anyone who bought version 3 after July 2020. Sans license, free of charge, SuperDuper 4 still allows you to make bootable backups.
I recommend SuperDuper 4 wholeheartedly.
See also: Dan Moren at Six Colors and Michael Tsai.
The Israeli daily Haaretz published a big and consequential exposé today alleging that weeks before the October 7, 2023 massacres in southern Israel the head of the UAE, Mohamed bin Zayed, warned Prime Minister Netanyahu in a direct phone call lasting some 45 minutes that something big was coming from Hamas. For additional context, Israel holds elections on October 27 of this year. And as it has for the last three years, Netanyahu’s degree of responsibility for what happened remains a central question in the election. So while it’s not explicitly noted in the article, the electoral implications are clear. The investigation itself appears to be essentially an excerpt from a soon-to-be released book. So it’s not precisely a Haaretz story, more one that they’re publishing, though that’s fine print. The article is long and detailed and I think quite credible. But it’s paywalled. So I wanted to walk you through the key details and provide some general analysis.
It’s best to think of this piece as three separate revelations. The first is that — all according to this article — Israel and Hamas in 2023 were pretty close to finalizing a semi-normalization of the situation in Gaza in a longterm truce, or “hudna,” between Hamas and Israel. The details of this aren’t fully sketched out but basically an end to the blockade, freer commerce and travel through Israel and Egypt, etc. Second is the warning from MBZ in the weeks before the attack. Then, finally, it claims that in the immediate aftermath of the attacks Hamas, was willing to free most or all of the hostages, probably excluding military-aged men in or out of uniform, with few if any conditions.
The axis of the story is the relationship between revelations one and two. And to avoid too many qualifying clauses in this description below I will be asserting the claims of the article except where I say otherwise.
The central player here is Yahya Sinwar, the late leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. When Sinwar came to power in 2017 he brought a new militancy to the position and embarked on a program of greatly expanding and intensifying Hamas’ military capacity, including its tunnel system. He wanted to go to war with Israel. But in this he was also acutely aware of the fact that every time the Palestinians or Hamas had done so in the past, the actions had been decisively crushed by Israeli military might and intelligence. So while preparing for war and confrontation, he decided to also explore a deal that could qualitatively improve life for Palestinians living in the Strip. Those negotiations were very far along at the end of the summer of 2023. They bogged down when Prime Minister Netanyahu started dragging his feet on just how many and which Palestinian prisoners would be released as part of the deal.
The background here is that, notwithstanding Benjamin Netanyahu’s reputation as a hawk and a war-monger on the left in the U.S., at least until 2023 his characteristic action was more kicking the can down the road. Biding his time, not committing himself. There were already a lot of clashes in the West Bank at the time and a major domestic political crisis in Israel over the “judicial coup,” which had brought the anti-Netanyahu opposition out on to the streets every week for almost a year. This all came after five successive elections which were indecisive and one of which took him out of power for a year before finally allowing him to create a narrow coalition relying heavily on the Israeli far right. So the general thrust of the article is some mix of Netanyahu having his hands full and doing his standard slow-rolling. He also probably wasn’t eager to agree to a deal that might put his coalition under strain.
Finally, Sinwar lost his patience with the process and cut off negotiations. This was in September. So like a month before the attacks. He must have had everything ready for an attack. But this would have been when he put the plan into motion. Intermediaries who had been working the Hudna negotiations got wind of something coming and Sinwar himself made a threat to one of these intermediaries and told him to get the message to Israel.
It’s a little hard to see the logic of this other than as an attempt to get Netanyahu back to the negotiations since the element of surprise was essential to the eventual attack’s success. Indeed, Sinwar seems to have said as much. Without the element of surprise it couldn’t work. So even these warnings were risky. The intermediary was uncertain and even afraid of what to do with the information, partly fearing that in conveying the message to Israel he might be held responsible for it. So he went to MBZ, the leader of the UAE. He was highly concerned about an attack that could lead to more or less what has happened over the last three years: a catastrophic attack on Israel, followed by horrific retaliation against Hamas in Gaza and leading to a regional war. He told the intermediary to get the message to the Israelis. He did that at the security and defense level. But the warnings were fairly vague and not much happened in response to the warnings. Netanyahu was briefed on the message and the meetings, as would be the norm.
A key backdrop to all of this is that Israel did not take Hamas seriously as a military threat. They took Hezbollah very seriously, as a de facto state/army. Hamas was different, basically a terrorist threat which could fire off homemade rockets and mount terrorist attacks, but not a true military threat. So I think it’s fair to say that when they heard Hamas was warning of something big they simply didn’t believe the scale they were later able to pull off. They apparently decided that Hamas would try to get possession of Israeli academic Elizabeth Tsurkov who had been kidnapped in Iraq and was being held hostage there. (She was eventually released in September 2025.) In any case, MBZ didn’t get the reaction he wanted. But he was also afraid that a more specific warning to the Israelis might prompt a massive preemptive attack on Hamas in Gaza. He wanted to know more. So he sent the intermediary back to find more details and to talk to Sinwar.
The intermediary talked again to Sinwar who gave a more direct and grave message. The intermediary and then MBZ got the message that some sort of catastrophic attack was planned. So MBZ made the decision to talk to Netanyahu directly. He conveyed all this in a 45 minute call between the two men. The kicker here is that Netanyahu did not brief any of his security or defense officials on this outreach. Of course they’d already gotten a version of the message. But the direct contact from a the leader of the UAE obviously showed a different level of urgency and gravity. The argument, and it’s a pretty good one, is that if Netanyahu had briefed the heads of Mossad, the Shin Bet and the IDF about this call they would have taken more aggressive protective measures.
To cite just one example, in the hours just before the October 7 attack, Israel saw something was happening in Gaza. Security officials met to evaluate it and they decided it was likely a drill and not to mobilize. Of course, it was not a drill. It was the beginning mobilization for the attack. These are all what ifs of course. But it does not seem implausible that if Netanyahu had briefed these officials on this warning that that conclusion arrived at in those overnight meetings might have been different and Israel could have had some level of military response in place when the attack started.
Finally, we have the possibility of a hostage release immediately after the attacks. Here this sounds quite plausible but I think this is an incomplete perspective and perhaps to an American audience misleading. Once the attack happened, all the regional leaders were desperately scrambling to stop what was coming. The government of Qatar threatened to expel Hamas from the country if they didn’t immediately release all the civilian hostages. (As I noted above, there’s some disagreement over the definitions of civilians: Hamas likely viewed all military age men and possibly everyone of military age as soldiers, whether currently in the IDF or not.) Hamas first agreed to release the civilian hostages with a number of conditions, essentially non-retaliation for the attacks and some changes to the status quo on the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif. This was a non-starter. Other players intervened and basically said no conditions. Just release them. Hamas then appears to have agreed to this, with perhaps some token conditions.
The response from Israel was there’s nothing to talk about. Then Mossad Director David Barnea told Prime Minister al-Thani of Qatar: “If they want to release the civilians, let them release them. We are not prepared to speak with Hamas.” The same message was passed through other channels.
The offer and the response are both extremely plausible. But I think it was basically inevitable. I’m not trying to litigate here what you or I or anyone else thinks makes sense or what would have been right. But at that moment about 1200 Israelis, the great majority civilians, had been killed. What was being proposed here was a release of most of the hostages and a return to some sort of negotiations. At that moment that was acceptable only to the tiniest fringe of Israeli public opinion. The verdict was that Israel had misjudged Hamas and fatally underestimated it and that the only solution was to destroy it as an organization and kill everyone who had been involved in the attack. So my point is I don’t think this revelation, if it is one, is a surprise. And I don’t think it’s either here or there in terms of it political ramifications within Israel. Because every other party and leader who is now at all contesting for power would have made the same decision.
The only slight caveat to that is that it became clear over time that Netanyahu’s government had no real interest or priority to seek the release of the hostages at all, even long after Israel had delivered that decisive and ferocious assault and killed tens of thousands of civilians along the way. Some of that lack of interest was the government’s hawkishness and desire for revenge. But it was also because at a basic level Netanyahu did not want to bring the war to a close because that would create perhaps-unstoppable pressure to hold new elections that he would almost certainly lose. (As it happens, he waited till the last possible legal date to hold a new election.) That fact may change some of the shading of this revelation. But I don’t think it changes that big picture.
And finally, does any of this matter for the upcoming election? I’m honestly not sure. I went around the Israeli papers and the story is getting reported though not necessarily with screaming headlines basically everywhere. By rights it should fundamentally discredit Netanyahu whose calling card has always been security and normalcy. But he’s already been discredited to anyone without an overwhelming personal or ideological commitment to supporting him. Whatever messages or warnings Netanyahu received in the weeks before October 7, the bigger story is that Netanyahu had been Prime Minister for the previous 14 years with only one short one year interruption in 2021 and 2022. All the policies, strategies and decisions were his — both in the moment and in the shaping of policy back to 2009. And it happened on his watch. Given that political context my best guess would be a moderate political hit if only because he’s already down to the hard core of the rightist camp. But I emphasize “guess.” I really don’t know.
As part of their overarching plan to reduce the power of blue states and promote myths about noncitizen voting, the Trump administration is pushing all types of changes to how the census operates. TPM reporter Layla Jones will talk to publisher Joe Ragazzo and executive editor John Light about what these schemes involve and what’s at stake.
Join them live at 2 p.m. ET on YouTube Live.
Yesterday I was kind of randomly rereading some details about Spain’s transition to democracy after the death of Francisco Franco in 1975, as one does. And I noticed that Spain had finally released the last classified documents tied to the attempted coup of 1981. The non-disclosure of these documents had helped maintain various conspiracy theories and counter-narratives about whether King Juan Carlos played quite the heroic role history has assigned him. In brief, Franco groomed Juan Carlos to succeed him believing he would maintain the Franco-ist dictatorship. But Juan Carlos quickly set about putting Spain on a path to democracy and when Francoist dead-enders in the army mounted a coup in 1981, Juan Carlos famously went on television, denounced the coup, thus leading to its total collapse. The counter-argument or claim is that Juan Carlos knew about the coup or perhaps even supported it and only pulled the plug when it looked like it was failing.
The release of the documents was just this last February. And they basically confirmed the established story, that there was no reason to believe Juan Carlos knew about the coup in advance and acted decisively to undermine and bring it to an end. But it was a small note in the Times article I read about this that got my attention: one of the reasons for the release, overseen by Spain’s current center-left government, was to combat historical revisionism and growing nostalgia for Franco among young men.
Sound familiar?
This points us back to a reality which gets too little attention but which also requires a dual approach that is challenging to get just right. We hear a lot about how Democrats need to have podcasts to appeal to young men, how their brand is toxic across rural America. In 2024 the story, as noted in the previous post, was that Democrats were even losing ground with Hispanic voters, to, of all people, Donald Trump. These points are all true, though the point about Hispanic voters was likely premature. But the general explanation is that the leading Democrats are hapless, that the party is in the thrall of the mercenary consultant class or a bunch of other explanations. But again and again we see that the same basic patterns are cropping up all over the world.
What this means pretty clearly is — while Chuck Schumer and the consultants may suck, it’s probably not really about them. It’s about something more fundamental, a crisis of liberal democracy which we have to try to solve even though we only dimly understand it. Yes of course there are theories and one or the other of them are probably partly right. But this isn’t about criticizing theorists. It’s about living in history, when the things really driving change are seldom that clear to those living amidst the change.
The danger here is that we collectively fall into a kind of self-disgust which I see all the time. Our leaders suck. We suck. We’re weak and hapless. The political faction or movement I belong to sucks. These all flow rather naturally from most of the mainstream media narratives about whatever challenges Democrats are facing at a given moment. And this is of course enervating. Or it can be. And it can promote conflict which is not necessarily productive conflict.
And yet just because it’s happening in Spain and in countless other similarly situated countries doesn’t mean we can say, “Welp, it’s bigger than us. That’s just how it is. Nothing we can do about it.” Obviously the challenge is still the same for any of us who believe in liberal democracy, in freedom and general human flourishing. In fact the challenge is probably greater because it’s not just some incidental thing that’s going to be solved in time for the next election — better consultants, no politicians over 65, politicians who will fight. It’s big and goes beyond any single person’s mistakes or individual excellence. And this is what I mean by a dual approach, the necessity of not falling into a kind of cheap and demoralizing self-critique while also recognizing that it is very much our responsibility to have the creativity, forcefulness and resilience to do something about it. In a way it requires us to understand our situation both from outside of history, looking at it from the long view, and also very much inside it, in the moment, with every action and option on the table, with every decision mattering because we don’t know how the future turns out.
Last year, an unplanned personal hiatus coincided with the time when I should have been reviewing the then-new iPhones 17 and iPhone Air. In my brief note explaining my absence, I wrote:
I look forward to getting back to writing very soon. I can feel it: I will be back soon. I’m itching to go. I mean, jiminy, it’s new iPhones week. But it’ll be a few more days before I get those reviews out.
354 days is arguably more than a few, but given that I missed the window for reviewing them when they were new, I thought it might be interesting to consider the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air on the cusp of their being obviated by the next generation of iPhones.
The iPhone Air is the nicest phone Apple has ever made, and probably the nicest device Apple has ever made, period. It’s just so goddamn nice. Over the years, Apple has gone back and forth with its treatment of the metal side rails on iPhone hardware: some years polished like jewelry, other years, matte like a tool. The iPhone Air is polished, and the effect is luxe. (And it stands in contrast to the matte iPhones 17 Pro.)
The whole point of the device is that it is absurdly thin. A year later, it still feels remarkably thin and light in hand — and, even better, thin and light in pocket. It is delightful to hold and carry. The screen is terrific. The buttons are perfect: they stick out just enough and have just the right clickiness.
The big concern most people have regarding the Air is battery life. I used my Air review unit extensively and battery life was never once a problem. Yes, battery life is shorter than with other iPhone models, but it’s more than long enough. When you know you might need to top it off, you just do it here and there throughout the day. I not only never once ran out of battery by the end of the day with the Air, I never once came all that close. It’s fine.1 I mean, if you’re the sort of person who struggles to get through the day battery-life-wise with a regular (thicker) iPhone, the iPhone Air obviously isn’t for you. But that’s really obvious.
My biggest concern going into it was the camera system. The iPhone Air has only a single rear-facing camera, with non-interpolated 1× and 2× zoom factors.2 In practice, yes, sometimes while carrying the Air I regretted not having either the ultra wide 0.5× lens or telephoto lens, both of which I’m accustomed to having at my disposal. But ultimately I didn’t miss either of those lenses enough that I regretted having the Air in my pocket that day. And conversely, there’s something mentally freeing about having just one lens. There’s no question which lens you should use. Zoom with your feet.
And the one lens the iPhone Air has is excellent. It’s not quite as good as the main 1×/2× lens on the Pro models, but it’s much closer to the Pro models in image quality than it is to the single-lens iPhone 17e. (But even the 17e is a damn good camera for a phone.) One thing you miss by not having a 0.5× ultra wide lens is a true macro mode. But because it uses a slightly smaller sensor, the camera on the iPhone Air has a closer minimum focus distance than the iPhone 17 Pro’s main camera (15 cm vs. 20 cm — those 5 cm often make a big difference). I like the iPhone Air camera so much that it didn’t factor all that much into my decision whether to buy one to use as my personal iPhone for the last year. It’s that good.
But I did not buy one to use as my personal iPhone for the last year. I bought an iPhone 17 Pro. The reason is size.
The iPhone 17 Pro comes in two sizes: regular and Max. I find the Max sizes too big — unpleasant to hold, unpleasant to pocket. The iPhone Air comes in only one size — a sort of one-size-fits-all midway point between the regular iPhone models and Max models.
| Width | Height | Thickness | Weight | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| iPhone 17 Pro Max | 78mm | 163mm | 8.75mm | 233g |
| iPhone Air | 75mm | 156mm | 5.64mm | 165g |
| iPhone 17 Pro | 72mm | 150mm | 8.75mm | 206g |
Width- and height-wise, the Air is pretty much halfway between the Pro and Pro Max. For me, in practice, the factor that really matters is width — and I find the Air too wide. Just holding the phones as objects to admire, the dramatic thinness and lighter weight make the iPhone Air the nicest, by far. But holding them to actually use, I find the Air feels too wide. Specifically, too wide to use with one hand, gripping it with my palm and fingers and swiping and tapping with my thumb. If I had my druthers, the regular-sized iPhones would be slightly smaller, footprint-wise. The regular iPhone 17 Pro is pretty much as wide as can be for me to use it one-handed. The Air is too wide for that — it’s a two-handed device for me. And that was the dealbreaker.3 I use my iPhone one-handed frequently, often while walking around the city carrying a bag or beverage in my other hand.
If the iPhone Air came in two sizes, regular and Max, corresponding to the widths and heights of the two Pro sizes, I would have bought the regular-sized Air model and, I’m convinced, been delighted with it for the past year. But the iPhone Air only comes in one size, and that size is too wide for my taste, and in practical use, that factor overrides everything I love about the Air.
If you use your iPhone two-handed almost exclusively — perhaps because you find even the regular-sized models too wide to use one-handed — there’s a good chance you’d be happier with the Air than whatever model you’re currently carrying. It’s so goddamn nice.
The iPhone 17 Pro is the best phone Apple has ever made, and perhaps the best device Apple has ever made, period.
After two years of titanium side rails and full-glass backs (the 15/16 Pro generations), the 17 Pro went back to aluminum, and the metal is now more of an entire frame for the device than just a side rail. There remains a matte glass panel on the back, but only for the bottom three-quarters or so, underneath the camera plateau. (Inductive MagSafe/Qi charging doesn’t work through metal.) The camera plateau is now aluminum, and, most noticeably, extends across the full width of the device, even though the three camera lenses (0.5×, 1×/2×, 4×/8×) remain in a triangle arrangement in the corner.
This new full-width plateau is a winning design. I think it looks good, but more importantly, feels great. It looks more balanced and feels more balanced too. It still wobbles when placed on a table, but it wobbles less. The camera capabilities, to me, are the defining aspect of the Pro models. It thus feels correct for them to be so physically prominent on the devices.
The iPhone 17 Pro was offered in three colors: cosmic orange, deep blue, and silver. All three colors are excellent, and each of them tempted me to some extent. I’m not sure why silver didn’t get an adjective — it’s a very nice colorway. But cosmic orange is the eyecatcher. For years, Apple has been releasing non-pro iPhones in fun colors, and Pro iPhones only in no-fun (or at best low-fun) colors. It really seemed like a mystery why Apple never released an iPhone Pro model in a vibrant fun color. Now that they finally did it, it seems like even more of a mystery why it took them so long — anecdotally, cosmic orange has been an incredibly popular choice. I see orange iPhone 17 Pros in use every day, often in clear cases to show off the color.
My personal rule has been to always buy black, or the nearest to black offered. Deep blue isn’t all that near to black, but it was the nearest, so that’s what I bought. I wouldn’t call it fun but I liked it when I bought it and I’m not tired of it now, nearly a year later. It’s a serious blue. After 10+ months of near-daily use, the anodization is beginning to wear away at the top corner of my iPhone’s camera plateau, where there’s a bit of a sharp corner. I find this to be a charming patina, not a flaw, and looking at that wear increases my affection for this little guy.
(Photo taken with the iPhone Air, using Halide Mark III.)
I’ve shot (and kept) 5,365 photos and 97 videos with the iPhone 17 Pro. (Perhaps I should shoot more videos.) The iPhone camera has long been the best camera in the sense of “The best camera is the one you have with you.” With each successive year, they come closer and closer to being the best camera I’ve ever owned, period. It’s really quite remarkable how good a camera it is.
Battery life has been excellent. I charge to 100 percent every night while I sleep, and never worry about it during the day. Very seldom is the battery under 25 percent by the end of the day. According to the statistics in Settings → Battery → Battery Health, maximum battery capacity remains at 96 percent after 230 cycles. That seems pretty good.
Durability has been terrific as well. I mentioned a month ago that Apple’s “Ceramic Shield 2” process seems to be the real deal. Even under close inspection, there’s seemingly not a single micro abrasion on the front glass. I used a Nomad leather back during the very coldest weeks of the east coast winter, but otherwise have never used a case. Despite near-daily use for 10-ish months, it’s in near-mint condition. I’ve also found that it’s about as grippy as one could hope in most weather conditions, the frigid cold being the one exception.
Dust and fuzz accumulates in the USB-C port — just like every phone with a USB port. I clean it out every few months. Some sort of crud also accumulates in the very thin, easily overlooked slit for the speaker at the top of the display. That requires something like a pin or needle to clean. I don’t know what that crud is and I don’t want to know. I also don’t know what Apple could do about this crud accumulation, but I need to reach deep to find anything at all to complain about regarding this iPhone. I look forward to a future hermetically sealed iPhone which has no crevices in which to accumulate crud.
One year later and it feels like both the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air could be announced tomorrow, not a year ago, and would seem fresh and exciting.
Apple also created a battery pack exclusively for the Air: the $100 iPhone Air MagSafe Battery. Like Apple’s late great Lightning MagSafe Battery Pack, the Air MagSafe Battery is a much better product than any third-party battery pack I’ve ever tried, and I’ve tried an embarrassing number of them. It sticks better magnetically, and there’s software integration with iOS that shows the battery pack’s remaining power when you first connect it, and in the Battery widget. iOS also seems smarter about when to draw power from it, making it last longer. It’s a no-brainer recommendation for anyone who buys an iPhone Air. You won’t need it most days, but on the days when you need it, it’s perfect.
My only gripe about the iPhone Air MagSafe Battery remains the same from the day it was announced last year: it has “Air” in the name because it’s designed exclusively for the iPhone Air. Apple’s old Lightning MagSafe Battery Pack was designed to fit any iPhone. (In fact, it debuted in 2020 alongside the iPhone 12 Mini, an iPhone that actually needed help getting through the day on a single charge.) The old Lightning battery pack remains so good that I continue to use mine (I own two) instead of the numerous third-party ones I’ve blown money on in the intervening years. The old Lightning ones don’t pack much of a punch, juice-wise — particularly because they’re now several years old — but no matter how much I use my iPhone, it’s always enough to extend me through the day. (The key is not to start using it until your iPhone drops under 30 percent — it takes less energy to recharge a mostly depleted battery.) I continue using them because they stick to the back of the iPhone so strongly, and, once attached, are so comfortable. It’s the last Lightning device I actively use, but unless Apple comes out with a proper USB-C replacement that works on iPhones other than the Air, I don’t foresee retiring mine until they’re completely shot. ↩︎
The front-facing camera on the iPhone Air is the new (for 2025) Center Stage camera. It’s exactly the same front-facing camera as the iPhone 17 Pro and non-pro models, and uses a square sensor with a wider field of view. ↩︎︎
This, of course, makes me wonder about the one-handed usability of the passport-sized foldable iPhone that Apple is expected to unveil tomorrow. ↩︎︎
Stoke Space announced Tuesday that it has raised another significant round of funding, $1 billion, as it makes a final push toward its debut launch next year. The Washington-based launch company also revealed plans for a larger medium-lift vehicle.
With the Series E funding round, co-led by Point72 Ventures and Spark Capital, Stoke Space brought its total amount of capital raised to $2.3 billion, a staggering amount for a company that has yet to attempt an orbital launch.
The quantity of new funding will enable the company to accelerate work on a larger "Block 2" version of the Nova rocket, capable of lifting 15 metric tons to low-Earth orbit in a fully reusable configuration, said Stoke co-founder and Chief Executive Andy Lapsa.
Patient Who Received Pig Kidney Becomes First To Progress to Human Kidney Transplant
Study shows xenotransplantation can serve as a bridge for patients with end-stage kidney disease
By MASS GENERAL BRIGHAM COMMUNICATIONS September 3, 2026
Riella L, Borges T, Rosales I et al.
Porcine kidney xenotransplantation as a bridge to allotransplantation: a first-in-human study
The Lancet, 2026;
"This case shows that porcine kidney xenotransplantation can provide prolonged renal support and be discontinued without clinically significant allosensitisation or zoonotic infection. Early cellular rejection resolved with treatment, whereas later graft failure was associated with microvascular injury progressing to thrombotic microangiopathy despite a negative donor-specific crossmatch, supporting the possibility that mechanisms beyond conventional antibody-mediated rejection contributed to late graft injury. Kidney xenotransplantation has the potential to provide prolonged dialysis-free support while also serving as a bridge to subsequent human allotransplantation."
In 2015, 6 of the top 25 bestselling hardcover books—this is a not-perfect but useful proxy for new books published—were fiction. In 2025, 18 of the top 25 hardcover books were fiction, meaning only 7 were nonfiction, almost an exact inversion of ten years ago.
From Sean Delone, via David Wallace-Wells.
The post Reading sentences to ponder appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
That is the topic of my latest Free Press column, here is one excerpt:
…college is a great place to make friends, date, and possibly meet a spouse. Those features are ever more important as America suffers a crisis of loneliness. Furthermore, if you think that artificial intelligence may displace a lot of jobs, or just reduce work hours, marrying well will become more important. The title of the new essay by Clara Collier says it all: “After Work, We’ll Have Each Other.” You are also going to live longer, so think hard about who you wish to spend that time with.
The data show that college-educated people are more likely to marry, and to stay married. More generally, college-educated folks have superior social indicators of all kinds, including resistance to alcohol, drug, and gambling addiction. (Charles Murray wrote a whole book on this theme, called Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.)
If you have a bachelor’s degree and are over 25 years of age, your chance of being married is 64 percent. If you have only a high school degree, your odds of being married are an even 50 percent.
For divorce, the results are more dramatic yet. The chance of a woman remaining married for at least 20 years is 78 percent if she went to college, but 41 percent if she is only a high school graduate. For men, the gradient is less sharp though still significant—namely, 65 percent versus 47 percent.
People who finished college also have more extensive networks of friends. For instance they are twice as likely to have six or more close friends, and less than half as likely to have no close friends at all.
There are some private sector jobs where you can spend four years alongside the same group of people and then have social networks to stay in touch over the following years. But all too often people come and go in their jobs and lose touch with former colleagues rapidly, or maybe never share much of a common experience in the first place. College seems to do an especially good job of keeping people connected.
We do not know the extent to which these relationships are causal ones. That’s to say, does going to college induce better outcomes, or are the people who will have better outcomes in any case more likely to attend college in the first place? Probably some of both. In any case, it is better to have this force on your side, even if you are not sure how important it is.
So, in sum, while the money premium from college is falling, the friends and marriage premium from college is going up and probably will rise further still.
Of course those are not the only reasons. That said, I do think going to college makes less sense, at the margin, than it did say seven or eight years ago, as I outline in the piece.
The post Reasons to go to college appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Eruptions are a regular occurrence at Anak Krakatau, a small volcano between the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra. Much of its activity remains relatively mild, but it occasionally puts on more impressive and hazardous shows of force. In early September 2026, a booming eruption lasting more than 24 hours sent gas and ash high into the atmosphere, disrupting thousands of flights and degrading air quality in parts of the country, including the capital city of Jakarta.
Satellites passing over the area during the eruption on September 5 captured images of the explosive activity. In the scene above, acquired with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on the NASA-USGS Landsat 8 satellite, a white plume of volcanic gas billows over a brown ash cloud. Below, a wider view captured by the VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on the Suomi NPP satellite shows the volcanic material dispersing over a large area.
Indonesia’s meteorological agency reported that ash had reached altitudes up to 6,000 meters (20,000 feet) to the east of the volcano and 15,000 meters (50,000 feet) to the west by September 6. The presence of ash in the atmosphere prompted the temporary closure of eight airports on Java and Sumatra, disrupting nearly 3,000 flights in and out of the area, according to news reports.
Ashfall affected populated areas, particularly to the east of Anak Krakatau in Jakarta and other parts of West Java, the Indonesian Humanitarian Coordination Platform (IHCP) reported. Volcanic ash poses health risks to people and can irritate the respiratory tract, eyes, and skin. However, this air quality hazard differs from the smoke produced by peatland fires elsewhere in the country in terms of particle characteristics, dispersal patterns, and protection measures, the IHCP noted.
On September 6, the continuous explosive eruption from Anak Krakatau subsided, though the volcano kept rumbling. It returned to a more typical pattern of Strombolian eruptions, characterized by intermittent spurts of ash and volcanic material. Airports had resumed operation by September 8, but the volcano remained at the second-highest alert level on the country’s scale, as it has been since early July.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey, and VIIRS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE, GIBS/Worldview, and the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership. Story by Lindsey Doermann.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
The volcano on Indonesia’s Halmahera Island routinely ejects ash, volcanic gases, and volcanic bombs.
Satellite imagery shows a surge of new volcanic activity in the ocean near Papua New Guinea.
Near-constant activity continues on the volcano in Russia.
The post Anak Krakatau Rumbles Again appeared first on NASA Science.
Links for you. Science:
Trump Moves To Let Ranchers Kill Wolves: ‘You Can Shoot ‘Em’
Earth’s Magnetic Field Can Help Archaeologists Sniff Out Forged Antiquities
New England’s forests are in trouble
Breakthrough Quantum Test Resolves a Major Cosmic Mystery
The ‘Gen Z stare’ — and the decline of saying things out loud
Other:
What happened when Boston’s real-estate market found Montrose Street
A Data Center Moved Into This Town, And The Neighbors Moved Out
Is Adam Hamilton “Too Woke For Kansas?” The Democratic Senate candidate in the Jayhawk State, a former Republican and a Methodist minister who runs its largest megachurch, thinks the charge is laughable—and that he’s going to shock the world by turning Kansas blue.
Persis Yu’s blueprint for challenging entrenched power on Beacon Hill
Who Wrote the Zohar?
‘Oh hell no!’ Trump sparks fury as he doubles down on latest name-change obsession
More Americans are identifying as Democrats ahead of midterms
The Forgotten Jewish Revolt That Erased a Civilization
Dingy, dated, doomed: A fond goodbye to the Mass. Pike rest stops
American Airlines passenger duct-taped to seat after mid-air meltdown loses his job
Who did I vote for? Real people from the 2024 Cooperative Election Study introduce themselves in one sentence. You guess how likely it is they voted for Trump.
Why Erika Kirk failed as Turning Point USA’s leader
The Replacements: Trump’s State Department spent 2025 gutting the diplomatic workforce. Now it’s discovered that many of the people it eliminated were, unfortunately, pretty important all along—and desperately trying to refill their roles. “State is shopping for the expertise it threw away,” said one former officer. “You cannot make this shit up.”
Ken Paxton’s Financial Disclosures Appear to Violate Federal Ethics Law, Experts Say
Flock Taught Cops How to Surveil No Kings Protesters
Gloria Steinem was a beacon for women like me
A16z Says You Actually Love Social Media, Enshittification Isn’t Real
Who’s Afraid of the A.I. Bubble? Former a16z partner Vijay Pande thinks an A.I. crash is inevitable, so we may as well get it over with. But how bad could things get, and what would the industry look like afterward?
You Wanted a More Brutal World. Milo Yiannopoulos gleefully supported a vicious, brutal deportation machine. Having helped unleash this nightmarish system, will he take responsibility for helping us dismantle it?
Since yesterday, President Donald J. Trump has been posting on social media at a frantic pace, showing AI images of himself with President George Washington on his own account and, on the official White House account, a video of himself as the DC Comics Green Lantern superhero. The White House social media account ripped off Green Lantern’s oath, captioning the video: “In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight. Let those who worship evil’s might beware my power… Green Lantern’s light!”
Back on his own account, Trump posted images of Space Force uniforms that mimic those of Starship Troopers, whose design the director of that 1997 film claimed was meant to invoke Nazis. He also posted two AI images of himself in what appears to be a spaceship with his hands on buttons as two nuclear mushroom clouds billow off planet Earth behind him, and two images of himself as a sort of superhero dark lord with a dark army around him with the captions “THEY WILL NEVER SLEEP AGAIN,” “GIVE THEM NIGHTMARES,” and “THEY WILL DREAM OF US FOREVER.”
He posted multiple images of himself changing maps or of new maps showing the change of the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” and the state of New Mexico to “New America,” and labeling the Strait of Hormuz as “NEW U.S. Territory.” He showed the colors of the United States over the North American continent, and he posted “before” and “after” maps in which Iran was replaced with a silhouette image of his own head, as well as an AI image of a U.S. military plane blowing up Iran’s Kharg Island with the caption: “Bye bye, Kharg,” along with repeated claims that Iran is collapsing. He posted an AI-generated image of himself beating Canadian prime minister Mark Carney at hockey and saying, “GET UP, GOVERNOR,” an insulting reference to Canada as a U.S. state.
He also posted an image of the moon with the caption: “THE MOON IS OURS” along with a U.S. flag.
And, of course, many of the things Trump posted claimed he would “GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS THE GREATEST PRESIDENT OF ALL TIME!” He posted AI images of former president Joe Biden wearing a Trump 2024 hat and anti-Trump actor Robert DeNiro holding up a shirt saying “TRUMP IS MY PRESIDENT.” He posted an AI image of what seemed to be the luxury liner RMS Titanic, labeled “DUMOCRATIC PARTY,” sinking in flames.
He acknowledged complaints about the fact he has pocketed more than two billion dollars from rapid-fire stock trading since taking office a second time. He posted an image of himself trading stocks at his desk in the Oval Office at a screen that reads “BOUGHT: INTEL $20” and another that reads “NOW $95” with the caption: “I do this for our Country, not myself. I’ve made Hundreds of Billions of Dollars on Stocks, and many other type Holdings, for the U.S.A., not myself, and all I do is get criticized by the Radical Left Dumocrats. Very unfair, but what can you do! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
He reiterated his demand for the SAVE America voter suppression act and claimed: “Except for the RADICAL LEFT that wants to RAISE YOUR TAXES, and wreck our Economy, EVERYONE LOVES TAX CUTS! My Big Beautiful Bill was the BIGGEST relief in HISTORY for hardworking families—Nobody’s seen anything like it!”
It seems likely that he and his aide Natalie Harp, who is apparently behind much of his social media, think trolling the country is a good way to keep attention focused on Trump rather than on rising inflation, corruption, or the war in Iran.
There is much to distract from. On CNN today, pollster Harry Enten noted that while Trump enjoyed a 20-point advantage over Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent, in 2024 on economic issues, Trump’s approval rating for how he is handling the economy is now 41 points underwater. “We’re talking about a switcheroo in the wrong direction of 61 points on this Labor Day,” Enten said. “It is not a happy Labor Day, indeed, for President Trump when it comes to how those who are employed view him on the economy.”
Also today, when Martha Raddatz of ABC News noted that gas and diesel prices are soaring, with the Labor Day gasoline average at $4.10 a gallon compared with $3.16 last year, she played a clip of Trump telling an audience that when they had to “pay a tiny little bit more for your gasoline, just remember, you’re doing it so that a very evil country cannot have—a country, really, it’s the number one state sponsor of terror in the world. We don’t want to have them have a nuclear weapon. So remember that, when you have to pay a little bit more, you’re at $4, it’s okay. I mean, it’s, I’m not, I’m not. I will never apologize. I did the right thing.”
Raddatz asked Energy Secretary Chris Wright today about when we might see a nuclear agreement with Iran, since it’s already been six months of higher prices and there doesn’t seem to be one on the table. Wright answered: “There may not be a nuclear agreement. It may be simply destroying their capabilities to do it. An agreement may await a next administration in Iran. We simply don’t know that. But I think what the president was communicating there is how critically important this is.”
Tonight, Trump posted: “Oil prices will drop precipitously, like everything else is dropping (but more!), when we WIN the war with Iran. Three Dollars a gallon, but ultimately, below Two Dollars a gallon. It will all happen quickly, and Iran will never have a Nuclear Weapon. MAGA! President DJT”
But while at some level Trump might think he is being clever by keeping the focus on himself, what he is really doing is demonstrating that he is no longer even trying to govern and is instead retreating into a world where he simply does whatever he wants without regard for the country. In the early hours of Trump’s rants yesterday, even before they had gained their full momentum, Representative Chellie Pingree (D-ME) called out the Republicans who are refusing to exercise their constitutional powers to protect the country.
“This is truly unhinged,” she posted on social media over a video of his posts. “I don’t want to hear ‘oh, it’s just Trump being Trump’ or he’s ‘trolling.’ Republicans cannot keep shrugging this off. Congress, the Cabinet + everyone around him has a responsibility to stop enabling this dangerous behavior and start asking whether he is fit to hold office.”
Today Trump acknowledged the Labor Day holiday, saying: “Happy Labor Day to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, and Dumocrats who will do anything possible to destroy our Country. These Deranged People, after fighting for 10 years, should finally acknowledge that your Favorite President (ME!), knows how to WIN! They should be exhausted by now but, sadly, they’re not. They’re going to give it one last shot at ruining America, but we’re not going to let that happen. We’re going to win the Midterms, BIG, and SAVE AMERICA! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
Former president Joe Biden had a different message for the country on Labor Day: “I’ve said it my entire career,” he posted on social media, “the middle class built America. And unions built the middle class. To every worker who’s ever punched a clock, worked a double, or walked a line for fair wages—and to everyone who stands up for them, at the bargaining table, in the statehouse, or on the shop floor: thank you. This country runs in large part because of you.”
For my part, I hope everyone had a restful Labor Day and is ready to face the fall season—and the midterm elections—with renewed energy.
—
Notes:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/natalie-harp-spotting-fuels-questions-about-trumps-ai-posting-spree/
Trump’s Truth:
X:
JoeBiden/status/2096966644870394260
Bluesky:
“The issues that he bawled about usually meant nothing to him. He was ready to abandon them whenever he could make votes by doing so, and to take up new ones at a moment’s notice … [He] was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses…. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him … full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.”
— H.L. Mencken in an obit of William Jennings Bryan, 1925
•••
Even though I live here in Orange County, I am a New Yorker.
I will always be a New Yorker.
I was born and raised in a town, Mahopac, located about an hour north of Manhattan, and after graduating college and spending 2 1/2 years as a writer in Nashville, I moved to the Big Apple to work for Sports Illustrated and eat an endless supply of bagels (with whitefish and tomato) and late-night slices of pizza. It is no exaggeration to say I love New York City. The buzz. The passion. The ‘Fuck you’ and ‘Your mom’ and potholes and summer piss stench and asphalt hoops and Nas and Biggie and Billy Joel and … I love everything about it. In many ways, it’s who I am.
I repeat: It is who I am.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was in the rear seat of a car driving across Manhattan and heading toward the Holland Tunnel. It was me and three Sports Illustrated co-workers, with an ultimate destination of New Jersey to attend a golf tournament (unusual for me, because I loathe golf). As we cruised west, one of us noticed a bunch of people standing on an upcoming corner, gazing upward. Within a few seconds, we saw what they saw: A gaping, burning hole in Tower 1 of the World Trade Center.
This was my introduction to … The Worst.
What followed remains borderline indescribable. We reached our destination, sat in a room and—together—watched on TV as buildings smoldered and planes crashed and people (who began their days presuming it was just another Tuesday) faced the unfathomable decision of whether to leap to their deaths or burn to their deaths. I couldn’t believe it. Could. Not. Believe. It. Upon somehow finding a way to return to my apartment late that night, I hugged my fiance and just … I dunno. Absorbed. Crumbled. Paced and moaned and failed to understand the enormity of what had occurred. This was impossible, right? It had to be …
The days that followed … I mean, people talk about New Yorkers never being more united, and it’s the truth. But what I remember most are the flyers. Flyers here, flyers there. Flyers on doors and windows and platforms. HAVE YOU SEEN and IF YOU SEE. A friend and I shuffled over to a midtown armory, where loved ones looking for the lost gathered. With everyone aspiring to help (but little actual need), I stood, cupped my hands and announced, “IF YOU HAVE A FLYER, MY FRIEND AND I WILL MAKE COPIES OF IT AND POST ALL OVER THE CITY!” Dozens of people handed us pieces up paper, including one woman—the wife of a man named Robert Pugliese—who said, glumly, “I know he’s dead.” We spent the next six or seven hours posting flyers. Knowing, as Robert Pugliese’s wife did, the people pictured were most certainly gone.
I also recall the smell. Even though our place was about a mile north of Ground Zero, the stench was inescapable. Metallic, burning rubber, wood, fleshy. Up your nostrils. On your skin.
God, I fucking hate 9.11.
Anyone in New York City at the time hates 9.11.
•••
Wait.
I want to correct that last sentence, because it’s not true.
Donald Trump, a born-and-raised New Yorker who was in the city on the worst-ever day, seems to love 9.11. Or at least love lying about it. And using it to make himself some sort of hero.
Which he most certainly was not.
And before I delve into this, I want to scream one point, because it pisses me the fuck off. So … here I go: EVEN THOUGH EVERYTHING I’M ABOUT TO WRITE IS VERIFIABLY TRUE, THE MAINSTREAM NEWS MEDIA RARELY (AKA: ALMOST NEVER) BRINGS THIS UP. EVERY YEAR WE HAVE A 9.11 ANNIVERSARY, EVERY YEAR DONALD TRUMP SPEWS SOME BULLSHIT, EVERY YEAR WE ALL PRETEND THERE’S NO HISTORY HERE! IT’S INFURIATING!
Put different …
Donald Trump’s first awful act in regard to 9.11 came within a few hours of the disaster, when he went on TV (his favorite place) and bragged about now having Manhattan’s tallest building. If you’re thinking, “No way someone does that”—yes, way.
Here’s the clip …
It’s funny. Before he became president, and was just a reality TV bozo, I sorta gave the dude the benefit of the doubt. Like, maybe he misspoke or had a different idea in mind. But—no. We know Donald Trump far too well, and this is precisely who he is. He cannot not brag, even if the subject involves ruination and destruction.
Don’t believe me? Twelve years before the Sept. 11 attacks a trio of Trump-employed casino executives died in a helicopter crash in New Jersey. Initially, Trump pretended to care about the lost ones, and tried wearing the Mr. Compassionate mask he wears from time to time …
Alas, he couldn’t do it. Before long, Trump shifted from expressing grief to … telling the news media he had narrowly escaped the disaster. In fact, not only did he say so in conversations—he made it part of his bio. Escaped near death. Almost died. Only, cough, it was a lie. A 100-percent lie.
Think about that for a moment. Think about the type of broken brain that even considers this an option.
Step 1: My employees die.
Step 2: They leave behind families and friends.
Step 3: Everyone seems sad.
Step 4: They’re not paying attention to me.
Step 5: I’ll lie and say I was supposed to be on the chopper, too.
•••
Through the months, years and decades that followed 9.11, Trump’s lies grew as does his love for teenage girls.
In no particular order:
• Trump has said time and time again he saw one of the planes hit the Towers from his window at Trump Tower.
His quote:
One problem: The building is located on 5th Avenue between 56th and 57th Streets, a little more than four miles away from Ground Zero. Unless Donald Trump is Superman, the view literally does not exist.
• Trump has insisted, in the immediate aftermath, he sent a more than 100 workers to help with the on-sight recovery. There is, literally, no record of this, and nary a single Trump “worker” has said they were dispatched to Ground Zero. More to the point, tight records were kept of anyone/everyone allowed at the site. There is not a single notation of Trump employees on the scene.
• Trump has insisted he went to Ground Zero and the recovery zone—“Soon after, I went down to Ground Zero with men who worked for me to try to help in any little way that we could.”
And …
There is, again, literally no record of this. No log entry, no photography, no memories of others. Zip, zero.
Supporters will point to this image …
… but that’s Trump blocks away, where he was doing TV interviews.
Because, of course he did.
• Trump has said, in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, he made a $10,000 to the 9.11 Foundation. Only, there’s literally no record of it. And if a public figure like Donald Trump makes a donation, there would most certainly be a record.
• The worst of the worst of the worst might be Trump at his apex xenophobic self. Trump has repeatedly insisted he saw Muslims celebrating atop buildings in Jersey City as the Twin Towers fell.
Don’t believe me? Roll the tape …
Of course, it was just a lie. Because why wouldn’t you use an unspeakable tragedy to spread hate? Just as he did with the Central Park Five? Just as he’s done with immigrants eating pets. Just as he always does, because he’s a spiteful, hateful, disgusting, small, petty piece of shit.
•••
And I always think about this—how disqualifying it should have been (and still be) for the president of the United States to have used our greatest tragedy to lie and lie and lie and lie. How gross it is. How evil it is. How inhumane it is. The man is remarkable, in that he has, literally, no empathy or compassion. He is a succubus, here to use and take and absorb.
He is evil, and his reaction to September 11, 2001 should have ended any chance of leadership.
Alas, 25 years after The Worst, we are here.
Led by the worst.
Up and to my viall a while, and then to my office on Phillips having brought me a draught of the Katherine yacht, prettily well done for the common way of doing it. At the office all the morning making up our last half year’s account to my Lord Treasurer, which comes to 160,000l. or there abouts, the proper expense of this half year, only with an addition of 13,000l. for the third due of the last account to the Treasurer for his disbursements, and 1100l. for this half year’s; so that in three years and a half his thirds come to 14,100l.. Dined at home with my wife. It being washing day, we had a good pie baked of a leg of mutton; and then to my office, and then abroad, and among other places to Moxon’s, and there bought a payre of globes cost me 3l. 10s., with which I am well pleased, I buying them principally for my wife, who has a mind to understand them, and I shall take pleasure to teach her. But here I saw his great window in his dining room, where there is the two Terrestrial Hemispheres, so painted as I never saw in my life, and nobly done and to good purpose, done by his own hand.
Thence home to my office, and there at business late, and then to supper home and to bed, my people sitting up longer than ordinary before they had done their washing.
The Pelican Nebula is slowly being transformed.
1. The Carob Prize, for scholars who tell the truth (WSJ).
2. Observations from watching Iranian social media.
3. The Emma McAleavy feminist vision.
4. Is the inflation picture shifting?
5. The labor market is doing fine.
6. If LLMs had the personalities of TV stars, would you choose Colombo?
The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Some are calling this “a Deep Blue moment” for AI.
All via T., a mathematician.
Update from OpenAI: “Our internal model group arrived at the Navier–Stokes solution in 88 hours, using around 10,000 coordinating AI agents.” And this. And from Noam Brown: “Yes, this result cost millions of dollars. But remember that when @OpenAI announced o3 it cost ~$500,000 to score 87.5% on ARC-AGI 1. Today, Astra scores higher for ~$20. In 2025 it took us and GDM an enormous amount of compute to achieve IMO gold. For the 2026 IMO, anyone with a $20/month ChatGPT subscription could do it. Massively scaling test-time compute gives us a glimpse of the future. I believe that a year from now everyone will have an AI at their fingertips capable of solving problems of this caliber.”
The post Some Navier-Stokes updates appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Interesting research: “Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs“:
Abstract: Leading large language model providers now conceal their models’ step-by-step reasoning, or chain-of-thought, to protect intellectual property and limit information leakage. Rather than storing these traces server-side, providers return them to the client as blocks of encrypted text, which the client passes back with each subsequent request. Building on prior research, we identify an architectural vulnerability: these encrypted blocks are fully compatible and interchangeable across different sessions, users, and models within a provider’s ecosystem. We exploit this compatibility to develop a scalable decryption jailbreak. By injecting an encrypted reasoning trace from a given model into a weaker, and less safeguarded model from the same provider, we force it to decode and output the trace verbatim in plaintext, without ever jailbreaking the more capable model directly. This vulnerability enables four distinct attack vectors. First, it circumvents anti-distillation mechanisms, allowing adversaries to extract a proprietary model’s reasoning, as we demonstrate across Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. Second, it allows for large-scale private data extraction. Developers frequently share session logs publicly, unaware of contents of the encrypted blocks. By decoding 315,320 reasoning blocks scraped from public repositories, we recovered 367 Personally Identifiable Information (PII) artifacts and 182 credentials. Third, it inadvertently reveals hazardous information hidden within the reasoning process, even in cases where the model’s final, visible output safely rejects a malicious request. Fourth, attackers can leverage this flaw to execute invisible prompt injections, embedding malicious payloads entirely within encrypted blocks to poison public agentic rollouts. Following responsible disclosure, we propose concrete cryptographic and system-level mitigations to secure client-side reasoning.
TL;DR: we spend more CPU cycles rendering commits for scrapers than we spend on all other kinds of legitimate access, including git clones. At any one time, across 5 geo-distributed nodes, there are 14 CPU cores doing nothing but rendering git commits as html.
I worry about this a lot from the perspective of Datasette, which serves a huge number of crawlable web pages.
Via Hacker News
The strongest argument I see for continuing to train much smarter models quickly is the need to build defensive systems against the dangers posed by other AI. [...]
We will need powerful, aligned AI for defense; to secure infrastructure, to protect against rogue agents in real time, and to invent entirely new protective measures. This will be a primary focus of OpenAI’s deployment efforts.
At the same time, even with the uncertainty that comes from anticipated broad AI progress and the need to build defensive systems, we must not let that become an excuse for recklessness. The idea of racing forward at all costs seems absurd once one internalizes the seriousness of the stakes.
— Jakub Pachocki, Chief Scientist at OpenAI
Tool: Video compressor
I recorded a short demo video of my Equal Earth animation on my phone and wanted to publish an optimized version of that video (using FFMPEG) on my blog, so I had Claude Fable 5.1 in Claude Code for web build me this tool using the WebAssembly build of FFMPEG.
Tags: ffmpeg, video, webassembly, claude, claude-code, claude-mythos-fable
Tool: Mercator ↔ Equal Earth
I got curious about the Equal Earth map projection that was recently voted on at the UN so I had GPT-6 Astra (medium) in ChatGPT Work build me this animated transition between Mercator and Equal Earth using D3.
Tags: geospatial, d3, vibe-coding, gpt-6-astra
Transcript
“Mary had a little lamb, but when she saw it sicken, she sent it off to Packingtown, and now it’s labeled chicken.”
Hi, Paul Krugman here. That’s a little ditty that was circulating, I can’t find any original source, around 1905, when Upton Sinclair published “The Jungle” — about the meatpacking industry, one of the sort of founding documents of the progressive movement.
The topic today is Donald Trump and beef, because here we are back in Upton Sinclair territory.
So you may have seen that last month Trump announced, given that we have high beef prices, that he was going to allow the tariff-free import of 300,000 tons of ground beef.
Rather oddly, he didn’t say from where and wouldn’t say from where for a while. And then eventually said, well, from Argentina, Brazil, and other places.
There has been a substantial uproar over these imports of ground beef because of concerns about safety. You know, if he won’t even say where it’s coming from or whether the countries involved are going to be practicing food safety, that is kind of an issue. And it turns out it’s not just, you know, not just woke liberal types but ranchers, lawmakers and food safety experts who were very concerned about the plan and were not reassured when Trump said the meat is “very clean and very good.”
Okay, little by little details are coming out about how all of this happened. It turns out that the initial plan to allow the beef imports was announced the day after a closed door meeting between Trump and a Brazilian meat packing billionaire who is a major donor to Trump.
And they went right ahead and announced the plan, although again without details. There doesn’t seem to have been much discussion of how this would work, of the concerns. After some initial blowback — even ranchers are concerned that people might become worried about the safety of U.S. beef — Trump announced that he was going to also allow farmers and ranchers to process their own beef rather than having to go through the regular meatpacking companies. But it turned out that the ranchers hate that too, because what they want is for people to believe that beef is safe. They want to be assured that there are quality standards being upheld.
And now that we have at least some information about the origins of the beef, we are even less reassured. In fact, just the other day, the European Union banned beef imports from Brazil because Brazil was not adhering to EU standards on the use of antibiotics. So there are, in fact, real concerns here about safety.
Okay, this is quite a story, and beef is not that trivial a product, but there’s a lot of secondary implications here. The first is that this is a very Trumpian story. It’s got this sort of characteristic combination of raw corruption and raw incompetence. Raw might not have been the best word to use here, but anyway.
The corruption: Obviously, this was a decision made because somebody who has given Trump’s campaign and possibly Trump himself money had a meeting with him and got an immediate policy change. So this certainly looks like undue influence. We don’t know exactly how it happened because it was a closed-door meeting.
Also, shouldn’t somebody have been in the room to or at least passed on this before it was announced to say, you know, is this a good idea? Shouldn’t there have been somebody from the Agriculture Department, somebody from the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office, but certainly someone from food safety to pass judgment or give some warning?
In a normal administration, any kind of decision like this involves a process in which multiple agencies get a chance to weigh in and in which somebody who knows something gets to say, look, there are real problems with this idea. But obviously that didn’t happen here. And basically it doesn’t happen in this administration.
This is an administration that does not like experts. Does not listen to expertise. That’s not just a result of particular personnel decisions that Trump made. That is just a defining characteristic. At a fundamental level, they’re just hostile to the idea of expertise in any domain, in pretty much every agency where there’s something to know, where there’s technical stuff that you need to know to make good decisions.
The people who actually know things, or the people who are willing to speak up about what they know, have been silenced, purged. That’s across the board. Basically, it’s Hegseths all the way down in this administration.
And so in this case, nobody was there apparently to say, this is really not a very good idea.
And I think it’s really striking that even Trump thought, well, okay, I can fix this. At least I can mend fences with the ranchers by giving them more leeway to be unregulated themselves. But it turns out that the ranchers want regulation. They want customers to know that the beef that they buy is safe. So just raw incompetence on top of the raw corruption.
There’s an even larger issue here. Normally, when we think about, or as we used to think about, left versus right, there is a question about the role of government. How big a role should government play? And ultimately, it’s a values question, normally. It is a question, should it be the government’s business to ensure that citizens are not in dire poverty? Should it be the government’s business to ensure that everyone has access to essential healthcare?
And the question of how far in that direction you want to go is the traditional left-right distinction. Obviously, I’m on one side of that, and I think that morally I’m right. I think even in practical terms I’m right, but that is a debatable point.
But there are certain roles that government must play. The government needs to provide public goods. The government needs to provide things that the private sector cannot do for itself, which is obviously things like national defense, things like public safety, and it turns out also things like ensuring the safety of the food supply, just like ensuring the safety of the water supply.
It turns out that regulation of what goes on in meatpacking plants, regulation of what goes into your food is something that you really want the government to do. Even people in the industries want that unless they are particularly unethical types. The people who are trying to do the business right want those public goods provided because if you don’t have those provided, then people will not trust their products.
And this is not something that you can leave up to the private sector. It’s not something where you can do your own research. It’s a very complicated world out there. And the informational burden of trying to figure out whether the people responsible for your package of hamburger are actually following safe procedures, that’s beyond everybody. It’s actually quite similar in a way to public health measures, including, by the way, of course, vaccination.
Like I said, it’s all the same story here: This retreat from even the most essential roles of government.
So this is not an administration that’s trying to turn the clock back to 1930. It’s not trying to undo the New Deal. It’s an administration that’s trying to turn us back to the 19th century or before. It’s really just trying to undo even the most essential functions of government.
They’re not doing this, I think, out of a philosophical concern. I don’t think they have a theory that says that we really don’t need these things. They just don’t think about it at all. They don’t do expertise. They don’t do thinking, really. And a lot of policy is just based upon who last spoke to Donald Trump and who has given him money.
It turns out that this is a case in which Brazil — and it appears it’s probably Brazil, there may be some Argentine stuff here, but it’s probably Brazil — Brazil is notorious for not practicing internationally accepted standards on the safety of its meat.
And so the last thing you want to do is allow Brazilian ground beef to be admixed. And by the way, none of this would be unique origin. This would be trimmings of beef that get ground up and mixed in with other beef. And basically, if you get a package of hamburger in the United States under this rule, you will have basically no idea where it came from. You’ll have no idea under what conditions the cattle were raised or how the meat was processed. And this is not something that’s in the interest of really anybody except personally this particular Brazilian beef baron who may have a bunch of unsold beef because the Europeans have turned back a shipment.
And of course Donald Trump himself presumably is getting some financial benefit personally out of the whole thing.
So it’s quite a story. It’s in a way captures all in one place everything that is going wrong, how quickly the United States is descending into kind of pre-modern, pre-development status. We’re just giving up all of the things that make an advanced society and advanced economy work.
Okay, that was hard work. And I’m kind of hungry. So I think I’m going to have a piece of hamburger with some iceberg lettuce.
Actually, maybe not.
Take care.
A regulation that raises gasoline prices makes people angry but when regulation prevents an industry from ever existing, most people never learn what they lost.
Consider nuclear power. Overnight construction costs for early U.S. demonstration reactors fell 81 percent between 1954 and 1968. For reactors begun between 1967 and 1972, costs rose 187 percent. The 1971 Calvert Cliffs decision and then the reaction to Three Mile Island in 1979 accelerated the cost increases and slowed construction even more.
What might have happened had the earlier learning and deployment trends continued? Peter Lang’s 2017 paper in Energies estimates that nuclear power would have cost about one-tenth as much by 2015. The additional generation could have avoided as many as 9.5 million premature deaths.
The number is staggering even if quartered. Millions of deaths. Yet, the graveyard was both invisible and silent.
(Furthermore, climate change would not be a problem today had nuclear power not been handicapped.)
The nuclear story you probably know but Niko McCarty has an excellent new Works in Progress piece on an invisible graveyard of technology that I knew almost nothing about.
In the 1980s, officials decided to regulate engineered microbes under the Toxic Substances Control Act, a law written for industrial chemicals. Microbes swap genes all the time, but EPA treats them as “new” whenever DNA is introduced from another genus. As a result, even a marker gene used simply to identify successfully edited cells can trigger review if it remains in the organism. McCarty reports that researchers filed more than 240 applications between 1987 and 2018: “Only a few were ever approved for widespread use.”
What have we lost? We can’t know for sure but among the plausible losses McCarty discusses are engineered bacteria that detect buried explosives, microbes that extract rare-earth metals and improved plastic-digesting enzymes. Similarly, Chernia et al. write:
Promising many societal benefits, emergent products of biotechnology involve releasing genetically modified microbes (GMMs) into the environment. However, regulatory challenges limit their use. So far, GMMs have mainly been tested in agriculture and environmental cleanup, with few approved for commercial purposes. Current government regulations inadequately address modern genetic engineering and limit the potential of gut therapeutics, skin products, self-repairing materials, ocean pollution treatment, anti-corrosion coatings, etc.
And those are just some of the plausible first-stage losses. Perhaps even more importantly, we learn by doing. Thus, no doing, no learning. The first approved product is rarely the safest or the best but when we fail to approve the first we don’t get the much better 5th. Forty years of that process could have taken us well beyond the applications McCarty describes. We must build to build better.
Nuclear power at least left us enough reactors to get some idea of what we lost. With microbes, I needed McCarty to tell me there was something missing even though I study these issues for a living. And note one reason new microbe loss was invisible. No vote was ever taken. No debate was ever had. Officials in the 1980s reasoned that genomes are made of chemicals and chemicals are covered, and that doctrine has governed the field ever since despite being overly broad and excessively costly.
How many other gaps in our technology have explanations buried in the Federal Register?
—
Here is a video version of this post. Which do you like better?
The post No Doing, No Learning appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Physicians reject palmistry as nonsense. But reading the creases of our palms for hidden meaning is what doctors have always done
- by Alison Bashford
Crackerjack new Mac app for creating and editing custom SF Symbols, from developer Amy Worrall:
McKinley is an all-in-one studio for drawing and annotating SF Symbols. It bundles vector tools with knowledge of the SF Symbols structure, so you can edit one set of objects across multiple weights, sizes and colours. Import SVG or start from scratch, live preview your work using Apple’s own renderer, and export directly to Xcode, so you never need touch the SF Symbols app again!
McKinley is Mac-assed out the wazoo:
I mean just look at McKinley. It’s both beautiful and quite obviously a serious professional tool. McKinley is a $60 one-time purchase, and there’s a 15 percent launch discount this week only (taking the price to just $51). What a remarkable 1.0.
See also: Michael Tsai; Worrall on Mastodon.
Matt Birchler:
So, yeah, I do think that, especially this year, unit sales will far lag behind the 18 Pro models, the normal iPhone 18, and probably the Air 2 and 18e. I think they will lag next year as well for similar reasons. I don’t know if this will ever become the most popular iPhone, but I do not think it will fail, and I think it will sell more units every year for its first few years on the market (especially if they can get the price down over that time as well).
My evidence for this is the increasing market share folding phones have in the Android world, as well as my personal experience using something very similar to what Apple is about to announce and having my own aha moment, where it really clicked with me.
Birchler has been using a Samsung Galaxy Fold8 — the new one that preemptively copied the folding iPhone’s aspect ratio — for the last month or so. So I’m intrigued by his firsthand experience with the same general form factor. But I have no idea what he’s talking about regarding “the increasing market share folding phones have in the Android world”. For 2025, Counterpoint and TrendForce both pegged foldable phones at 1.6% of the global market. Just today Counterpoint released a report that says “Foldables still account for only about 2% of the overall smartphone market, leaving plenty of room for the category to grow.”
Anecdotally I find it hard to believe the 2 percent number. It’s my nature to take notice of the phones people use, and there’s no way that 1 in 50 people I see have foldable phones. I don’t even think it’s 1 in 100. On a recent vacation, I didn’t see a single foldable at the airport nor at the resort hotel where we stayed. Obviously my own anecdata could be all wet, but I think “2 percent” is generous — and presumably, if it’s accurate, it’s almost entirely from outside the U.S. It’s like saying “touchscreen phones” had “increasing market share” before the iPhone. Going from 0.1% to 0.2% is a doubling of share, but the share is still tiny.
Regarding the name, Birchler spitballs a decent suggestion:
Finally, there’s the name. Everyone seems to think it’s going to be the iPhone Ultra, and I guess if I were putting money down, that’s what I’d bet on as well.
But I just don’t like it. I don’t like it because it’s not “ultra” in many ways, and I don’t like it because what do you call the bigger version of it in a year or two? The Ultra Max? Maybe you do…
I personally think it should be called the iPhone Folio. I think there’s a 99% chance I’m wrong, but hey, won’t it be amazing if I’m right?
The problem with “Folio” is that it’s too descriptive only of the form factor. Not the feeling it’s supposed to convey. I’m betting on “Ultra”, but I’m still rooting for “Duo”, which has some history and sounds like a nice companion adjective to “Neo”.
Last week both Google and Apple updated their maps to accommodate Trump changing the United States Geological Survey’s recognized name for Lake Ontario to “Lake America”. Just as with Trump’s fiat renaming of the Gulf of Mexico back in the first days of his 2.0 administration, Google and Apple are showing the same names to the same people, by region. Here are the names you now see for Lake Ontario, based on what region your device is set to:
This is exactly the same as their joint solution to the Gulf of Mexico renaming — the U.S. sees “Gulf of America”, Mexico sees “Gulf of Mexico”, and the rest of the world sees “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)”.
Here is the solution I strongly believe Google and Apple should follow:
There is no reason to show these new Trump-dictated names anywhere outside the U.S., even putting them in parentheses. There is no reason to show only the actual traditional names exclusively for users in Canada (for Lake Ontario) and Mexico (for the Gulf). Treating Canada and Mexico as special cases only makes sense if they’re part of some sort of dispute over the names. They’re not. The names of these two bodies of water are not contentious. There is no long-simmering debate about them, like there is with Denali/Mount McKinley in Alaska. The one and only country on the planet with a crackpot kook-ridden government that claims these bodies of water have new names is the United States; the only country that should see the new names is the United States.1
So, I disagree with how Google and Apple have chosen to handle these re-namings. But it is correct that users in the United States do see the new names.
Here’s Andy Ihnatko, at his eponymous website:
We all have every right to be upset. Google’s receiving plenty of flak over this move (as is Apple; Apple Maps now shows “Lake America,” reportedly after being pressured directly by Trump). I dislike Google’s and Apple’s choices, but I can’t personally fault them.
That said, Trump’s move is clearly meant to antagonize Canada during a volatile period in our relations. He’s throwing gasoline on a tariff fight that’s already creating uncertainty and suffering among vulnerable businesses and consumers on both sides of what was once an impeccably peaceful border. Google and Apple didn’t need to move so damned quickly. I wish they’d deferred the name change long enough for things to cool down a little. Doing so would have avoided creating the perception of handing one side a swift, validating victory.
I doubt a cooling-off period would help. Wounds don’t feel better when they’re reopened after healing. It’s best to get it over with. Applying the change to Google and Apple Maps while the GNIS database ink is still wet at least serves to remind who made this change and why. And whose change it rightfully is to make.
This is a bitter pill for some to swallow. What a lot of people want is for Google and Apple to just ignore the U.S. government’s official new names. E.g., to pick just one high-profile pundit, here’s Kara Swisher regarding Google (“quislings”) and Apple (“craven”, “pathetic”). But I suspect, quite strongly, that the people who profess to be the most angry at Apple and Google for going along with this change are the same people who would argue most strongly that Goliath tech companies and mega-billionaires wield too much anti-democratic power and influence.
It’s not coherent to argue that Google and Apple should decide which names to put on their maps only when you want them to ignore the names from the official government database. Neither Google nor Apple are going to sell their maps apps, but it’s not outlandish to think that in some alternative universe, one or more of the leading maps app might be owned by, say, Elon Musk or Larry Ellison. Would the people who want Apple and Google to ignore the official names from the GNIS support the same stance if the two leading maps apps were owned by SpaceX and Oracle instead? Obviously they would not.
What we want is a system where geographic names are determined democratically, by voting. And that is the system we in fact have. Trump won. The Department of the Interior has the power to change these names. If you’re angry that their official names in the United States are now Lake America and Gulf of America, stay angry that Trump won the 2024 election. Stay angry that our president continues to debase his office and embarrass our nation. Directing your anger at Google and Apple for reflecting that change is shooting the messengers.
But this is why I find it embarrassing that both Google and Apple are foisting these absurd names on the rest of the world, even if only between parentheses. These names are nonsense, and they are Americans’ nonsense to deal with.
China is another country with ridiculous geographic dogma. China demands that Taiwan, which is an independent free nation, be falsely labelled as a province of China. Apple Maps reflects that policy — within China. It doesn’t label Taiwan as “(Province of China)” on maps outside China. Bullshit inside parentheses is still bullshit. Less seriously but more preposterously, the Chinese government also insists that the obscure Diaoyu Islands, subject of a long-running territorial dispute with Japan, be drawn larger than they actually are on maps. Apple Maps dutifully renders those inflated false island sizes to users in China. It doesn’t show them to users anywhere else in the world — not even as dotted outlines. Chinese users see Chinese government dogmatic nonsense; no one else does.
So too it should be for U.S. government dogmatic nonsense. Spreading the nonsense to the rest of the world only makes it more embarrassing.
Neither Google nor Apple claim to be cartographic editorial authorities. I do not think we should want them to be. Other non-governmental institutions do claim to be independent authorities. The Associated Press has stuck to their guns even in the face of losing its White House press pool seat over their refusal to adopt the “Gulf of America” name. And then there’s Wikipedia, whose reputation, integrity, popularity, and independence haunt the right wing. From Politico, last week:
Other platforms will soon follow, a senior administration official told Politico on Tuesday. “We got Lake America changed on Google Maps, and many other maps are changing in a couple days. And Wikipedia is going to change as well,” said the official, who was granted anonymity to speak frankly.
As of Wednesday, Wikipedia was still using the original names of both the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario, while noting that Trump had signed orders to rename them.
Regarding this, Molly White noted:
A Wikipedia editor put it well: “You almost want to pat them on the head and say ‘Yes, of course it will’ in the same way you’d tell a small child that Santa Claus will be delivering their presents.”
And, I feel strongly, the traditional names should remain visible, in parentheses, even for users in the U.S. for a period of, say, five years. What is someone who doesn’t follow current events — god bless them — to think if they go looking for Lake Ontario on Google Maps or Apple Maps and don’t see it? ↩︎
Over the last day or so, a number of the big inside DC sheets have run pieces striking a skeptical note about the GOP’s 2025-26 redistricting — Axios and Politico, for examples. It’s not just that they maybe aren’t strong enough to withstand a Democratic wave (no gerrymanders are impregnable) but that they are fundamentally based on the assumption that the 2026 electorate would look basically like the 2024 electorate, as Axios put it. That’s not quite the same as saying “as popular as.” It’s more the shape of the electorate. And that’s why it’s not quite as silly as it might sound, though not wholly unsilly. And one example of this is that Republicans made a bet that things like the big Hispanic shift toward the GOP, especially in places like Texas and the Southwest, represented a kind of realignment as opposed to just a really bad year for Democrats.
To be clear, I don’t think anyone sees these switcheroos as “dummymanders” yet, where it actually turns out worse for the gerrymandering party than if they did nothing at all. Just that it may not end up providing that much advantage.
Obviously this all remains quite hypothetical. We don’t know what happens in November. The standard line is that “a lot can change.” That’s obviously true in a theoretical sense. Of course a lot can change. But in practical terms, I don’t think that’s quite right. There’s actually very little reason to believe much is going to change, because the key things underlying the GOP’s current unpopularity — prices, the Iran War and Donald Trump’s behavior — show almost no likelihood of changing. It’s more that there still remains a significant amount of uncertainty about what the situation is right now. As Charlie Cook put it in that post I wrote up last week, is it “bad, really bad, or truly horrible”? What we’re seeing at the moment is Republicans setting aside the happy talk and bravado, looking at the durability of the current dynamics and realizing that it is in fact really bad. I’m not sure it’s all really any worse for Republicans than most of us have figured. It’s more that DC has been behind the curve.
On that basic question of “bad, really bad, or truly horrible,” I don’t have a better idea than anyone else. On the basic question, I continue to think that the political class has not absorbed the depth of Donald Trump’s unpopularity, that it has seeped into areas where partisan polarization doesn’t usually allow it. But of course my hopes lean in that direction. So I’m skeptical of that too.
One thing that is interesting about this cycle is that, from one perspective, the Senate almost looks rosier for the Democrats than the House. To be clear, not in the sense that a Senate pick up is more likely. I don’t think anyone seriously thinks the Speaker of the House is going to be a Republican next year. I mean this more in the sense of possibilities, the “maybe it could happens” you start seeing on the map. The reason is simple: gerrymandering, or rather that the Senate doesn’t have it.
It still very much goes without saying that the Senate is permanently tilted toward small-population and generally rural states. In our current politics that tilt all goes to Republicans. But it’s not open to the fine-tuning that gerrymandering makes possible. Iowa is a very white and very rural state. But it’s still Iowa. You can’t just shave off some marginal parts and hand them to Illinois and grab some more rock-solid ones in Missouri or Nebraska or South Dakota. Doesn’t work that way. And that’s adding to the unpredictability as we move toward November.
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Trackables:
There are plenty of health tracking apps. Surprisingly, nearly all of them are bloated, subscription-gated, or blatantly harvesting our data; often all three. We wanted something simpler, less annoying and more fun, that’s where it started.
Trackables turns the data your Apple Watch already collects — activity, sleep, steps, heart rate — into a clear, friendly, transparent interface.
Totally free of charge, totally private, made by a small team of ex-Apple folks. (They might add a paid tier in the future, but core functionality will remain free.) I’ve been using Trackables for months and it’s just a better dashboard to the stats I care about than the Health app itself.
(One interesting detail: HealthKit only makes raw data available to apps. Apple Health’s “sleep score” isn’t part of that data — only the raw input, like how many hours you slept, and how much time was spent in each sleep stage. So Trackables computes its own sleep score. When I bother to compare, Trackable’s score is almost always similar to Apple’s, but seldom exactly the same. But I personally find that Trackable’s sleep score corresponds better to how I feel I slept. Which, admittedly, is usually pretty good.)
The Onion:
The Onion: How did you get into the entertainment industry?
Ellison: I remember going to the movies as a kid, and when the houselights went down and that hush fell over the crowd, I’d think to myself: I’d like to build a massive propaganda apparatus one day.
Here's a paper featured by Microeconomic Insights, which shows that in the highly concentrated dialysis market, in which prices are mostly federally regulated, mergers reduce competition on quality.
Thomas G. Wollmann: How to Get Away with Merger: Stealth Consolidation and Its Effects on US Dialysis
"This paper studies premerger notification of US dialysis acquisitions from 1996 to 2017. Like many industries, dialysis has consolidated rapidly. During this period, thousands of facilities changed ownership, yet only half were reported to federal antitrust authorities. Unlike most industries, dialysis prices are mostly set by the government, so acquisitions of rival facilities reduce the incentive to compete on quality. Since patients are often already in poor health, preventing stealth consolidation could save lives.
The study combines data on market structure, antitrust enforcement, and patient health. I begin by describing patterns in the data. Next, I estimate a structural model of dialysis competition, enforcement, and agency costs. Finally, I use the estimates to predict what would have happened had all dialysis mergers proposed during the study period been reportable.
Three main findings emerge.
Premerger notification is critical to effective antitrust enforcement. All else equal, exemption reduces the likelihood of enforcement by about 90%.
Exempt acquisitions that concentrate ownership degrade quality, as evidenced by higher postmerger hospitalization and mortality rates.
The benefits of expanding premerger notification exceed the costs by orders of magnitude. This reflects the deterrence effect of antitrust enforcement (i.e., rivals won’t try to merge if they know their deal will be blocked) as well as the efficiency of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which polices billions of dollars of dialysis transactions with very few resources."
The post Ed Elson and Scott Galloway interview me on AI appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Will 21st century transportation innovations work against urban density, as the car did in the 20th century, or promote urban centralization, as the railroad did in the 19th century? Reducing the cost of commuting always reduces urban centralization in the classic Alonso-Muth-Mills model but that result reverses if the number of trips is endogenous and the elasticity of trips with respect to their costs is greater than one. That elasticity may have increased over time, as an increasing share of daily trips seems to be discretionary and city centers increasingly provide entertainment. This paper asks discusses the urbanizing effects of four trends in transportation technology: shared mobility (such as Uber), autonomy (such as Waymo), vertical travel and green mobility, as provided by bike lane. As people spend more time travelling in denser, large areas, innovations that reduce the time cost of travel, such as autonomous cars, seem likely to complement urban living, as long as they don’t excessively increase traffic. Sharing is also easier in big cities, so technologies that involve sharing are also centripetal. The other trends seem less likely to have major effects. Moreover, the forces of inertia, which include both regulation and legacy infrastructure, are likely to limit the impact of any new technologies in Europe and the U.S., so that the biggest changes in urban form are likely to appear in east Asia and the developing world.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Ed Glaeser.
The post Will new transportation technologies increase urban density? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Editor’s Note: Today’s story is the answer to the September Puzzler.
Several of the outcrops at Vasquez Rocks Natural Area in Southern California jut from the arid landscape of the Soledad Basin at remarkable angles. Geologists estimate that the tilt of sedimentary rock strata found in the area averages 50 degrees, steep enough that many of the otherworldly formations appear to point toward the stars.
That’s fitting, in some ways, because the rocks have served as one of the Star Trek franchise’s favorite backdrops ever since the show’s inaugural season, when Captain James T. Kirk scrambled up the jagged terrain during an iconic battle with a member of a reptilian alien species.
Viewed from space, the Vasquez Rocks are considerably less dramatic, but they show up clearly as bands of gray nestled between mountain ranges in these false-color (left) and natural-color (right) images captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9. The false-color view (bands 6-5-4) incorporates shortwave-infrared and near-infrared observations that accentuate differences in the landscape’s vegetation in comparison to the natural-color image on the right.
The Vasquez Rocks didn’t start out pointing skyward. When they were forming 25 million years ago, sediment was spread across alluvial fans—cone-shaped deposits that develop as fast-moving streams empty onto relatively flat plains. The sediment likely hadn’t traveled far, much of it eroding from nearby uplands. Over time, the alluvial fan deposits were buried and cemented into thick layers of sandstone and conglomerate rock.
Over millions of years, the region was then reshaped by the interaction of tectonic plates just to the east. Two plates grind past each other along a boundary that includes the San Andreas Fault, a strike-slip fault where the North American plate moves southeast and the Pacific plate northwest, contributing to the powerful tectonic forces that ripple throughout the region.
Eventually this tectonic activity led to the uplift and deformation of the Soledad Basin, with sedimentary layers gradually tilting, folding, and rotating. Once they were exposed at the surface, millions more years of weathering and erosion sculpted the formations further, removing softer material and leaving the more resistant sandstone and conglomerate fins and ridges that wow visitors today.
The rock formations represent far-flung moons and planets in several other Star Trek episodes and Vulcan, Spock’s home planet, in two Star Trek movies. Other productions have highlighted the Vasquez Rocks as well. They make appearances in dozens of other television shows and movies, including the science fiction series Westworld, For All Mankind, and Battlestar Galactica.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.
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Links for you. Science:
Dengue cases in Florida nearly double in one week, here’s where
Docs Alarmed by NIH Plan to Redirect Medical Research $$ to Pentagon
VDH Identifies a Locally Acquired Case of Dengue Virus Infection in Northern Virginia Resident
Inside the D.O.J.’s Investigation of Fauci and Other Virus Scientists (truly bizarre in that it takes far too long to get to the point that most people who know what they’re talking about don’t think the lab leaks hypothesis is legitimate)
You’re Trapped Under Rubble And These Guys Are Your EMTs. WYD?
Sick sea lions signal rising toxin risk along California coast
Other:
Mamdani, media, and negativity bias
Neo-Nazis and the Impotence of Trumponomics
Mamdani Opens Office of Worker Power
Janeese Lewis George gets a preview of the mayoral life
Why Did Trump Order Up 660 Million Pounds of Mystery Meat?
Sisterhood Was Gloria Steinem’s Guiding Principle
Pennsylvania’s motor-voter system effectively screens non-citizens from voter registration
Gloria Steinem’s Many-Splendored Feminist Life
The real covid-19 scandal is still unfolding
Over 170,000 Nonprofits Lost All Their Data. Is Microsoft to Blame?
The Newspaper Shouldn’t Be Complicated
Ben Wikler Has a Plan to Supercharge American Democracy
What Influencers Owe Us: “Your followers are funding your life, so they expect some level of transparency.”
How Low Can It Go
Kaepernick and the Movement He Inspired
Storm clouds over the horizon looked like mountains last week as I came in from a late afternoon paddle in the kayak.
There’s a lot going on, but it feels like we could all use a break.
I’ll be back at it tomorrow.
Up pretty betimes, and awhile to my vyall, and then abroad to several places, to buy things for the furnishing my house and my wife’s closet, and then met my uncle Thomas, by appointment, and he and I to the Prerogative Office in Paternoster Row, and there searched and found my uncle Day’s will, end read it over and advised upon it, and his wife’s after him, and though my aunt Perkins testimony is very good, yet I fear the estate being great, and the rest that are able to inform us in the matter are all possessed of more or less of the estate, it will be hard for us ever to do anything, nor will I adventure anything till I see what part will be given to us by my uncle Thomas of all that is gained. But I had another end of putting my uncle into some doubt, that so I might keep him: yet from going into the country that he may be there against the Court at his own charge, and so I left him and his son at a loss what to do till I see them again. And so I to my Lord Crew’s, thinking to have dined there, but it was too late, and so back and called at my brother’s and Mr. Holden’s about several businesses, and went all alone to the Black Spread Eagle in Bride Lane, and there had a chopp of veale and some bread, cheese, and beer, cost me a shilling to my dinner, and so through Fleet Ally, God forgive me, out of an itch to look upon the sluts there, against which when I saw them my stomach turned, and so to Bartholomew Fayre, where I met with Mr. Pickering, and he and I to see the monkeys at the Dutch house, which is far beyond the other that my wife and I saw the other day; and thence to see the dancing on the ropes, which was very poor and tedious.
But he and I fell in discourse about my Lord Sandwich. He tells me how he is sorry for my Lord at his being at Chelsey, and that his but seeming so to my Lord without speaking one word, had put him clear out of my Lord’s favour, so as that he was fain to leave him before he went into the country, for that he was put to eat with his servants; but I could not fish from him, though I knew it, what was the matter; but am very sorry to see that my Lord hath thus much forgot his honour, but am resolved not to meddle with it.
The play being done, I stole from him and hied home, buying several things at the ironmonger’s — dogs, tongs, and shovels — for my wife’s closett and the rest of my house, and so home, and thence to my office awhile, and so home to supper and to bed. By my letters from Tangier today I hear that it grows very strong by land, and the Mole goes on. They have lately killed two hundred of the Moores, and lost about forty or fifty. I am mightily afeard of laying out too much money in goods upon my house, but it is not money flung away, though I reckon nothing money but when it is in the bank, till I have a good sum beforehand in the world.
Instead of Amazon, I spent the past week browsing a new breed of websites known as “dopamine sites,” a trend that emerged in South Korea. These websites — like Dopamine Shop and FoodNeverComes — recreate the entire ritual of online shopping: You search for products, compare reviews, add items to your cart, enter a shipping address, place an order, and even track your delivery.
Then … nothing happens. No money changes hands. No package arrives.
Here is more from Itika Sharma Punit. Via the excellent Samir Varma.
The post South Korean aspirational markets in everything appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Today’s post is brought to you by my sponsor, Mechanize. They’re hiring junior software engineers at $300K/year base salary. Apply now!
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For some time, I’ve been attracted to the “it’s the phones” explanation of fertility decline. One counterargument is that fertility has been falling since the 19th century. But that fact actually supports the claim that iPhones are causing the recent collapse in fertility. To see why, consider for a moment why smart phones explain declining fertility.
It’s misleading to call smart phones a “phone”. They are a mobile general purpose entertainment center, with phone calls representing just one use among many. They also represent the culmination of a set of changes over the past 200 years that have made life increasingly fun, but also less social. I see four major changes:
1800-1920: Urbanization. City life is more interesting than rural life, leading to smaller families. (In addition, improved health care and sanitation means that fewer children die.) Here’s Noah Smith:
Urbanization disrupts the need to grow your own community, by giving you a community of strangers. Fertility rates have always been much lower in cities than in the countryside, and when countries become more urbanized and wealthy, their birth rates drop.
1920-1930: Movies and radio. Most people are lazy and vastly prefer consuming stories without having to read a book.
1955-1975: Television. TV brings movies into peoples’ living rooms.
2010-today: It’s the phones.
Unfortunately, this Statista graph stops in 2020, and thus understates the recent decline in US fertility, which is now below 1.6:
When you look at the graph, be aware that some of the volatility reflects transitory factors such as the Depression and World War II. Nonetheless, some interesting patterns are worth commenting on. The 1920s saw a particularly rapid decline in fertility, perhaps due to a particularly rapid rise in fun. Here’s AI Overview:
The US general fertility rate (live births per 1,000 women aged 15–44) steadily declined during the 1920s, moving from 117.9 in 1920 down to 89.3 by 1929.
When I read novels from the post-WWI period, they occasionally discuss the rapid cultural change among the young, partly under the influence of Hollywood films. Instead of going right from childhood to adulthood, there emerged a long period of transition, with loosening cultural restrictions on the lifestyle of young people. New forms of entertainment like radio and movies made urban life much more interesting for most people. Even 100-year old silent films are quite entertaining.
Another big fertility decline occurred between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s, probably due to television. And then fertility in the US leveled off for more than 30 years. The post-2010 decline is global in nature, which points to “the phones” as the most plausible suspect.
For most of us, family life is now just one part of our life. But for most of human history, family life was almost everything. The family unit worked together and played together. Before TV, radio, and film, social life was the main form of entertainment. Larger families were more fun, less lonely.
So, when people say, “it’s the phones”, I think they actually mean “it’s the fun”. Fertility is declining because we’ve invented technologies that we find more fun than traditional family life. It’s not that family life is becoming less fun, it’s that the enjoyment of family life is staying constant as alternative activities become ever more attractive. The opportunity cost (in foregone fun) of family life is increasing.
But that does not mean that higher fertility is a lost cause. People still do place some value on family life. And people who are rich enough to have servants do all the hard parts of raising children tend to have relatively large families. In the US, billionaires have larger families than middle income people
In the future, plentiful AI-enabled robots may contribute to childcare, making us all billionaires. Here’s The Economist, discussing the views of Elon Musk:
Mr Musk predicts that, within five years, artificial-intelligence systems may surpass the sum of all human intelligence. Within ten years, robots in the workplace will help usher in an era of such “amazing abundance” that money will become meaningless.
I can hardly wait! Oddly, Musk worries about fertility. But if Musk is correct about our future limitless wealth, then we may soon resume worrying again about “overpopulation”. Why does Musk not believe that average people would react to great wealth the way he and his fellow billionaires have responded, that is, by having bigger families?
PS. To be clear, I’m not anywhere near as optimistic as Musk about the near future, but I do expect future generations to eventually become quite rich by today’s standards, mostly due to AI.
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1. How are age verification systems going?
3. Are humpback whales policing nature?
4. “Traces of nearly four million coins reveal how Rome achieved economic integration.”
5. Estimating cybersecurity costs (numbers).
6. Great Barrier Reef is doing fine?
7. California Forever meets further setbacks (NYT).
The post Monday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
I’m on the train home after another weekend in Essex sorting out the parental house and I nearly forgot to write this.
We have now just about finished looking through everything and now, thanks to my much-more-diligent-than-me sister, we have dozens of folders of categorised papers of mostly old Labour Party related material, at least some of which we hope to find homes for. We’ll see.
I’m pretty over this whole thing now and even though we’ve cleared this huge hurdle it feels like a never ending task. I’m so ready to move on. Even so it was, as ever, hard to leave the place.
§ This week’s NTS Early Bird Show with Spirit Blue was unusually guitarry and unusually good, ideal for a gentle start or a quiet evening.
§ Before I went to Essex, during a couple of dry days, I finished the final patch of scything. This year, spread leisurely over a couple of months, I’ve scythed 946m2, taking around 13 hours, plus another 5 hours of clearing the cut grass.
§ Having played with Home Assistant enough on my laptop in VirtualBox to decide it was useful, this week we got a Home Assistant Green device to run it on, as the simplest option. A bit of me thought it would make more sense to have a more generic kind of home server, which could be used for other things, but I don’t want to run a server off any kind so. I got most things set up again on the Green but, inevitably, there are many, many things to improve and fiddle with.
§ I had a nice few hours in London on my way over to Essex. I met R for lunch, then popped in to see the installation The Department of Euterpe at the Warburg Institute, which was alright, worth popping in if you’re passing and like that sort of thing.
Then I went to see Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (Jane Schoenbrun, 2026) which was interesting and fun although I’d probably have enjoyed it more if I was more into horror movies (it wasn’t scary but riffs on them) and/or in a larger audience (there were six people there, mid-Friday afternoon).
§ That’ll do.
Neo-Nazis — no point in euphemisms — just won big in the rough equivalent of a state-level election in Germany. America’s leading neo-Nazi — again, no point in euphemisms — congratulated the AfD (in German) on the result, and in return received “thanks for your support” from the AfD’s lead candidate.
In the days and weeks ahead there will be many analyses of the results and its implications from people who, unlike me, know something about German politics. For now, let me do something more parochial, and write about what the Sachsen-Anhalt election might teach us about U.S. political economy.
So, about America: Make America Great Again meant different things to different people — racism, of course, being a key component. But in Donald Trump’s mind it also clearly meant trying to bring back “manly” jobs. He would do this by imposing tariffs to eliminate trade deficits, which, in his garbled version of economics, would end huge U.S. “giveaways” to surplus nations. And this would, in turn, lead to a huge revival of U.S. manufacturing employment.
Why is Germany relevant to this story? Because in terms of both trade balances and manufacturing Germany is, in effect, the anti-America. Where we do indeed run large trade deficits, Germany runs huge surpluses. And while Germany, like every other advanced economy, has seen the manufacturing share of employment decline over time, it remains a more industrial nation than the U.S. has been since the 1980s.
Indeed, relative to the size of its economy, Germany runs trade surpluses and retains large-scale manufacturing employment to an extent that lies far beyond the wildest dreams of Trumponomics.
And none of this appears to make a bit of difference to the resentment that underlies right-wing extremism on both sides of the Atlantic.
Start with trade. Here are balances in trade in goods and services for the two nations, expressed as a percent of GDP:
The U.S., as Trump constantly emphasizes, consistently buys more stuff from other nations than they buy from us. In his mind this means that we are being ripped off (as opposed to attracting large inflows of foreign investment, which as a matter of sheer accounting necessarily implies that we run trade deficits.) In any case, however, the Germans should be feeling pleased with themselves for running big trade surpluses, and hence taking advantage of the rest of the world, right?
Somehow, they aren’t.
America’s large trade deficit in manufactured goods does mean that we have fewer manufacturing jobs than we would if that trade were balanced. Robert Lawrence of the Peterson Institute for International Economics estimates that eliminating the deficit would raise the manufacturing share of employment from 7.9 to 9.7 percent, similar to my own back-of-the-envelope calculations. Correspondingly, Germany, with its large manufacturing surpluses, has relatively higher manufacturing employment as a share of total employment. Here are trends in industrial employment — a bigger category than manufacturing alone, but the trends are similar:
Even Germany has gradually become “deindustrialized,” but even now it is more of an industrial nation, as measured by where the jobs are, than the United States has been for at least 35 years. Has this insulated Germany from the bitterness and political extremism that many U.S. observers attribute to deindustrialization? Apparently not.
So here’s one way to think about the political economy here. The economic component of MAGA might be described as a plan, or maybe a concept of a plan, to make the U.S. economy more like what it was in the 1950s, when we didn’t run trade deficits and had a lot more men working in industry. But this might also be described as a concept of a plan to make America more like Germany. And what the results in Sachsen-Anhalt show is that even if such a plan were to deliver the promised results (which it wouldn’t), it would do little if anything to reduce politically radicalizing resentment.
I should mention one more lesson from the AfD’s victory, one that has me reconsidering some of my own beliefs.
Many U.S. observers, me included, have laid considerable stress on the problem of “left-behind” regions — rural and small-town areas bypassed by the rise of a knowledge economy, which tended to favor large, highly-educated metropolitan areas. These economically stranded regions have been plagued in particular by declining employment among men of prime working age, a decline that in turn is associated both with social problems and with strong support for Trump and hard-right politicians in general.
For many years it has been common to think of the former East Germany, which includes Sachsen-Anhalt, as one of the many European analogues to what Austin, Glaeser and Summers called the Eastern Heartland. Indeed, East Germany, which had near-full-employment among working-age men, went through an extended period of men-not-working after German reunification.
But that story is now long out of date:
Residents of the former DDR still consider themselves economically disadvantaged, and their incomes are somewhat lower than the national average — although not, as far as I can tell, as low in relative terms as poorer U.S. states. But in any case the tale of East Germany as a deeply depressed region no longer fits the facts.
What, then, is the moral of this analysis? Mostly it’s negative: Crude economic factors don’t explain the fascist shift in Germany. And Trumponomics, even if it worked (which it doesn’t) wouldn’t end the resentment feeding our own authoritarian movement.
MUSICAL CODA
Not topical; I just need cheering up
Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI
Apparently today is RSI day at OpenAI, for Recursive Self-Improvement - I think it's their new AGI. Both this piece and the new essay An Alien Mind (by Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki) talk about it, and this one doesn't even bother to expand the acronym.Included are details on how OpenAI's own research team are using coding agents. Like pretty much everyone else 2026 has been the year that agentic engineering really took off at OpenAI, best illustrated by this chart:
I'm intrigued at what caused that significant acceleration in AI spend per researcher in late July - my best guess is that's when internal employees gained access to the model later released as GPT-6 Astra.
Tags: ai, openai, generative-ai, chatgpt, llms, coding-agents, november-2025-inflection, recursive-self-improvement
Not sure it’s practical, but it’s certainly striking.
It’s Labor Day, so here’s a post about how human labor is alive and well in the age of AI.
I live in San Francisco and hang out with a lot of tech people, both in the AI industry and outside of it. And one thing that almost everyone I know here believes is that AI’s main economic effect is to displace humans from their jobs. Most people don’t have concrete arguments for why this should be true; it’s just an article of faith. The conventional wisdom is pretty well summed up by the first line of this tweet:
In fact, AI companies themselves have spent years talking about how their inventions are going to render large swathes of humanity economically obsolete — an odd marketing pitch, perhaps, but one that seemed to reflect their honest expectations.
A lot of times, San Francisco tech people are out of step with the general public. This time, though, the public seems to agree. A recent Ipsos poll found that most Americans expect AI to compete with human workers more than it complements them. And Pew finds that this belief has even strengthened in recent years:
So basically, most people think AI is a job-killer. And yet somehow, this job-killer keeps stubbornly refusing to kill jobs. In the aggregate, the labor market is about as healthy as it’s ever been. The prime-age employment rate — the single best indicator of how many Americans have jobs — continues to hover near all-time highs:
Of course, there are lots of other things going on in the labor market right now besides AI. But most of those things — tariffs, the Iran war, etc. — are bad for employment. It’s not easy to identify some sort of positive shock that is canceling out the job-killing effects of AI.
Or maybe it is, if the shock is AI itself. Theoretically speaking, automation can create jobs just as easily as it can destroy them. Here are Acemoglu and Restrepo (2019), explaining the various ways that technology can affect the demand for labor:
Automation [can be bad] for labor because of a displacement effect—as capital takes over tasks previously performed by labor…
[A]utomation technology also increases productivity, and via this channel, which we call the productivity effect, it contributes to the demand for labor in non-automated tasks…
[T]he displacement effect of automation has [historically] been counterbalanced by technologies that create new tasks in which labor has a comparative advantage. Such new tasks generate not only a positive productivity effect, but also a reinstatement effect—they reinstate labor into a broader range of tasks and thus change the task content of production in favor of labor. The reinstatement effect is the polar opposite of the displacement effect and directly increases the labor share as well as labor demand. [emphasis mine]
In other words, automation can do three basic things. Yes, it can replace people and take their jobs. It can also make them more productive, which can both create jobs and destroy them.1 And, crucially, automation can create new jobs for people to do. Power looms replaced master weavers, but they created jobs for technicians and engineers to make the power looms work. The internet automated much of the work of travel agents, but created jobs for web designers. And so on.
People who think of AI as a job-killer might not have thought of the second and third of these. Or they may have thought of them, but simply assumed they’re not a big deal. Anecdotally, a lot of tech people think that AI will keep substituting for more and more tasks until A) productivity increases just increase the demand for AI, and B) there are no new tasks left for humans to do. AI detractors, meanwhile — like Daron Acemoglu himself — often simply assume that new tasks created by AI will be “bad tasks” like misinformation and cybercrime that hurt the economy instead of helping it.
But these assumptions simply might not be correct. AI might be creating lots of new tasks for humans to do. For example, software engineers are writing less and less code themselves. Instead, they’re spending more and more time telling AI to write code — that represents a productivity improvement. But they’re also trying to figure out what code to tell AI to write, making sure AI is writing the kind of code they want, integrating that code into products, and so on. Those are all new tasks. There are also a lot of software engineers working on improving AI itself, and on discovering new applications for AI. Those are new tasks as well.
This helps explain why in the age of Codex and Claude Code, software developer jobs have been increasing as a percentage of total employment:
Anecdotally, organizations that thought they could replace lots of their software engineers with AI ended up having to hire many of them back — sometimes at a premium.
In fact, this is a story we see throughout the economy. Alex Tabarrok recently reported on a Census Bureau survey about AI that’s been running since 2023. The Census Bureau calls companies up and asks them A) how AI affected their total employment, and B) how AI affects the tasks that workers do.
Most companies reported no change in overall employment, which could just be due to inertia. But of companies that did report a change, more reported an increase than a decrease!
And here’s the breakdown by sector:
The story was similar for tasks. Tabarrok writes:
Among firms using AI, 44% say it supplemented or enhanced work an employee already does. Ten percent say it performed a task an employee used to do. Eleven percent say it introduced a task no one had been doing.
Here’s the chart:
Rigorous research, meanwhile, sometimes finds negative effects of AI on labor demand at the industry level, and sometimes not. But at the company level, the evidence is clearer — Kharazian, Simon, and Stevens (2026) find that when companies adopt more AI, they tend to hire humans rather than replacing them. Here’s a blog writeup of their findings:
And here’s a chart:
Interestingly, they find the same for entry-level jobs — the jobs that people usually identify as being most under threat from AI.
So despite Acemoglu’s skepticism, it looks like for now, the new tasks being created by AI are probably matching or even slightly exceeding the tasks replaced by AI. Of course this measure is “number of companies” rather than “number of jobs”, but the pattern is pretty clear.
The Economist, meanwhile, has a report on how AI is creating jobs, both through the “new tasks” channel and by boosting demand in areas that AI can’t yet touch — physical jobs like construction and HVAC installation. Here’s what they write about the productivity/demand effect:
The Economist estimates that AI has so far created around 1m new jobs in America. That easily exceeds the roughly 200,000 lay-offs attributed to AI since mid-2023, and appears more than enough to offset weaker hiring in many back-office roles. America’s AI infrastructure splurge has created many of them…The Economist tracked five industries at the heart of the data-centre build-out, from electrical contracting to equipment manufacturing. Since 2023 employment in them has risen by roughly 320,000 more than broader…trends would suggest…LinkedIn, a social network for strivers, estimates that nearly half a million data-centre jobs were created between 2023 and 2025 in America, with data-centre technicians and engineers among the most common recent hires…
The scramble for workers is showing up in pay cheques, too. Indeed finds that installation and maintenance jobs at data centres advertise wages about 40% higher than comparable work elsewhere…In the year to June, average hourly earnings rose more than 13% in electrical-equipment manufacturing and nearly 8% among electrical contractors. [emphasis mine]
And here’s what they write about new tasks:
AI is also creating a new class of white-collar jobs. Engineers build the models, data annotators label their inputs and judge their answers, “forward-deployed” engineers adapt them for customers, and newly minted “heads of AI” decide what companies should do with the technology. Some of these roles barely existed until recently. Many are quickly growing in number. Postings for heads of AI, AI engineers and directors of AI have roughly doubled since 2023-24, according to LinkedIn…
Preliminary research by Gad Levanon, chief economist at the Burning Glass Institute…reckons roughly 1% of professional jobs are now “AI jobs”…[P]rofessional occupations closest to the AI boom—engineers, software developers, mathematicians and data scientists…have added roughly 730,000 jobs above trend in recent years[.] [emphasis mine]
What about specific occupations? Technology has certainly destroyed many specific types of jobs over the centuries — there are (basically) no more elevator operators, human telephone operators, or people who do manual typesetting for printing.
And yet in recent decades, we haven’t seen as much of this sort of occupational destruction. For example, a lot of people thought the internet would kill travel agents. And while the industry was hit hard, there are still plenty of travel agents left:
The reason is probably that the job of “travel agent” is much more flexible and “messy” than older types of jobs like elevator operator; travel agents do a whole lot of different tasks, so they’re harder to replace than people who just stand there and press a button. That makes modern jobs harder to replace entirely.
It’s a good bet that AI will eventually make some occupations obsolete. But so far, despite awe-inspiring progress in model capabilities, it’s extremely hard to find occupations that have seen significant replacement by AI. Top AI researchers who famously predicted the end of human radiologists saw their predictions get confounded. Truckers, too, are doing just fine. (Update: Here’s a good clip of Geoffrey Hinton explaining why he was wrong about radiologists.)
The most impressive example might be translators. It seems pretty obvious how AI could replace human translators, and yet it hasn’t done so yet:
Here’s a chart:
If you could go back to 2022, and tell people that in four years, AI would be solving frontier math problems, but we’d still have the same number of people working as translators, how many would have believed you?
It turns out that it’s very natural for people to overestimate the degree to which AI will take their jobs. Hartley et al. (2026) have a really excellent paper called “Job Loss Fears in the First Years of Generative Artificial Intelligence”. Here’s a thread explaining the paper’s findings.
Basically, the authors find that fear of AI job replacement is extremely common:
And they find that the more people’s jobs are exposed to AI, the more they think their jobs are about to be replaced:
In fact, the more of their day people spend using AI at work, the more they’re afraid of being replaced!
And yet when the authors looked for a correlation between AI exposure and actual job loss, they found…absolutely nothing. People’s fears simply haven’t come true yet.
What’s going on? The authors hypothesize that people who use AI more start to understand its ability to replace the tasks they do at work. But as we keep finding, replacing tasks isn’t the same as replacing jobs. People keep finding new things to do in their roles at work — sometimes things AI can’t do yet, but often things that couldn’t even be done until AI made them possible!
It seems like we’re uncovering a consistent human blind spot here: People don’t actually know how they produce value at their jobs. Modern jobs are much more than a simple collection of tasks — they are pieces of a complex machine that produces value in ways that an individual worker often doesn’t even see.2 So when AI comes along and starts replacing people at various tasks, it just ends up making them more valuable as pieces of their corporate machines.
How long that situation will persist, of course, is an open question. AI leaders are starting to realize that it might take a very long time for the full effect of their inventions to be felt:
This is why the AI companies’ recent messaging pivot — many now say that AI will create jobs rather than destroying them — may be honest, rather than a cynical marketing ploy to calm public outrage.
But then there’s the question: Can this situation persist indefinitely? No one knows, of course. But my bet is that while many occupations will eventually be mostly replaced by AI, humans will still have plenty to do. I’ve argued that in order for AI to start replacing human jobs wholesale, it’ll have to get much more agentic — which will make it inherently more unreliable from a human point of view. So I predict that humans will always have jobs keeping AI agents on track.
Even if I’m wrong, though — even if the AI job apocalypse does eventually come — it doesn’t seem like it’s coming soon, and it certainly isn’t here right now. Everyone keeps thinking that AI is a job killer, and AI keeps on refusing to be what everyone expects.
Happy Labor Day!
Update: John Cassidy has another good post on this same topic.
Higher task-level productivity can destroy jobs by letting employers do more with less. It can create jobs by creating economic growth, which boosts labor demand. But I think Acemoglu et al. might overlook another source of productivity-driven job creation, which is variety. When carmakers became more productive, they became capable of pumping out more different makes and models of cars. This probably made consumers want cars more, because people enjoy variety — GM famously overtook Ford by offering more models, more frequent model updates, and more colors.
This is why jobs may feel like “bullshit” to the people doing them, even as they command high wages in the market.
An astronaut’s image of Earth from the 2026 lunar flyby reveals not our profound smallness but our growing significance
- by Aeon Video
A century ago, the Pan-American road promised a new era of fraternity between the two continents. Did it succeed?
- by Shawn Miller
I am a heavy user of sidenotes:1 they keep optional content next to the text instead of sending the reader to the bottom of the page and back. Tufte CSS renders them without JavaScript but only accepts inline content. CSS anchor positioning, now supported by recent browsers,2 is an elegant alternative. Sidenotes can hold several blocks, still without JavaScript, and fall back below the paragraph referencing them on narrow viewports and older browsers.
In 2023, Eric Meyer demonstrated this technique in “Nuclear Anchored Sidenotes.” The main improvement over other solutions is that the notes can sit anywhere in the HTML document. You can place them after the paragraph referencing them, as regular block elements for text browsers, screen readers, feed readers, and reader mode to render them properly:
When the viewport is too narrow or the browser does not support CSS anchor positioning, you can style them so the reader can skip them or glance at them without losing their position in the text:
Once the viewport is large enough, they appear in the margin, at the same vertical position as the matching reference mark, unless they would collide with a previous sidenote, as in the example below:3
The gist of CSS anchoring is to position an element relative to another element—the anchor. For the sidenotes, the anchor is the reference mark. I use the following markup, with a data attribute to specify the anchor name:
Market Design
<sup id="fnref:YYY" data-anchor="--lf-sn-YYY">
<a href="#sidenote-YYY">1</a>
</sup>
The matching note is an <aside> element carrying the same data attribute for
the anchor name. We put it after the paragraph holding the reference mark:
<aside role="note" id="sidenote-YYY" data-anchor="--lf-sn-YYY">
<sup>1</sup>
<p>A first paragraph.</p>
<p>A second paragraph.</p>
</aside>
On a narrow viewport or when the browser is too old for CSS anchoring, we style the sidenote, which stays below its paragraph, with a muted color:
aside[role="note"] {
margin-block: 1rlh;
color: #444;
}
On a wide viewport and when the browser is recent enough, we move the sidenote to the right margin:
@supports (anchor-name: attr(data-anchor type(<custom-ident>))) {
@media (min-width: 72rem) {
main {
position: relative;
sup[data-anchor] {
anchor-name: attr(data-anchor type(<custom-ident>));
/* → anchor-name: --lf-sn-YYY */
}
aside[role="note"][data-anchor] {
anchor-name: --lf-sidenote;
position: absolute;
position-anchor: attr(data-anchor type(<custom-ident>));
/* → position-anchor: --lf-sn-YYY */
top: max(anchor(top), anchor(--lf-sidenote bottom, -1rlh) + 1rlh);
left: 100%;
margin: 0 2rem;
width: 18rem;
color: inherit;
}
}
}
}
attr() extracts the anchor name for the reference mark from the data-anchor
attribute. It returns a string, unless we specify a CSS unit or a type, like
here: the browser parses the data attribute as a custom
identifier, which anchor-name validates as a dashed
identifier, a custom identifier starting with two
dashes.4
The note itself is absolutely positioned past the right edge of the main block.
It selects the matching reference mark as its anchor with position-anchor set
to the value of the data-anchor attribute. Each note is also an anchor named
--lf-sidenote. We use it to keep the next note from colliding with this one.
The anchor() CSS function lets us position the note’s top
edge relative to its anchor: anchor(top) aligns the top edge of the note with
the top edge of the reference mark. It can also take another anchor as a
parameter: anchor(--lf-sidenote bottom) would align the top edge of the note
with the bottom edge of the closest preceding anchor named --lf-sidenote—so
the previous note.5 Like attr(), anchor() accepts a fallback
value as its second parameter and use it when the named anchor does not exist.
The top property handles three cases, illustrated in the following diagram:
anchor(--lf-sidenote bottom, -1rlh) + 1rlh
resolves to 0 and max() returns anchor(top).max() returns anchor(--lf-sidenote bottom) + 1rlh.max() returns anchor(top).Have a look at the complete stylesheet, which also adapts the reference mark to the location of the note: a “↓” arrow when the note sits below the paragraph, a “→” arrow when it moves to the margin. Gwern’s “Sidenotes In Web Design” lists more implementations and their trade-offs.
Some bloggers aim to write a post in 30 minutes. I planned to publish
three web-related articles this weekend. Instead, I spent an inordinate amount
of time elsewhere: about 15 commits on the build system, a pull request to
update CSS highlighting for nested selectors in Pygments, and a
small correction to MDN’s article on the anchor() CSS function. The
SVG illustration took a bit less than an hour and the article itself a handful
of hours. The attr() function came in after I thought “inline style looks
ugly, isn’t there a better way?” But, hey, I still think this is worth it! 🎨
My PhD advisor told me this is unwise. ↩
The first bits of anchor positioning are supported from Chrome 125 (May 2024), Firefox 147 (January 2026), and Safari 26 (September 2025).
Before Safari 26.5, sidenotes may collide due to a bug in how dependency chains are handled. You can detect this situation with some JavaScript. It is, however, not needed in the solution described here as we depend on a more recent feature. ↩
If you noticed the runt in the first note, I share your pain and lament that
Firefox does not implement text-wrap: pretty. ↩
Typed attr() is supported from Chrome 133 (February 2025),
Firefox 155 (September 2026), and Safari 27 (not yet released). Check Una
Kravets’ article for details. To support more
browsers, you can inline the anchor name and the position anchor directly in
the HTML:
<sup id="…" style="anchor-name: --lf-sn-…">
<a href="#sidenote-…">1</a>
</sup>
“Managing Anchor Associations With Data Attributes and Advanced
attr(),” by Daniel Schwarz, explores CSS
anchors and typed attr() in more detail. ↩
The exact rule for the target anchor element is more complex: “if an ancestor of [the note] satisfies the following conditions, return the nearest such element to [the note]. Otherwise, return the last element in tree order that satisfies the conditions.” One of these conditions is that “[the candidate] is an acceptable anchor element for [the note],” which requires that “[the candidate] is laid out strictly before [the note],” where the relevant clause is that “[the candidate] is either not absolutely positioned or occurs earlier in the flat tree order than [the note].” ↩
Standard optimal capital tax theory abstracts from modeling asset prices, making it unsuitable for thinking about capital gains and wealth taxation. We study optimal redistributive taxation in an environment with asset price movements, adopting the modern finance view that asset prices fluctuate not only because of changing cash flows, but also due to other factors (“discount rates”). We show that a combination of realization-based capital gains and cash flow taxes implements the optimal allocation regardless of the source of asset-price fluctuations. Moreover, the capital gains tax avoids distortions in portfolio choice (the socalled lock-in effect) by targeting total net trades rather than gains from selling individual assets. These results stand in contrast to the classic Haig-Simons comprehensive income tax concept as well as recent proposals for wealth or accrual-based capital gains taxes.
Wealth taxes lose the comparison. That is from Econometrica, by Mark Aguiar, Benjamin Moll, and Florian Scheuer.
The post Capital gains vs. wealth taxes appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Today’s Picture of the Week celebrates the intricate design of the Multi Object Optical and Near-infrared Spectrograph, or MOONS, a new instrument at ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) that recently performed its first observations. Shown here, suspended in darkness, are two of MOONS’ infrared cameras. These multi-tiered shiny metal structures, covered in bolts and cables, will be used to probe the construction of our galaxy and those beyond.
The centre of the Milky Way is shrouded in dust, which blocks visible light from inner stars passing through to us. By gathering a different type of light that can pass through this dust, called infrared, MOONS can investigate the properties of millions of these ‘hidden’ stars. This will enable astronomers to produce an accurate 3D map of the centre of our galaxy. MOONS will also be used to study millions of other galaxies, probing how they form and evolve at different ages of the Universe.
How does MOONS’ design enable detailed observations of so many cosmic objects? By using around 1000 fibre-optic cables, each mounted on a robotic positioner that carefully points it to the exact location of an astronomical object, whose light is then fed from the VLT into two spectrographs. Spectrographs work like a prism creating a rainbow, splitting the light they receive into separate ‘colours’ (or wavelengths) to then be detected by cameras, like the ones in this image. The fingerprints of chemical elements encoded in the light can then be analysed in detail, revealing properties of cosmic objects like composition, mass, and velocity. To minimise contamination from sources of infrared light around the instrument, MOONS is kept very cold (between –143 and –233 degrees Celsius) thanks to a cryostat.
MOONS was developed by an international consortium led by the Science and Technology Facilities Council's UK Astronomy Technology Centre. Reflecting on his image of the unique and powerful new instrument, photographer and ESO astronomer Luca Sbordone says: “I find that these objects are beautiful, it’s a beauty that comes from the cleverness, precision, dedication and accumulated knowledge needed to make them”.
Here's tomorrow's conference agenda for the opening day of the Redefining Health Care in the Age of A.I. conference in Paris. Philippe Aghion will speak on "Should we fear AI?"
My talk is about "Computational Intelligence and Organ Allocation on a Global Scale."
Tym Syrytczyk, London, autonomous vehicles in the UK.
Shane Regan, Long Island, 16, AI agents.
Maximilian Kornstein, 15, Atlanta area, agents and general career support.
Irene Chen and Jessica Dai, UC Berkeley, data on peptides use.
Evan Warfel, Bay Area, updated meta-analyses through AI.
Daniel Dominguez Gomez, biomedical think tank for Mexico.
Malhaar Agrawal, U Penn., prediction markets and clinical trials.
Andrei Russel Ismael, Harvard, biomedical start-up.
Benedict Springbett, London, conference on the importance of legal issues for UK growth.
Metin Metin, Izmir, Turkey, 15, AI and brain organoid electrophysiology.
Ben Vyshedskiy, Harvard, biology podcast.
Afra Wang, Bay Area, podcast and study of Chinese AI.
Joe Hazell, LSE, AI and macroeconomics.
Anne Arno, Krakow, writing and biography.
The post Emergent Ventures winners, 59th cohort appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Winter near the Antarctic Circle brings months of frozen darkness, when sea ice chokes ocean waters and many of its denizens hunker down to ride out the harsh conditions. But as winter began to release its icy grip, an uncommonly clear satellite image revealed that part of this remote realm was still very much awake, at least volcanically speaking.
Mount Michael, the stratovolcano at the center of Saunders Island, rises above the ice-filled South Atlantic Ocean in this image, acquired with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on the NASA-USGS Landsat 8 satellite on August 24, 2026. The natural-color image is overlaid with an infrared signal (OLI bands 7-6-5), shown in red, revealing heat from the persistent lava lake in its summit crater. A puff of a volcanic plume hovering over the peak, along with darkened snow on its northern slopes, also suggests ongoing activity.
Saunders Island is one of the South Sandwich Islands, a string of small volcanic peaks about 350 kilometers (220 miles) long that formed from the South American plate subducting beneath the tiny South Sandwich plate. Regular eruptions, including at Mount Michael, have occurred on these islands in recent centuries.
Because of the volcanoes’ remoteness, scientists rely on satellite data to understand their activity. An analysis of thermal anomalies in Landsat, Sentinel, and ASTER (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer) observations spanning 30 years led researchers to conclude that Mount Michael hosts a persistent lava lake in its summit crater. Only a handful of other volcanoes on Earth, including Kīlauea, Nyamulagira, and Erta Ale, are known to have similar, frequently active features.
Thermal observations from the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) and VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) instruments have also enabled long-term monitoring of Mount Michael. Data provided through MIROVA, a near-real-time volcanic hot spot detection system, indicate that low-intensity activity has been ongoing at the volcano for the past several years. Other observations from NASA’s Aura satellite show that emissions of sulfur dioxide and other gases are common at Mount Michael.
The cloud-free window over Mount Michael would close in short order. One week later, when Landsat 9 passed over the island, a more active atmosphere had returned. But the weather patterns interacted with the island to put on a spectacle of their own. The 843-meter-high (2,766-foot-high) peak jutting from the ocean disturbed passing winds to produce a series of wave clouds resembling the wake of a ship, a familiar phenomenon in this region. False-color imagery captured by NASA’s Aqua satellite indicates that a volcanic track caused by degassing sulfur dioxide was likely present as well.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Lindsey Doermann.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
The volcano on Indonesia’s Halmahera Island routinely ejects ash, volcanic gases, and volcanic bombs.
Icy, isolated Peter I Island stirred up a show in the atmosphere off the West Antarctic coast.
Beaver Island is one in a string of verdant and scenic jewels in a northern Lake Michigan archipelago.
The post A Bright Spot at Mount Michael appeared first on NASA Science.
Why are Saturn’s poles geometric?
