Filmed at home, this ran about two hours, and yes that is Nabeel Qureshi, with a cameo from Spinoza toward the very end. From Jackson:
From the episode summary:
Tyler and Nabeel are good friends, and given how prolific Tyler is, I decided to use Nabeel as an entry point and interview them together. We discuss sacred commitments, AI acceleration, mentorship, friendship, and more, but I focused the majority of the conversation on art and aesthetics. Tyler and Nabeel are unlikely aesthetes given their day jobs, but in fact take art deeply seriously. They have a shared love for and similar tastes in art, music, and film, in particular. We discuss strange and beautiful art, aesthetic stagnation, and a wide range of favorites: The Beatles, Mozart, Mondrian, Springsteen, Lana Del Rey, Kanye West, Cassavetes, The Sopranos, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=wC78q_BeD27XDnLN&v=qPHV-BezoIc&feature=youtu.be
Excerpt:
Tyler: (18:31) I think I’m very mundane in many ways. When Marc Andreessen had that famous tweet about not being too introspective, I know he got slammed for that, but I sympathize with that in many ways. I have my work. I focus on it. I want to go see places I haven’t seen before. That really drives me. I feel pretty well motivated. I do think all kinds of deep thoughts, but to me those deep thoughts feel more superficial than my so-called superficial urges to go around doing things. And I’m fine with that.
…Jackson: (23:25) Do you experience art primarily by thinking or by feeling?
Tyler: (23:29) I don’t even know what those words mean. I experience it by looking at it. I don’t think I have very deep emotional responses. I think it’s pleasure and I feel I learn a lot from it. When I go out and look at other works of art or just the world, I see a lot more than people who don’t live with art. I don’t think I feel that much. I’ve never cried in front of a painting. When I read these accounts of someone seeing a Madonna and weeping, it makes no sense to me. It’s like people who do sports gambling. Why do you do that? There are positive-sum gambles for you. Here are a few.
There is much more of interest, self-recommending!
The post Jackson Dahl podcasts with me and Nabeel on aesthetics appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Rocket Lab announced on Monday that it is acquiring the satellite communications company Iridium. The deal, made for cash and shares of Rocket Lab stock, values Iridium at about $8 billion.
The deal pairs the launch company, founded and led by Peter Beck, with a decades-old profitable satellite company whose network of 80 satellites in low-Earth orbit provides telecommunications services.
"We believe this will be one of the most transformative deals in the space industry," Beck said in a short promotional video announcing the deal. "It's the ultimate combination for growth."
Up betimes and to my office, and by and by to the Temple, and there appointed to meet in the evening about my business, and thence I walked home, and up and down the streets is cried mightily the great victory got by the Portugalls against the Spaniards, where 10,000 slain, 3 or 4,000 taken prisoners, with all the artillery, baggage, money, &c., and Don John of Austria forced to flee with a man or two with him, which is very great news.
Thence home and at my office all the morning, and then by water to St. James’s, but no meeting to-day being holy day, but met Mr. Creed in the Park, and after a walk or two, discoursing his business, took leave of him in Westminster Hall, whither we walked, and then came again to the Hall and fell to talk with Mrs. Lane, and after great talk that she never went abroad with any man as she used heretofore to do, I with one word got her to go with me and to meet me at the further Rhenish wine-house, where I did give her a Lobster and do so touse her and feel her all over, making her believe how fair and good a skin she has, and indeed she has a very white thigh and leg, but monstrous fat. When weary I did give over and somebody, having seen some of our dalliance, called aloud in the street, “Sir! why do you kiss the gentlewoman so?” and flung a stone at the window, which vexed me, but I believe they could not see my touzing her, and so we broke up and I went out the back way, without being observed I think, and so she towards the Hall and I to White Hall, where taking water I to the Temple with my cozen Roger and Mr. Goldsborough to Gray’s Inn to his counsel, one Mr. Rawworth, a very fine man, where it being the question whether I as executor should give a warrant to Goldsborough in my reconveying her estate back again, the mortgage being performed against all acts of the testator, but only my own, my cozen said he never heard it asked before; and the other that it was always asked, and he never heard it denied, or scrupled before, so great a distance was there in their opinions, enough to make a man forswear ever having to do with the law; so they agreed to refer it to Serjeant Maynard. So we broke up, and I by water home from the Temple, and there to Sir W. Batten and eat with him, he and his lady and Sir J. Minnes having been below to-day upon the East India men that are come in, but never tell me so, but that they have been at Woolwich and Deptford, and done great deal of business. God help them. So home and up to my lute long, and then, after a little Latin chapter with Will, to bed. But I have used of late, since my wife went, to make a bad use of my fancy with whatever woman I have a mind to, which I am ashamed of, and shall endeavour to do so no more. So to sleep.
Below are a variety of materials relating to the Viking 1 and 2 missions. Please use the menu at right to jump directly to the section you seek.
Retro-style video features animation of one of NASA’s Viking spacecraft en route to Mars and landing there in 1976. Video includes actual footage of NASA mission control for Viking, and the Deep Space Network in California’s Mojave Desert, which communicates with spacecraft.
Learn More and DownloadThirty-five years after NASA’s Viking missions launched, the team looked back at this extraordinary and “gutsy” mission.
Read More and DownloadExamine NASA data and images to help scientists find and catalog shapes in the Martian clouds in this Citizen Science Project.
Learn More
The post Viking Mission Resources appeared first on NASA Science.
Links for you. Science:
Updated COVID vaccines cut risk of hospital care, heart complications, new data reveal
CDC’s chief blocked a covid vaccine study. Now it’s in a top medical journal.
The Ebola Outbreak’s Central Mystery: Where Did This Virus Come From?
Be Not Afraid. Bats Are Amazing
U.S. provides experimental Ebola treatment for outbreak in Congo, bringing trials closer
New walking shark discovered in Papua New Guinea
Trump Administration Moves to Preserve Cells and DNA of Imperiled Species. The government is teaming up with Colossal Biosciences, a private company that claims to have revived extinct dire wolves, to store samples from at-risk animals and plants.
Other:
Dems Must Talk Seriously About Supreme Court Expansion
How The OMB Rule Will Hurt You And Your Town
In Search Of A Shared Theory Of Power
Trump’s Peeling Green Gift to America
Cargo Culture
Trump’s Reflecting Pool fiasco is no longer just a laughing matter
Russell Vought’s Latest Plan to Gut the Government Should Terrify You
What comes next after D.C.’s historic primary?
The politicization of federal grant funding will hurt Arizona
Senator Demands Trump Personally Pay Taxpayers Back For Reflecting Pool Mess: “This was not a result of vandalism, but your administration’s incompetence,” Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) told the president.
Opponents Of The JCPOA Unlocked A Hellish Future
Iran and Egypt will meet, uncomfortably, in Seattle’s World Cup ‘Pride Match’
Sen. Van Hollen backs El-Sayed for Michigan Senate in break from Democratic leadership
A Final Day At Aqueduct, New York’s Forlorn And Forgotten Racetrack
And There’s Always The Bezos Post
We Must Restore Congress as the Predominant Branch of Government
Centrist Emotional Support Journalists
We Can Still Realize FDR’s Vision
NYC Rent Guidelines Board approves 2-year rent freeze, fulfilling Mamdani campaign pledge
Alexander Hamilton, the Wrong Founder
As America’s birthday approaches, its front yard is a construction zone
Ford Has Been Rehiring Quality Inspectors After AI Fell Short
Judge Blocks ‘Unconstitutional and Dangerous’ Trump Order Designed to Derail Mail-In Voting
Moody’s warns proposed political review of grants a credit negative
Trump the Bathroom Slob?
A Terrible Thing Happened to My Family
This MAGA Ohio Town Could Soon Face the Mother of All ICE Raids
Beware the Pink Tide?
Census Bureau Quietly Scraps Plan for Improved Data Collection on Race and Ethnicity
America Is Trapped in the Grossest Pool Party of All Time
Climate Change
I Went to Trump’s Great American State Fair. It Was Bleaker Than I Expected.
Starmersim
Over the last decade, multiple news organizations have inflicted Cletus Safaris on their readers, in which a reporter goes to a diner or some other folsky communal spot and talks with MAGA diehards with the goal of Elucidating The Real America. One would think that with the DSA seizing all three branches of governmentthree Mamdani-endorsed candidates winning Democratic primaries in New York City and a democratic socialist winning the D.C. mayorality it might behoove members of the political press corps to interview voters who voted for these candidates so as to understand this supposedly seismic event.
In D.C., for example, I really doubt democratic socialist Janeese Lewis George only lost D.C.’s Ward 3 by 1.8% (45.4% to 43.6%). It might be that Ward 3 is chock full of socialists, but I really don’t think that’s the case*. But a news organization could send reporters out to ask some questions! It would provide people with useful information, and it would be interesting: unlike the same fucking Cletus Safaris, this would be new–and you can’t spell news without new!
That they do not do this, and instead, fall back on the same tired tropes suggests that our news media also need the equivalent of a replacement election.
MOAR CLETUS SAFARIS! But leftistly!
*Not only do I think the Democratic primaries in areas where the primary is the de facto election experienced a ‘change’ election, but we also are seeing the weakening, if not collapse, of traditional urban power centers, and those centers are slowly being supplanted by new organizations and groups. Also, personality, as always, played a role. When Democratic voters in heavily Democratic areas are angry at Democrats, they don’t vote for Republicans, they move farther left (or off the axis entirely).
June 25-28
Red Sox 6, Yankees 3
Red Sox 6, Yankees 1
Red Sox 4, Yankees 1
Red Sox 5, Yankees 4 (10)
Yankees – 100 100 100 – 3 8 4
Red Sox – 000 040 02x – 6 7 0
Yankees – 000 000 010 – 1 3 0
Red Sox – 121 001 01x – 6 9 0
Yankees – 000 010 000 – 1 3 0
Red Sox – 112 000 00x – 4 7 0
Yankees – 000 000 002 2 – 4 3 1
Red Sox – 000 200 000 3 – 5 6 2
More Langs:
Sonny Gray with a 7 1/3 IP no-hit bid vs the Yankees
He’s the first former Yankees pitcher with a no-hit bid of at least 7 innings against the Yankees since 6/30/57 Ralph Terry (7 1/3 IP)1988: 14
1917: 13
1915: 12
1914: 12
2026: 11 *active
1933: 111917: 112:21 [Friday]2:22 [Saturday]This is the first time consecutive Yankees-Red Sox games have been 2 hours, 22 minutes or shorter since they played three straight Sept. 27-29, 1983
IP H ER BB K PIT
Thu: Connelly Early: 6.0 5 2 1 9 98
Fri: Payton Tolle: 7.0 1 0 2 7 88
Sat: Jake Bennett: 6.1 3 1 2 3 87
Sun: Sonny Gray: 7.1 1 0 1 9 97
26.2 10 3 6 28 1.01 ERA
Yankees Swept By Red Sox After Blowing Lead In Extras As Rally Goes For Naught In Brutal Loss
Greg Joyce, Post
A late rally gave the Yankees a chance to finish a brutal weekend on a high note.
Instead, somehow, it only delayed the misery.
On a night when Sonny Gray took a no-hitter into the eighth inning, Aroldis Chapman and the Red Sox defense melted down in the ninth inning, and the Yankees took the lead in the 10th, it still all came crumbling down for them . . . to deliver one last knockout punch on the way back to New York.
After the Yankees took their first lead since Thursday night with two runs in the top of the 10th, [Boston] came back to win it in the bottom of the frame against Fernando Cruz, as Jarren Duran's walk-off single lifted them to a 5-4 win that finished off a four-game sweep Sunday night at Fenway Park. . . .
[MFY manager Aaron Boone:] "It's one of those crap moments of the season, crap times of the season . . ."
On a weekend in which they were dominated by Red Sox starting pitching — Connelly Early, Payton Tolle, Jake Bennett and Gray combined for 26.2 innings in which they gave up just three runs, 10 hits and six walks while striking out 28 — the Yankees have now dropped eight of their past 11 after suffering their first four-game sweep to their archrivals since 2018.
The Red Sox had not won four straight games all season until this series. . . .
A month that began with the Yankees losing Aaron Judge to the injured list (his timeline for a return is still very fuzzy) is nearing an end with the club looking like it is feeling the effects . . . along with [the absences of] Giancarlo Stanton and Trent Grisham. . . .
The Yankees[' bats] . . . have all gone cold at the same time, resulting in a four-game sweep in which the Yankees combined to hit just 17-for-128 (.133) with 10 walks. . . .
The night had begun like the last few before it, with Gray mowing down the Yankees.
Tolle had retired the first 16 Yankees on Friday night before Bennett carried a no-hitter into the fifth inning Saturday. Gray took flirting with history a step further before another former disgruntled Yankee, Chapman, flushed it in the ninth.
But even after the Yankees rallied and went ahead in the 10th . . . Cruz could not finish it off in the bottom of the inning.
He left pitches up that turned into a single, double, sacrifice fly and then Duran's walk-off winner.
"Great teams go through this," Cruz said.
[Shitty teams go through it, too.]
Oswaldo Cabrera's First Game Back Since Gruesome Ankle Injury Comes With A Costly Yankees Error
Greg Joyce, Post
For the first time since a gruesome ankle injury last May, Oswaldo Cabrera was back in a big league lineup Sunday night.
It did not go as well as he had hoped, though, with a crucial fielding error giving way to a pair of runs early on the way to the Yankees' crushing 5-4, 10-inning loss to the Red Sox at Fenway Park.
Cabrera went 0-for-3 . . . But his fielding error at third base loomed large in the fourth inning.
With a runner on first and one out in a scoreless game, Carlos Rodón got Willson Contreras to hit a hard grounder to third. Cabrera bobbled it and by the time he threw over to first, it was too late.
One out later, the Yankees should have been out of the inning, but instead Caleb Durbin came up next and hit a two-run single in what became a 37-pitch inning for Rodón, a big reason why he only lasted five innings.
The Yankees defense had let them down Thursday night, committing four errors, and then came back to bite them again Sunday. . . .
Cam Schlittler played with fire for four innings and got away with it.But then in the fifth, his defense added some lighter fluid, and his start went up in flames.After Amed Rosario let a smoked ground ball go through his legs instead of turning a potential inning-ending double play, the first of four unearned runs came in on Schlittler to sink the Yankees in a sloppy 6-3 loss to the Red Sox on Thursday night . . .Former Yankees prospect Caleb Durbin delivered the deciding blow before the fifth inning was over, taking Schlittler deep for a two-run shot just over the Green Monster to break a 2-2 tie.The Yankees tried to mount a comeback in the ninth against their former closer, Aroldis Chapman, who loaded the bases with two outs before finally shutting the door.It was a messy loss for the Yankees, who committed a season-high four errors . . . and wasted some chances to cash in offensively before the scuffling Red Sox came alive. . . .The offense . . . [went] 3-for-11 with runners in scoring position — including Ben Rice, the Yankees' best hitter, going 0-for-4 in those situations and leaving seven men on base.Schlittler stranded a pair of runners in each of the first, second and fourth innings. He might have been able to do it again in the fifth, until Rosario's fielding error opened the floodgates. . . .
. . . the season-high four errors they made in Thursday's 6-3 loss to the Red Sox at Fenway Park were especially tough.And even as they made the most errors in a game since the four they committed in a loss to Boston at Yankee Stadium last Aug. 21, there were even more miscues than the ones that made the stat sheet. . . .Among the culprits was José Caballero, whose defensive versatility is part of what the Yankees were looking for when they acquired him from Tampa Bay last season.But they probably didn't foresee him starting in left field five times over an eight-game period as he's been forced to with Judge and Trent Grisham sidelined. . . . [H]is errant throw on Jarren Duran's very shallow fly ball [in the fifth] allowed Ceddanne Rafaela to score and helped Boston take control of the game.The fact that Rafaela even tried to score on the play indicated what the Red Sox thought of Caballero in left. . . .Ball goes right under Amed Rosario's glove and the Red Sox score pic.twitter.com/WpfNGlZdiD— Talkin' Yanks (@TalkinYanks) June 26, 2026As for his throw home, which took Austin Wells away from the plate, Caballero said, "I put good velo on it. It was just a little off the line. And mistakes happen." . . .[Thirs baseman Amed] Rosario let Willson Contreras' rocket 112 mph grounder go through his legs for a two-base error in the fifth . . .Wells was charged with an error on a catcher's interference that wiped away a groundout by Abreu in the first. Schlittler threw a pickoff attempt at second base that went into center field for an error, and the right-hander also watched Caleb Durbin's pop-up drop in front of him for an infield single in the second. Yerry De los Santos made the fourth error of the night in the eighth.
The Yankees at least spared themselves the infamy of having a perfect game thrown against them [on Friday]. . . .Red Sox lefty Payton Tolle dominated them across seven innings, allowing just one hit to Spencer Jones after retiring 16 straight to start the game, as the Yankees stumbled to a second straight loss by a score of 6-1. . . .Tolle, who struck out 11 in six innings of one-run ball against the Yankees in April, was even more untouchable on Friday night while striking out seven. Jones poked a single into center field off him with one out in the sixth, and Tolle later walked a pair in the seventh. But all three base runners proved harmless as he mowed down the Yankees, who have now lost six of their past nine. . . .Besides Tolle vying for a perfect game, the only real drama — if you can call it that — of the night came in the bottom of the fifth inning, when the benches cleared after Will Warren walked Willson Contreras. Ball four was up and in on Contreras, who essentially stands on top of the plate, and he flipped his bat before jogging down to first and jawing at Warren.Contreras, who had crushed a 418-foot homer off Warren earlier in the game, seemed to want to know why the Yankees pitcher was looking at him. . . .That only added to the frustration for Warren, who gave up five runs on seven hits and three walks across 5.2 innings. For the first time in his career, he did not record a single strikeout. Warren was consistently hit hard even on outs, as 10 of the 24 balls the Red Sox put in play against him came off the bat at 95 mph or higher.
What's become a mostly docile matchup in the AL East got some heat in the bottom of the fifth of a 6-1 Red Sox win, when Willson Contreras jawed at Will Warren as he headed to first base following a walk.Warren, whose second pitch of the at-bat was up and in to Contreras — clearly crowding the plate — said some words back to Contreras and the benches cleared.After Contreras homered and had an RBI single off Warren earlier in the game, Contreras flipped his bat after Warren walked him on a 3-2 pitch that was close to Contreras' elbow.Contreras continued to shout at the right-hander once he got to the bag, with first baseman Paul Goldschmidt looking to calm the situation.Warren clearly wasn't pleased with Contreras' behavior at the plate, saying the slugger was "playing games in the [batters'] box."Aaron Boone said it's what Contreras is known for."I think that's what he does a lot,'' the manager said. "His arms hang over the plate, so I don't know where we're supposed to go [with pitches]. I think there's probably a method to what he's doing. He probably wants that. . . ."Contreras was a menace to the Yankees all night, as he singled in a run in the first and homered to left in the third before the walk.The Yankees, losers of six of nine, have bigger concerns than any antics by Contreras as they try to right themselves . . .
Contrary to popular belief, those were not toothpicks the Yankees were swinging Saturday.But they essentially would have served the same purpose as the lumber they did use, which has been ineffective the past few days.Once again, the Yankees got shut down by a lefty, with their bats going silent and offensive woes growing louder in a third straight loss to the last-place Red Sox, this time 4-1 on a fine afternoon at a sold-out Fenway Park.For a second straight game, Jake Bennett and the Red Sox bullpen held the Yankees to just three hits while Gerrit Cole got hit around, resulting in their seventh loss in the past 10 games. . . .[New York] suddenly looks like it dearly misses Aaron Judge, not to mention Giancarlo Stanton and Trent Grisham, who are also on the injured list. Grisham should return within the week, but Judge and Stanton do not appear anywhere close to coming back . . .Cole got hit hard for a second straight start, giving up four runs on seven hits, including a pair of solo home runs to Masataka Yoshida (to lead off the bottom of the first) and former Yankees first-round pick Anthony Seigler (in the bottom of the second).But the bigger culprit was the offense. After Tolle took a perfect game into the sixth inning against the Yankees on Friday night, Bennett had a no-hitter into the fifth Saturday . . .Over the first three games of this four-game set, the Yankees have gone just 14-for-94 (.149) with eight walks.Some of their most dependable batters have contributed to the recent malaise. Ben Rice went 0-for-4 Saturday and is now 2-for-23 over his past six games. Bellinger went 1-for-2 with two walks, improving him to 2-for-19 over his past six games. Amed Rosario, who had been a reliable lefty killer early on, is now 7-for-42 over his past 15 games. . . .
Ben Rice has spent most of the season looking like an MVP candidate.But the past six games have been much more pedestrian, magnified by the rest of the Yankees offense going through a cold stretch with him. . . .He is batting just 2-for-23 with a .174 OPS over his past six games, of which the Yankees have lost four. . . .To be clear, Rice is far from alone in having a rough week. But it is noticeable because of how impactful he has been for most of the season — he finished Saturday batting .276 with a .940 OPS — with this marking the quietest stretch of his season so far.It comes during a week in which the Yankees have faced a heavy dose of lefty starters — including each of the past four games, with Red Sox southpaw Jake Bennett holding him down Saturday. . . .In a bit of an oddity, Rice grounded out in eight straight plate appearances before striking out in his final at-bat Saturday.There's still no timetable for the Yankees to get their two biggest bats back from the injured list in Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton . . .
1. The great Scott Wheeler on Stephen Sondheim (Free Press).
2. Is space the most underrated policy area?
3. On the USAID and deaths debate. Hardly the final word, but an injection of sanity into what has been a low quality debate. Here is commentary from GPT Pro. In a few years we might have some accurate estimates.
4. Using LLMs in economic history.
5. Measuring economic growth through the valuation of human life.
6. Brooklyn Coffee Shop showcases my book The Complacent Class.
The post Monday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The temptation to use artificial intelligence (AI) to cheat is shaking up elite universities in the United States. Professor Roberto Serrano, who is the Harrison S. Kravis University Professor of Economics at Brown University, has detected a massive fraud in one of the classes he teaches, ECON 1170, an advanced undergraduate course in mathematical economics. He has conclusive evidence that at least 50 students cheated on the March midterm exam, making it the biggest known scandal at Brown and in the entire Ivy League, which brings together the East Coast’s eight most elite private universities, including Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth College and University of Pennsylvania.
When he reported the case to high-ranking officials at Brown, he got a cold reaction. The response from the president, he said, was absolute silence. The dean did not comment either until Serrano took the case before the Academic Code Committee.
Here is the full story, via Anecdotal.
The post AI cheating on math econ at Brown appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

It’s almost hard to remember nowadays, but before the pandemic a lot of us were worried about falling business dynamism in the United States. For whatever reason, Americans just weren’t starting companies — either high-growth startups or small businesses — at the rate they used to. Much ink was spilled discussing possible reasons for the trend, and potential levers for reversing it.
Then the pandemic came, and the trend shifted almost overnight. Suddenly, Americans were creating new businesses again:

Notably, even in 2024 the trend in business applications showed no sign of reverting to its pre-pandemic level. The shift seems at least partly durable.
No one knows exactly why new business creation has surged in recent years. But one possibility is that technology has made it possible for people to start businesses with a lot fewer employees. Stripe Economics has an interesting blog post about the rise of “solopreneurs” — independent businesspeople who don’t employ anyone else at their businesses:
The upshot is that there’s a big trend to “solopreneurship”, and that the pandemic accelerated the shift:

Solopreneurship has been increasing since 2008, both in absolute terms and as a percent of new business formation. Some of this is due to legal changes. The Obamacare exchanges make it easier for solopreneurs to buy their own health insurance. The Qualified Business Income deduction, the simplified home-office deduction, and other tax changes have made it more favorable to be a solopreneur.
On top of that, the internet made a lot of solo business models easier to execute, from dropshipping businesses to YouTube channels to subscription-based email newsletters. I am a solopreneur myself — Noahpinion is an S-corporation. Substack made it incredibly easy for me to sell and deliver content online, Twitter/X made it incredibly easy for me to market that content, and Stripe made it incredibly easy to receive payments — all without hiring anyone.
The team at Stripe Economics argues that this latter trend is just getting started. Thanks to AI, the number of business models that can be executed by single individuals is growing rapidly:
An agent can now help you find the best tools for your business and handle your integration with minimal support….The recent growth in nonemployer businesses shows a positive relationship with industry-level AI adoption…
Part of the reason businesses historically tended to be built by groups was that a single individual rarely possesses all the skills needed in the entrepreneurial journey. Whether it’s how to evaluate or size a market, code an app, price a product, write and execute a marketing campaign, or close a deal, AI (and AI-augmented software) can fill many of the gaps that founders previously turned to another human for. Or, as Sam Altman so succinctly put it: “revenge of the idea guys.”
We think this phenomenon is the true engine of the AI surge in business formation we’re seeing today. The availability of this breadth of on-tap assistance allows anyone with sufficient motivation to go it alone. Given this, we think the 20% figure is a floor rather than a ceiling in terms of AI impact.
This makes sense. It’s pretty clear that one big reason to have a multi-person company has always been individual specialization. But Claude is far more versatile than any human being, so in the age of AI agents, specialization will probably be less important in many cases.
Even in the (many) cases where that doesn’t allow one person to run a company all by themself, it will tend to push companies toward lower headcount. Kim and Koning have a new working paper showing that “AI-native” companies now being created tend to have about 25% fewer employees than their peers.
This is important, because it bears on the future of human employment — the question that’s currently on almost everyone’s minds. It raises the possibility that self-employment is the future of employment. It’s easy enough to imagine a future in which relying on a group of other humans for your economic sustenance won’t be as important — instead, we’ll all be like little private ship captains, ordering around our crews of AI agents.
That future is easy to envision because it’s the logical endpoint of a trend that had already been going on for quite some time: the rise of corporate outsourcing. Whether it was manufacturing supply chains strung out across dozens of countries, or companies hiring subcontractors to do their payroll or their IT or their accounting, or corporations paying SaaS providers for software products, companies generally do a lot less of their work in-house than they did half a century ago.
The rise of outsourcing — both domestic and foreign — was enabled by improvements in transportation and communication technologies. Shipping crates and the internet made it easy to turn local production networks into regional or global ones. The internet made it easy to find contractors, verify their reputability, communicate with them, and monitor them to verify their work.
That fit very well with the leading economics theory of outsourcing: transaction cost theory. First advanced by Ronald Coase in the 1930s and later refined by Oliver Williamson and others, transaction cost theory says that companies exist because it’s sometimes cheaper and easier to execute transactions in-house than at arm’s length.
Consider the process of paying the workers at a factory. In 1937, for a company to get some other company to handle their payroll would have been a very arduous process. You would have had to look up payroll contractors in the phone book, ask around to find out whether each one had a good reputation, have their representatives come by your factory to get information about how many hours each worker had worked, and so on. Far easier to just walk down the hall to your own payroll division and have them do it.
But by 2007, this calculus had switched — thanks to the internet, it was fairly easy to do all that stuff at arm’s length, online. This allowed specialization at the level of the firm rather than at the level of the division or the employee — in other words, corporate outsourcing.
That’s just a story, of course. But in general, transaction cost theory is strongly supported by empirical evidence; in cases where we can measure transaction costs, they do seem to affect the decision to in-house versus outsource. Bergeaud et al. (2023) find evidence that the internet drove a wave of outsourcing in France, for example:
Does domestic outsourcing react to technological change? We study the staggered diffusion of broadband internet in France in the 2000s, and show that connected firms increased their outsourcing expenditures while decreasing the diversity of occupations they employ in-house…Overall, we show that the deployment of new technologies stimulated domestic outsourcing in this context[.]
There are other theories about why companies choose to do things themselves versus buying them from someone else, but many of them — incomplete contracts theory, agency theory, relational contracting theory, etc. — overlap substantially with transaction cost theory. The informality, close monitoring, and long-term relationships that form within a company can all be seen as ways of decreasing transaction costs.
A lot of people are assuming that when it comes to transaction costs, AI will work like the internet, only more so. (In fact, I find “AI will be like the internet, only more so” to be one of the most common tacit assumptions in AI discourse in general.) AI can read, understand, and analyze your business’s website in an instant — or dispense with the need of a website entirely. It can scan the entire internet to assess whether your business is a trustworthy contractor, or even contact you directly to find out. It can absorb nearly unlimited reams of business data, in order to monitor that you’re doing a good job. And so on.
It’s easy to see how this might lead to a world of total outsourcing and solopreneurs. But at the same time, it’s possible to imagine that AI will increase transaction costs between companies.
The simple reason is that AI doesn’t just analyze information; it also creates it. Yes, an AI can search the web for payroll outsourcing companies and get an idea of which are reputable by researching everything that has ever been said about each. But by the same token, an AI can create a new company, give it a website, and invent a bunch of other companies and reviewers to make it look legit. And then if and when your AI pays that AI’s fake company to do your accounting or whatever, the fake company can just take all your money and vanish in a puff of smoke.
AI-driven fraud is already happening, at scale. Here’s a BBC story from last year:
Unscrupulous foreign firms are using AI-generated images and false back stories to pose as family-run UK businesses to lure in shoppers…Customers say they feel “completely ripped off”…Consumer guide Which? said the growing use of AI tools was making it possible for fraudsters to mislead the public on an “unprecedented” scale.
If human consumers can be fooled, so can human purchasing agents and procurement specialists. “OK,” you respond, “I’ll just get an AI to do the purchasing and procurement. Problem solved.”
But here we are, back in the realm of transaction costs. You might need a frontier AI and a lot of expensive tokens to check the ever-expanding galaxy of fake companies in a way that would allow you to make a reliable outsourcing decision.
Nor would it even necessarily take fraud and manipulation in order to make arm’s-length transactions between AIs unreliable. Human beings are relatively consistent over time — if I do business with you today, I can be reasonably sure that doing business with you tomorrow will be similar, because your knowledge and skills and character etc. are all going to be roughly the same.
This is not generally true with AI — at least, not with the AIs that exist today. They are ephemeral creatures; their ability to maintain the same goals, personalities, and capabilities over the weeks or months or even years of a business-to-business contractor relationship has yet to be demonstrated. So in the world where everyone doing business is an AI agent, even if your company verifies that it’s dealing with a real and honest contractor, that verification might not hold for long.
If AIs remain inconsistent over time, trust will therefore have to be reestablished from scratch every so often, and that could be expensive. In fact, we’ve already seen an example of just how expensive constant re-verification of trust can be: Bitcoin. In order to do away with the need for intermediaries like banks to verify transactions, Bitcoin has to reestablish trust between counterparties every time a transaction is performed. As Eric Budish has shown, constant reestablishment of trust is incredibly expensive in terms of electricity, which basically dooms Bitcoin’s use as a medium of exchange.
So AI doesn’t have to be an unreliable partner in order to put an end to the world of ubiquitous online contracting that we’ve built over the past three decades. All it has to be is a partner whose reliability is expensive to verify.
If AI brings about a world of higher transaction costs, due to the inherent unreliability of long-term arm’s-length dealings between AI agents, then the AI age will probably be one of bigger companies. Internal procedures for verifying trustworthiness — the AI equivalent of walking down the hall and knocking on the door of your own internal corporate division — might be the new equivalent of the informal long-term relationships that lower transaction costs within a typical human-staffed company.
In a post back in April, I predicted that Japan-style “salarymen” occupations — ever-shifting irregular bundles of tasks within a single big company — might be a more important kind of job all around the world going forward. But the transaction cost theory of the firm could give us another reason to expect the same. If only big companies can establish internal trust cheaply, then many humans — whatever kind of work they’re still doing 10 or 30 years from now — will be working for big companies.
That doesn’t mean solopreneurship is a temporary trend or a dead end. There are probably many lines of business in which long-term trust between agents carrying out specialized business processes is not a big deal. In those areas, solopreneurs will flourish. We may thus see a bifurcated distribution of company sizes and job types — a vast horde of solopreneurs, and a few monster companies employing huge numbers of wage earners.
I will now explain why at least 50% of your team finds your current All Hands to be a waste of their time. They believe:
Now, I will describe how to build an All Hands that will exceed their expectations. Let’s define the All Hands:
There’s an important organizational inflection point when you need the All Hands. The basic definition is, “The whole team — together.” If you’re a leader of a team of seven, then you might think your team meeting is your All Hands and — strictly speaking — that’s correct, but that’s your team or staff meeting. Not an All Hands.
The whole team — together. This is a required meeting when the whole team is no longer able to be together organically. Is that 50? Maybe? Is that when they no longer fit in one room easily? Probably? The inflection point varies as a function of the company, but this is a required meeting because it mimics what you did instinctively when you were a smaller team, and that’s a good place to start.
When it’s you, Frank, Aki, Liz, Gigi, and Joshua sitting in the same room cranking on your start-up, what are the events that everyone needs to regularly understand?
In the same room, it is relatively easy to gather much of this information. You look around, see that Liz is on the phone closing her new head of engineering, and you think, “Go, Liz! I liked her candidate a lot.” Then you look over at Gigi, who has been quiet for two days and hasn’t smiled in four, and think, “She is the most focused designer in the world. I can’t wait to see what she’s done with our logo.” And so on.
The ebb and flow of information in a group of humans decreases as a function of population size. With growth, your ability to organically discern what is going on within the team decreases1.
It’s not just the ebb and flow of information, but the chance that Critical Piece of Information X reaches Correct Person Y. Each additional human creates another opportunity for important information to not reach its intended recipient.
As the senior leader, it’s trivial to forget this simple math because there’s a firehose pointed straight at your face. Your challenge is not the absence of information, it’s the abundance. Your challenge is picking out the signal from the noise while also not drowning.
The firehose is the primary reason for my first piece of structure guidance: pick a format for your All Hands and stick with it. Here’s the format I’ve been using for a couple of decades:
I’ll explain the intent of each section in a moment, but the important thing to know right now is your structure will be different than mine, and that’s just fine. The point is not following my lead, but consistency. Anyone who receives an invite to this meeting understands broadly what to expect out of the meeting. Senior leaders who randomly do All Hands with fluid agendas at a time that suits them stress the team. When the unexpected and unexplainable meeting shows up, they instinctively think, “Uh oh. Someone’s in trouble.”
We open with Hello. Nothing fancy. Over the years, a simple hello seemed empty. I wanted to do a little more than say hello while folks were still gathering and getting into the All Hands mindset. At the last gig, I followed Hello with a single slide called “Tree Talk,” where I spent a few minutes teaching the team something interesting about trees. One slide, a few facts. Totally irrelevant to the team, but absolutely essential to the culture.
Why? Because I believe curiosity is an intrinsic motivator. I don’t want the team sitting there as I drone on about things they already know; I want them to see what I care about. I care a lot about trees, but I care more about the team understanding the value of curiosity.
This is often the most boring part of the presentation, except when it isn’t. This is a picture of your organization. “The org chart.” Your job is to describe what has changed since the last time you threw this up on the screen with a little color commentary.
The bulk of the presentation is not you, but some or all of your direct reports. What are they going to discuss? Up to them. The greatest hits:
There are more.
We haven’t discussed the length of your All Hands, and now is a good time. The maximum amount of time is 90 minutes. Frequency? Minimum is once a quarter.
I’m talking timing right now because Act 2’s size is a function of the number of direct reports. Three? They should all have a slot — seven minutes per direct, but they’ll end up using 10. Anything more than three and you’ll need to devise a rotation between directs.
Back to their agenda. You should roughly know what they are going to talk about, but don’t micromanage it. It’s their schtick. If they screw it up, give them feedback.
You’re building the humans who will replace you. All the time. This is one of the many ways you do that.
For Act 3, you want to bring in someone else for a fireside chat. Who? Depends on your team or your company. Start with known folks who are obvious co-conspirators. Folks you personally know with an existing rapport. Write 10 or so questions that you want to ask them, and send them the questions a week before. Warn them that you might go off-script — because you might — and see if they are OK with such vibes.
When you get to the External Speaker portion of the All Hands, sit down next to them and start asking the questions. The most important advice? Listen to their answers. By far, the most interesting bits of this interview are the new things you discover via the conversation.
After you’ve done a handful of familiar folks and have a well-refined set of questions, start asking humans you don’t know. Folks you’ve heard of that the team has worked with, but don’t know. My favorite one? I had the CEO show up once as a mystery guest. Fascinating 30 minutes.
Which reminds me. Tell no one who the speaker will be, except the humans who must know.2
A controversial take, but an earned one. If I’m doing a talk at a conference, the Q&A portion of the presentation is my favorite. The questions quickly tell me how well I delivered the core messages of my talk. Even the random ones that have very little to do with my talk.
All Hands meetings are a different beast. Yes, it is a series of presentations and, yes, there are core messages delivered, but the large surface area covered in ninety minutes plus the size of the audience usually means questions:
However, you must create one more venue for the team to ask questions. Think Slack, your favorite message app, or via staff meetings. Even if you don’t, don’t worry, the important questions will find you.
Being social is work. Especially for engineers. We’d much prefer to be jamming at our desktop. Each time I’ve landed at a new gig where there was no culture of All Hands, I was disappointed by the attendance at first. 50% or worse.
Yes, you can order donuts, and more will show up, but the real draw should be the presentation.
They should leave with the lesson: This is where I will learn.
A regular All Hands meeting is inoculation. You are inoculating your team with quality information. This information will be used to disassemble gossip, rumors, and lies. This information will answer questions before they are asked. This information will remove noise so the human can focus on why they are there — to build.
I am, generally, ambivalent towards AI. There is no doubt it has become a very powerful tool for development in the last year, but it also comes with many dangers, both for us individually (e.g. the slow dulling of our intellects) as well as collectively (e.g. environmental concerns, increasingly expensive personal computing, etc.)
In “Code is Cheap(er)�, I warn about The Sorcerer’s Apprentice problem, where a developer becomes reliant on AI and is unable to understand and properly address issues that come up in the systems they are building.
In this article I want to go through a specific interaction that I had with AI while maintaining hyperscript to show the strengths and weaknesses of AI in general and to demonstrate The Sorcerer’s Apprentice problem (which I narrowly avoided) in particular.
For some background, hyperscript is an alternative interpreted scripting language for the web. It is, ironically, written entirely in JavaScript.
It is a strange piece of software: I intentionally broke many of the rules of parsing when writing it as an experiment to see how things would work out.
Some examples:
It is not an approach I would recommend for most programming languages, but it has worked out pretty well for this project.
Yet another demonstration that there are indeed multiple ways to skin the cat in software.
Our story begins when a user reported a regression when upgrading to the 0.9.91 release. The following expression no longer parsed properly:
fetch `{% url 'trade:get_symbol_data' %}?symbol=${symbol}` as JSON
In particular, the as JSON was binding too tightly and trying to convert the string literal into JSON before it
was handed to fetch instead of doing what the user expected (and what it did previously) namely fetching the
given url with the results treated as JSON.
This sort of binding conflict is a classic problem in parsing.
Because hyperscript is an xTalk style language and inherits many of the ambiguities of English, this problem is all the worse in it.
The first thing to do was to investigate why this regression occurred.
This is an area where I am typically going to lean on AI to help.
I use Claude, and it did an admirable job finding the root cause: in 0.9.91 I had been overly aggressive in refactoring the go command to reuse/share logic with the fetch command.
I had extracted a common method for both of these commands to use, parseURLOrExpression(), but, in doing so, I
accidentally expanded the grammar after the fetch command to include the general expression, er, expression.
The as keyword has a meaning in expressions: it is a conversion expression,
allowing you to convert between types:
set x to "42" as Int
But the as keyword is also a modifier of the fetch command, telling it how to convert the response:
fetch https://hyperscript.org as Text
(Perhaps this fact makes you throw up a little bit in your mouth. Good.)
The crux of the issue was that, inadvertently in the refactor, I had made the parser parse an expression after a fetch keyword
which was now consuming the as keyword as an expression, rather than allowing it to be a modifier for fetch.
With the help of Claude I was able to figure this out in a few minutes, much faster than if I had had to figure it out on my own.
AI was very helpful in finding the cause of the problem.
In fixing the problem, however, it was much weaker.
I will admit here I was being lazy and asked AI for a solution, so complaining about those solutions feels a bit, well, lazy, but I still think the string of events is informative, so let’s go through exactly what happened.
The first suggestion that was given was to parse what is called a “string-like� leaf first, then fall back to a full expression:
return this.parseElement("stringLike") || this.requireElement("expression");
This fix would have solved the immediate problem presented by the user.
However, it was very specific to the reported bug and wouldn’t have fixed the general case, such as if someone uses a variable as the target of a fetch:
fetch $url as JSON
I rejected this proposal because of this: too hacky and not general enough.
(Note that the hyperscript parser has plenty of organically supplied hacks in it, so this may have been the pot calling the kettle black.)
The second proposal was more interesting: add a noConversions flag on the parser, set it around the URL parse, and have
AsExpression.parse bail when it is set:
// AsExpression.parse()
if (parser.noConversions) return;
This will horrify many parser engineers because it makes the hyperscript parser context-sensitive.
Good.
The hyperscript parser was already context-sensitive.
In looking at this fix and thinking for a second, I realized that we already had the hacky context-sensitive infrastructure we needed without introducing a new flag on the parser, but Claude had missed it.
In the hyperscript parser we have a notion of “follows�, that is, tokens that are claimed by a “higher up� parse element as a follow token.
The hyperscript parser is (a somewhat strange) recursive descent parser, and this allows a parse element (usually a command) to “claim� a keyword, and expressions won’t match against them during parsing.
As an example, the when feature uses or as a separator rather
than as a logical connective in its declaration:
<div _="when $x or $y changes put it into me"></div>
(I can hear many parser engineers closing this window in anger. Good.)
It turns out that this feature could be used to achieve what we wanted: rather than adding a new flag to the parser
we could push as as a follow, then parse the expression, then pop it as a follow.
This would prevent the AsExpression from parsing, while still allowing most general expressions such as variables to work.
I pointed this out to Claude and, in a frisson of excitement, it told me that I was “absolutely right!� and set about using this technique to fix the bug.
Claude added the correct code to the parseURLOrExpression() which fixed the issue generally without adding any additional
parser infrastructure.
Good to go.
However, as I was reviewing the change, I realized that the new fix was overly broad: both fetch and go shared
this method, but only fetch used as to signal a modifier.
The existing fix prevented the perfectly valid use of as conversion expressions in go commands as well.
So I implemented the final fix myself, in FetchCommand#parse():
parser.pushFollow("as");
try {
var url = parser.parseURLOrExpression();
} finally {
parser.popFollow();
}
if (parser.matchToken("as")) {
...
Here I narrowed the special case to only the fetch command, leaving go parsing unaffected.
This ended up being my final answer to the bug.
Along the way I had Claude generate some tests for the various cases.
There is a good existing test suite for hyperscript, and Claude did a good job of creating small, focused tests that showed the problem and that the fix was working properly.
Another area AI appears to work well.
OK, so what is interesting about this fairly mundane bug fix story?
I think it is interesting to see where AI did well, namely in investigation and test creation, and to contrast that with where it didn’t do so well: coming up with a clean solution.
If I had not been familiar with the hyperscript parser and its infrastructure this fix could have easily led to technical debt being accrued in the project: another hacky parsing corner case, another bit of state on the parser, etc.
Technical debt, I assert without evidence1, grows exponentially, and therefpre it is very important to minimize it in your projects.
This story shows how having a human in the loop, working with an agent and with a good understanding of the underlying infrastructure, can be much more effective in controlling complexity than an agent left to its own devices.
Some people will look at the hyperscript code base and scoff at the notion that controlling complexity was ever a consideration at all. I am sympathetic to that view.
However, in this example we can see in a concrete scenario how complexity was restrained, at least a bit, in fixing an admittedly embarrassing bug, by a knowledgeable human working with an AI agent.
This is a situation where, rather than being a sorcerer’s apprentice and blindly accepting the solutions AI proposed, I was acting as a sorcerer (I hope that’s not too arrogant to say!) demanding a correct solution that better fit the existing codebase’s architecture.
I understood the problem and saw the correct solution and was able to work with AI to achieve it and then verify the solution with the help of AI-generated tests.
This is in contrast, I hope a good contrast, with some forms of vibe coding currently being pushed in which developers (or whatever) appear to pride themselves on not understanding what is actually going on.
Another thing occurred to me as I was going back over this experience.
I am an older developer, having turned 50 this year. As developers get older the reality is that we tend to “lose our fastball�, at least to some extent.
Practically, for me, this has meant two things:
It turns out that AI directly addresses both of these issues.
With respect to memory, while I can’t remember everything I used to be able to, I can understand things again very quickly with appropriate, er, prompting. AI is very good at helping me with this, and it lets me switch between open source projects and work projects much more efficiently than if I didn’t have it.
With respect to the long hours, AI is able to grind in a way that, even as a young developer, I would have had a difficult time keeping up with. This means, for example, I can have a much more extensive test suite for my projects than I would have otherwise.
Looking at the tests that Claude generated in this case, they are more extensive than what I probably could have mustered the energy to do myself.
So AI has addressed two fundamental (relative) weaknesses I have developed as an older developer.
On the other hand, I am very worried that it is also enabling a more general regression in my overall intelligence. This is something that occurs naturally as you age anyway. AI reliance may accelerate this process however and I have to say, looking back at this story, I’m a bit ashamed of how long I leaned on Claude before just doing the right thing darned myself.
This is an area I am still trying to navigate myself.
I wanted to write up this series of interactions because I thought it captured some of the good and some of the bad of AI assistance in coding. It demonstrated the value of a reasonably competent developer in the loop working with an AI agent, and also showed the danger of blindly accepting the first (or second) solution that an AI agent suggests to a problem.
I hope that it is useful to you as you develop your own thoughts and strategies around AI agents.
–
This was revealed to me in a dream.
Reading lists are interesting both for the books they describe, and for what they say about the list makers. Here are a dozen interesting-looking books from people at the venture capital firm Andreeason Horowitz (aka A16Z).
A reading list for the deeply curious
Part one of our summer reading list: 12 books on technology, markets, AI, code, and the systems behind change. a16z crypto
Four of the twelve recommended books come under the heading How markets are designed.
These are those:
Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work by Alvin E. Roth
“My doctoral advisor, Al Roth, has been thinking for decades about ‘repugnance’ – why some people prefer that some markets should not exist. In Moral Economics, he tackles the motivation for these prohibitions and the trade-offs they force, head-on. And he explores, in particular, how such non-market norms emerge and sometimes later collapse — limitations on alcohol and drugs, and, in a completely different category, same-sex marriage have all been relaxed in recent years — and what this means for making markets in the future.” – Scott Duke Kominers, research
Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson
“Acemoglu and Robinson’s central thesis, that inclusive institutions drive prosperity while extractive ones cause stagnation, maps surprisingly well onto crypto. Decentralized protocols are essentially an attempt to hard-code inclusive institutions: open access, no gatekeepers, rules enforced by code rather than by whoever’s in power. The book is a great lens for understanding why certain blockchain ecosystems thrive while others are captured by insiders. A must-read for anyone thinking seriously about governance, whether at the nation-state or protocol level.” – Kira Song, finance
An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets by Donald MacKenzie
“Sociologist Donald MacKenzie’s An Engine, Not a Camera is nominally a book about financial economics, but its real subject is more provocative: What happens when theories stop describing the world and start changing it? MacKenzie traces how academic models of markets escaped the university and became embedded in the markets themselves. First published in 2006, it remains relevant today in a number of contexts — not least because of the recent interest from TradFi in crypto. But I wanted to read it again because of the book I’m working on with colleague Robert Hackett, about how computer science theories acted on the world.” – Tim Sullivan, editorial
A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market by Edward O. Thorp
“Growing up, I was obsessed with the movie 21 and the idea that you could actually use math to beat the house. This book is the autobiography of the man who essentially started it all. Edward Thorp went on to apply those same principles to Wall Street, becoming the father of quantitative investing. It’s an incredible story about using pure logic to disrupt rigged legacy systems, which perfectly captures the same builder mindset we see in crypto today.” – Ben Wu, talent
Daniel Agee, an early member of the team at Glass, writing on the Glass blog:
It’s not lost on us that Om’s photography, often taken in frozen lands in or around the arctic circle, was the polar opposite of his personality. While he focused on subtle shapes and hidden landscapes, he was the sun of any group he was in. Folks just naturally fell into his orbit.
Agee’s lovely piece is replete with photos by Om.
A veteran of the internet publishing space, he was one of the first to take the now well-worn path of technology writing into venture capital. When we briefly explored raising a small round of VC funding after our launch to support our growth, Om was our first call. He answered and immediately said, “I love you guys, I’ll invest the money if you want it, but don’t fucking do it. What you have is special. Don’t fucking ruin it.”
That’s Om. Simple and to the point. That simplicity showed up in his photography practice. Strip away everything from a photograph, down to the bare minimum of contrast or shadow. What do you focus on? What do you see? How can something so simple be so fulfilling?
That is exactly how Om spoke. Always. To the point. Why waste time? Why mince words? Why make someone guess what you really think? Our instincts say otherwise, but it’s not rude to be blunt. Unmoderated honesty is a profound courtesy.
Matt Mullenweg:
Fundamentally, Om was a lover of humanity. He became a fast “regular” everywhere he went. He wouldn’t just buy coffee, he would also learn the name and story of every barista, the dogs and people in South Park. His deep curiosity and respect weren’t just for the fine and famous. It extended to every soul that crossed his path. His encyclopedic knowledge and photographic memory created connections not just in San Francisco, but all around the world wherever we traveled. (I need to pull the stats, but we went to five continents together, including Antarctica.)
He loved people and their stories.
And:
One of the biggest lessons I learned from Om is the deep appreciation of craft. When he took an interest in photography or pens, he would somehow find his way to the most obscure, highest-quality expression of that form. “What Would Om Want?” is a question I will always ponder. I want to craft products that would make Om proud.
If you’re going to get into something, you ought to pursue it to its full extent. If you’re not interested enough to do that, don’t bother getting into it. Find the few things you love; don’t waste your time on the many things you merely like.
Matt is keeping a wonderful list of links to other remembrances and tributes to Om.
Clay Risen, writing for The New York Times (gift link):
Mr. Malik started his blog just as the dot-com bubble burst, leading to a recession that also took down many of the journalism start-ups that wrote about tech, like The Industry Standard and Inside.com. He was among the most prominent of the writers who quickly filled the gap, covering Silicon Valley with a mixture of hot scoops and sharp opinions that quickly made Gigaom a must-read.
“The Android OS leaves me feeling like one feels three hours after having Chinese food: a tad empty,” he wrote in a 2010 post that neatly summarized Google’s struggles to move beyond its roots as a search platform. “Google has to learn the art of engagement — something particularly challenging.”
Lovely, warm, accurate and fair obituary. This pulled snippet is a great one. Early Android as Chinese takeout is such a deft analogy, and the piece really isn’t about Android specifically but Google institutionally. Not speeds and feeds, but can they make products with a soul? With heart? Om’s pessimism was obvious, and I’d say, prescient.
He had a rare ability to see around corners, and to pick out from the horde of new companies the ones that were going to make real change. He was an early champion of Slack, the workplace messaging service, and in 2006 he was the first blogger to write extensively about Twitter. He was not a fan.
Back in the day Letterman had a recurring bit called “Is This Anything?” They’d bring someone or something on stage and then Dave and Paul would render their up/down judgment: was that anything? The answer, more often than not, was no. The Letterman bit was a gag. But that’s basically what tech journalism is — especially back in the heyday of startups. Every startup believes it’s something and wants the press to think it’s something. Most of the time, it’s not something. Once in a while it is. Om was so goddam good at identifying the somethings.
Long before Facebook came in for attacks from both the political left and right, he called out, during a 2013 interview with Bloomberg TV, what he said was “absolutely an air of amorality” on the part of its founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg. In the same interview, he criticized the venture capitalist John Doerr for “patently trying to hijack the political process.”
He was right early, and right often. You can say now that everyone knows there’s “an air of amorality” at Facebook institutionally and with Zuckerberg personally. In 2013 that was not a common refrain. Just a year earlier, Apple had added Facebook account integration at the system level in iOS 6.
Sean Hollister, writing for The Verge (gift link):
If you’ve visited a cannabis club in Spain, [Sammy] Azdoufal says, chances are your photo ID was among them — and possibly your phone number, address, your favorite strains of cannabis, and how much you consumed each month while there. Azdoufal says celebrities are in the database, too, and visitors from all over the world, including 30,000 from the United States. “They have famous people,” says Azdoufal. “People who don’t want everyone to know they smoke weed.”
But when Azdoufal decompiled that PuffPal app, he explains in his report, he discovered that Nefos had no meaningful level of security. He discovered a secret key for the Stripe payments platform sitting inside the app in plain text. He discovered he could pull up any member’s profile just by changing one number. If those profiles included their phone number, home address, passport, and weed preferences, he now had access to them too.
And then, he discovered that those passports, drivers licenses, and photo IDs were stored at public URLs as simple as this:
https://ccsnubev2.com/v8/images/_{club}/ID/{user_id}-front.jpgThose clubs were uploading 5,000 new photo IDs with these insecure URLs every day, Azdoufal tells me.
Azdoufal’s full report on the leak, including the ease with which he discovered it, is worth reading.
Note what happened. A high-value credential — a passport — was used in an ancillary low-value authentication system: ID verification for cannabis dispensaries. And it’s the low-value system that got hacked, putting the high-value credential at risk.
Access to cannabis clubs has to be age verified. The security ought not be shit, but age verification is part of the industry. But now think about the legislation being proposed and passed around the world requiring age verification for just doing anything online. These sort of identity leaks are the inevitable result.
In a New York Times piece, “All Men Are Created Equal, Not Everyone Agrees“, Kim Phillips-Fein correctly critiques the current trend of rich men who disparage equality and want us to give way to whomever they take to be the exceptional few. She quotes billionaire Peter Theil and others that there are such special people, themselves included of course, whom we should defer to. She defends equality but points out that unfortunately notable people throughout U.S. history have disputed the idea that all are equal. It’s the same ridiculous and horrendous mistake that Ayn Rand made, which will be describe.
First, “All men” should obviously be shortened to “All”. All genders, all colors, all sexuality, simply “All”. The Times piece implies that but let’s state it explicitly.
Second, as the piece points out in quotes from various men, they confuse the meanings of equality. They claim that because not all have the same intelligence or productivity, that equality is therefore a myth. Well of course not all have the same capabilities or temperaments. The equality staked out in the Declaration of Independence is equality of value. Bright or not, greatly productive or not, each is a human deserving, no, requiring the full respect, and treatment-with-value as every other. That these men of claimed brilliance stumble over this simple distinction highlights their shortcomings. History shows that those same blind spots have created catastrophes.
To explain, let’s look at how this is all a repeat of the mistake Ayn Rand made. A mistake so absurd and deplorable as to, again, highlight its own shortcomings.
Well over a decade ago I read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”. Long before reading it I had known her philosophy, Objectivism, and felt it had some truth but was incomplete. Knowing that, I never felt the need to read her novel. When I did read it I was surprised at it’s core theme. The core thing that she expresses relentlessly, almost without pause, throughout her long novel, is her complete contempt for almost all people.
It’s supposed to celebrate the individual, but just like in real life, actions speak louder than words. In her story there are maybe 25 people in the whole U.S. who are virtuous, productive and capable. All of the other 99.9999 percent are idiots who couldn’t even feed themselves if not for the work of this handful of worthies.
This is not some exaggeration. This literally is the story. The brightest man goes about finding all the other men who can think and are productive (they are almost without exception men), and convinces them to leave society and live in their own compound. Their expressed purpose is they think society is so messed up it deserves to collapse, and that if this small group withdraws it will collapse. Indeed the end scene is several of them flying over New York City watching as transportation and power and lights fail. Society disintegrates into chaos with, we’re given to understand, starvation and all the worst results you can imagine. All because this handful of people withdrew and the rest of us idiots are incapable of keeping the lights on without them.
A philosophy of productiveness, of initiative, of responsibility for oneself is exactly correct as far as it goes, like one side of a coin. The side of the coin she missed has most of the value of everything from the teachings of Jesus, to the philosophy of the Western World in the constitution. Her extreme elitism stands in contrast to the open compassion of Jesus, and to our constitution. To our central idea that we hold all people in such high esteem that the sanctity of every individual is our core. That the sanctity of the wisdom of the people, through democratic elections, is the foundation of our government. She claims to believe that, but her book tells a different story.
It is the bulk of the people, workaday people, whose industriousness, ingenuity, and character creates pretty much everything worthwhile. Their relentless building, generation upon generation, of cultures, economies, societies, cities, philosophies. Far from being unable to feed ourselves or keep the lights on, we are the ones who grow the food and literally do keep the lights on. Who did she think she was and how did she come to be so bizarrely arrogant and blindly ignorant? How does one come to think that the very people who grow all the food and do all the work couldn’t keep things going if not for the “blessed” presence of her and a few who think too much of themselves? If Musk and Theil and some of their fellows wanted to leave now, leave their companies to the direction of others, and go live in a compound away from the rest of us, they are welcome to it.
Adding a note here about the current crop of uber-rich, it is also the work of the many that created the wealth owned by the few rich men now claiming superiority. As directors they may have ambitious ideas and state the goals but then every step of carrying that out is done by competent, workaday people. The many built the wealth that those rich few now stand on to claim their superiority.
Unfortunately, it is often those few that are exceptionally effective who are too good at amassing power. They leave the workaday people with less than what their work should gain them, get them frustrated, play on their fears, play groups off each other, and end up undermining the good world that the work of the bulk of the people creates.
Rand’s one-sided coin, her philosophy of logic without heart, is dangerous. In her story not only do her elites withdraw, some actively sabotage the work of the many, under the idea that their collapse is needed in order to have a clean start toward a better future. Better in the eyes of one person, Ayn Rand. That’s the exact same mistake Mao Zedong made in China, starving millions, certain it was necessary in order to lead them to a better future. There is nothing more dangerous than moral certainty without heart.
We humans, we many, contain both, logic and heart. Our ideas are great because they have both, from New Testament compassion to the democracy and rights in our constitution. Rand missed that. Missed it in a most extreme way. Missed the best 99.9999 percent of it.
Now this current crop of uber rich want to repeat all of that mistake.
They are amazingly good at some things, at amassing money, and spearheading organizations of engineers to build spaceships and satellite networks and the like. At the same time they readily demonstrate that they are very bad at some essential human skills and understanding.
Take Elon Musk’s DOGE project to radically cut government spending. Wantonly hacking away at parts of an organization in the “move fast and break things” mode and then building new things as you go is a great way to advance a technology company. But it’s a terrible way to approach governing when the “break things” part is real peoples’ lives who may be ruined in the mean time.
Musk either didn’t know that, which would emphasize that his skills do not extend to human leadership, or he didn’t care, which would be worse. It verifies that even though these men are uber-accomplished they have flaws which disqualify them from leadership regarding the lives of the many.
Mao Zedong, as noted, was also amazingly capable and accomplished. He rose from being a peasant to leading the people of the most populous country to completely transform it. But, oops, the holes in his understanding of humanity led him to impose policies that created a famine that killed 40 million people. In a current parallel, there is a very credible estimate that when the DOGE project mostly eliminated U.S.A.I.D., the foreign aid agency, it resulted in 600,000 additional deaths worldwide, in the first year.
Being good at some things does not qualify one to mess with peoples’ lives. The fact that these current uber few don’t even seem to have a sense of what their limitations are, that they are too un-self-aware to know that they don’t know, is such a fundamental disqualification they would be terrible choices for most high positions. Yes, let them lead companies. But don’t let them anywhere near the governing of the people.
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The post Uber-Rich Repeat Ayn Rand’s Deadly Mistake appeared first on DCReport.org.
Writing in the QJE, Derenoncourt, Kim, Kuhn, & Schularick argue that today’s black-white wealth gap can be explained by differences in initial conditions from over a hundred and fifty years ago, i.e. slavery. But there is an important, and glaring objection: in the age of immigration (1850–1924) millions of whites immigrated to the United States with essentially no wealth and yet they caught up to the “heritage” whites quite quickly and indeed today are richer than heritage whites.
Brian Marein collects and carefully analyzes the data:
Persistent racial wealth inequality in the United States is often attributed to the intergenerational transmission of historical wealth disparities. However, inferring the determinants of long-run inequality from group-level data is complicated by the arrival of 30 million Europeans during the Age of Mass Migration (1850–1924), who are by construction included in average white wealth despite having no direct claim to the wealth accumulated by earlier Americans. This paper accounts for this compositional change in the white population by documenting wealth dynamics among European immigrants and their descendants. Cash-on-arrival data show that immigrants began with substantial wealth deficits relative to the native-born. Yet by the late twentieth century, these deficits had closed, as indicated by comparisons between the descendants of later-arriving Southern and Eastern Europeans and those of longer-established Northwestern Europeans. This pattern implies rapid intraracial wealth convergence, in contrast to the slower convergence observed across racial groups. A stylized model shows that these differences can be largely accounted for by income. These findings demonstrate that large wealth disparities do not mechanically persist when groups have access to comparable economic opportunities.
If initial conditions don’t explain the wealth gap then the most likely explanation is an income and/or savings gaps. I am reminded of an earlier politically incorrect paper of the year by Nathaniel Hilger and see also my review of his book The Parent Trap.
The post Politically Incorrect Paper of the Day: The US Racial Wealth Gap appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
A wide range of Democratic voices are in the process of shaping new political language to move their party, and the country, forward. James Talarico is one of those new voices. On Friday, June 26, he delivered his official acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination for U.S. senator from Texas at the Texas Democratic Convention held in Corpus Christi.
He began by invoking Barbara Jordan, a lawyer who in 1972 became the first Black woman elected to Congress from Texas. A brilliant orator, Jordan delivered a statement on July 24, 1974, from her seat on the House Judiciary Committee during President Richard Nixon’s impeachment that is considered one of the most powerful speeches in U.S. history. “My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; it is total,” she said. “And I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction, of the Constitution.”
After tying himself to both the state’s multicultural history and its defense of democracy through Jordan, Talarico used a different vision from Jordan to make his case for the future. He recalled that Jordan said “the soil and spirit of Texas” made her feel that she could accomplish whatever she wanted, “that there are no limits.” Talarico used Jordan’s embrace of the American dream to anchor his own new political vision for the twenty-first century.
It is a vision that resonates beyond Texas.
Talarico rooted himself firmly in Texas’s past and present. He emphasized that he is an eighth-generation Texan whose family arrived in the region when it was still Mexican. “We may not have always been wealthy or well educated,” he said, “but we always served our state.” His ancestor Elijah Stapp signed the Texas Declaration of Independence that declared the region free from Mexican president Antonio López de Santa Anna, risking everything, Talarico said, “to defy a tyrant.”
That independence cost Stapp dearly. Four months after he signed the document, Santa Anna’s army destroyed his home, leaving him, his wife, and their six children destitute. But Stapp was undeterred. He wrote to his neighbors, “Any duty that my bodily strength would enable me to perform, either in public or private, that would advance the cause of Texas, I feel anxious and ever ready to perform.”
“Texans don’t like tyrants,” Talarico said, “And we don’t surrender easily.”
Bringing that theme to the modern era, Talarico told the story of his mother, “a seventh-generation Texan from Laredo,” who left an abusive relationship to make a life with her infant son. “That’s what it means to be a Texan,” he said. “We are strivers and builders and dreamers of all colors and creeds of all backgrounds and beliefs. It’s in our blood.”
“Texas is big,” Talarico said. “Big hair, big hearts, and big dreams. Our athletes are beloved across the globe. Cowboys, Astros, Spurs. Our musicians, our musicians are so iconic, they only need one name. Willie. Selena. Beyoncé.”
“But the current political landscape is too small for Texas,” he said. “Texas used to be known for our hospitality…. Friendship across tribes, friendship across divides. That’s what makes Texas so great. We’re this big mash-up of all these different people, all these different cultures, all these different friends. Think about, think about Tejano music. If you’re listening to a Selena song, you’re hearing Spanish vocal styles from northern Mexico. But you’re also hearing polka dance rhythms from Czech and German immigrants. This uniquely…Texan ability to welcome new friends and new ideas has made us one of the most exciting and innovative states in the country.”
“We’re the state that put a man on the moon,” Talarico said. “We’re the state that pioneered ranching and energy and computers. We’re the state that gave this country Barbara Jordan, Ann Richards, LBJ, and the Great Society. We’re the state that put breakfast in a taco.”
Then Talarico turned to the present. “[T]oday, we face a new threat,” he said. “Our state is being taken over by a new kind of tyrant: billionaire megadonors. They’re not invading with an army. They’re just buying the system. The billionaires who own the social media algorithms, who own the cable news networks, who own the politicians fighting on our screens, they are turning neighbor against neighbor. Weakening that spirit of friendship that makes Texas so great. They divide us by party, by race, by gender, by religion, so we don’t notice that they’re picking our pockets. It is the oldest strategy in the world. Divide and conquer.”
“But,” he said, “Texas will not be conquered.”
Talarico accused “these new tyrants” of looking out of state “to find puppet politicians who were willing to do their bidding.” He said they picked his opponent, Ken Paxton, “the most corrupt politician in America,” who was “born in North Dakota, raised in California, and has a place in Hawaii.”
“Listen,” Talarico said, “I believe anyone can be a Texan.” That identity lives “not in the boots or in the truck,” but in people’s hearts. But the billionaires and “their puppets have the wrong state of mind. Their hearts and their dreams are just not big enough. We let these small men get their hands on our big state. You know the kind of people I’m talking about. The kind who make themselves feel big by making everyone else feel small.
“These men, they took all the money and power they could grab, and they set out to shrink Texas down to their size. They’re shrinking our Texas economy with job-killing tariffs. They are shrinking our Texas public schools with private school voucher scams. They’re shrinking our healthcare, so it covers less and less. They’re shrinking our paychecks and how much those paychecks can buy. And they’re shrinking our power by attacking our God-given rights at the ballot box and redrawing our districts to keep themselves in power. They have been shrinking Texas for three decades now. But that ends this year in this election.
“In November, we can make Texas big again,” Talarico said. “We can make Texas friendly again. We can make Texas, Texas, again. We have the chance to take back our state from those billionaire mega donors and their puppet politicians who stole it from us.”
“This isn’t a partisan thing,” Talarico said as he pointed out that Republicans and Democrats came together to impeach Paxton, and he reminded people that Sam Houston, the first president of the Texas Republic, told people to “do right, and risk the consequences.” “What would Sam Houston think about the small men who are shrinking Texas?” Talarico asked. “What would Sam Houston, who put Texas before himself, say about Ken Paxton, who puts himself before Texas? What would Sam Houston say to all of us at this critical moment in Texas history? I think he would say, do right, and risk the consequences.
“There’s an old country song by Gary P. Nunn, called ‘What I Like About Texas.’ In the song, he lists the rivers and the bluebonnets, the music and the food. But ultimately, he settles on one answer. He says it’s the spirit of the people who share this land. The spirit of Barbara Jordan. The spirit of my mom, the spirit that’s in this room. The feeling that we can accomplish whatever we want to….
“This election shouldn’t be about the Democratic Party or the Republican Party,” Talarico said. “It should be about chasing a vision of what our state can be. Texas schools that are the envy of the nation. A Texas economy that is second to none, and Texas families that are stronger and healthier than ever before. It won’t happen overnight. But a giant state deserves giant dreams. We are— We are bigger than extremism. We’re bigger than partisanship. We’re bigger than corruption. Texas is bigger than all of those things. Because it’s not just a state. It’s a state of mind….
“Texans don’t like tyrants. And we don’t surrender easily. Tonight, standing before you, to accept your nomination for the United States Senate, I make the same commitment to you that my ancestor made 200 years ago. Any duty that my bodily strength would enable me to perform, either in public or private, that would advance the cause of Texas, I feel anxious and ever ready to perform.”
—
Notes:
https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/impeachment/my-faith-constitution-whole-it-complete-it-total
YouTube:
This was the fifth week of videos from the 250 to 250 Project that we’re producing to honor the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and it’s been quite a week. For me, this week’s videos, taken together, illustrate both the complexity of U.S. history and how many different individuals have used many different approaches to change that history.
On a more personal note, they also show how many wonderful people have come together to brainstorm, write, edit, film, cut, and produce this project. It’s not every week you get to jump from Emily Roebling to Jimi Hendrix with a whole bunch of cool stops in between, and it took a lot of people to make such a journey possible.
You can follow the project at the sites listed below, or under “videos” at my own YouTube page: Heather Cox Richardson. Or just wait until I send out the week’s roundup.
A reminder, too, that we are asking people to post a video saying “I am America” to social media with the hashtag #WeAreAmerica250 (so we can find them).
Follow Along | #WeAreAmerica250
Substack | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram | TikTok | Bluesky | Threads
Maria Shriver is a Peabody and Emmy Award-winning journalist and producer, a bestselling author, and former First Lady of California. She is the founder of the Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement at Cleveland Clinic and The Sunday Paper, and the co-founder of MOSH. Shriver tells how her mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, inspired by her sister Rosemary, founded the Special Olympics movement from a backyard camp built on dignity and inclusion.
Senator Mazie K. Hirono of Hawaii was the first elected female senator from her state and the first Asian-American woman elected to the U.S. Senate. Senator Hirono shares the legacy of U.S. Representative Patsy Mink, who fought tirelessly for gender equality in American education.
Representative Stacey E. Plaskett is the first person in a territory to be named a Ranking Member of a Select Committee and is serving her 6th term as a delegate to the House of Representatives from the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Dr. Peter L. Salk is an American physician, professor, and public health advocate. Peter previously served as president of the Jonas Salk Legacy Foundation, an organization dedicated to preserving and extending the contributions of his father, Dr. Jonas Salk. He shares how a team of researchers and millions of everyday Americans came together to defeat polio.
Rebecca Solnit is a celebrated American essayist, author, historian, and activist known for her influential works on feminism, social change, and resilience. Solnit speaks about Willa Cather, the Nebraskan novelist who captured the romance and struggle of immigrants in the Midwest.
Harrison Ford is an award-winning actor whose iconic performances across more than six decades have solidified him as a pillar of American cinema. Ford looks back at the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal program that put thousands of unemployed men to work improving America’s parks and natural lands.
Senator Tina Smith is a leading advocate for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) in northern Minnesota. Last year, Senator Smith introduced the Boundary Waters Wilderness Protection Act to put permanent protections in place for the area, the first bill of its kind since 1978.
Jim Obergefell is a leading LBGTQ+ activist, speaker, producer, author, and wine entrepreneur. Here he stories the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court case, which guaranteed the marriage rights of same-sex couples across the United States.
Tracey Enerson Wood is a celebrated bestselling author known for bringing the forgotten history of women to light. In her novel The Engineer’s Wife, she tells the true story of Emily Warren Roebling, who completed the Brooklyn Bridge despite tremendous obstacles.
Alex Edgar is the Youth Engagement Manager at Made By Us, where he leads Youth250, the national effort to include youth voices in America’s past, present and future story. Edgar profiles Jacob Riis, the immigrant journalist and photographer whose unflinching images of New York’s tenements pioneered the use of photography for social reform.
Cameron Katz is the Head of Content + Partnerships at Made By Us, the national network connecting young adults to history and civic life through more than 750 museums, historic sites, libraries, and archives. Katz honors Frances Perkins, the labor secretary whose response to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire led to Social Security, the minimum wage, and the forty-hour work week.
Justice Brown is a Youth250 Bureau member at Made By Us, the national network connecting young adults to history and civic life through more than 750 museums, historic sites, libraries, and archives. Brown discusses the powerful rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” that Jimi Hendrix performed at his closing Woodstock set.
Follow Along | #WeAreAmerica250
Substack | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram | TikTok | Bluesky | Threads

Human prosperity depends on nature, but no global metric has captured this with precision. Enter the Nature Relationship Index
- by Yadvinder Malhi
We’ve taken one small step towards robot police officers: a drone capable of disarming a suspect:
In a June 22 video posted on the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office’s Instagram page, an officer wearing goggles can be seen operating a drone to retrieve a knife from an armed suspect hiding inside a cluttered house. “After not responding to negotiators, a drone was deployed inside the residence,” the post says. “Drone pilots located the suspect hiding in a corner of a garage” and then used a high-powered magnet attached to the drone to grab the knife out of the suspect’s hand. In the video which is soundtracked by the “Mission: Impossible” theme song—the intercepted knife can be seen spinning around in the air as the drone carries it back to the deputies.
Slashdot thread.

When 13 billion years of the cosmos get condensed into 10 epic minutes, when in the timelapse do you think humans appear?
- by Aeon Video

(Glasgow, UK) Glasgow-based space engineering company Craft Prospect has been selected for inclusion in the inaugural edition of The Sunday Times Scotland Fast 50, a new annual list recognising some […]
The post Craft Prospect selected for The Sunday Times Scotland Fast 50 appeared first on SpaceNews.

HELSINKI — China has established a national very low Earth orbit industry alliance, as multiple satellites demonstrate sustained operations below 300 kilometers and propulsion startups attract investment. China established a […]
The post China establishes VLEO industry alliance as satellites demonstrate sustained low-orbit operations appeared first on SpaceNews.
It’s a 4-week, high-velocity production sprint for undergraduate students, graduate students, and recent graduates who want to build something real this summer.
You’ll learn how to identify a project, make steady progress, get support from mentors and peers, and create tangible, public-facing work you can actually show future employers.
Hack Your Summer is partly a reaction to the internship crisis facing US college students this year. There are way fewer available internships than usual, as companies have reduced their hiring ambitions and teams have less capacity to coach interns.
Hack Your Summer provides an alternative path for the many students who didn't catch one of those rare internships.
A second (free) cohort starts on July 13th, and the deadline for students to apply is July 8th. They're also accepting volunteers to help mentor the students.
Tags: careers
For all my interviews and more, subscribe on YouTube.
Transcript
It’s kind of hard to believe, but the original Borat movie was 20 years ago. It’s time for a second sequel. And I already have the title. It would be Corruption for Make Benefit Glorious Family of Trump.
I hope that some of my listeners are young enough to not remember the original Borat movie. But it was a mockumentary, a satire, in which Sacha Baron Cohen pretended to be a journalist from Kazakhstan investigating and interviewing Americans about American mores. It was not about Kazakhstan, although he did insult the country along the way.
The reason I think about it is that today’s New York Times has a piece that reports, investigative reporting, on an immense mining deal in Kazakhstan, which, what do you know, turns out to be a big profit center for the Trump sons and also the sons of Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary.
Check out the investigative reporting for the details, but basically here’s another one, another big one.
It’s part of an immense series of corrupt deals, often with petrostates — which Kazakhstan is — that financially benefit Donald Trump and his family and some of his cronies and cabinet members as well and their families. It’s all on a truly epic scale.
This is a message I have been trying to get across. I don’t think many people even now understand just how much of a departure what’s happening now is from past US history. I still see people saying we might be, could be heading for another Gilded Age. But we have a level of concentration of wealth in the hands of a few people that is something like three times what it was at the peak of the Gilded Age. We’re in a super duper Gilded Age.
And I sometimes hear people say, well, could we be returning to old kinds of corruption? Might we have another Teapot Dome scandal? Well, my God. Teapot Dome was a scandal actually involving mineral rights and bribes during the Harding administration, although not bribes to the president’s family, which is, again, something entirely new. The scale of the bribes was about $500,000: adjusting for inflation, that’s something like $9 million today.
So how much has Trump enriched himself since returning to the White House about 500 days ago? The answer is certainly more than four billion dollars, almost certainly more than four and a half, maybe five billion dollars. Divide that by 500 and we basically have a Teapot Dome sized corruption scandal on an average day under Trump.
So it’s basically day after day of scandals as big or bigger than Teapot Dome. Our corrupt grandfathers, great-grandfathers were pikers compared with this, just as the Gilded Age robber barons were pikers compared with the modern-day tech bros.
This is obviously not good. It’s actually quite horrifying. How did we so quickly descend into becoming a truly massively corrupt country on a level that we used to think of as being associated only with tinpot dictators in the third world? And yet here we are.
This ought to be a political issue and it ought to be a legal issue as soon as the government is back in the hands of people who actually take the rule of law seriously. Again, without going into the details of the deal, it’s surely illegal. I mean, it’s illegal under the Emoluments Clause. Probably since there are definitely Kazakhs on the take as well, it’s illegal under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. This is just, it’s illegal up the wazoo.
Of course, it will not be prosecuted as long as Trump is in the White House. But forget any Democrat who isn’t promising to go after this massive corruption when they regain power. If they don’t, then none of this matters, but that should be a core part of anybody’s platform.
I’m not a political expert — sometimes I think nobody is — but my God, again, this corruption is so blatant. And it does resonate with people. It’s really clear that corruption at the top and the sense that ordinary people are paying the price while people with power enrich themselves is an effective popular issue. That is actually the issue that brought Viktor Orban down in Hungary, which is one of the hopeful signs for what may happen to America going down the pike.
So here we are, just to remind you that this scandal, it’s a huge thing. It’s page one in the New York Times, but in a way it’s actually kind of ordinary, since even this size of scandal is happening every few weeks these days.
Do not make the mistake of treating what’s going on as in any sense normal. This is hugely abnormal, and I believe that the American people will understand that it’s abnormal even if pundits get bored of talking about the corruption. So drive it home, maybe for make benefit American people instead of the Trump family.
On college campuses around America, old-fashioned blue books are making a comeback.
Around a century ago these standardized booklets for written exams were introduced by Butler University in Indianapolis. For many former students of a certain age — myself included — the sight of a blue book can generate anxiety and even nightmares. And many former instructors — myself again included — recall the tedium and strained eyesight of trying to decipher students’ handwriting. So it was an improvement when exam-taking shifted from paper to computer. Or so it seemed at the time.
Now, however, students are using AI to write essays and answer questions on take-home exams, as well as taking in-person exams on their computers. As a result, an AI-arms-race has developed between instructors and students. Concerned that students are not doing the work themselves but are simply copying and pasting AI output, instructors have begun using AI programs to detect students’ use of AI. Inevitably, there are now AI programs that students can use to outwit the instructors’ AI detection programs.
So, not surprisingly, many instructors are going back to handwritten in-class exams, generating a sudden boom in the demand for blue books. Ominously, even the return of in-person testing may not solve the problem of testing in the face of AI: Cheating using AI glasses is on the rise in Asia and will doubtless spread worldwide.
My concern here isn’t about testing; it’s about learning. The objective of testing is to further learning, and there is growing concern (as well as evidence) that students’ use of AI damages their capacity to learn. And what we really mean by learning is the ability to think. Students who rely on large language models to answer questions won’t learn how to think by reasoning through the evidence to form a conclusion. As a result, they will be unequipped to deal with situations in which AI either can’t provide an answer or provides misleading answers.
In short, there are good reasons to worry that what we’re calling artificial intelligence will adversely affect the development of our natural intelligence. Moreover, in the case of basic learning, those adverse effects may be virtually irremediable.
The rise of generative AI isn’t a complete departure from an ongoing process of outsourcing human judgment and understanding to external models. Rather, generative AI is just a further step in a process that began a generation ago with the launch of Google search and accelerated with the rise of smartphones. However, ChatGPT and Claude Code ratcheted that process up to a much more rapid pace.
Granted, each stage of this process has brought obvious short-term benefits to those using the new technologies. Yet these benefits have come at the cost of real, measurable long-term damage to human understanding and cognition. And AI, which is already creating a crisis in education, will almost surely make the damage much worse.
Beyond the paywall I will address the following:
1. A brief history of outsourced cognition
2. The sharp deterioration in learning with the advent of smartphones
3. The AI cognitive crisis
4. Will cognitive losses due to AI lead to a new form of inequality?
HumanAgent in the loopI dislike the phrase “human in the loop” because it cedes authority to the machines. Let’s flip the narrative. It’s our loop, we work the same way we always have, now we recruit agents to join the team. An agent-assisted process need not be a black box that takes in prompts and emits features. [...]
Let’s do agentic software development like that. Not as a loop we’ve been excluded from, instead as one we invite agents into.
— Jon Udell, “Doctor, it hurts when agents create unreviewable PRs.” “Don’t do that.”
Tags: jon-udell, coding-agents, generative-ai, agentic-engineering, ai, llms
Most pharmaceuticals involve high upfront costs, to discover and test the drug, and very low marginal costs. Another pill can be printed almost for free.
That cost structure favors health systems, such as that of Britain, that try to pay lower for services. They can end up getting a relatively good deal from price discrimination. After all, they can be served at low marginal cost, at least for those ttreatments.
Now imagine a biomedical future where many more treatments are based on the sequencing of your individual genome, and then the development of specific treatments personalized to you. Obviously it will depend on developments, but very likely those remedies will have relatively high marginal costs.
In that setting the British approach to health care procurement and pricing will work less well. It is the well-capitalized, “overspending” systems, such as the United States, that will have an easier time making the adjustment.
“The rising relative advantage of well-capitalized health care systems” is a neglected trend, because it makes a lot of earlier elite pronouncements about health care economics look a bit off.
The post Will future biomedical advances be low marginal cost? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Workplace technological changes were instrumental in creating new tasks for women over the last century. This paper studies the adoption of the typewriter into US workplaces. Exploiting exogenous variation in typist demand across sectors, I document that the typewriter increased women’s labor force participation, leading to lower rates of marriage and fertility. These developments stemmed from a transition of White women from households into office work and an indirect crowding-in effect drawing Black women into household services. Acting as a “meeting technology,” the typewriter reshaped social interactions, enabling White women to marry above their socioeconomic backgrounds and achieve upward mobility.
That is from a recent paper by Myera Rashid. Via Kris Gulati.
The post Typewriters and fertility appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

At first glance, it may look as though we’re about to enter the Milky Way. However, today’s Picture of the Week actually features the road sign indicating the entrance to the ALMA Observatory, in Chile’s Atacama Desert. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), which is operated by ESO together with international partners, studies the light from the coldest corners of the Universe.
Water vapour in Earth’s atmosphere readily absorbs the millimetre and submillimetre wavelengths of radiation that ALMA observes. This is why ALMA is located in one of the driest and highest places on Earth, on the Chajnantor Plateau in the Andes, at an impressive altitude of 5000 metres.
ALMA has given us some of the most detailed images of our Milky Way, showing among other things filaments of dense clouds of gas and dust at its core. Unlike our eyes, or a camera like the one that took this photo, ALMA uses a technique called interferometry that allows us to see fine details of distant celestial objects. By combining the light captured with each of the 66 high-precision antennas in its array, ALMA works as a single telescope with a diameter equal to the farthest distance between antennas.
While not being able to physically reach the glowing band of our galaxy seen in this picture, images like the ones produced by ALMA are some of the closest "gateways” we have to admire the Milky Way and its constituents.
Editor’s note: In honor of America’s 250th birthday, Earth Observatory is revisiting stories about the landscapes that helped shape U.S. history. The images and text on this page were originally published on September 14, 2014. Explore the full collection here.
The song is familiar to every American, but the moment and place where it was composed are less so.
On April 24, 2014, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 captured this view of Baltimore, Maryland, and its harbor. Fort McHenry and its star-shaped ramparts—the place where “that star-spangled banner yet wave[d],” on September 14, 1814—stand at the entrance to the city’s Inner Harbor. The area was a pivotal battleground in the War of 1812.
In September 1814, British naval and ground forces advanced on the city of Baltimore, emboldened by the August 24 burning of the White House and the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. On September 12, British forces landed at North Point, 5 miles (8 kilometers) southeast of Baltimore (just off the lower right of this image), and engaged American troops in several small battles. By September 13, the land forces approached the city of Baltimore but were repelled by U.S. Army and Maryland militia forces assembled behind a mile of earthworks and trenches along Hampstead Hill—near what is now known as Patterson Park (image top center).
On the morning of September 13, British naval vessels set up positions roughly at the point where this image is labeled Baltimore Harbor. They began a 25-hour bombardment of Fort McHenry, staying far enough offshore to hit the fort with rockets and cannonballs but out of the range of American artillery. Unable to subdue the fort, and hampered by several merchant vessels that were intentionally sunk in the harbor, the British forces ended their attack on the morning of September 14.
The Battle of Baltimore moved a young American lawyer and negotiator to write a song entitled “Defense of Fort M’Henry.” Francis Scott Key had spent the night of September 13 on a British vessel in the Patapsco River, working to secure the release of American prisoners of war. Local legend in Maryland holds that the HMS Tonnant was anchored roughly where the Key Bridge is now located, giving Key a direct view toward Fort McHenry and “the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,” that “gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.” On September 14, a clean 30 by 42 foot American flag was raised over Fort McHenry “by the dawn’s early light.”
Key’s four-verse song was published on September 20, 1814, in the Baltimore Patriot and the Advertiser. The battle hymn was eventually renamed “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and was declared the national anthem in 1931.
Beyond its pivotal role in the War of 1812, Baltimore has long been an important seaport on the East Coast of the United States, particularly because of its proximity by road and rail to inland agricultural and industrial hubs in the Midwest. Situated on the Chesapeake Bay, the city is now home to more than 600,000 residents. According to some media reports, nearly one-quarter of the jobs in the Baltimore area are related to science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. It is home to the Space Telescope Science Institute, the operations center for the Hubble Space Telescope.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen, using Landsat data provided by the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Michael Carlowicz.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.

Marshy, sandy terrain and an impassable inlet helped colonial forces repel British forces during a pivotal battle on the barrier…

In a precursor to Memorial Day, people in Charleston, South Carolina, honored fallen Civil War troops with flowers, songs, and…

Along the northeast side of the Capital Beltway in Maryland, green spaces weave through the developed landscape.
The post Star-Spangled City appeared first on NASA Science.
(Lord’s day). Early in the morning my last night’s physic worked and did give me a good stool, and then I rose and had three or four stools, and walked up and down my chamber. Then up, my maid rose and made me a posset, and by and by comes Mr. Creed, and he and I spent all the morning discoursing against to-morrow before the Duke the business of his pieces of eight, in which the Treasurer makes so many queries.
At noon, my physic having done working, I went down to dinner, and then he and I up again and spent most of the afternoon reading in Cicero and other books of good discourse, and then he went away, and then came my brother Tom to see me, telling me how the Joyces do make themselves fine clothes against Mary is brought to bed. He being gone I went to cast up my monthly accounts, and to my great trouble I find myself 7l. worse than I was the last month, but I confess it is by my reckoning beforehand a great many things, yet however I am troubled to see that I can hardly promise myself to lay up much from month’s end to month’s end, about 4l. or 5l. at most, one month with another, without some extraordinary gettings, but I must and I hope I shall continue to have a care of my own expenses.
So to the reading my vows seriously and then to supper. This evening there came my boy’s brother to see for him, and tells me he knows not where he is, himself being out of town this week and is very sorry that he is gone, and so am I, but he shall come no more. So to prayers, and to bed.
I hear stories from readers—some of them sad, but many bring me great joy. Below is a very inspiring email I received earlier this week.
So many of us are trying to live more mindfully. And it’s hard to do nowadays. We rely on technology, but it has turned on us. It’s intrusive and manipulative—isolating its users, while promoting passivity and addictive behavior.
I’m trying to help people live better lives in this hostile environment. That’s the main purpose behind The Honest Broker. When I get an email like this, it makes me feel like it’s not all in vain.
I’m sharing this with permission—but leaving out the author’s name.
Dear Ted,
I am writing to express my gratitude for your work and for being an Honest Broker. In an attempt to illustrate my thanks, I’d like to briefly describe the wonderful effect you have had on my life.
Since discovering your Substack in 2021-2022, I have begun to turn my life around by making significant improvements to my quality of life and, subsequently, the lives of those around me. This is in no small part due to the influence of your books and articles.
The feeling I frequently get when I read your writing is along the lines of “He gets it,” or “Someone finally said it,” and “This needed to be said.” I would describe this to a friend as “Ted is able to express in words things that I feel and know to be true but am unable to describe myself.” Maybe that’s just the mark of a greater intellect or of a talented writer in general. But, to me personally, it is as if I had an understanding friend. This is something I needed and came to me at a time when I felt I had none.
For the past several years you have served as a much needed role model. I greatly admire your world view and relate to your experience as a musician finding your way. In 2022-2023, while reading Music to Raise the Dead, a copy of From Ritual to Romance jumped out at me from the racks at a thrift store. Around the same time, I picked up a copy of The Golden Bough and Battle for the Mind by W. Sargent as well as Solitary Confinement by Christopher Burney. These ideas were swirling about in my head, as I was also drinking heavily as usual, when a line from The Honest Broker jumped out at me. One of your friends had recently gotten sober, and you mentioned that it had been “deserving of your highest praise.” When I read that line, some willingness appeared within me that was not traceable before. At that moment I considered seeking help for my drinking problem.
As I write this, I have been sober for 2 years and 10 months. I have been wanting to write this letter to you for about as long. In lieu of going into more detail, I want to thank you again for your amazing body of work that influenced me, gained my trust, and continues to give me hope.
I have so many questions I would like to ask, but I feel selfish writing them here. I am sure you will continue to inspire myself and others with your writing, and for that I am content.
This serves as eloquent testimony for the real purpose of arts and humanities, and why I’m such a fervent advocate for them. You don’t pursue them to pass tests or drop names at a cocktail party—but to live a wise life, a mindful life, a good life.
There are people everywhere who are doing just that. Their stories aren’t told in the media or made into motion pictures, but they are far better role models than movie stars or pop singers.
Here are some links to provide context for this reader’s letter.
This email came from a conservatory-trained pianist at an early stage in her career:
If you can share, I’d be really interested to know: You probably get many requests to participate in various projects—how do you decide which projects to say yes to and which to decline?
My response:
First, I always try to give priority to my ‘big picture’ long term projects—even though they may not bring in any income at the time. This can cause a lot of pain and suffering in the short term, and external circumstances can force our hands at times. But if we don’t fight for our long term goals, who will?
For a while, I had a rule that I would always spent at least one day per week on projects that were my own choice, not something anyone hired me to do. Over time I shifted even more of my focus and energy to my pet projects. (Nowadays I turn down almost everything that doesn’t fit with my own objectives—but I didn’t get to that degree of autonomy overnight.) We all need to be able to pay our bills, so sometimes there are limits on our ability to manage your own daily schedule.
But you should spent a significant amount of time thinking about where you want to be in 5, 10, 20 years. And then make sure you are taking steps in that direction.
There were long periods in my life when I had very little control over my schedule. But even in those difficult days, I found some time every week to chase my dreams. That might mean pursuing them on weekends or late at night, but I refused to give up on them. Many of those dreams did became realities—but only because I never abandoned them, and kept building my pathway to them week after week.
Probably the key difference between me and most other writers is: (1) I go to great lengths to avoid projects ‘assigned’ to me by other people, maybe almost to an extreme, (2) I am always thinking about what I want to do as part of my long term vocational plan, and (3) I make decisions that others tell me are stupid, because I’m willing to walk away from a significant short term opportunity. But I know I need to do this if I hope to achieve the higher goals I’ve set for myself.
I hope this helps.
This next question came from an esteemed music writer: He wanted to know how I had “defied the odds” in my relationship with Stan Getz, who is frequently portrayed as an irritable and irascible individual—and he mentions that he had heard this from many sources, including Getz’s ex-wife Monica.
Here’s my response.
Links for you. Science:
The horseshoe crab has protected our health for decades. Now it’s time to return the favor.
Nearly 160 U.S. Troops Sick With Flu In Texas After Hegseth Axed Vaccine Mandate
The bobcat is the only wildcat in Mass. So why are so many people sure they’re seeing mountain lions?
This Controversial Substance Is Suddenly Being Called A Health Product By RFK Jr. — Doctors Aren’t Celebrating (Kennedy is insane)
‘A weird result from an already weird hominin’: Archaeologists discover all Homo naledi skeletons found in South African cave are female
COVID Vaccine Linked to New Side EffectBenefits, Especially in Older Adults
A New Antibiotic Idea From An Old Source
Other:
AI is driving an already expensive housing market nuts in San Francisco
Shock and Awe in Moscow
Before SpaceX IPO, investors in China secretly acquired stakes
Those World Cup “Hydration Breaks” Have Fox Rolling in Dough
‘Every time you turn around, there’s a new price increase’: US small-business optimism plummets
Trump Still Has a Bad Case of Obama Envy
The Media Keep Making This Mistake About the Iran Talks
How the Prairieland ‘Antifa’ Verdict Threatens the Anti-Trump Resistance
Legendary TV Director James Burrows Dies At 85
He despises Jews, admires Hitler—Now, he’s starring in videos for a Tenn. candidate for governor
Eli Lilly gave extraordinary obesity drug access to a 79-year-old patient. Who was it?
Keir Starmer Proves that Triangulation is a Dead End
Reflections on the Reflecting Pool
It’s The Corruption, Stupid. A generational opportunity to bridge the digital divide was hijacked by Republicans and converted into a giant slush fund for the country’s richest technofascists.
Vandals used box cutter or knife to cut 290 or 300-foot “slit” in lining of Reflecting Pool
Obama, Trump, And The Outmoded Politics Of Indirection
Vandalism at the Reflecting Pool? Yes—It Was Committed by Donald Trump
New photos show first look at Kennedy Center facade without Trump’s name
The Reflecting Pool Water’s Fine. It’s easy being green.
Trump Blames Vandals for Reflecting Pool Problems. Internal Records Tell Another Story. The documents do not indicate that the peeling blue coating and algae blooms were caused intentionally.
Why MAGA buys Trump’s Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool hoax. The GOP base would love to arrest people who laugh at them
Fixing the Democrats’ Toxic Brand Starts With Being on the Ballot
A Look Inside the Welcome Bags Planned for White South African Refugees
Mosquitoes, already? Blame cars
Elon Musk ordered to give deposition as ‘vote buying’ scheme bites him
Georgia Goes MAGA in the Republican Senate Primary
The New York Times helped turn trans rights into political controversy, analysis finds
The Banality of Peter Thiel’s Evil
Apple is charging you more and blaming AI data centers. That’s a big deal.
How a New York Primary Wound Up at the Center of the AI Storm (Bores lost)

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched Sunday carrying a multi-ton, radio-broadcasting satellite for SiriusXM’s to replace two aging satellites in geostationary Earth orbit.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station happened at 10:25 p.m. EDT (0225 UTC), the opening of a four-hour window. The rocket flew on an easterly trajectory upon leaving the launch pad.
The 45th Weather Squadron forecast an 80 percent chance for favorable weather at the opening of the launch window that improves to 90 percent as time goes on. Meteorologists are watching for interference from cumulus and anvil clouds.
“Flow aloft will be weak and variable, supporting daily storm motions that will be seabreeze and outflow dependent. This erratic nature of storm motion is more evident in today’s model runs, suggesting a higher risk of storms lingering closer to the coast later into the night,” launch weather officers wrote. “However, remnant storms and clouds should slowly diminish as the night wears on during both the primary and backup launch opportunities.”
SpaceX launched the mission using its Falcon 9 booster with the tail number B1085. This was its 17th flight having previously launched NASA’s Crew-9, RRT-1 for the U.S. Space Force, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1, Fram2, SiriusXM’s SXM-10, the MTG-S1 weather satellite for Europe, EchoStar XXV, and nine Starlink missions
A little more than 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1085 landed on the drone ship, ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas’, stationed in the Atlantic Ocean. This was its 158th successful landing, tying it with the now retired vessel, ‘Just Read the Instructions’, which is being used for Starship operations.

The SXM-11 satellite, weighing about 15,000 pounds (7.5 tons), was deployed from the Falcon 9 rocket’s upper stage a little more than half an hour after launch.
It was manufactured by Lanteris Space Systems, a subsidiary of Texas-based Intuitive Machines. The company, formerly branded as Maxar Space Systems, was acquired by Intuitive Machines in January 2026 for about $800 million.
The SXM-11 and SXM-12 satellites were built to replace SiriusXM’s XM-5 and the Sirius FM-5 satellites, which launched in 2010 and 2009 respectively.
“After years of planning, engineering, testing, and collaboration, SXM-11 is set to launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and begin its journey to orbit,” SiriusXM wrote on its LinkedIn page. “As the most powerful high-powered satellite in SiriusXM’s fleet, SXM-11 will help enhance signal reception, expand coverage in Alaska, and support the delivery of audio entertainment and information services across the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean.”
The 230-foot-tall (70.1 m) satellite is based on the IM-1300 satellite bus. With its solar panels extended, the spacecraft spans 106 feet (32.3 m).
SiriusXM said about 60 percent of the 7.5 ton satellite’s mass comes from the fuel onboard. The last of these satellites, SXM-10, which launched in June 2025, is estimated to remain in service until 2040, according to a financial disclosure from SiriusXM to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

1. Why were the Covid vaccine trials so quick?
2. Sumner on Greenspan, Giannis, and more.
3. 100 best books of the 21st century? (NYT).
4. AI and the crisis of classical liberalism.
5. The memory tax, good thing supply is elastic.
6. Is Teortaxes solving for the political equilibrium?
7. Frank Lloyd Wright house for sale in TN for $1.6 million.
The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Welcome back. Toe update: two weeks after stubbing my toe it’s still a little painful but gradually less so each day. It was definitely more than a standard stubbing. I’ve been trying not to put too much weight on it, and avoiding any cardio exercises, and skipping things like lunges at the gym that would require bending and weight-bearing. A bit bored of it now.
§ Early in the week I changed my three main web projects from using pre-commit to prek, a drop-in Rust-based replacement. The only real reason – apart from a promised speed increase – was that pre-commit doesn’t support dependency cooldowns. I use them in uv and this meant I’d occasionally have different versions of things like ruff installed which caused problems. It was easy to switch and seems to work fine.
I found several closed issues on the pre-commit project with people asking for cooldown support, each of which was closed with a terse note explaining that it duplicated an existing issue. I couldn’t find any existing open issue so I had no idea if it was worth waiting for pre-commit to add support or not. Onwards.
§ I have a load of music videos in the Music app on my Mac which I rarely watch. I realised I could move them over to my Plex library instead and then I might actually put them on the telly occasionally. It took me quite a lot of trial and error before I finally realised that you can only nicely have Plex handle music videos if you also have it handle your audio music files – you need to have at least some audio files by an artist before their music videos will appear in the interface.
This seems bizarre to me and I can only assume it’s due to some old coding decision that would be problematic to fix or undo. You can have a library of music videos treated as general video files but then Plex won’t do anything nice with automatically fetching metadata etc. and treating them as music.
§ Then the week’s heat arrived in earnest and I spent a few days hunkering inside in the dark like a caveman. A caveman maintaining a rigorous routine of opening and then closing windows, closing and then opening curtains, as the sun made its way around his, er, detached cave.
We had 30+ºC daytime temperatures, only a degree or two cooler than London most days, which was unusual. This only lasted a few days but, with the humidity, it was too, too long. The heat upstairs gradually increased over the week, resisting attempts to cool it down in the early morning. I’m very lucky I didn’t have to actually do much but even so, the idea of those conditions going on for a couple of weeks in the future is 😬.
My sister was staying for a few days so we had several days of activities with our Mum. Our place might have been too warm but that was nothing compared to an upstairs room in a care home with little in the way of air movement. Eesh. But it’s OK, there are proposed targets: “by 2040, all residential care homes should be able to maintain indoor temperatures between 16ºC and 26ºC.” (PDF) That’s OK then.
The weather finally changed on Friday afternoon and it was such a relief. Heat and humidity dropped, a breeze picked up, and we could sit outside marvelling how cool it was. We wouldn’t normally have thought it was “cool” but by comparison, oh, wonderful.
We’d put off a trip to Small Breeds Farm Park until Saturday and it was much better than we expected in terms of how well organised and put-together it was. Quite chill, nice staff, lots of eager sheep and goats, and many staring owls of various kinds. Recommended, especially late in the afternoon as most visitors head off.
Me and my sister sorted through several boxes of things brought here from the beach hut plus a couple of things that had originally been in the two caravans our family had since we were kids. I found it quite hard going. This continuation of sifting through our pasts, deciding over and over again what to keep, what to throw away, what someone else somewhere might want. Dismantling our past. I don’t keep that much myself – what’s the point? A few odd familiar things as mementoes. The rest of the past disappears and I float on into a future I find hard to imagine.
§ I’m gearing up to start scything the lawn/meadow soon. Usually I’d spread this over short stints across July and August but this year I’ll need to get much of it done before the end of July when we have a family party here.
Today I went out and pulled up dozens and dozens of ragwort plants, which is bad (“its poisonous nature makes it a serious weed of paddocks and pastures”). We do this every year so I think there’ll be fewer the following year because we’re not giving them a chance to drop their seeds. And yet.
I still need to finish the lawn edging, and to finish demolishing the concrete pond (never mind re-making a new pond). Both of which projects have been on hold due to my stupid toe and this week’s infernal heat.
§ We gave Alice and Steve a go this week because Nicola Walker is always worth watching. Unfortunately the rest of the show wasn’t really. The tone was a bit weird, mostly all jokey comedy with her absolute fury coming from somewhere else. And the characters were all pretty thin, especially the young people. All quite odd so we stopped after two episodes.
And we watched The Sheep Detectives (Kyle Balda, 2026). I’m not whoever the target market is but I can only review it as I find it, and that was not good. I can’t be bothered to say any more. If you’re 10 you’ll probably love it.
§ OK.
I usually wait until at least 2 years have past to re-up a post, but events this week are just getting so crazy that I felt like I had to rerun this post I wrote about Europe and air conditioning last summer:
Europe is at a very high latitude, and people think of it as a cold place that doesn’t need AC. But climate change is increasing the frequency of punishing, brutal heat waves all across Europe, and the region’s lack of AC is causing huge numbers of deaths and vast amounts of suffering. This year things are worse than ever before, as Beth Gardiner reports:
Already this summer, two major heat waves have broiled Europe. During the first, Ireland, France, and the United Kingdom sweated through their hottest-ever May temperatures. A month later, France notched its two hottest days and its hottest night since records began: Thermometers soared past 110 degrees Fahrenheit in the west and 104 degrees in Paris. Spain reported its two hottest June days since at least 1950, and Britain, where temperatures reached 99 degrees, recorded its three hottest June days. The temperature in Basel, Switzerland, hit 100 degrees. Germany and Austria are enduring heat in the 90s, and braced for worse as the weather moves east. Temperatures this high can be life-threatening: More than 200,000 people have died because of heat in Europe in just the past four years, the World Health Organization estimates.
Robinson Meyer has some great statistics about how few Europeans have AC:
Even many hospitals lack AC, leaving patients lying in pools of their own sweat (and dying in droves).
Regular Europeans are hitting the breaking point. 8 out of 10 people in France — the country hardest hit by the most recent heat wave — want their country to install AC in houses, schools, and public transit. Parisians are rushing out to buy AC units as fast as they can:
And fights are even breaking out as supplies run short.
But even as regular Europeans desperately scramble for the life-saving relief of air conditioning technology, European elites have been trying to keep their people from getting the relief they need. Germany’s public broadcaster is running a campaign to dissuade its citizens from getting AC, on the grounds that AC’s energy use exacerbates climate change:
Meanwhile, some people at Germany’s Federal Environmental Ministry claimed (falsely) that portable air conditioners don’t work.1 In the UK, a “Professor of Sustainable and Resilient Cities” went on TV to claim (falsely) that air conditioning can’t beat a heat wave. Last year a “senior lecturer in healthy buildings” told British citizens to try applying yogurt to the outsides of their windows to cool their houses. A British news program told British citizens that using AC is “selfish”:
There are innumerable similar episodes of European elites spreading blatant disinformation about AC, actively interfering with AC installation, or demanding that their citizens die for a minuscule climate benefit. Perhaps the single most ludicrous story was that the people who run the European Commission decided to cut off AC for their lower-level employees, while keeping the AC on for themselves:
The European Commission’s headquarters was forced to shut down its air-conditioning system on Friday due to the heat wave…Staff working at the Berlaymont building received a text at midday, reading: “BERL — URGENT — Due to extreme weather conditions, forced shut down of air cooling system from floor 1 to 7 for the rest of the day.”
The 13-story building is home to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, her 26 commissioners and about 3,000 staff. Von der Leyen works on the 13th floor, and most of her commissioners’ offices are housed on floors eight or above…
“It’s like feudalism,” a Commission official working on a lower level of the Berlaymont, granted anonymity to speak freely, told POLITICO on Friday, referring to the fact that upper floors housing commissioners got to keep their AC on. A second official agreed it was a “disgrace.”
I know it’s become common to say that America’s elites don’t care if their people suffer and die, but I find it hard to even imagine American government officials doing something like this.2
Why are European elites so insane about air conditioning, even as regular Europeans desperately yearn for the technology? This was the subject of my post last year. Part of it is the poisonous ideology of “degrowth”, which tells Europeans that they can save the planet through their own personal suffering (which of course they can’t). Part of it is cognitive dissonance — if elites reverse themselves after crusading against AC for so long, it forces them to admit they made a mistake. Part of it is the desire not to lose face in front of the Americans, who were far earlier to adopt AC.
But I think part of it is simple cultural conservatism — the idea that using AC would change European culture in strange and unacceptable ways. Cultural conservatism might be a big part of why some cultures eagerly adopt new and superior technologies, while others turn up their noses and refuse.
Anyway, here is my post from last year:
Many years ago, I was watching a nature show. It was about some hunter-gatherers on some Pacific island. The film crew went right up and talked to one of the hunter-gatherers about his life — hunting, gathering, finding and killing witches among his fellow tribesmen, and so on. But as they talked, I realized that there must be a giant video camera right in the face of this tribesman. And he wasn’t even reacting to it. What was this strange, unnaturally shaped object, made of strange unknown materials, and potentially possessing magical powers? Didn’t he wonder? And didn’t he ask himself if he could get something like it, and use it for whatever these strange foreigners were using it to do?
I often think about the example of the tribesman and the video camera. It’s a small version of a story that happens again and again, on a far grander scale, determining the fate of entire nations and geopolitical systems of power: absorption of foreign technology. Most of the things you use on a day-to-day basis were not invented in the country in which you live (even if you live in America). They were invented all over the world, and one crucial reason you have access to them is that your society deemed it fitting to allow those technologies into the country.
Adopting foreign technologies sounds like a no-brainer, but there are lots of risks involved. Hierarchies of power and status can be disrupted, creating political chaos. Existing economic relationships can shift, creating unexpected winners and losers. But perhaps most frighteningly, foreign technology can change a country’s traditional culture.
One Pacific island civilization that was determined to absorb foreign technology without letting it change their culture was Japan. When the “black ships” from the West arrived in the 1850s and demonstrated how helpless Japan was in the face of foreign powers, the country’s leadership (after a brief civil war) decided that their only choice was to absorb foreign technologies and institutions. But they wanted to preserve Japan’s traditional culture as well. They thus came up with the concept of “wakon yosai” (和魂洋才), which translates roughly as “Japanese soul, Western technology”. Over the course of the next century and a half, Japan intentionally strove to preserve elements of its unique culture even as it reshaped its society around new gadgets and production processes.
Travel to Japan today, and I guarantee that unless you are staying in a very backwoods rural place, the room where you stay will have an air conditioner. It will almost always be a “mini split”, or wall unit, looking much like the image at the top of this post. It will be quiet, but powerful enough to keep your room cool even in the increasingly hot summers that Japan now suffers due to climate change. This is a technology never available in Japan’s premodern days, and yet it has been near-universally embraced with no apparent degradation to the country’s traditional culture or national pride.
Europe is different. Data sources differ, but nobody puts AC usage in Europe (or the UK) at more than around 20%. This technology, which almost all Japanese people enjoy, is one that most Europeans do without.
You might think Europe is simply too far north to need AC. But latitude is no longer the defense against heat that it used to be, because climate change is stalking the region:

With this rise in temperature — and the aging of the European population — has come a rise in preventable death. Estimates of heat-related mortality vary, but the most commonly cited number is 175,000 annually across the entire region. Given that Europe has a population of about 745 million, this is a death rate of about 23.5 per 100,000 people per year. For comparison, the U.S. death rate from firearms is about 13.7 per 100,000.
So the death rate from heat in Europe is almost twice the death rate from guns in America. If you think guns are an emergency in the U.S., you should think that heat in Europe is an even bigger emergency.
Most of this death is preventable. The technology that prevents it is air conditioning. Barreca et al. (2016) find that heat deaths in America declined by about 75% after 1960, and that “the diffusion of residential air conditioning explains essentially the entire decline in hot day–related fatalities”. Essentially, wherever AC gets rolled out, heat-related death plunges. Taking Barreca’s estimate and applying it to Europe suggests that as many as 100,000 European lives — 0.013% of the population — could be saved every year if the 80% of European households who don’t have AC were to get it.3
And yet Europe has not done this. The official reason — at least, where one is given — is that AC uses electricity, which contributes to climate change. For example, this is from a 2022 article in MIT Technology Review:
Climate change is making extreme heat the norm across more of the world, increasing the need for adaptation. But in the case of AC, some experts are concerned about how to balance that need with the harms the solutions can cause…
[M]any Europeans are hesitant to welcome air conditioners with open arms. “Seeing AC as a solution to heat waves and to climate change is of course a bit problematic because of the energy that’s being used,” says Daniel Osberghaus, an energy and climate economics researcher at the Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research in Germany.
Today, cooling devices like ACs account for about 10% of global electricity consumption—and since most of the world’s electricity still comes from fossil fuels, that’s a significant chunk of worldwide emissions. Because of their massive energy use, “they do get a bad reputation,” says Kevin Lane, an energy analyst at the IEA.
Many other stories also mention climate as a reason Europe resists AC. Green organizations like the World Resources Institute, which have a lot of influence in Europe, consistently recommend far less effective “passive cooling solutions” due to emissions concerns. And European regulations do block AC, by mandating that newly built buildings be carbon-neutral. (This in addition, of course, to good old NIMBYism also blocks AC installation, especially in the UK.) Tyler Cowen writes:
European governments do a great deal to discourage air-conditioning, whether central AC or window units. You might need a hard-to-get permit to install an AC unit, and in Geneva you have to show a medical need for it. Or in many regions of Europe, the air conditioner might violate heritage preservation laws, or be illegal altogether. In Portofino, Italy, neighbors have been known to turn each other in for having illegal air-conditioning units. The fines can range up to €43,000, though most cases are settled out of court by a removal of the unit.
In fact, Andrew Hammel alleges that Germany has raised climate-based opposition to AC to the level of an ideological crusade. Here are some excerpts from his thread:
I believe attitudes toward air-conditioning are class markers in many European countries. Air-conditioning is seen as prototypically American, and that’s important…
The urban haute bourgeoisie -- bureaucrats, public media executives, NGO employees, humanities grads, journalists, professors, lawyers, judges, etc. -- are the holdouts [in terms of installing AC]…
First of all, *every one* of these people has a story about visiting the USA and nearly freezing to death in an over air-conditioned store or office. Every. Damn. One…To these people, A/C is the ultimate American solution to a problem. Instead of accepting nature as it is, Americans use expensive, wasteful technology to artificially change the environment to fit their fat, lazy lifestyles. They insist on defying and conquering nature, not “cooperating” with her. And they don’t care if they cook the planet while they do so…
[T]he European urban haute bourgeoisie turns it into a rigid ideological aversion to any form of air-conditioning…These people regard these decisions not just as their personal lifestyle choices, but rather as a *model for all of society*. They regard themselves as a revolutionary vanguard of advanced ecological consciousness which must aid the less enlightened to reduce their carbon footprints. And these people *run German society*…Urban planners and people who create construction codes in Germany are also brigadiers in the anti-A/C jihad…
Which is why it’s pretty common on sweltering days to hear Germans complain about the “goddamn ‘eco-this’ ‘organic-that’ pencil pushers” who continue to force them to sweat for hours in overheated hospitals, classrooms, and offices.
This is immediately recognizable as the poisonous ideology of degrowth. Degrowth frames climate change as a problem of personal overconsumption and extravagance to be curbed by austere self-restraint and government policy, rather than as a technological problem to be overcome by installing green energy. This is foolish, of course — it leads to human suffering while not doing much to actually curb climate change. But it’s very popular in northern Europe.
The climate-based crusade against AC is a little infuriating, because it probably kills a lot more people than the reduced emissions save. Right now, Europe is responsible for only about 13% of global carbon emissions from fossil fuel use, meaning that the climate impact of installing AC all over the region is pretty minimal. Does anyone think that incredibly tiny margin of emissions reduction is really worth tens of thousands of lives a year?
But from reading anecdotes like Hammel’s, I kind of suspect that there’s a second, deeper reason why Europe so far refuses to install AC: protection of traditional culture. The thing about German elites pooh-poohing AC as an unnecessary American extravagance suggests that some Europeans view lack of AC as quintessentially European culture — a tradition by which Europeans can define their own uniqueness vis-a-vis the rest of the world.
Many articles about Europe’s strange reluctance to use AC hint at this attitude. For example, here’s CNN:
A big part of the reason [they don’t install AC] is many European countries historically had little need for cooling, especially in the north…“In Europe… we simply don’t have the tradition of air conditioning… because up to relatively recently, it hasn’t been a major need,” said Brian Motherway, head of the Office of Energy Efficiency and Inclusive Transitions at the International Energy Agency. [emphasis mine]
And here’s Euronews:
The rest of this story lies in history and culture…Southern Europe built its cities to cope with heat: thick walls, shaded windows, and street layouts designed to maximise airflow…That’s also why white paint dominates the picturesque skylines of Mediterranean places like Santorini in Greece or Vieste in Italy: The bright surfaces reflect sunlight and radiant heat, helping interiors stay cooler…In northern Europe, on the other hand, summers were once mild enough that cooling was rarely needed…Air conditioning, when it appeared in Europe, was seen as a luxury or even a health risk. Many Europeans still believe exposure to cold air can make you sick, and the stereotype persists that AC is for rich people.
And the WSJ reports that there are widespread superstitions about the dangers of this technology that most of the rest of the world uses every day:
In France, media outlets often warn that cooling a room to more than 15 degrees Fahrenheit below the outside temperature can cause something called “thermal shock,” resulting in nausea, loss of consciousness and even respiratory arrest. That would be news to Americans[.]
Even if climate is the official, intellectual reason for Europe refusing live-saving AC, the idea that AC goes against Europe’s traditional culture is probably an important underlying motivator.
(This trend isn’t unique to Europe, of course. Americans may pride themselves on being more futuristic than the Europeans, but they still haven’t adopted Japanese washing toilets in significant numbers, and so their quality of life has suffered in small ways that, having never experienced the luxury of this foreign technology, they cannot even comprehend.)
Whatever the reason, the resistance to AC technology is making Europe a more impoverished civilization. It’s a major reason why Europe now feels shabbier and more hardscrabble than America, despite its beautiful old cities and low crime rates.
Europe needs to emulate societies that embrace the technological future. Japan is a good one, but an even better example might be Singapore. That city-state’s legendary founder, Lee Kuan Yew, believed that air conditioning was the crucial technology that allowed his country to become one of the richest on the planet:
“Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics.
Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency.”
Europe would do well to listen to his advice.
Absorption of foreign technology simply makes the difference between a poor society and a rich one — between a technologically advanced society and a backward one. Most countries have their blind spots here, but Europe’s spasmodic rejection of air conditioning is far more costly than most.
In fact, portable air conditioners with a single tube are less effective than other types of air conditioners, because they create a pressure differential that pulls some hot air in from outside. Window units, mini splits, heat pumps, and central AC do not suffer from this problem. You can also get a portable unit with two different hoses, which greatly reduces the problem. But that being said, portable air conditioners DO cool a room down.
Though we do see the occasional NYT op-ed urging Americans to swear off AC. Fortunately, no one listens to this crap.
This is actually a bit of an overestimate, since the European households who already have AC are probably ones who need it more.
The deserted remains of Ingles Plaza sit on a stretch of U.S. Highway 70, destroyed by flooding from tropical storm Helene with only dirt and construction equipment to mark what was once home to Swannanoa’s only grocery store and post office.
At an intersection nearby, a hand-painted sign reads, “Wanted Swannanoa Post Office” above a photo of community members lined up outside the shuttered building. After months of closure, the post office was recently demolished after Ingles, who leased the building, opted not to reopen the facility.
Swannanoa, a small unincorporated community of around 5,000 residents roughly 10 miles east of Asheville, North Carolina, is largely considered to be Helene’s “ground zero” by Buncombe County officials. When tropical storm Helene devastated Western North Carolina in September 2024, Swannanoa endured large-scale destruction.
More than 18 months later, the community is still recovering. But while the strip mall has been cleared of debris, there is no new post office to anchor it. Instead, residents are redirected to the Grace Station Post Office in North Asheville, nearly 13 miles from the old site and a long journey’s worth of hassle for residents. And they’re not alone.
In fact there are six post offices still shuttered across Western North Carolina, a region that houses 11% of the state’s population. Since Helene, residents in those communities have been deprived of reliable mail, furthering their sense of lingering aftermath from the storm.


“Some people will never really totally recover,” said Dan Slagle, 73, a retired postal worker who has lived in Swannanoa since 1979. “But it put this community of people closer together. And we just can’t let our post office leave us.”
Slagle is the culprit behind the “Wanted” sign and has spearheaded community efforts to bring the post office back as part of his work with the Swannanoa Grassroots Alliance. In his Swannanoa home, he has boxes filled with hundreds of papers, print-outs of correspondence with officials, reopening notices and personalized postcards.
“It’s a service that has been for the U.S. population for over 250 years, before we were even a country. It’s mandated that you get delivery six days a week, but it’s not mandated that every little nook and cranny has to have a post office,” said Slagle. “The Postal Service is one of the centers of communities. 28778, that’s the zip code for all of us that live here. All of us can congregate at the post office, and it’s a community service, just like the grocery store… which we don’t have.”
Although some federal post office buildings damaged by the storm have recently been restored and are now fully operational — Chimney Rock and Barnardsville are examples — Swannanoa is one of several communities where the post office needs to be relocated because the original site was damaged beyond repair.
According to a statement from United States Postal Service representative Philip Bogenberger, “offices in Micaville, Swannanoa and Marshall require relocation since the buildings were damaged beyond repair. In Micaville, the building was washed away. In Swannanoa and Marshall, the property owners opted not to repair the facilities. The relocation process continues for those offices, and our goal is to find alternate locations nearby for each office.”
In other communities, including Plumtree, Fleetwood and Green Mountain, the post offices damaged by Helene are set to reopen. However, the constant back-and-forth has caused confusion and mail delays for customers frustrated and exhausted with the delay.
| Post Office Location | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Chimney Rock | Reopened Feb. 2026 | Full retail & P.O. box service restored |
| Barnardsville | Reopened | Fully operational |
| Swannanoa | Relocation pending | Demolished; residents sent 13 mi. to Grace Station |
| Marshall | Closed | Residents rerouted 38 mi. round-trip to Weaverville |
| Micaville | Relocation pending | Building washed away entirely |
| Plumtree | Set to reopen | Timeline unclear |
| Fleetwood | Set to reopen | Timeline unclear |
| Green Mountain | Set to reopen | Timeline unclear |
“Marshall is the county seat for Madison County. People have to drive to Buncombe County, to a different county to get their mail,” said Gina Mashburn Heath, a mother of three who lives in Marshall. “And you cannot mail anything out in our area.”
All Marshall residents were redirected to Weaverville, a 38-mile round-trip. “Weaverville is a small town. How nuts for the Weaverville post office to also have all, like most, a big chunk of Madison County and Barnardsville, which is in Buncombe, and Alexander, which is in Buncombe, as well as all their own mail.”

A month after the flood, Swannanoa residents were redirected to a mobile unit down the road in the town of Oteen. Two months after the storm, an undated notice appeared on the door of the mobile unit informing residents that they would be relocated to Grace Station, where they have been ever since. There was “no postal person listed or contact,” said Slagle.
The original Swannanoa Post Office building was a leased facility that sustained significant damage from floodwaters. But Ingles Market Inc., a regional supermarket chain that owned the property, chose not to repair it and took it off the market, forcing USPS’s relocation. According to federal law, the Postal Service can only lease properties that are actively on the market.
A full 18 months after the storm, in March 2026, customers received a USPS relocation card in the mail, inviting them to send comments on a new proposed relocation, without specifying a site for the relocation. USPS clarified the 45-day comment period ended April 19, 2026. Now, Swannanoa residents await a finalized relocation site.

In the aftermath of Helene, 21 post offices in Western North Carolina were forced to close their doors after sustaining major damage. According to a statement from USPS, 15 have reopened in the 18 months since. The Chimney Rock Post Office is the latest, and is providing full retail and P.O. box services.
State officials, including North Carolina Republican Sen. Ted Budd and Republican Congressman Chuck Edwards, who represents North Carolina’s 11th congressional district, have advocated for the restoration of the shuttered post offices to varying degrees. In September 2025, Congressman Edwards led an amendment that would require USPS to produce a concrete plan on reopening the closed facilities and reestablishing service.
“Hurricane Helene devastated much of our rural infrastructure, including local post offices that serve as lifelines for our communities. While significant progress has been made to rebuild across Western North Carolina, the restoration of postal facilities has lagged,” Edwards said in a statement. “That’s why I led an amendment requiring the U.S. Postal Service and its Office of Inspector General to provide Congress with a clear plan and timeline to reopen these facilities and fully restore service.”
Earlier in the year, he raised concerns about the inoperable post offices to USPS Inspector General Tammy Hull, but was met with vague restoration plans. “Several post offices remain inoperable, forcing residents to travel up to an hour to access services,” said Edwards to Hull in an April 2025 General Government Subcommittee hearing.
More recently, in March 2026, United States Postmaster General David Steiner testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform about the financial future of USPS, proposing Congress grant the Postal Service “greater legal authority to make retail network changes.”

Main Street, the central business artery that runs through Chimney Rock, a mountain town around 25 miles southeast of Asheville, is home to the town’s sole post office. Service was restored on Feb. 23, 2026, after nearly 17 months.
Peter O’Leary, Chimney Rock’s mayor and the owner of Bubba O’Leary’s on Main Street, recalled how residents had to open P.O. boxes in order to receive mail. “If you want your address to be Chimney Rock, you have to have a P.O. box. I couldn’t just walk across the street or down the street and get my mail. I had to actually get in a vehicle and drive,” said O’Leary.
Shelly McCormack’s family has owned Riverwatch Bar and Grill on Main Street for 27 years. She said the absence of a post office created a headache for her parents and other business owners. “It was being sent to Lake Lure and then it would have to be forwarded back to Hendersonville,” said McCormack. “It was just unclear.”
Max Brown, a college student who works at Riverwatch Coffeehouse and Gift Shop, grew up in Chimney Rock but moved to Asheville two months before Helene. When the Chimney Rock post office closed, people not only experienced delays, but postal employees also lost their jobs. “A lot of the postmasters, after the storm hit, didn’t think that the post office was coming back, so they had all left. I think there’s only one or two there now that were here before the storm,” said Brown.
McCormack said she’s enthusiastic to see the post office fully functional again. “We have just made leaps and bounds in terms of progress since Helene took place. And we’re just so happy to see the post office back open, to be able to use it again.”
But other communities are still in the thick of restoration, with no end in sight. Marshall is another town with no post office, along with several other municipal buildings still not in existence 18 months later. The fire department, police station, town hall and courthouse buildings were all damaged by the flood and are now abandoned, while services have relocated to temporary buildings.

“It just adds to the discombobulation of everything that all those services that were housed downtown, as they should be, are now just in some random trailer or a room of a commercial building that’s unused,” said Mashburn Heath. “It’s like a game of hide and seek to try to find your basic municipal services.”
The building that housed the Marshall post office was privately owned and leased by the U.S. government. The former owners, an elderly couple unable to afford the costs of rebuilding, sold it to a local family. According to Mashburn Heath, the family bought it with the intention of having a functioning post office downtown again.
“If the idea was to abandon the downtown, we should not have let all the small business owners put so much time and energy and money into rebuilding,” said Mashburn Heath. “We brought our town back, with grassroots effort, and we’re there supporting people best we can with their businesses.”
Post offices have served as a vital means of communication for people for centuries. During Helene, digital communication was temporarily destroyed. Without cell service or internet access, many found themselves cut off from the rest of the world in an unprecedented blackout that in some places, lasted weeks.

Mashburn Heath recalled how difficult it was in the early days after losing her home, when she couldn’t get things in the mail. It’s hard “when you can’t get those important pieces of information, bills, documents, things that people even want to send you, to give you support while all this is going on.”
“We do a lot digital, but honestly, Madison County doesn’t last digital. In some places. A lot of us here love Madison County for that reason. It’s like, we’re kind of purposefully away from it all,” said Mashburn Heath. “People lost their computers, they lost their tablets. They lost their files. Mail is absolutely crucial … people needed to replace their documents and everything.”

According to the United States Postal Regulatory Commission, an independent regulatory agency, the Office of Public Affairs & Government Relations liaisons with Congress and other government agencies about high-level matters involving USPS, including service interruptions.
Slagle, who worked at the Swannanoa post office for 25 years before retiring in 2003, was a constant and familiar face for the community. “I saw a lot of people every day, and when they came through the door, it was always ‘Hey, how you doing?’ And I guess I remembered their P.O. Box number better than I remember their name,” he reflected.

The post Going postal: Residents refuse to give up the fight to have mail services restored appeared first on DCReport.org.
Excellent use of AI to create relatively accurate and realistic tours through history. Chloe is an engaging and personable guide–a fact of some importance.
Hat tip: Kevin Bryan.
The post Chloe vs. History appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
As part of it's Dealbook feature, the NYT yesterday included this conversation about The moral economics of prediction markets
"The economist Al Roth, a professor at Stanford University, shared a 2012 Nobel Prize for his work in market design and matching theory. He spoke with Sarah Kessler about his latest book, “Moral Economics,” which offers a framework for understanding controversial markets, and how it applies to prediction markets. The conversation has been edited and condensed.
Your book explores what you call repugnant markets — meaning some people don’t think they should exist — like prostitution, surrogacy and drugs. How do prediction markets fit in?
When I think about repugnance and prediction markets, I think back to when Darpa proposed a policy prediction market that became characterized as a terrorist prediction market, and people really objected to that.
That objection was sort of misplaced. It would be great if terrorists who were planning attacks wanted to tip their hand by betting on them in advance. But also, if you were a terrorist who knew about the 9/11 attacks in 2001, and you wanted to make money, you wouldn’t bet on a prediction market. You would short United Airlines and American Airlines.
What do you make of all the reports of insider trading on prediction markets?
The reason we forbid insider trading in securities markets is to give people confidence in them. Securities markets have an important financial function that is threatened by insider trading, and I’m not sure that prediction markets necessarily do.
What worries me about the current state of prediction markets and Washington insiders is more the blurring of private and public functions. I don’t think that being an associate of the president should allow you to bet on a Truth Social post by President Trump. That is very bad public policy, but not necessarily an indictment of prediction markets per se.
Do you have an opinion on whether prediction markets should be regulated by the C.F.T.C. or state gambling authorities?
Futures markets, like securities markets in general, play other roles in society. If you’re a farmer who’s growing wheat, a futures market allows you to sell your wheat before you’ve planted it, which allows you to buy the fertilizer and make plans. That’s one role for federal regulators.
The contract has a delivery date. It says on a certain day a freight car is going to deliver potatoes to me. If, for example, someone tried to corner the potato market by reserving all the freight cars so that you wouldn’t be able to deliver on the contract, the regulator could intervene.
With prediction markets, there’s nothing that has to be delivered. It’s just that someone has to adjudicate whether the bet was a yes or a no. That requires maybe some kind of regulation, but that seems more like a customer relations thing.
Is there anything that you would change about the design of prediction markets?
I have some ideas about what we can do about gambling and addiction. An appropriate regulator or consumer protection agency could start to require that apps allow you to put a limit on your betting.
Before the game starts, you can say to the app: When I’ve lost a hundred dollars, shut down. Don’t let me make any more bets.
And that might help some people just the way bartenders are supposed to stop serving you if you’ve had too much to drink. "
Bernie Sanders, posting on Twitter/X Thursday (don’t complain to me that he doesn’t use his Bluesky account):
Corporate greed is Tim Cook, the billionaire Apple CEO, claiming that hiking prices on Apple products by over $200 is “unavoidable” after it made $112 billion in profits last year & spent $310 billion on stock buybacks.
These price hikes aren’t unavoidable. They’re unacceptable.
It boggles the mind how anyone could post this and not question the common sense napkin math of a company spending 3× its annual profit on stock buybacks. That’s theoretically possible, I suppose, but obviously unsustainable. A company would have to burn through a cash hoard or incur massive amounts of debt to spend 3× its profit on anything. It makes no sense. Someone who doesn’t consider the common sense of those numbers probably shouldn’t be spouting off on anything related to economics. And of course Apple files an annual report with the SEC, easily searchable via the web, which plainly shows that the company spent $89 billion on stock repurchases last year, and paid shareholders $15 billion in dividends. Those numbers make sense for a company that earned $112 billion in profit.
I suspect Sanders is so ignorant of basic economics that he sees the ampersand in his tweet as additive — that Apple made $112 billion in profit and spent $310 billion in buybacks and thus had something like $420 billion of money “in the black” with which they could eat the cost of rising RAM and SSD components. But they’re not additive. Stock repurchases are purchases. If Apple actually had spent $310 billion on stock buybacks last year — which, to repeat, they most certainly did not — even Karl Marx might excuse them for raising prices on their products this year, because they’d be in a $200 billion hole they needed to dig out of.
But such concerns, obvious to anyone who’s taken an Econ 101 course in college, seldom stop ideologues.
Putting aside Sanders’s factually incorrect and nonsensical $310 billion figure, let’s just consider this general scenario: A company makes a product that consists of essential components they must purchase from suppliers. Something happens — outside the company’s control — that causes those essential components to rise in price significantly. Therefore the cost of goods for the company’s product increases significantly. What should the company do? Raise prices and pass those increased costs on to their customers, maintaining the same level of profit for themselves? Or hold prices steady and eat those costs, accepting lower profits or even negative margins, so that customers remain unaffected?
One can hold logically consistent views at both extremes. At one end, the belief that business is business and higher costs naturally result in higher prices passed along to customers. At the other end, the belief that companies should put the welfare of their customers ahead of their own profit seeking. Perhaps you think the answer is somewhere in-between: somewhat higher prices and somewhat lower profit margins. What you cannot do is hold a philosophically consistent logically coherent view where your answer to how a company should respond in such a scenario is contingent on what the “something happens” is that caused component prices to rise.
When the “something happens” is a global RAM and SSD shortage resulting from the AI datacenter capex spending spree, Sanders’s tweet makes clear that he’s of the opinion that Apple should eat these costs.
But when the “something happens” was Trump’s tariffs, Sanders argued that (emphasis added) “Trump’s across-the-board tariffs are not the way to do it. We do not need a blanket and arbitrary sales tax on imported goods which will raise prices on products that the American people desperately need.” And again: “Trump’s blanket tariffs will just raise prices for American consumers and hurt our relationships with allies, undermining our global position.” Not “might” raise prices. “Will” raise prices.
Sanders arguing today that Apple should eat the entire cost of rising RAM and SSD components makes no more sense than this tweet from Donald Trump a year ago:
Walmart should STOP trying to blame Tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain. Walmart made BILLIONS OF DOLLARS last year, far more than expected. Between Walmart and China they should, as is said, “EAT THE TARIFFS,” and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!
Sanders’s tweet is better punctuated and capitalized, but it’s the same illogic. Zero economic sense, 100 percent ideological wishful thinking. Yelling angrily doesn’t make your argument any more compelling or coherent.
From the bottom of Rolfe Winkler’s report for The Wall Street Journal Thursday, on Apple’s unprecedented price increases (gift link):
Apple’s price hikes arrived the day after Micron Technology, the big American maker of memory and storage, reported blowout quarterly earnings, touting gross profit margins that topped 80%. Shares jumped 16% after the close and appeared likely to power a Thursday rally among semiconductor stocks. [...]
In an interview Wednesday night, Micron Chief Business Officer Sumit Sadana said the company couldn’t make investments during the memory market’s last downturn, when Micron’s gross profits went negative, in part because certain customers took advantage to pay rock-bottom prices.
“We told a couple of the customers who were being very aggressive with pricing at that time that this is not constructive,” he said, without naming Apple, adding that low prices discouraged capital investments. “A lot of the industry investments got shut down in 2023 because of really poor pricing and really poor margins.”
I overlooked this segment when I read (and linked to) Winkler’s report Thursday. It really does seem clear that Sadana is blaming Apple for not cutting Micron any slack when the supply/demand curve for RAM had a different look in 2023. I’m sure Micron’s current 80 percent margins are here to stay this time, so getting a few jabs in at Apple will never come back to bite Micron and Sadana.
Observers are noting that the reflecting pool fiasco, in which Trump created the idea there was an emergency, ignored experts, bypassed normal procedures to give a wildly inflated contract to a crony, bragged about his success, ignored the problems, claimed his enemies had sabotaged him, and finally stationed troops around the landmark he had turned into a swamp, represents the Trump administration perfectly.
But a report by Michael Scherer of The Atlantic about Trump’s remodeling of the West Colonnade is perhaps an even better representation of the Trump presidency. In March, Trump tore up the light brown Tennessee flagstone that paved the walkway in the West Colonnade that connects the White House residence to the Oval Office and replaced it with polished black African granite carved in Italy. When a reporter asked Trump who was paying for the remodeling, Trump answered: “Paid for by me.”
But, as Scherer discovered, that was a lie. He examined National Park Service budget documents showing that the walkway replacement cost taxpayers $689,232, all part of a $1.3 million project that includes new hardware for nearby doors. Last year, Scherer reports, the National Park Service spent $347,503 to replace the stucco on the colonnade wall so Trump could hang pictures of the U.S. presidents alongside plaques featuring his own opinions of them. Documents say the project was a “Rush project at request of POTUS.”
Scherer explains that Trump has redirected taxpayer money from national parks around the country to his own projects, leaving the parks unable to make needed repairs or hire staff. Expected funding for more than 900 Park Service projects never arrived—including $424,000 to replace a guardrail on the edge of a cliff in Colorado’s Gunnison National Park that National Park Service employees identified as “a significant safety hazard for visitors.” For some parks, nearly 70% of approved funds have been pulled back.
Trump has also pulled National Park Service staff to Washington, D.C., for his Freedom 250 events, a crisis because the Park Service has lost almost a quarter of its staff since he took office. In his 2027 budget, Trump calls for cutting staff by another 3,967 full-time employees, or 31%.
That budget also asked for another $10 billion to beautify Washington, a sum that Scherer notes is nearly eight times as large as all the money spent on National Park Service projects in 2025. The Senate Appropriations Committee stripped that request out of its marked-up version of the president’s budget.
The administration appears eager to keep what’s happening in the national parks out of sight. Early this year, the Department of the Interior instructed its employees that they could not share information about serious injuries or deaths on public lands, instead redirecting all such information through the Department of the Interior’s Office of Communications.
As outdoors writer Wes Siler reports in his Wes Siler’s Newsletter, the Interior Department “manages the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Reclamation, and Bureau of Indian Affairs. Those agencies are responsible for about 20 percent of all land area in the United States, hundreds of millions of annual visitors, and spend annually $88.6 billion taxpayer dollars.”
As Jake Spring reported in the Washington Post, more than 300 million people visit America’s national parks each year, and about 350 of them die (not always from accidents). In the past, park service employees could identify deaths or injuries from unsafe conditions, warning others from the area. Now the communications team from the Interior Department controls that information and does not always release it.
It did not release the information that a 72-year-old man died of extreme heat on a popular trail in the Grand Canyon on June 12 of this year. NPS employees wanted to warn other visitors, but the Interior Department did not release the information. Four days later a couple aged 67 and 68 also died of extreme heat on the same trail.
The profligate use of our tax dollars for whatever Trump and his cronies want while the American people suffer is at least as representative of Trump’s reign as is the peeling, algae-filled, militarily guarded Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
This president and administration are turning the extraordinary resources of the American people—the things we the people have created over decades with our effort and our tax dollars—to their own ends. We are paying for their theft with a significantly diminished country, and even with our lives.
On May 29, 2026, the administration proposed dramatic changes to the awarding of federal research grants. Rather than continue awarding research grants on the basis of a merit system established through rigorous peer review, the administration proposes to base federal research grants on approval by political appointees.
It refers to an executive order Trump signed in May 2025 that said previous governments had “politicized” science with their response to the Covid-19 pandemic, concern about climate change, and incorporation of diversity, equity, and inclusion in scientific studies and called for a return to “a gold standard” of scientific research.
The lead driver of the proposed change is the Office of Management and Budget, directed by Christian nationalist Russell Vought. Vought was a key author of Project 2025, and the plan will empower his team in the executive branch to divert tax dollars to channels he approves, rather than those scientists support. The proposed changes limit foreign collaboration, and if the government decides a grant is failing to “effectuate program goals, Federal agency priorities, or the national interest,” the OMB can yank the grant.
Americans created world-class research universities and institutions during and after World War II as it became clear that it was more cost effective for the federal government to award grants to those researchers doing work their peers recognized as the best in the country, rather than trying to create such labs for the government. Relying on businesses, they realized, would limit scientific and medical research to avenues that promised to produce short-term profits. So they developed a web of universities and scientific institutions where tax dollars could be allocated only to those doing superior work in areas that offered long-term scientific and medical advances.
In the process of doing that work, university researchers share their discoveries with each other and train the next generation of scientists, creating an extensive network of scientific advances that generate new products and new treatments, and that has made the United States a world leader.
The American people paid for that system with their work and their money. Now Trump’s hand-picked loyalists want to dismantle it to advance their own ideology. As economist Paul Krugman noted in February in his newsletter, destroying faith in science and experts leaves people open to the idea that they should reject “the establishment” and instead follow right-wing leaders like Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Krugman also notes that, according to McKinsey, spending on wellness in the U.S. alone amounts to about $500 billion a year. Americans paid close to $70 billion for nutritional supplements alone.
And as the administration tears up the system, people die. An ardent supporter of Secretary Kennedy, Dr. Joseph Mercola, has urged parents to be skeptical of Vitamin K shots for newborns, which the American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended since 1961. Right-wing figures pushed those concerns, and Kennedy has refused to recommend the shots, which prevent catastrophic bleeding in newborns.
In May, Duaa Eldeib of ProPublica reported that parents increasingly are refusing the shots and that newborn deaths from vitamin K deficiency bleeding are on the rise. Mercola has now publicly and strongly changed his previous stance.
It’s not just babies at risk. After World War I the so-called Spanish Flu decimated U.S. soldiers coming home from the war, and as Cristina Stassis of Air Force Times reports, since the 1950s the military has required that service members be vaccinated against the flu. In April, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called the requirement “overly broad and not rational” and complained that it would “weaken our warfighting capabilities.”
Just two months later, more than 220 troops at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas came down with the flu. One sick trainee died of a medical emergency; an investigation of the cause of his medical emergency is underway.
When Hegseth changed the requirement, Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS), an Air Force veteran, noted that “[t]he reason it was mandatory was to enhance readiness.” Representative Joaquin Castro (D-TX), who represents the district where Lackland is located, posted that Hegseth’s ending of flu vaccinations “was a reckless decision that put troops in harm’s way and undermined our military readiness.”
Greg Jaffe and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that after the outbreak, the Air Force required vaccines for all the recruits at Lackland.
Just as administration officials are tearing up the scientific research Americans have built over the last 80 years, Hegseth is also tearing up the U.S. military, which Americans have built with their blood and treasure since 1775.
Filip Timotija of The Hill noted that since he took over at the Pentagon last year, Hegseth has gotten rid of more than two dozen senior military leaders with little or no explanation. Those include General C.Q. Brown Jr., the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the Navy’s chief of naval operations; Admiral Linda Fagan, the commandant of the Coast Guard; General Randy George, the Army’s chief of staff; and General James Mingus, the vice chief of staff of the Army.
Last week, Hegseth added General Chris Donahue, the commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa, to that list. Donahue has had a storied career and commands wide bipartisan support in Congress. Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) called the firing “yet another unforced error from a Secretary leading the Pentagon with bro-culture bravado rather than restraint, humility and careful stewardship of the finest fighting force in the world.” Hegseth “is more interested in purging people he perceives as insufficiently loyal than empowering proven patriots who can actually lead,” Tillis wrote. “It’s sophomoric. It’s unserious. And it’s bringing great harm to our Department of Defense.”
That lack of seriousness has given us Trump’s debacle in Iran, where the U.S. and Iran are trading strikes again over Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz. Benoit Faucon, Summer Said, Costas Paris, and Robbie Grammar of the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Iran expects a payoff of $40 billion a year in payments for security, safety, and environmental services from vessels crossing the strait, leaving Iran stronger after Trump’s war than before it.
Tonight, Trump made apocalyptic threats against Iran, posting that “United States aircraft just struck Iranian missile and drone storage locations, and coastal radar sites, for violating the Cease Fire Agreement, AGAIN! It is very possible that they will never learn! There may come a point when we are no longer able to be reasonable, and will be forced to militarily complete the job that we very successfully started. If that happens, the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist!”
Administration officials and their cronies are turning the country we worked so hard to build into a vehicle for building their own power and their own wealth, and Republicans in Congress have steadfastly refused to stop the looting or even to investigate. So lax have they been that last month, Emily Davies of the Washington Post reported that White House lawyers had begun private briefings for administration officials on how to prepare for congressional oversight in case Democrats win the midterms.
Yesterday House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), a Trump loyalist, warned a crowd at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in Washington, D.C.: “If we were to lose the midterms, heaven forbid, these Democrats—y’all, impeachment’s not even the big concern. They will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body, and they’ll go after the president’s family, the Cabinet, his donors, and friends—half of you in this room will be targeted. I run the protection program. I’ll take care of you. Ok, we’re gonna win. We’re gonna win the midterms.”
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Notes:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/06/national-parks-trump-white-house-renovations/687700/
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/05/restoring-gold-standard-science/
https://magazine.hms.harvard.edu/articles/brief-history-federal-funding-basic-science
https://www.ucdavis.edu/magazine/why-federally-funded-research-so-important
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/18/us/flu-outbreak-air-force-base.html
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5941693-hegseth-ousts-general-donahue-pentagon/
https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/27/world/live-news/iran-war-strikes-trump
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/06/reflecting-pool-america-250-trump/687716/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/05/04/white-house-briefs-staff-midterm-losses/
https://www.propublica.org/article/vitamin-k-shot-joseph-mercola-reversal-babies
X:
michaelscherer/status/2070545059355689188
JoaquinCastrotx/status/2067772807199535297
SenThomTillis/status/2070175173735522480
Bluesky:
Twelve minutes long:
“One stop shopping” for why AI will not put everyone out of work.
The post My ARC talk on AI and jobs appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
There is talk of this with the pending change in PM, but I would not do it. I am quite aware that a) not all of the privatisations went well, and b) American data indicate that state-owned utilities do not seem very economically different than, or less efficient than, privately-owned utilities. Especially for water, where the natural monopoly elements are especially strong.
Nonetheless massive restructuring will be needed to make all of these companies, no matter who owns them, “AI companies.” That will require capital raises and pay scales that will be difficult for the public sector to pull off. So right now renationalisation would be a mistake.
Most generally, I would say the returns to resource mobility will be rising significantly.
The post Renationalising British utilities appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

SpaceX flew its final Starlink mission of the month aboard a Falcon 9 rocket launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Sunday morning.
The Starlink 17-40 mission will add another 24 broadband internet satellites to SpaceX’s low Earth orbit constellation. The company has more than 10,700 satellites currently in obit in order to statistics tracked by astronomer and orbital tracker, Jonathan McDowell.
Liftoff of the Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4 East occurred at 9:09 a.m. PDT (12:09 p.m. EDT / 1609 UTC). The rocket flew on a south-southwesterly trajectory upon leaving the pad.
SpaceX launched the Starlink 17-40 mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number B1088, making its 17th flight. Previous missions for this booster were NROL-126, Transporter-12, SPHEREx, NROL-57, and 12 Starlink deliveries.
A little more than eight minutes after liftoff, B1088 landed on the drone ship, ‘Of Course I Still Love You’, positioned in the Pacific Ocean. If successful, this will be the 206th landing on this vessel and the 630th booster landing to date.
During the first half of 2026, has launched its Falcon 9 rockets a total of 75 times and of those, 59 were in support of its Starlink constellation.
Here’s a breakdown of SpaceX’s Starlink launches per month versus its total for that month:
My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring DF last week to promote Auth.md, their new open protocol for AI agent registration. (Who’d have thunk that I’d be getting paid to promote new uses for Markdown 22 years after releasing it?)
Sign-up forms were built for humans in browsers, so how do AI agents programmatically register with services? That’s the question Auth.md aims to answer. It’s a single Markdown file you host at your domain that tells agents how to register your users, which flows you support, what scopes you expose, and how credentials get issued. It’s like robots.txt but for agent registration.
Cloudflare, Firecrawl, and Resend have already adopted it.
An open protocol authored by WorkOS. Read the spec.