FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report
The 2025 Internet Crime Report was published a few weeks ago, but I only just saw it.
Lots of interesting statistics.
The 2025 Internet Crime Report was published a few weeks ago, but I only just saw it.
Lots of interesting statistics.
Space companies and investors in Europe are closely watching SpaceX’s plans to go public, an event that could spur new investment in other companies.
The post European space industry watching SpaceX IPO plans appeared first on SpaceNews.
AMSTERDAM – European nations are adopting a mix of sovereign, bilateral, federated and dual-use commercial technologies to enhance military readiness. “When we talk about sovereignty, independence, safety or security, we […]
The post Nations opt for a mix of sovereign, bilateral, federated and commercial space capabilities appeared first on SpaceNews.
In November, Starcloud sent a small satellite called Starcloud-1 into orbit via a SpaceX launch. The 60-kilogram spacecraft was the first to carry a compute system with an NVIDIA H100 […]
The post Starcloud’s path to 88,000 computing satellites appeared first on SpaceNews.
AMSTERDAM – Spire Global has established a facility in Munich to develop and manufacture as many as 100 small satellites annually. With manufacturing plants in Boulder, Colorado, Glasgow, Scotland, and […]
The post Spire expands European manufacturing with Munich plant appeared first on SpaceNews.
Europe has proposed reserving two-thirds of 2 gigahertz mobile satellite spectrum up for renewal next year for European operators, complicating SpaceX’s direct-to-device ambitions and the outlook for Viasat’s European Aviation Network.
The post Europe’s satellite spectrum proposal clouds SpaceX and Viasat plans appeared first on SpaceNews.
The Artemis 2 mission has captured global attention for obvious reasons. It signals a return to the moon, reflects geopolitical ambition and showcases the next phase of human spaceflight. But […]
The post Artemis 2 captured the world’s attention. It should change how we think about supply chains. appeared first on SpaceNews.
Oxford, UK – 27 May 2026 Archangel Lightworks, the laser communications company, has successfully completed field trials of the TERRA-M, the world’s smallest deployable operational optical ground station, proving its […]
The post World’s smallest deployable operational optical ground station proves capability in successful trials appeared first on SpaceNews.
SpinLaunch CEO Massimiliano “Massi” Ladovaz paints an ambitious picture of a rapidly shifting space industry driven as much by geopolitics and sovereignty as by engineering innovation. Ladovaz argued that SpinLaunch’s […]
The post As geopolitics reshape space, SpinLaunch sees an opening appeared first on SpaceNews.
NanoAvionics, founded in 2014, was known for producing individual satellites and small constellations until April, when the company won a 122.5-million-euro contract ($142 million) to build the initial 280 satellites […]
The post Kongsberg NanoAvionics sets sights on building and supporting sovereign constellations appeared first on SpaceNews.
AMSTERDAM – A former senior Ukrainian defense official called on SpaceX to tighten controls on Starlink terminals that she said are reaching Russian forces through third-party countries or intermediaries. Kateryna […]
The post Former Ukraine official calls for stricter restrictions on Russian use of Starlink appeared first on SpaceNews.
• SITAEL announces a growth plan targeting €200 million in revenues by 2031, currently supported by over €150 million in backlog and nine launches planned by 2030.• The company confirms […]
The post Sitael Accelerates Growth in Space: New Missions, Industrial Capacity and a Trajectory Towards 2031 appeared first on SpaceNews.
AMSTERDAM – Spire Global revealed another element of its campaign to rapidly scale satellite production in German: strategic cooperation with Schaeffer AG, a major German manufacturer of automotive systems and […]
The post Schaeffler AG joins forces with Spire to build sovereign European satellites appeared first on SpaceNews.
The Federal Aviation Administration will require SpaceX to complete an investigation into its latest Starship test flight before allowing the vehicle to fly again.
The post FAA requires mishap investigation into latest Starship launch appeared first on SpaceNews.
HASC 2027 NDAA supports realignment of the Space Development Agency and the Space Rapid Capabilities Office under a portfolio-based acquisition structure
The post House Armed Services draft bill eliminates SDA, Space RCO as separate entities appeared first on SpaceNews.
Where will humans go after Mars? Is Mars the end of the line or is it a steppingstone to somewhere else? If we “moon-to-Mars,” do we then “Mars-to-somewhere else?” These […]
The post Mars to Titan: the next rallying call? appeared first on SpaceNews.
AMSTERDAM – European industry representatives and legal experts are worried that the EU Space Act is too slow, too rigid and too bureaucratic. Speaking at SmallSat Europe, panelists said they […]
The post European space industry warns EU Space Act could slow competitiveness appeared first on SpaceNews.
In things I write here in the Editors’ Blog, I am both critical of mainstream news conventional wisdom and also interested in it as a political artifact in itself. Whether it is accurate, fair, quality journalism, it is a fact of the political geography on its own. So it’s important to understand, and I spend a lot of time trying to analyze and place it on that basis.
On that front I wanted to return to a point I’ve alluded to a few times recently, which is that just in the last week or so there’s been a shift in that elite news conventional wisdom toward what we and others have been saying for a couple months. And that is a new focus on the disconnect, really the chasm opening up between Donald Trump’s political fortunes and his political actions. It’s not simply that Trump isn’t adjusting or repositioning as a more conventional politician might. Trump’s never been that way. It’s out of character. But he’s accelerating into the most toxic parts of his presidency. In addition to general discontent about the economy and the very unpopular Iran War, he’s pushed things like his ballroom and his slush fund to the very top of the political agenda, even short-circuiting or delaying other parts of his agenda to further them.
This is the big political fact and perhaps the big question of the political moment. Why is this happening? Does Trump simply not care? Does he have a trick up his sleeve? Is he so coddled and insulated at this point that he truly thinks he’s all-powerful?
The New York Times put the matter this way in the sub-headline of a news analysis piece on May 23: “President Trump continues to act like he’s politically all-powerful, even in the face of indications that he is not.” The headline of the same piece provided the context: Defiant After Bad Week, Trump Pushes Ahead on Politically Unpopular Ideas. It’s the piece two days later that further got my attention: Trump’s Self-Indulgence Deepens G.O.P. Fears in Midterms. Here the story is more clearly elaborated. Trump is doubling down on the most unpopular parts of his agenda — or things like the ballroom and slush fund that strain the term “agenda” — as his Capitol Hill majorities are going onto life support. A Politico PM piece that came out minutes before I published this post brought Trump himself in to make the point. “Trump: ‘I don’t care about the midterms’”. It is a feature of the moment that requires an extra-political explanation — either a secret election-gaming fix, as some imagine, or something within Trump himself or his perceptions of the world around him that has pulled him outside of the conventional math of political calculation.
We’re seeing this now because the evidence in front of us has become so overwhelming. On another level, though, his political weakness has taken the juice out of his constant razzmatazz of political domination — the stunts, the takedowns, the cartoonish public choreography, the ritual slayings of former allies. Trump has always used these spectacles of power to keep alive the idea that he always has the last say, that he’s always the strongest, toughest guy in the room. He punishes; others endure, as sure as gravity pulls objects down rather than up. But the scale of the unpopularity and political weakness is just too great. They’ve reached a critical mass where the whole carnival of power isn’t resonating in the same way, or maybe not at all. The change is both being driven by and driving his deteriorating hold on Capitol Hill. These stunts and antics are a kind of ideational gerrymandering, aimed at holding perceptions of Trump’s power — and thus to a real degree the reality of his power — in place. But like an electoral gerrymander, in the face of sufficient unpopularity they become brittle and can break suddenly. And that’s what appears to be happening.
The land is always changing, sometimes by human hands: cities are built, farms expanded, and forests logged. Other changes lie mostly outside people’s control: wildfires burn through communities, and hurricanes reshape coastlines. For most of the past four decades, observations from the Landsat satellite record show that humans have dominated changes to the U.S. landscape. Recent research revealed a shift in that trend, suggesting that disasters might be catching up.
In a NASA-funded study published in Nature Geoscience, scientists analyzed nearly 35 years of data from NASA/USGS Landsat satellites to better understand what has been shaping the continental U.S. landscape. The researchers, led by former Landsat science team member Zhe Zhu, found that “human-directed disturbances” like logging, agricultural expansion, and construction have declined, while “wild disturbances” like wildfires and hurricanes—disasters that can be influenced by human activity but are not controlled by people—have risen in frequency and intensity.
Robert Emberson, associate program manager for the NASA Disasters program and not affiliated with the study, said that understanding the forces transforming the U.S. landscape is critical for future planning. “If you know what’s causing them, you can begin to plan around disasters,” Emberson said. “Any understanding of causal factors impacts the adaptation strategy.”
This research is especially useful for policymakers working to prepare communities for resilience, he said. For example, a region expecting to see increased wildfires could strategically perform prescribed burns, remove brush or dry grass around homes, and construct new buildings with fire-resilient materials.
Between 1988 and 2022, 18 percent of the land area in the continental U.S. was disturbed at least once, the researchers found. Adding repeated disturbances, the cumulative area disturbed rises to almost 700,000 square miles, equivalent to nearly one-third of the continental U.S. Humans drove more than half of that change, clearing or developing over 446,000 square miles of land—that’s bigger than the size of Texas and California combined. For example, the animation above, composed of Landsat images from 1985 to 2025, shows the expansion of Reno, Nevada, into a previously undeveloped desert landscape.
Meanwhile, wild disturbances—disasters like wildfires, hurricanes, and landslides—drove much of the remaining change, transforming more than 165,000 square miles of the continental U.S. The Landsat images in the animation below show areas burned by wildfires in Eldorado National Forest west of California’s Lake Tahoe from 1985 to 2025. Major fires in 1992, 2014, and 2022 cleared large swathes of forest, leaving behind bare ground that slowly reforested.
Although human activity has disturbed a larger cumulative area than wild events, the trends over time are moving in opposite directions. That is, land disturbance caused directly by people has been decreasing, while wild disturbance has been increasing.
Specifically, human-directed land disturbances decreased by nearly 232 square miles (600 square kilometers) each year over the course of the study period. Researchers attribute this change to declines in construction, agricultural expansion, and logging, likely brought about by a combination of policy changes, technological improvements, and the 2008 financial crisis’s effect on construction.
In contrast, land affected by wild disturbances increased by more than 77 square miles (200 square kilometers) per year. Fire, drought-related stress, and wind disturbances all became more frequent, likely due to climate warming and other environmental factors, the study authors wrote.
“What this study basically tells me is that what we’ve been doing is not working,” said Ramakrisna Nemani, a retired NASA scientist and co-author on this study. “We have to go back and come up with new strategies on how to deal with these natural disturbances.”
The study’s findings drew on the deep archive of Landsat data, which has long been a key resource for detecting change on Earth’s surface. Think of it like a “spot-the-difference” game. Historically, identifying differences between images required scientists to manually identify the source of the change; for example, using ground observations combined with satellite imagery to determine whether a bare spot resulted from wildfires or logging. For this study, scientists trained a new machine-learning algorithm to do that differentiation work for them.
They fed the algorithm 40 years of land-change data acquired by satellites, manually inspecting and identifying changes at 50,000 locations. After a decade of work, they developed a product that achieves more than 75 percent accuracy across most disturbance types.
The resulting product details the causes of disturbance across the continental U.S. over the course of nearly 35 years. With this information, communities can analyze the past to better plan for the future. “The USA is entering a new era of disturbance,” the study authors wrote. “The challenge now is to transform our relationship with disturbance from one of control to one of coexistence.”
NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, based on data from Qiu, S. et al. Animations by Ross Walter, Landsat Project Science Support. Story by Madeleine Gregory, Landsat Project Science Support.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
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The post A Shift in What’s Shaping U.S. Landscapes appeared first on NASA Science.
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Most of all, we cover Ptolemaic Egypt. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Toby cover how Alexander took over the empire almost without a fight, why Alexandria became the Manhattan of the ancient world, whether the era was as philosophically fertile as it was scientifically, whether your ancient doctor’s visit had positive expected value, what Egypt was actually exporting and selling, whether living standards rose above subsistence or stayed Malthusian, how the ethnic divide between Greek rulers and Egyptian subjects shaped society, what constrained the Ptolemaic Empire from becoming the next Rome, whether Cleopatra has been overhyped, what Julius Caesar was really thinking when he sided with her over her brother, the new frontiers in archeology, whether Herodotus can be trusted, what ancient Egypt knew about Israel and India, when Egyptian jewelry peaked and why, what triggered the sudden emergence of civilization across the ancient world, why a six-year-old Tyler knew King Tut better than Napoleon, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Either technologically or institutionally, what is it that the Persians had that the Egyptians did not?
WILKINSON: The Persians had a pretty formidable army. Their military technology was certainly superior to the Egyptians at the time that they conquered Egypt originally in the 6th century BC. Like many empires, I suppose, throughout history, they overreached themselves. They overextended themselves, and they found it increasingly hard to hold together this empire stretching all the way from the Aegean to the borders of India. Bits of the empire started to fragment and pull away. Egypt had always had this very strong sense of its own identity. When it had a chance to throw off the Persian yoke, it took it.
COWEN: Let’s think about some of the achievements of Ptolemaic Egypt as an era. Infrastructure. What did they do that was most impressive?
WILKINSON: Build Alexandria. Alexandria the city was a new foundation established by Alexander the Great to bear his name. Unlike all previous ancient Egyptian cities, it was a city built from the outset for commerce. It was a city built on the Mediterranean coast with a great natural harbor, with facilities for loading and offloading ships. It had a great lighthouse guarding the entrance to its harbor, which became one of the wonders of the world. The whole city was really designed from the get-go as a great commercial center looking outwards to the Mediterranean, rather than inwards to the rest of Egypt.
COWEN: Canals, artificial lake. What else did they do?
WILKINSON: They built a city quite unlike anything previously seen in the valley of the river Nile. In fact, any inhabitant today of a modern city would recognize the grid iron pattern of streets. Streets intersecting at right angles, that was something completely unheard of until this point in Egypt with vast public buildings. This was the Manhattan of the ancient world, if you like, in scale, in grandeur, and in the level of commercial activity.
And:
EN: What were the main exports of the Alexandria region? What are they selling, making?
WILKINSON: Oh, the two big exports that account for the lion’s share of Egypt’s wealth at the time are gold and grain. Gold has been mined in Egypt for millennia up to this point, but it’s still the place in the ancient world that produces large quantities of gold. Of course, gold has always been a great currency of international commerce.
Then Egypt is famed as the breadbasket of the ancient world. It produces a superabundance of grain thanks to the fertility of the Nile and the benign climate. It produces more than it needed for its own consumption, by comparison with poorer agricultural regions in Greece and Asia Minor, which struggled to produce enough food. Yes, gold and grain were the absolute engine of Egyptian prosperity.
COWEN: There’s metalwork, there’s glass. What else is there, manufacturing, as we would call it today?
WILKINSON: Oh, yes. There’s a big ceramics industry, so producing not just pots, but terracotta statues and votive objects. There’s glassmaking, as you’ve said. There’s advanced metallurgy, goldsmithing, ironworking, copper and bronze foundries. There’s what we might call the decorative arts, so sculpture, painting. All of these things thrived in ancient Alexandria.
COWEN: Do they have living standards sustainably above subsistence, or is this a Malthusian equilibrium, where they get some wealth and then more people survive and the wage falls again, and it doesn’t get much above what is required to keep people alive?
Recommended, informative and interesting throughout. And I am very happy to recommend all of Toby’s books, including his latest
The post My excellent Conversation with Toby Wilkinson appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
So I waked by 3 o’clock, my mind being troubled, and so took occasion by making water to wake my wife, and after having lain till past 4 o’clock seemed going to rise, though I did it only to see what she would do, and so going out of the bed she took hold of me and would know what ailed me, and after many kind and some cross words I began to tax her discretion in yesterday’s business, but she quickly told me my own, knowing well enough that it was my old disease of jealousy, which I denied, but to no purpose. After an hour’s discourse, sometimes high and sometimes kind, I found very good reason to think that her freedom with him is very great and more than was convenient, but with no evil intent, and so after awhile I caressed her and parted seeming friends, but she crying in a great discontent. So I up and by water to the Temple, and thence with Commissioner Pett to St. James’s, where an hour with Mr. Coventry talking of Mr. Pett’s proceedings lately in the forest of Sherwood, and thence with Pett to my Lord Ashley, Chancellor of the Exchequer; where we met the auditors about settling the business of the accounts of persons to whom money is due before the King’s time in the Navy, and the clearing of their imprests for what little of their debts they have received. I find my Lord, as he is reported, a very ready, quick, and diligent person. Thence I to Westminster Hall, where Term and Parliament make the Hall full of people; no further news yet of the King of France, whether he be dead or not.
Here I met with my cozen Roger Pepys, and walked a good while with him, and among other discourse as a secret he hath committed to nobody but myself, and he tells me that his sister Claxton now resolving to give over the keeping of his house at Impington, he thinks it fit to marry again, and would have me, by the help of my uncle Wight or others, to look him out a widow between thirty and forty years old, without children, and with a fortune, which he will answer in any degree with a joynture fit for her fortune. A woman sober, and no high-flyer, as he calls it.
I demanded his estate. He tells me, which he says also he hath not done to any, that his estate is not full 800l. per annum, but it is 780l. per annum, of which 200l. is by the death of his last wife, which he will allot for a joynture for a wife, but the rest, which lies in Cambridgeshire, he is resolved to leave entire for his eldest son. I undertook to do what I can in it, and so I shall. He tells me that the King hath sent to them to hasten to make an end by midsummer, because of his going into the country; so they have set upon four bills to dispatch: the first of which is, he says, too devilish a severe act against conventicles; so beyond all moderation, that he is afeard it will ruin all: telling me that it is matter of the greatest grief to him in the world, that he should be put upon this trust of being a Parliament-man, because he says nothing is done, that he can see, out of any truth and sincerity, but mere envy and design.
Thence by water to Chelsey, all the way reading a little book I bought of “Improvement of Trade,” a pretty book and many things useful in it.
So walked to Little Chelsey, where I found my Lord Sandwich with Mr. Becke, the master of the house, and Mr. Creed at dinner, and I sat down with them, and very merry. After dinner (Mr. Gibbons being come in also before dinner done) to musique, they played a good Fancy, to which my Lord is fallen again, and says he cannot endure a merry tune, which is a strange turn of his humour, after he has for two or three years flung off the practice of Fancies and played only fidlers’ tunes. Then into the Great Garden up to the Banqueting House; and there by his glass we drew in the species very pretty.
Afterwards to ninepins, where I won a shilling, Creed and I playing against my Lord and Cooke. This day there was great thronging to Banstead Downs, upon a great horse-race and foot-race. I am sorry I could not go thither.
So home back as I came, to London Bridge, and so home, where I find my wife in a musty humour, and tells me before Ashwell that Pembleton had been there, and she would not have him come in unless I was there, which I was ashamed of; but however, I had rather it should be so than the other way.
So to my office, to put things in order there, and by and by comes Pembleton, and word is brought me from my wife thereof that I might come home. So I sent word that I would have her go dance, and I would come presently. So being at a great loss whether I should appear to Pembleton or no, and what would most proclaim my jealousy to him, I at last resolved to go home, and took Tom Hater with me, and staid a good while in my chamber, and there took occasion to tell him how I hear that Parliament is putting an act out against all sorts of conventicles, and did give him good counsel, not only in his own behalf, but my own, that if he did hear or know anything that could be said to my prejudice, that he would tell me, for in this wicked age (specially Sir W. Batten being so open to my reproaches, and Sir J. Minnes, for the neglect of their duty, and so will think themselves obliged to scandalize me all they can to right themselves if there shall be any inquiry into the matters of the Navy, as I doubt there will) a man ought to be prepared to answer for himself in all things that can be inquired concerning him.
After much discourse of this nature to him I sent him away, and then went up, and there we danced country dances, and single, my wife and I; and my wife paid him off for this month also, and so he is cleared.
After dancing we took him down to supper, and were very merry, and I made myself so, and kind to him as much as I could, to prevent his discourse, though I perceive to my trouble that he knows all, and may do me the disgrace to publish it as much as he can. Which I take very ill, and if too much provoked shall witness it to her. After supper and he gone we to bed.
The upper galaxy might be more photogenic, but the lower galaxy is more unusual.
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him. Richard does have a new book coming out, Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster. While I liked the book (and blurbed it), I do not feel our conversation about the book would be that interesting — too much beating up on the stupidities of other people, which is an activity not in short supply. So we agreed to (mostly) discuss Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo instead. Given that, what should I ask Richard?
The post What should I ask Richard Hanania? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
NASA officials announced contract awards for the initial elements of a lunar base on Tuesday, including two rovers that will provide mobility to astronauts.
With the series of announcements, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman sought to maintain momentum around a Moon Base initiative revealed two months ago as part of the space agency's return to the Moon. "For those waiting patiently, the grand return is close at hand, and we will not slow down," he said.
The manager for the lunar base, Carlos Garcia-Galan, said the space agency had selected two companies, Astrolab and Lunar Outpost, to build approximately 1-ton rovers that would be ready for delivery to the Moon in 2028. Astrolab will receive $219 million for its "CLV-1" rover, and Lunar Outpost $220 million for its "Pegasus" rover, building upon initial contracts awarded two years ago. Each rover is expected to have a range of 200 km and be capable of driving autonomously, with guidance from operators on Earth, in addition to being driven by astronauts.
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Hey there! This is Craig Mod broadcasting Ridgeline from my new home-cooked newsletter software, mailbot2000. An issue of Roden came out last week and was sent via mb2k, if you’re subbed to Roden and didn’t get it, please let me know / check your spam. If you are getting this and didn’t “Yo” me for Roden, please reply with a little “Yo!” to let me know this is arriving (it also signals to Gmail that this isn’t spam). OK, onward!
FAA requires SpaceX-led mishap investigation before resumption of Starship launches
The Federal Aviation Administration made the determination after analyzing the results of Starship Flight 12, which took place on Friday, May 22.
The Federal Aviation Administration said that SpaceX needs to complete a mishap investigation into the 12th flight of its Starship-Super Heavy rocket before it can launch Flight 13.
In a statement shared on Wednesday, the FAA said that it completed a “thorough assessment of the operation” of the Starship Flight 12 mission, which took place on Friday, May 22. It determined that the off-nominal performance of the Super Heavy booster, tail number Booster 19 “resulted in a mishap.”
“The FAA is requiring SpaceX to conduct a mishap investigation,” the agency said. “The FAA will oversee the SpaceX-led investigation, be involved in every step of the process, and approve SpaceX’s final report, including any corrective actions.”
Starship’s Raptor engines ignite during hot-staging separation pic.twitter.com/oNdU0Z4FQI
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 22, 2026
During the ascent phase of the mission, one of the 33 Raptor V3 engines on the Super Heavy booster, tail number B19, went out about 1 minute and 42 seconds into the ascent. Less than a minute later, at about the 2 minute, 22-second mark, SpaceX began intentionally shutting down engines as it progressed towards stage separation.
The staggered shutdown brought the booster from 32 down to five engines burning and then stage separation began. SpaceX’s on-screen graphics representing the engine status showed 12 out of 13 center engines were ignited at the 2 minute, 32-second mark, but as the outer ring started re-igniting several engines were shown to be out, which was not the plan.
“We are not seeing as many booster engines ignited as we expected for boostback, but we are seeing six good engines on ship,” said Dan Huot, a member of the SpaceX communications team, during SpaceX’s broadcast. “It looks like we just had an early boostback shutdown.”
In a post-mission write-up on its website, SpaceX gave an early assessment of what it saw at that point in flight.
“Following stage separation, the Super Heavy booster performed a directional flip maneuver and attempted its boostback burn. It was unable to light all planned engines and performed a partial boostback burn that ended early,” SpaceX wrote. “Super Heavy attempted to reignite its engines for the landing burn before experiencing a hard splashdown in the Gulf of America.”
While one of the three Raptor Vacuum engines on the Starship rocket’s upper stage (tail number S39), SpaceX was able to maneuver that part of the rocket to the intended splashdown site in the Indian Ocean. Teams determined during the mission that they would forego a planned re-ignition of one of the Raptor engines on S39 during its coast phase.
The FAA did not identify the engine issue on S39 as a driving factor for the SpaceX-led mishap investigation. Such an investigation is triggered by a determination from the FAA as part of its oversight role for commercial spaceflight to help ensure public safety.
The agency lists nine potential causes for such a review, including the following:
In its statement on Wednesday, the FAA confirmed that there “are no reports of public injury or damage to public property.” The agency didn’t state specifically which piece of SpaceX’s 14 CFR (Code of Federal Regulations) Part 450 launch license was violated during the off-nominal performance of B19, but noted that the FAA needs to gain assurance that a return to flight would not adversely affect public safety.
This is not SpaceX’s first rodeo though when it comes to mishap investigations. The company completed similar assessments following the first four launches of Starship-Super Heavy, when it was in its Version 1 configuration, and three mishap investigations following Flights 7-9, which consisted of Version 2 rockets.
This latest pause from launching will cause SpaceX to take a closer look at its Raptor 3 engines, which made their debut on Flight 12. While no public announcement has been made, the combination of a failed boostback burn with the booster combined with an engine out on the ship upper stage make it unlikely that SpaceX will attempt an orbital launch with Flight 13, which would also preclude a catch of the ship with the chopstick arms on the launch tower.
Additionally, SpaceX may also choose to forego a catch of the Super Heavy booster on Flight 13 as well and decide to repeat the soft splashdown in the Gulf planned for Flight 12.
Starship flip and landing burn at the end of its twelfth flight test pic.twitter.com/0iJUox3FJt
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 25, 2026
In its financial filing ahead of an anticipated initial public offering, SpaceX said that it aimed to begin deploying its Starlink Version 3 satellites in the back half of 2026. It hasn’t offered additional specifics as to when exactly that may happen.
“Our growth strategy depends on our ability to increase our launch cadence and payload capacity, which is dependent on the successful development of Starship at scale,” SpaceX wrote in its S-1 prospectus document.
“Unexpected design modifications, supply chain disruptions, anomalies, environmental issues, and other unforeseen technical challenges could result in delays or failures to deploy Starship on our anticipated schedule, which would delay or impede our ability to achieve our other business objectives, such as the deployment of our next-generation satellites, the expansion of our satellite-to-mobile connectivity services, and deployment of in-orbit AI compute infrastructure.”
SpaceX does have hardware in flow for Flight 13, which is expected to consist of Ship 40 and Booster 20. The company noted that it moved at least 10 Raptor engines from Booster 20 to Booster 19 after a 10-engine static fire test in March ended abruptly due to a ground-side issue.
It highlighted that test during the first episode of its new in-house docu-series about Starship, which was published in the weeks leading up to Flight 12. A release date for the second episode hasn’t been announced as of May 27.
“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” — David Hume
If you’re of a certain generation,1 you’ve probably seen the movie Office Space. If you haven’t, I strongly recommend it, both because it’s funny as heck, and because it’s a perfect encapsulation of a certain time and place in the world. The movie hearkens back to the big technology companies of the 1990s, when — according to the mythology, at least — nerdy engineers did all the real work while know-nothing middle-management types took all the credit. (You’ll also recognize this as the culture that gave rise to Dilbert.) The iconic character representing the backwardness and inefficiency of the 1990s corporation was Bill Lumbergh, the suspender-clad boss whose main function was to pester engineers to fill out useless paperwork.
A lot of nerdy types watched Office Space and assumed — or at least hoped — that in the end, the smart engineer types would take over corporate America from the plodding Lumberghs. And in fact, something like this happened in the 2010s — as Big Tech eclipsed much of the old economy, engineers became extremely highly paid, and began to fill the ranks of middle and upper management. It was the Revenge of the Nerds, the age of human capital, the triumph of humans who actually knew how to do difficult technical things.
But just as with the highly paid artisans of early 18th century Britain, the scarcity of human capital spurred a wave of automation. This year, AI found its killer app — Claude Code and other agentic coding tools that allow AI to do much (though not all) of the hard mental work that the much-put-upon engineers in Office Space were doing by hand. Although AI has not yet replaced many professions, the rapid progress has lots of people wondering what exactly humans will be useful for in 10 or 20 years. If AI does replace coders and mathematicians, what chance do any of the rest of us have?
Although some people in the AI industry still think that humans will be rendered economically irrelevant, that answer is increasingly unsatisfying. Realizing that a popular backlash against their industry is underway, many AI leaders and AI boosters are actively looking for the answer to the question of “What will humans be useful for?”. So far, the most popular answer, advanced by folks like Alex Imas, is that humans will be useful simply because they’re human:
The idea here is that it will become a sign of prestige and social status — which are always in short supply — to have humans do something for you instead of AI. No matter what else machines can do, they can never replace the knowledge that it’s a real human being making your sandwich.
I kind of have my doubts about this thesis — I’ve seen a lot of people pay extra to have a Waymo drive them instead of an Uber, so they didn’t have to sit with a human driver in the car. But maybe Imas is right; we’ll have to see.
But I have a slightly different answer to the question of “What will humans do?”. I think humans will continue to be required for something beyond simply being their beautiful human selves. I think there will be an increasing demand for human labor in the all-important job of maintaining AI alignment.
“Alignment” can mean many things in the AI community, but one basic definition is “ensuring that AI’s goals are the same as humans’ goals”. This is something that AI labs try to do before releasing their products to the world. But as AI becomes more and more agentic — as we turn over more complex and longer-lasting tasks to intelligent machines — it’s going to be harder and harder to keep them aligned with what humans actually want. And if there’s one thing humans will always have a comparative advantage at, it’s knowing what we want.2
In other words, it’s the lumbering Lumbergh, rather than the technically competent engineers, who I believe represents the ultimate future of human labor. He may seem boring and pointless, but by forcing engineers to file their TPS reports and do other seemingly useless tasks, Lumbergh is — however approximately and inefficiently — keeping the engineers’ goals aligned with those of the company they work for.
In the far future — maybe 10 or 20 years from now — this will mean that humans’ main productive function is to make sure that increasingly autonomous AIs stay on task instead of “reward-hacking”, rewriting their own utility functions, going rogue, or otherwise slacking off. Over the next few years, though, I expect human work to gently shade from technical work into alignment work, as we spend our hours verifying the output that AI delivers us.
Generative AI has dramatically decreased the cost of many kinds of output. With the touch of a button, you can write an essay, turn a data set into an academic paper, write a report for your boss, and so on.
Everyone is doing this, and the result is that our society is currently being overwhelmed by a wave of AI output of questionable quality — in other words, what has come to be known as “slop”.
Slop is rapidly taking over every domain of human output. Over one-third of new websites are now estimated to be AI-generated, and over half of internet traffic is now believed to be AI. AI-generated court filings and news articles are on the rise. Even respected public figures are now posting obviously AI-generated content as their own. AI-generated political influencers are becoming a standard tool for electoral campaigns.
1. As meat prices rise, the economics of Texas barbecue.
2. Economic historian Eric Jones has passed away.
3. Claims about the Pope and Claude. If true, further evidence for my Straussian hypothesis.
4. Koyama reviews Tyler Goodspeed on business cycles.
5. “Chinese battery manufacturer Calb has broken ground on a €2 Billion gigafactory in southern Portugal which is expected to represent more than 4% of the country’s GDP when in full swing.” Link here.
6. Web site on Italian decline.
The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
While in principle I don’t like gerrymandering, when fascists are willing to use extreme gerrymandering to hold power, we’re left with no alternative (if the worst we have to do to stop the fascists is gerrymander temporarily, we will have been very fortunate). And usually, when I think about the actual consequences of gerrymandering, it’s something along the lines of an anonymous fascist or fascist collaborator will lose their seat.
But not in Maryland. In Maryland, the Republican who would lose his seat is Republican Rep. Andy Harris. Harris hates D.C. residents, and the feeling is mutual. In Harris’ case, I will rejoice when he is no longer able to harass the residents of the mainland colony known as the District of Columbia.
Also, never underestimate the utility of spite for defeating fascists.
Romesh Vaitilingam writes to draw my attention to the recent survey of economists, concerning Living-Donor Kidney Transplants, conducted by the Clark Center for Global Markets at Chicago Booth.
He says
" I’m writing now as I thought you might be interested in the results of this survey, which was inspired by reading your recent Wash Post column."*
Below are the three questions they asked, and the results to each one. At the survey link above you can find the responses of the individual economists surveyed.
Only one economist appeared to be skeptical about kidney exchange, and I was surprised at who it was (respondents may answer these questions very quickly...).
The next question concerns the End Kidney Deaths Act, which was introduced to the respondents at these links:
The End Kidney Deaths Act gets a good deal of support (above) while an unspecified decentralized market gets considerably less support, below.
###########
*Earlier posts
Microsoft Copilot Cowork Exfiltrates Files
The biggest challenge in designing agentic systems continues to be preventing them from enabling attackers to exfiltrate data.In this case Microsoft Copilot Cowork (yes, that's a real product name) was allowing agents to send emails to the user's own inbox without approval... but those messages were then displayed in a way that could leak data to an attacker via rendered images:
Because these messages can contain external images that trigger network requests to external websites, data can be exfiltrated when a user opens a compromised message sent by the agent.
Since OneDrive can create pre-authenticated download links, a successful prompt injection could cause those links to be leaked, allowing files to be downloaded by the attacker.
Via Hacker News
Tags: microsoft, security, ai, prompt-injection, generative-ai, llms, exfiltration-attacks, lethal-trifecta
A lot of the emails I get from founders are now written in a hard-hitting journalistic style. I know they're written by AI, because no founder ever wrote this way before. And once you realize something is written by AI, it's hard not to ignore it.
I have never knowingly finished reading an email signed by a human but written by AI. It feels like being lied to, and who would stand for that?
[...] It makes me think less of the author. It means they can't write well unaided (or feel they can't), and that they're trying to trick me.
It's not impressive to use AI to write stuff for you; any teenager can do that.
Tags: writing, ai-misuse, paul-graham, generative-ai, ai, llms
California Brown Pelican, Snowy Egret, California Sea Lion, Harbor Seal, in San Mateo County, CA, US
We took our new folding kayak out in the harbor and saw sea lions and harbor seals chilling on the docks.
Yesterday, federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement pepper-sprayed Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) along with demonstrators outside Delaney Hall, a 1,000-bed detention center in Newark, New Jersey.
In February 2025 the administration signed a 15-year, $1 billion contract with the GEO Group, which operates private prisons, to expand the Delaney Hall facility dramatically as an ICE prison. New Jersey officials have argued in federal court that GEO Group does not have the required permits to operate the expanded facility, yet the facility opened about a year ago.
In February, twenty-five detainees at Delaney Hall signed a letter distributed by the national advocacy group for undocumented immigrants, Cosecha, as “Our Cry: A Letter from Inside Delaney Hall.” In the letter, they apologized “for the way we entered the United States,” explaining that “we were experiencing safety circumstances that endangered our lives and the lives of some members of our family.” They emphasized that they had surrendered to border authorities and continued to work within the system, attending check-ins, getting work permits, and paying taxes, before being seized by ICE agents.
They explained that they have not been afforded the legal hearings guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and are being pressured to self-deport under threats of being sent not back to their country of origin, but rather to third countries like Uganda. They noted that ICE agents have arrested children, the elderly, and people with medical issues and that the facility is overcrowded.
In a second letter, Delaney Hall detainees expanded their picture of their circumstances, noting that some of them have lived in the country for more than a decade, have citizen children, and were complying with legal requirements. They noted that detainees with HIV, cancer, diabetes, and heart conditions are not receiving proper medical attention.
In the second letter, signed by nearly 300 people, the detainees pleaded with “Senators, Congress members, foundations, and organizations that collaborate with immigrants” for help. In big letters at the bottom of the document they wrote: “S.O.S.,” the international distress call.
As Sophie Nieto-Muñoz of the New Jersey Monitor reported, about 300 detainees at Delaney Hall began a work and hunger strike on Friday over the conditions and treatment there. From inside, they called their family members outside, who shared their stories of worm-infested food, crowded conditions, and pressure to self-deport until guards cut their access to phones and tablets. Their goal, they said, was the immediate release of young detainees, the elderly, and those who are medically vulnerable, and to bring attention to the fact that immigration judges are ignoring their cases.
On Saturday, Kim and Representative Rob Menendez Jr. visited the facility.
Kim posted on social media that the detainees had accurately represented conditions there. He said he found an eighteen-year-old high school student crying and saying she just wanted to graduate; a pregnant woman without full OBGYN care; a woman who had suffered a miscarriage and had no medical care; a mother who was largely separated from her four-month-old baby, the husband of an American citizen wife and child; spoiled food; a court docket showing one judge with 74 cases to handle in one day, allowing the judge about five minutes per case; a man from South America being threatened with deportation to Congo, where there is an active Ebola outbreak; and so on.
Kim concluded: “Spending tens of billions of dollars from American families to perpetrate cruelty against people who aren’t violent criminals or felons is a waste of money and wrong…. Our government should focus on helping Americans afford their lives, not lock people up in for-profit detention centers where corporations like GeoGroup and CoreCivic make billions. No profiting off of human misery.”
On Sunday evening, dozens of protesters blocked the entrances to Delaney Hall after it appeared that guards were trying to move Martin Soto, one of those who announced the hunger strike. His wife, Gabriela Soto, has been organizing protesters on the outside. “The people inside Delaney Hall are fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, and members of our community,” she told Ryan Mancini of The Hill. “In New Jersey, we believe in the rule of law and that everyone deserves to be treated with basic dignity. We have a duty to safeguard the rights, health, and well-being of everyone within our borders.”
On Monday, New Jersey governor Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, was denied entry to the facility. She said that refusal raised “serious questions about what they are trying to hide from public view.” A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that Sherrill’s visit was “nothing more than a political stunt on Memorial Day when visitation is currently suspended due to riots outside in the facility.”
DHS also insisted that Democratic lawmakers were “spreading smears” about ICE and Delaney Hall. It denied that there was a hunger strike underway, and claimed that “ICE has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold actual U.S. citizens,” although nearly 50 ICE detainees have died. It claimed Democratic concerns were “a political stunt” and insisted those it is detaining are “the worst of the worst.”
On Monday, Kim, Sherrill, and New Jersey representatives Nellie Pou and LaMonica McIver were back at the facility along with about 150 protesters when federal agents sprayed the crowd with pepper balls and pepper spray. In a statement, DHS said: “No individuals were directly struck by pepper ball projectiles.” It then went on to call the protesters “dangerous rioters” and said their obstruction of the way out of the facility—preventing Soto’s removal—was “a federal crime.” It added that “assaulting law enforcement is a felony.”
In fact, far from being a dangerous rioter, then-representative Kim was caught on film in the evening of January 6, 2021, picking up the trash the actual rioters left behind in the Capitol.
On Monday afternoon, a DHS spokesperson said they had moved Soto to a different facility.
Representative McIver responded to DHS today, saying: “I was at Delaney Hall yesterday. Everything the detainees wrote in their S.O.S. letter is 100% correct. DHS is lying to keep their abuses from being exposed. And to make things worse, they pepper sprayed [Senator Andy Kim] and are lying about it to cover their tracks.”
The administration’s deportation policies were back in the news this weekend after the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), an agency within DHS, announced sweeping changes to policies for obtaining permanent residency in the U.S. Before this administration, about 800,000 people a year applied for a green card, and half of them applied from within the U.S. Now those people apparently will have to leave the country and apply through consulates abroad.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council explained that the new policy will “force people to leave their jobs, homes, and families for weeks or months, all at their own expense,” decisions made at consulates are “virtually unchallengeable” in court, and backlogs will get even worse than they already are. He notes that about half of all green cards go to people applying from within the U.S.: “everyone from spouses and children of US citizens to skilled professionals getting a green card through an employer.”
Law professor Daniel Kanstroom told Rebecca Schneid of Time magazine that it appears “[t]his Administration is trying to make it as difficult as possible for as many people as possible to attain permanent resident status.” Referring to the spouses and family members of people who are legal residents or U.S. citizens, he added: “We’re focusing now on the group of people who potentially have the strongest reasons to stay in this country legitimately.”
Schneid notes that in the Immigration and Nationality Act, Congress explicitly allowed people to change their residency status from within the U.S.
David Bier of the libertarian Cato Institute told Schneid that DHS has already slashed green card approvals in half simply by failing to process the applications.
On Friday, Judge Waverly Crenshaw of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee dismissed the criminal charges against Kilmar Ábrego García. After wrongfully deporting Ábrego García to El Salvador, the administration facilitated his return only after securing an indictment against him for human smuggling, based on a 2022 traffic stop, saying he is a member of the Salvadoran gang MS-13.
Ábrego García had not faced charges from the traffic stop initially, and Crenshaw said the Justice Department’s reopening of the old case to prosecute Ábrego García after he had successfully challenged his deportation to El Salvador showed vindictive prosecution. “The evidence before this Court sadly reflects an abuse of prosecuting power,” Crenshaw said.
Sergio Martínez-Beltrán of NPR reported that DHS called Crenshaw’s decision “naked judicial activism” and vowed that “this Salvadorian is not going to remain in our country.”
In a statement, Ábrego García said, “Justice is a big word and an even bigger promise to fulfill; and I am grateful that today, justice has taken a step forward.”
Representative Maxwell Frost (D-FL) posted today that he had just visited so-called “Alligator Alcatraz,” which appears to be in the process of shutting down. He suggested that Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Trump haven’t wanted to admit it was closing because they have spent a billion dollars of taxpayer money on the site in less than a year.
But, Frost said, “we can’t allow this place to just shut down and then not talk about it anymore. That’s what they want because they used a billion of our dollars to enrich private contractors that built and operated the place. They want us to move on because they don’t want us to talk about the human rights abuses and civil rights abuses that happened there and in other facilities as well…. We have to continue to push for accountability and consequences for people who broke the law and misused our…money, meant for hurricane preparedness, to kidnap and cage our neighbors.”
—
Notes:
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5894189-new-jersey-detention-center-sherrill/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/09/nyregion/newark-ice-protest-arrest-ras-baraka.html
https://www.lahuelga.com/elgrito
https://newjerseymonitor.com/2026/05/22/delaney-hall-hunger-strike/
https://www.thecity.nyc/2026/05/25/protesters-newark-ice-detention-delaney-hall-hunger-strike/
https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/15/us/ice-immigration-detention-centers-medical-care-deaths-invs-vis
https://time.com/article/2026/05/23/green-card-changes-trump-explained/
X:
RepNellie/status/2058949020228198704
RepLaMonica/status/2059298223919878156
AndyKimNJ/status/2058624606085226502
DHSgov/status/2059110483928486057
Bluesky:
atrupar.com/post/3mmrk4vmwvc26
I posted this on my blog a few years ago, and still can’t believe it. Here’s an article published in The Mirror (UK) by Chiara Fiorillo, News Reporter:
“A hermit may have lived in a precarious house perched on the side of a cliff in California for the past 10 years — but nobody seems to know who the man actually is.
A dilapidated three-storey structure, made of driftwood, was first spotted at Devil’s Slide in the San Francisco Bay Area in December 2022, when it was filmed by a drone. Stunned onlookers said the intriguing home was partially destroyed during the rainstorms that hit the Bay Area earlier this year but has since been rebuilt.
(Above: turn off the intrusive soundtrack.)
Drone operator @ParallaxEffect, who posted footage of the driftwood shack on YouTube, said he was hiking along the California coast with some friends when they noticed the property, which he described as ‘one of the most incredible human structures I’ve ever seen’.
The shack appears to have several rooms and is located on a steep San Mateo County rock face. The video shows wood and ropes in the structure as well as a boxing punching bag, several buoys, some old signs, and what appears to be a fully enclosed room.
On Google Earth, the shack appears to have a rope rising from it, which is linked to the Devil’s Slide trail above — and it may possibly be used as a means of entry and exit. A Google Maps satellite image also seems to show the structure intact as waves crash onto the rocks beneath it.”
If you look at the left, there appears to be a cave or tunnel. When blown up, there appears to be a pathway of rocks leading into it.???
(This was below Highway One, driving from San Francisco to Santa Cruz, in the vicinity of the Devil’s Slide tunnel.)
In my years of photographing driftwood shacks for the book: Driftwood Shacks: Anonymous Architecture Along the California Coast, I never saw anything faintly resembling this.
Wow!!
Thanks to Jeff Sinder and Ruth Kneass
www.mirror.co.uk/news/us-news/mystery-hermit-living-cliffside-shack-30955761
Busy day, so brief post
On Memorial Day the New York Times published an article with the headline “Trump is the only person who can save America, according to his cabinet.” The article offered a quantitative analysis of senior-official sycophancy. As the article notes, Donald Trump likes to hold long, televised cabinet meetings. In these meetings, according to the Times,
On average, at least one of every six sentences either flattered Mr. Trump, gave him credit or criticized his political opponents.
This “Dear Leader” treatment is unprecedented in American history. Regardless of how successful, no previous president has been showered with this kind of obsequiousness and deification.
Outside the MAGA bubble, Americans are increasingly seeing Trump as the loser he is. He has failed on every front. Manufacturing employment is down, inflation is outpacing wages, consumer sentiment is at a record low, mortgage rates are up. Trump’s war of choice has led to utter humiliation. According to current polls, Americans are giving Trump extremely low approval ratings, both overall and on every major issue — even border security:
Inside the MAGA fantasy bubble, however, Trump’s reign is hailed, almost literally, as the Second Coming.
Some of this reflects Trump’s own personality. His inner self is obviously a bottomless pit of insecurity. He self-medicates by demanding Pyongyang-level flattery, destroying national monuments and replacing them with garish, vulgar trash, persecuting critics and comedians, and starting stupid wars.
But Trump isn’t the first public figure to seek self-aggrandizement in an attempt to fill his inner emptiness. The important question is why the American right — not just his pathetic cabinet, but the whole movement, including the 6 extremistsRepublicans on the Supreme Court — has been so willing to empower him. And that’s a question much bigger than Trump himself.
The truth is that the right wing attempt to build a cult of personality around a deeply unpresidential figure, while it has reached new levels of absurdity under Trump, isn’t new. Republicans tried to do the same thing for George W. Bush. Remember this?
And readers of a certain age may recall that the right’s canonization of Ronald Reagan began while he was still in office.
It’s tempting to dismiss personality-cult theater as trivial, but it isn’t. When prominent people in a republic act as if they were living in a monarchy, the republic increasingly becomes a monarchy in reality.
Beyond that, influential Republicans have substantively granted Trump more personal power, more ability to act as a monarch, than any of his predecessors. Republicans in Congress have abandoned their role as an independent branch of government. In a recent post on X, Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, sounded just like Trump’s cabinet members:
And the Roberts Supreme Court has gone most of the way toward giving Trump dictatorial powers.
Right-wing legal thinkers have increasingly embraced “unitary executive theory,” under which the entire executive branch — including agencies Congress has designated as independent — answers personally to the president, who can hire and fire officials at will. The Roberts Court hasn’t explicitly endorsed this theory. But the Court has given presidents absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts — effectively placing Trump above the law. And Roberts has declared that the president is “the only person who alone composes a branch of government,” which, combined with the subservience of both Congress and the Court itself, does in effect make Trump a dictator.
Why has the modern American right abandoned the idea of a constitutional republic and embraced rule by strongman? Good question — and one I’ll try to answer another day.
For now, let me just point out that while it may seem ironic that so much praise and power has been lavished on Trump, America’s most incompetent modern president, the combination of flattery and failure isn’t an accident. It is, in fact, a self-reinforcing doom loop.
Trump needs and demands sycophantic praise and unfettered power in part to compensate for the fact that he’s such an objective failure. And while his manifest unfitness is part of the explanation for his failure, his policy disasters also have a lot to do with the bubble that surrounds him. Nobody dares to tell him when he’s wrong. Nobody can stop him from indulging his whims, not matter how disastrous their consequences.
The point is that the dire state we’re in — the leader of the free world has turned against freedom, the greatest power the world has ever known is self-immolating before our eyes — isn’t just a matter of Donald Trump’s personal failings. It’s the culmination of decades of right-wing sabotage of everything that made American great.
MUSICAL CODA
PICARD: Data, shields up
DATA: Brilliant! Shields can reduce damage we sustain. Not immunity. Not hubris. Just prudence. It's not precaution—it's strategy.
[camera shakes]
WORF: HULL BREACHES ON NINE DECKS
DATA: Here's what happened: you told me to raise shields, and I didn't
— Kyle Ferrana, @KyleTrainEmoji
Tags: ai-misuse, coding-agents, ai, llms
Market Designcurl team are facing right now thanks to the deluge of (credible) AI-assisted security issues being reported.
The rate of incoming security reports is 4-5 times higher than it was in 2024 and double the speed of 2025 -- meaning that on average we now get more than one report per day. The quality is way higher than ever before. The reports are typically very detailed and long. [...]
For the first time in my life, my wife voiced concerns about my work hours and my imbalanced work/life situation. I work more than I’ve done before, but the flood keeps coming. [...]
This is a never-before seen or experienced pressure on the curl project and its security team members. An avalanche of high priority work that trumps all other things in the project that is primarily mental because we certainly could ignore them all if we wanted, but we feel a responsibility, we have a conscience and we are proud about our work.
The good news is that curl is a very solid piece of software, so the vulnerabilities people are finding tend not to be of high severity:
What is also a good trend: almost no one finds terrible vulnerabilities. All vulnerabilities found the last few years in curl have all been deemed severity LOW or MEDIUM. I'm not saying there won't be any more HIGH ever, but at least they are rare. The most recent severity high curl CVE was published in October 2023.
Via Lobste.rs
Tags: curl, security, ai, generative-ai, llms, daniel-stenberg, ai-ethics, ai-security-research
Selinna is 15 when she leaves her home in Nigeria, bound for Italy, a journey as perilous as it is transformative
- by Aeon Video
That is the theme of my latest Free Press column, here is one excerpt:
Principle five: Run experiments.
This is a more general version of the healthcare point. AI will generate so many new ideas and hypotheses, including for drugs and medical devices, but not only. Become a tester. Test new battery designs, new educational techniques, or new methods of conserving valued wildlife.
The demand for experiments will rise sharply, and most of those cannot be done by robots, at least not anytime soon.
Principle six: Gather data.
AI is a marvelous tool, but it relies on knowing lots about the world. That can stem from reading the internet, watching videos of people folding clothes, and hearing recordings of voices, among many other ways of absorbing information.
The more powerful the AI, the higher the returns from feeding it data, because it will make smart and useful inferences from those data. But most data in our world have never been put into AI models. Just consider corporate records, historical archives, referee reports for failed scientific papers, accounts of lab procedures, and much more. Most of that remains virgin territory.
The next few decades will bring an immense investment in feeding more data into the AIs. So there will be new jobs in gathering environmental data, job safety data, construction site data, corporate and management data, public health data, agricultural data, education data, and much more. Those jobs could be yours.
Recommended.
The post Seven ways to avoid losing your job to AI appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Donald Trump is haunted by a specter. It pursues him, exposes him, mocks him. It’s why he started the Iran war, and why he can’t finish it.
That specter is Barack Obama.
Unfortunately, the two will be tied forever in history. It was Obama’s teasing at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner, with the audience laughing heartily while Trump sat grimly in silence, that sat like a burning coal in Trump’s gut, eventually leading him to run for president as much as an act of revenge as anything else.
And it was Obama’s presidency — not anything he did, mind you, just the fact of a Black man in the White House — that created the racial backlash that made it possible for Trump to win. In office, Trump has tried to undo everything associated with Obama, and it’s that impulse that brought us this war.
For Trump, this is intensely personal. You can tell how jealous and insecure Obama makes him, for in so many ways, Obama is what Trump wishes he could be. Every day when he looks in the mirror to apply his makeup, Trump sees the wrinkled face of a fat old man who might once have been good looking, but hasn’t been for a long time. Obama is (relatively) young and thin and handsome. All of Trump’s boasting is desperate and sad; Obama has a self-assurance that doesn’t need to shout. Obama is legitimately well-educated and smart; Trump feels horribly insecure around those with advanced degrees (the tell that he’s feeling that way is when he brings up his uncle who taught at MIT). Foreign leaders admired Obama yet have nothing but contempt for Trump; the same is true of the cultural elite whose approval Trump craves. The former president hangs with acclaimed artists and thinkers; Trump has to content himself with Kid Rock.
Whatever you thought of his presidency — and it had plenty of shortcomings — Obama has a coolness Trump knows he could never approach. He’s sleek and confident where Trump is garish and overcompensating. Trump brings up Joe Biden more often in conversation, because he can call Biden weak and old, but Obama hovers in the background, a sly smile on his face, always mocking Trump and his failures.
Trump’s insecurity where Obama is concerned is what led directly to the Iran War, and it’s why he can’t find a way out. Everything about how Trump has approached Iran in both his terms was in reaction to Obama, especially the nuclear deal completed near the end of his second term. Given where we are now, Trump’s trashing of that deal has to be considered one of the most extraordinary foreign policy screwups of the 21st century.
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was the product of lengthy negotiation that included the U.S., Russia, China, France, Germany, and the U.K. It was finalized in 2015, and created a monitoring system to prevent Iran from enriching uranium beyond what could be used for civilian purposes. In exchange, Iran got sanctions relief and the return of some of its funds that had been frozen in western banks after the 1979 revolution.
From the outset, Republicans complained that the deal wasn’t harsh enough on Iran. But it worked. It didn’t solve every problem having to do with Iran (including its support for proxy groups that carried out acts of terrorism), but it did solve the nuclear problem, at least while it was in effect.
Which is why Trump’s national security team in his first term begged him not to withdraw from the agreement. But he didn’t listen; the deal had Obama’s name on it, and he couldn’t tolerate that. So in 2018 he abandoned it, insisting that because he was such a great dealmaker, Iran would come crawling back and give him anything he asked for. “They are going to want to make a new and lasting deal,” he said. But there was no plan, no strategy, no path to a new agreement. Inevitably, Iran resumed its efforts to put itself in a position to build nuclear weapons.
It was a mistake of monumental proportions, undertaken for the pettiest reasons and topped only by the war that it produced. Because Trump couldn’t stand to see Obama’s agreement remain intact, he killed it and put himself on the road to this idiotic war. And now he can’t end that war, because he’s still looking over his shoulder at Obama.
Here’s what Trump posted over the weekend:
At the moment, it looks like what the administration is negotiating is not “THE EXACT OPPOSITE, in fact!” but something that could look a lot like the original JCPOA. Iran will get sanctions relief and the release of its frozen funds, and in exchange, something or other will happen with its existing nuclear material and its ability to enrich uranium in the future (there’s disagreement on what that will look like). Only now, Iran will be able to demand more concessions for opening the Strait of Hormuz — in other words, returning to the status quo before Trump launched the war. The Iranian regime is in a far stronger position than it was before the war.
Then on Monday, Trump posted this:
It’s a reference to $1.7 billion in Iranian funds that were unfrozen as part of the deal (and were actually delivered in cash, because sanctions had cut Iran off from the international banking system). But, we should note, the Trump administration will almost inevitably be unfreezing more Iranian funds if and when they come to an agreement to end the war — and this time, it could be as much as $20 billion. And “Trump’s Iran policy” is a battleship sitting in the ocean shooting down drones, which is not exactly a picture of success.
But the point is this: As he makes decisions about Iran, Trump is still haunted by Obama. He can’t stop talking about him. I can promise you that whenever this war ends, whether with a signed agreement or Trump just declaring victory and going home, he will say that what he got was much better than Obama’s deal, because he’s so much smarter and stronger. He’ll say it, but he’ll know it isn’t true.
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Starcloud has ordered optical terminals from SpaceX to use Starlink as a global data-relay network for its future orbital data centers, deepening ties with the company it is counting on to launch full-size spacecraft.
The post Starcloud orders Starlink lasers for orbital data center network appeared first on SpaceNews.
AMSTERDAM – The recent surge in European defense spending could bolster Europe’s entrepreneurial space sector, but only if bureaucratic roadblocks are cleared, panelists said at the SmallSat Europe conference. While […]
The post The surge in military budgets can help Europe’s entrepreneurial space sector — if spending speeds up appeared first on SpaceNews.
The $16.5 million award is for ‘thrust-control technology’ designed to make solid propulsion systems more adaptable across different missions and weapons programs
The post Voyager wins DARPA contract for solid rocket propellant technology appeared first on SpaceNews.
Burdensome regulations and limited access to capital continue to act as a drag on Europe’s smallsat sector despite proposed new legislation and an influx of defense spending.
The post Regulations and access to capital continue to hinder Europe’s smallsat industry appeared first on SpaceNews.
A new Chinese commercial rocket engine startup has conducted a successful long-duration hot fire test of a closed-cycle kerosene-liquid oxygen engine.
The post Chinese startup Mega Engine advances reusable staged-combustion rocket engine appeared first on SpaceNews.
Not identifying people based on their use of Wi-Fi routers, but identifying people using Wi-Fi signals.
This is accomplished through what is known as WiFi sensing, or the use of WiFi signals to infer information about a physical environment. When radio signals like WiFi travel through a space, they interact with the objects and people around them. Those signals can be reflected, scattered, or absorbed. By analyzing how the signal is expected to behave compared with how it is actually received, researchers can infer details about the surrounding environment.
“By observing the propagation of radio waves, we can create an image of the surroundings and of persons who are present,” said Thorsten Strufe, a KIT professor and study co-author, in a press release. “This works similar to a normal camera, the difference being that in our case, radio waves instead of light waves are used for the recognition.”
The contract is for the development of the U.S. Space Force’s Space Data Network backbone
The post SpaceX wins $2.29 billion Space Force contract for military data network appeared first on SpaceNews.
NASA announced May 26 the first contracts associated with its plans to develop a lunar base, picking four companies to develop and deliver landers and drones to the moon.
The post NASA selects four companies for initial moon base awards appeared first on SpaceNews.
Open Cosmos, based in the United Kingdom, is facing a 2028 deadline to field an ambitious broadband constellation for Europe. That system, ConnectedCosmos, aims to reduce reliance on undersea cables […]
The post Open Cosmos’ CEO on what it takes to bring IoT to space appeared first on SpaceNews.
I went to my college reunion this weekend. It was cold and rainy at a time of the year when it’s supposed to be warm and sunny or at least warm and rainy. So I didn’t stay as long as I’d planned. But in the short time I was there, I had a number of people come up to me and say that I’d brought them around on the idea of Court reform. This was about things I’ve written here in the Editors’ Blog but, interestingly and somewhat surprisingly to me, far more of the comments were about things I’ve said on the podcast. This was of course gratifying to hear personally. But I note it here because it was an example, out in the wild if you will, of the broader pattern: a sea change in ideas, goals and judgments of the Supreme Court and the necessity of reform. I saw it at this elite university reunion. I’m seeing more and more examples of it within the legal academy – at least the beginnings of it. And perhaps most importantly we’re seeing discussion about it from elected members of Congress.
What’s the next step there? One thing I get asked about again and again is what can individual people do? A related question is, how do we clear out the old consultants, or the old foreign policy hands or the old advisors and staffers, etc. etc. That’s inherently challenging.
But there’s something very direct we can do on this issue. It’s not something any of us can do individually on our own. But it’s something we can be a part of. And it has a big, big effect. We’re still a few months out from the 2026 midterms and we’re more than two years out from the 2028 general election (after which comes the first moment when all of this stuff could actually happen). What we can do is be part of establishing litmus tests for elected office as a Democrat. Two critical ones, I would say maybe the most critical are: abolish the filibuster and reform the Court.
“Litmus tests” get a bad name. In American political discourse, they are usually framed as cheap and narrow-minded things that single-issue activists use to constrain or maybe eliminate statesman-like behavior. Think about it for a moment, and I think you’ll see that the phrase is almost always used this way. It’s almost never used as a positive thing. But that’s wrong. What litmus tests do is create clarity, truth in advertising. When you vote for candidate X, you know what you’re getting. They’ve given a clear promise that they support a particular thing and will do, if given the opportunity, a particular thing. If they don’t come through, they can be voted out of office. The promises need to be crisp and clearly framed. Politicians will almost always try to avoid that. They want to retain freedom of action. You’ll see this so often in the Senate when the caucus moves as a pack resisting demands to say clearly what they do and don’t support on critical issues. But when questions or pledges are framed tightly enough that becomes very difficult.
That’s what we can all do. We can use all our avenues of expression, our financial contributions, our voting and generic advocacy to shape and enforce a new set of rules, a new set of assumptions about what Democrats will do when they are in power again. You’ll also need a lot of new people. Some will have to be forced into retirement. There will have to be expectations about new advisors and policy hands. But where we can all make our voices and demands heard is building this set of litmus tests: making it clear that it’s not acceptable to be elected to Congress as a Democrat without supporting abolishing the filibuster and reforming the Supreme Court.
In May 2026, the Global Volcanism Program reported nine actively erupting volcanoes in Indonesia—more than any other country at the time. Such activity is typical for the Southeast Asian archipelago, where eruptions have occurred at 55 volcanoes since the 1960s—the highest total for any country. Japan ranks second with eruptions at 40 volcanoes over that time period, followed by the United States with 39, according to Global Volcanism Program data.
Even for such an eruption-prone country, the persistence of activity at Mount Dukono stands out. The remote stratovolcano, located at the northern end of Halmahera Island, has been erupting nearly continuously since 1933, with near-daily rumbles and frequent emissions of ash and volcanic gases. The volcano routinely flings hunks of semi-molten rock, known as volcanic bombs, hundreds of meters from its vent.
This sort of activity at Dukono turned deadly on May 8, 2026, when ash and volcanic bombs rained down on a group of hikers. In the days following the tragedy, the mountain remained highly active. Indonesia’s volcanological survey reported an average of 52 eruptive events per day between May 9 and 16, with ash plumes rising 400 to 4,300 meters (1,300 feet to 14,000 feet) above the summit.
NASA and other U.S. government satellites detected thermal anomalies, ash plumes, and sulfur dioxide emissions in recent days. Indonesian authorities have set the alert level at 2 (on a scale of 4) and warned the public to stay at least 4 kilometers (2 miles) from the crater.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
The Tongan volcano expanded its mid-Pacific real estate during its latest eruptive phase.
A massive, old caldera and more recently formed craters shape the landscape in the eastern Sierra Nevada.
The hill-shaped features are a sign of explosive volcanic activity—a rarity on the Red Planet.
The post Ever Restless Mount Dukono Erupts appeared first on NASA Science.
This is mostly a podcast about Benjamin Britten, and in particular his War Requiem, with Rebecca Lowe (former singer and conductor, in addition to philosopher and also her current role at Mercatus).
Here is the YouTube, here is the transcript and further listening links. Excerpt:
LOWE: Yeah, so we should think about what it means for a conscientious objector to have written this work, which is supposed, in some sense, to maybe pay tribute to the soldiers. Maybe, in some sense, it’s supposed to play some role in the British response to the war. At a time when, of course, conscientious objectors had been seen as maybe betraying the nation. There are very interesting, tense questions about the choice of Britten to compose this work.
COWEN: And Benjamin Britten himself, he described the work as a reparation.
LOWE: Yes.
COWEN: Paid to the dead soldiers.
LOWE: That’s right.
COWEN: I think in some ways, he always had World War I more in mind than World War II. But other parties involved, of course, didn’t see it that way.
LOWE: That’s true.
COWEN: But Wilfred Owen was a World War I poet. And that was the formative experience for him, was World War I. And also, the Spanish Civil War influenced him greatly. So, he wanted to do this work, and I’m not sure he ever found a way to make it succeed with World War II. That, to me, is one of the drawbacks of the work.
Definitely recommended, it is fresh material throughout. Can you find a better podcast on Britten and his War Requiem, arguably his greatest work? And here is the Rebecca Lowe Substack and podcast more generally.
The post Can liberals be pacifists? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The South Carolina state senate has just again killed the state’s redistricting bill. Given what’s already happened — definitely happening, definitely not happening, definitely re-happening with the help of the governor — I wouldn’t say anything should be treated as final. But it’s another major reverse. And it certainly seems like a sign these senators aren’t kidding, whatever Trump threatens.
As we discussed a few weeks ago, South Carolina is already VERY gerrymandered. Distribute Rep. Jim Clyburn’s voters to the rest of the delegation and you have a real chance in a wave year that you lose net seats. Not saying that would be guaranteed to happen. But I think it’s the real driver in the Senate.
This session is sponsored by OpenProse. More on them below — they're also the reason we're here.
Dan Barrett built OpenProse — a framework that lets you write programs in structured English and run them with an AI agent like Claude Code. The description sounds either obvious or impossible depending on your priors. When I told him it sounded impossible, he said: “People were shocked that it works.”
So we installed it and built something live.
The project: a service that would show me tides, weather, sunrise, moonrise — everything I want to know before a walk along the coast. One command. A few minutes. It came back with an hourly tide chart for Montara (I picked a town I don’t actually live in), fog conditions, waxing crescent moon, the works.
Here’s what interested me about the architecture underneath.
Each OpenProse component has a requires block and an ensures block. Requires is what the component expects from its caller. Ensures is what it promises to produce. I said that looks like a function — domain and range. Dan said think more like a service. The distinction matters: when you have many components, an inversion-of-control container wires them together by matching ensures blocks to requires blocks. The same way Spring would wire Java components — except the whole thing is written in structured English and run by an LLM.
The Dijkstra objection comes up immediately: natural language is too ambiguous to be a programming language. Dan’s answer: we don’t know what’s possible until we walk the landscape. Plenty of people would have said nothing is possible with prose. That’s clearly not true. The question is just where the edges are — and you can only find those by trying.
The ensures block is effectively a postcondition. It’s what every sibling component can rely on. When I asked about extract method — you write one of these things, it grows, eventually you pull a piece out and name it — Dan said yes, all the time. Usually just by asking Claude to do exactly that.
The other clever piece: sub-agents pass pointers instead of data. Variable bindings are files. The pointers are file paths. When a sub-agent produces a giant context block — a full PDF analysis, a research output, a tide chart — it writes it to disk and hands back the path. The main thread stays clean. Context management, done at the file system level.
I’m building a Smalltalk VM from scratch right now — yes, literally writing a VM — and watching this I thought about how different it is to build a virtual machine when your primitives are LLM calls instead of machine instructions. My VM is 1000x faster. But the primitives here are so much larger that on the right problems, it’s a wash.
What’s next for OpenProse is interesting. Dan’s thesis is that the whole industry is moving toward declaring outcomes and letting agents figure out the path. Codex has a /goal feature. Anthropic just shipped something called Outcomes in their API. The pattern is: specify what you want to be true, not how to make it true. OpenProse is an early articulation of that idea at the framework level.
One of my many projects from the last 40 years is now actually possible. The genie just got smarter.
Dan is at @IRL_DanB on Twitter and dan@openprose.ai. OpenProse is open source — search it on GitHub and follow along. He loves feedback and means it.
NASA’s vision for a future, long-term sustained presence on the Moon gained more clarity on Tuesday as the agency announced a series of contract awards for future robotic missions.
The agency announced that two companies developing lunar terrain vehicles (LTVs), Astrolab and Lunar Outpost, would each be receiving contracts valued at about $220 million each to finish their designs and get them to the Moon’s surface.
Astrolab’s Crewed Lunar Vehicle (CLV-1) takes after its original design, called FLEX, and Lunar Outpost’s Pegasus vehicle takes heritage from its earlier Eagle design. NASA previously put out a call for LTVs that would be capable of surviving on the Moon for up to 10 years, but revised its requirements to have more readily available options to augment earlier astronaut missions.
Connected to that, NASA also awarded the LTV delivery contract to Blue Origin, using it’s Blue Moon Mark 1 lander in a contract that’s worth $234 million for each LTV delivered.
“Since the beginning, Blue Origin has been committed to Lunar Permanence,” wrote Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp in a post on X. “Thank you, @NASAadmin, for sharing that vision. We’re ready to make it a reality.”
The announcement came during a news conference at NASA’s headquarters in Washington D.C.. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said these and other upcoming missions, scheduled to begin in the back half of 2026, that will lay the early ground work for an enduring presence on the Moon’s South Pole.
“As we announced during the Ignition event, we intend to take an iterative approach, sending a demand signal to industry for a lot of landers and rovers and tech demonstrations and all the scientific payloads these missions can accommodate,” Isaacman said.
“We are leveraging the NASA playbook from the 1960s, figuring out what works and what doesn’t in this epic science of survival because the Moon Base is as beautiful as it is hostile.”
In these early days of crewed landings during the Artemis era, LTVs will need be deployed at a safe distance from the Human Landing System (HLS) landers being provided by SpaceX and Blue Origin. They will kick up quite a bit of lunar regolith during their landing burns, which could damage an LTV if it’s too close.
“Protecting for [plume surface interaction], we plan to keep the LTVs approximately 2 km away when the landers land,” said Ryan Stephan, NASA’s acting director for cargo landers. He previously served as the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) Technical Deputy based at Glenn Research Center.
“They’ll traverse in, be able to pick up the crew, and then do missions up to like 10 km during the crewed period and then uncrewed, like Carlos said, a total of like 400 km throughout the lifetime.”
Moon Base Program Executive Carlos García-Galán said NASA envisioned footprint of the Moon Base to be “hundreds of square miles with different assets, all building up to the objective of permanent lunar presence on the Moon.”
The first piece of the pie, dubbed Phase One, extends from now through 2029 and was the focus of Tuesday’s briefing. In addition to the lander and rover contracts announced, García-Galán also unveiled Firefly Aerospace as the recipient of a $75 million subcontract awarded by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to deploy a series of lunar drones on the MoonFall mission.
During this technology demonstration, which will take place in 2028, one of Firefly’s Elytra Dark spacecraft will fly to the Moon over the course of 45 days before it enters lunar orbit. It will then de-orbit and deploy the drones about 50 km above the Moon’s South Pole.
These hopper drones are designed to last one lunar day (14 Earth days) and will test out the basic technology as well as performing imaging and scouting for future sites of interest.
“High-resolution imagery across all mission phases, including the deployment, the landing, and nominal operations of staying in-situ or hopping around,” García-Galán said. “It will continue image collect during an extended mission and it will analyze different sites for unprecedented detail and basically allowing us to build our understanding of soil mechanics, the terrain, the lighting conditions in-situ of wherever we want to go.”
The MoonFall drones can also have the capability of setting up what García-Galán called a “Moon Base perimeter” that would go on the corners of areas “where we think we have either key scientific objectives or we want to build up the Moon Base.”
Asked whether such a perimeter would act as a keep-out zone for nations not party to the Artemis Accords, an agreement for Deep Space best practices and understanding, Isaacman said it lent to the importance of reaching the Moon first before nations that the U.S. sees as adversaries, like China.
“I think the idea that there are areas of great interest on the lunar surface, we do want to get there and explore them and we also obviously want to be very mindful of the Outer Space Treaty, so that we are respectful of other nations that are putting assets on the lunar surface and we would expect that to be reciprocal,” Isaacman said.
Three missions that were formerly part of the original CLPS program were redesigned as Moon Base Missions 1-3:
Lay long in bed talking and pleasing myself with my wife. —[We have had several examples such as this, in the past few days diary, of Mr. Wheatley tiring of his self-imposed work of censorship. D.W.]— So up and to my office a while and then home, where I found Pembleton, and by many circumstances I am led to conclude that there is something more than ordinary between my wife and him, which do so trouble me that I know not at this very minute that I now write this almost what either I write or am doing, nor how to carry myself to my wife in it, being unwilling to speak of it to her for making of any breach and other inconveniences, nor let it pass for fear of her continuing to offend me and the matter grow worse thereby. So that I am grieved at the very heart, but I am very unwise in being so.
There dined with me Mr. Creed and Captain Grove, and before dinner I had much discourse in my chamber with Mr. Deane, the builder of Woolwich, about building of ships. But nothing could get the business out of my head, I fearing that this afternoon by my wife’s sending every [one] abroad and knowing that I must be at the office she has appointed him to come. This is my devilish jealousy, which I pray God may be false, but it makes a very hell in my mind, which the God of heaven remove, or I shall be very unhappy. So to the office, where we sat awhile.
By and by my mind being in great trouble I went home to see how things were, and there I found as I doubted Mr. Pembleton with my wife, and nobody else in the house, which made me almost mad, and going up to my chamber after a turn or two I went out again and called somebody on pretence of business and left him in my little room at the door (it was the Dutchman, commander of the King’s pleasure boats, who having been beat by one of his men sadly, was come to the office to-day to complain) telling him I would come again to him to speak with him about his business. So in great trouble and doubt to the office, and Mr. Coventry nor Sir G. Carteret being there I made a quick end of our business and desired leave to be gone, pretending to go to the Temple, but it was home, and so up to my chamber, and as I think if they had any intention of hurt I did prevent doing anything at that time, but I continued in my chamber vexed and angry till he went away, pretending aloud, that I might hear, that he could not stay, and Mrs. Ashwell not being within they could not dance. And, Lord! to see how my jealousy wrought so far that I went softly up to see whether any of the beds were out of order or no, which I found not, but that did not content me, but I staid all the evening walking, and though anon my wife came up to me and would have spoke of business to me, yet I construed it to be but impudence, and though my heart full yet I did say nothing, being in a great doubt what to do. So at night, suffered them to go all to bed, and late put myself to bed in great discontent, and so to sleep.
Links for you. Science:
On reforming the NIH (excellent, must-read; accessible to non-specialists, and why parts of the “Abundance” agenda are ill-formed hooey)
Inside the Race to Develop a Test for the Rare Andes Hantavirus
Hantavirus Isn’t Just a Threat. It’s a Test. (“…the most pressing question for health leaders isn’t how worried we should be, in part because the threat remains effectively zero for anyone who hasn’t come into close contact with those on board. The question is how seriously health officials are taking the disease, since they are the ones in a position to keep the outbreak small and contained.”)
LLM hallucinations in the wild: Large-scale evidence from non-existent citations
Prokaryotic Pangenomes Are Bet-Hedging Devices
Real-life Snuffleupagus found swimming in the Great Barrier Reef
Virologist accused of starting COVID-19 will fight U.S. ban on funding
Other:
How the 120th Congress Can Crush the Gerrymandered Maps. Democrats will have—and in Virginia, do have—the tools to win the redistricting free-for-all. (regardless, Democrats should still remove the VA Supreme Court)
Democrats still hope ‘the people’ will do their work for them
No one wants a permanent gerontocracy
Institutional Rot And The Death Rattle Of America
Rather Than Whining About the Media, We Should Fight to Win
You’re paying Kash Patel to … go snorkeling?
Meet the candidates for an At-Large seat on the D.C. Council
A Nonprofit Accusing Janeese Lewis George of Ethics Violations Has a Board Member With Ties to Kenyan McDuffie’s Campaign
Library holds taking forever? You’re not alone.
Mamdani Announces Balanced Budget Without Cuts. Buoyed by billions in assistance from the state, real talk about what it takes to run New York City, and some taxes on the rich, the mayor closed a historic leftover budget deficit.
Behind the Claude Frenzy That Ate Up All the Mac Minis
The revolt against i-Ready: Private equity-backed software faces parent, teacher and student fury
The clippening
Why it took 65 years for L.A. to build its most important rail line
The DOGE-ing of the Humanities Is Being Reversed
What Suddenly Made Jon Ossoff Into Such a Democratic Rock Star?
‘McCarthyism with a Texas Accent’
RFK Jr.’s next vaccine moves could upend White House election-year messaging (and kill people too…)
Meet the Sad Wives of AI. Are you married to a man who’s obsessed with AI? I’m so, so sorry.
Whiteness is a pay cut. That’s the lesson America should learn but won’t.
The Supreme Court Has Unleashed ‘Jim Crow 2.0’ As The South Rolls Back Black Representation
Could Brain-drain Leave Israel Brain-dead?
Trump’s National Prayer Event Features Speakers Who Smeared Catholicism, Islam
‘Are You a Zionist?’ Why This Question Is No Longer Relevant
‘Outright Lies’: House Dem Posts Receipts After Eric Trump Denies Family Investments
How the Military Mindset Has Crushed Our Country’s Men
Federal Agents Target Immigrant Rights Volunteers With 3 A.M. Home Raids
Trump Is Rooting Around in the Public Trough
Hospital Will Open The First ‘Detransition Clinic’ In Settlement With DOJ
What the Dissents in the Mifepristone Case Tell Us About What’s to Come
RFK Jr. Wants Teens To Be Able To Use Tanning Beds — And The Logic Behind It Is Bonkers
Today feels like the end of an era for jazz fans. Something has changed—that’s the pervasive mood right now. And things will never be like they were before.
Yesterday, saxophonist Sonny Rollins died at age 95. And today is the centenary of Miles Davis’s birth (back in Alton, Illinois on May 26, 1926). The juxtaposition of those two events is unsettling.
I was planning to celebrate Miles at 100 today, but now I’m also grieving the death of the last superstar of that same generation. Put those two milestones together, and it’s an uncanny moment.
Rollins was the last surviving musician who had appeared in the most famous jazz photo in history—the “Great Day in Harlem” image from August 12, 1958. That was when 57 illustrious musicians gathered together at 17 East 126th Street for an Esquire magazine photo shoot.
The image was used to illustrate an article called “Golden Age of Jazz”—and it really was golden back then. Most of the jazz greats were still alive, and a star-studded assembly of them had gathered together in one spot.
That photo is like Raphael’s School of Athens for jazz fans. It’s a stirring visual reminder that these legends were once real people, and coexisted in the same time and place.
In 1996, Life magazine commissioned Gordon Parks to gather the survivors for an updated photo at the same location. The building was by now decrepit, bricked up and covered with graffiti—and only 11 musicians appeared for the reunion.
Their numbers continued to dwindle and, after Benny Golson’s death in 2024, Sonny Rollins was the last survivor of that Great Day. But now he’s gone—and this Golden Age survives only in the fading memories of older jazz fans
We still have the recordings, of course. In those grooves, these artists live on forever young, full of funk and fire. Miles and Rollins not only survive this way, but are still joined together as they were in real life in Rudy Van Gelder’s studio back in 1954.
But the permanence of vinyl can’t hide the larger fact—namely that jazz history of this sort can no longer be experienced live and in-the-flesh. This is a relatively recent phenomenon.
When I first became a jazz fan, the recorded history of the music wasn’t even fifty years old. I could see the pioneers of every style of jazz on the bandstand —and that was true whether I focused on Chicago jazz legends of the 1920s or Swing Era stars of the 1930s or the beboppers of the 1940s. And on and on.
You couldn’t even call this jazz history—it was just jazz, plain and simple, in all its living glory. And I nowadays describe this as my education, but it didn’t feel like schooling back then. It was too much fun for that.
I now write books of jazz history—but they are a poor substitute for those kinds of immersive experiences. But still, I try my best to capture in my books the unfettered enjoyment of those direct and unmediated encounters with the jazz greats.
If we ever lose the fun of this music, we will be in bad shape indeed. Preserving it isn’t easy in the present day, when jazz is primarily propagated at schools and colleges—and is permeated with a pedagogical zeal that was completely unknown to the music’s originators.
Don’t get me wrong, Louis Armstrong most certainly educated a bunch of people—but they were rarely aware of it. They thought they were out for an evening of fun and revelry.
Even Miles and Rollins understood that—they knew they were serious artists, but they never tried to demonstrate jazz history. They just embodied it. And brought it to life, night after night, on the road and in front of paying audiences.
So go ahead and listen to those classic records today and pay homage to the dearly departed. But if we really want to hold on to their gift from the past, the best way is by supporting jazz out in the wild—at the jam session, in the clubs, even out on the streets.
Even so, I will dwell happily in nostalgia for a little while longer today—and share two of my favorite videos of live jazz. They feature the two musicians I’m thinking about right now.
First, here’s a film of Sonny Rollins in full flight. This gripping performance from 1986 serves as the opening for Robert Mugge’s documentary Saxophone Colossus. When I first saw it, I was unaware of the injury Rollins had sustained during the filming. That only adds to drama.
And here’s a rare video of Miles Davis playing “So What” (from the iconic Kind of Blue album) alongside John Coltrane. As hard as it is to believe, this kind of music was once on television.
So today I celebrate these past masters, and invite you to do the same. Tomorrow let’s help build a musical culture for the future they would be proud of.
That is the new Soumaya Keynes book, out today. I was happy to have blurbed this book, and here is an essay, on export restrictions, based on the book.
The post *How to Win a Trade War: An Optimistic Guide to an Anxious Global Economy* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Up until a decade ago, China had never launched as many as 20 orbital rockets a year. But beginning in 2022, the Asian country launched 64 rockets and last year reached a record total of 93, marking it as the second-most productive space power in the world.
Further growth is anticipated from both the company's state-owned enterprises as well as a rapidly expanding number of private launch companies. There is nothing wrong with this, as China's rapid growth in launch has been mirrored by the United States and, in particular, SpaceX.
However there is an issue with these launches, as China appears to be ignoring long-established norms about disposing of the upper stages of rockets. These are the parts of the vehicle that separate from the first stage of a rocket and push a satellite or spacecraft into orbit.
The Interstate Bridge Replacement project’s investment grade analysis traffic and revenue analysis shows the $15 billion project will be a waste of money that will serve fewer vehicles in 2050 than use the bridge today. And it will cause tens of thousands of vehicles to divert to the parallel I-205 bridge, increasing traffic, congestion and pollution.
IBR’s generously funded public relations team is trying to divert attention from these inconvenient truths with a pat talking point: They’re falsely claiming that the investment grade analysis (a much more detailed, sophisticated and accurate set of models, required by banks and the federal government) is somehow an excessively conservative, low-ball, worst-case estimate, useful only for assessing financial risk. That’s simply untrue: Investment grade analyses have been much more accurate in practice that highway department forecasts, and importantly, haven’t been too conservative: traffic levels often fall well below investment grade forecast predictions. That’s been the case in Washington State, where both the major toll bridge projects–the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and the SR 520 Bridge in Seattle–have fallen far below their investment grade predictions.
IBR claims we needed a bridge big enough to handle 180,000 vehicles per day. The results of the Investment Grade Analysis show charging $4.60 tolls to use I-5 will cause traffic to drop from 127,000 vehicles today to about 77,000, and traffic won’t recover to current levels for several decades. And even that is likely a wild exaggeration. And IBR has failed to disclose that tens of thousands of vehicles will divert to the I-205 bridge. These numbers are ominous for the project: What they mean is that with tolls, there’s no reason to spend literally billions to widen I-5 between Portland and Vancouver–that roadway will go largely unused for decades. At the same time, tolling the I-5 crossing will snarl traffic elsewhere in the region. This investment grade analysis shows that the IBR is a tragic and costly mistake that will squander billions and make traffic worse.
The two highway deparment’s are desperate to divert attention from these numbers–which they have been delaying for years. IBR’s talking point is these are “conservative” numbers, only to be used for financial analysis: “pay no attention to the investment grade forecast we just spent a couple of million bucks on.” They claim that the projections are a kind of “low-ball” or worst case analysis to conservatively estimate revenues, and can’t be used to characterize real world effects, especially traffic diversion. Willamette Week reports:
A project spokeswoman confirms the Stantec analysis does indeed show a large drop in daily traffic but says the numbers are a worst-case scenario. “Estimates for this financial analysis include an additional layer of conservatism to allow for a period of transition as the community adjusts to tolling,” she says. . . . “The traffic and revenue analysis work is an exercise to determine revenue projections and takes a fiscally conservative approach,” the project spokeswoman says. “[That] tends to project lower bridge usage so as to not overstate revenue potential.”
None of that is true. These expensive investment grade analyses are required by markets and the federal government precisely because state highway departments inevitably have “optimism bias” leading them to build over-sized, expensive facilities, and to count on toll revenues from traffic that never materializes. The whole point of an investment grade analysis is to not take on expensive debt that can’t be repaid because in reality, far fewer people will pay to take a tolled road than a free one.
Investment grade analyses are more accurate, more carefully researched and have lower errors than highway department modeling. That’s why WSDOT and ODOT spent $700,000 on a “Level 2” traffic and revenue analysis for the IBR in 2023, and spent a further $2.3 million, with the same company, Stantec–to produce a “Level 3” study over the past two years. The Level 3 study uses more detailed and sophisticated measures, particularly on “value of time” to estimate how traveler behavior will respond to tolls. And the Level 2 and Level 3 studies are much more accurate than DOT forecasts: The modeling IBR used for its EIS has an error six times greater than the Stantec Level 2 model, and consistently over forecasts current travel levels.
While they’re less inaccurate than highway department projections, the truth is that even investment grade analyses have optimism bias, and routinely over-estimate traffic on tolled facilities.
That’s certainly been the experience of WSDOT, Oregon’s partner in the Interstate Bridge Project. WSDOT has built two major bridge projects in the last couple of decades, and financed them substantially (though not entirely) with tolls. These are the Tacoma Narrows Bridge (built in 2008) and SR 520 Floating Bridge (built in 2012). Like the proposed IBR, both projects added tolls to a previously free crossing. In both cases, WSDOT hired consultants to prepare an “Investment Grade Analysis” of traffic and revenue of the projects.
And in both cases, the investment grade analyses seriously over-estimated future traffic levels. And not by a little, but by a lot.
Both of these bridges provide cautionary tales about the biases in traffic forecasting. Enough time has elapsed now—more than a decade in the case of each project—to allow us to reasonably compare forecasts to actual travel. There’s utterly no merit to the claim that Investment Grade analyses are unrealistically low, as state DOT officials proclaim.
Similarly, WSDOT”s experience with tolls on the SR 99 tunnel under downtown Seattle—built to replace the now demolished Alaskan Way Viaduct—shows that forecasts are frequently wrong, and routinely over-estimate both revenue and traffic. When the project was authorized, WSDOT officials promised $400 million in bonds supported by toll revenues, but then—after construction was authorized—slashed the bond amount in half to $200 million because traffic studies showed revenue would be much lower than hoped for. Even then, the SR 99 bonds have had to be bailed out by the state legislature.
Investment Grade Analyses of tolled highway facilities do not tend to under-estimate future traffic levels; if anything, investment grade traffic and revenue studies tend to over-state future traffic levels and associated revenue. The claim that investment grade studies are “too conservative” implies that such studies routinely under-estimate traffic levels on tolled roads (i.e. that actual traffic levels are significantly higher than shown in the investment grade analysis). While the IBR asserts that this is true, they present no actual statistical evidence to show that investment grade studies under estimate traffic. In fact, studies that have been done show that actual traffic levels on tolled facilities are lower than forecast by these supposedly “conservative”.
The second span of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was opened in 2008. It was financed in principal part by tolls. Wilbur Smith and Associates prepared an Investment Grade Traffic and Revenue Analysis for WSDOT, which predicted that annual traffic—measured by vehicle toll transactions—would grow at a rate of 1.7 percent per year over the forecast period. Total transactions were predicted to grow from slightly more than 14 million to more than 18 million by 2025. In fact, annual transactions have been below forecast levels ever since 2009. Actual growth in transactions since the bridge opened have been 0.6 percent per year, barely a third of the growth rate predicted in the Investment Grade Analysis. Aggregate traffic growth has been less than half of the amount predicted, increasing by about 2 million transactions per year since the bridge opened, rather than about 4 million transactions.
WSDOT completed the replacement portion of the SR 520 floating bridge in 2012, paying for the project in part with tolls, which are assessed on a variable basis. The investment grade analysis prepared by Wilbur Smith predicted their would be a sharp drop-off in traffic on the bridge when tolls were introduced, and that once that shock was over, traffic levels would grow at an annual rate of almost 3 percent per year. The forecast accurately predicted the initial decline in traffic, but over the past decade, has consistently under-estimated traffic growth. Traffic levels on the SR 520 floating bridge today are about one-third lower than predicted by the Investment Grade Analysis, about 60,000 vehicles per day, rather than the predicted 90,000.
The SR 520 bridge is one of two crossing Lake Washington. Before it was expanded (and tolled) the SR-520 bridge carried slightly fewer vehicles than the parallel I-90 bridge, about 3 miles to the South (as the crow flies). Just before tolls were imposed in 2011, the I-90 bridge carried about 18,000 more vehicles daily than the SR-520 bridge. Since then, traffic has gone up on I-90 and gone down on SR-520. Today about 80,000 more vehicles use the I-90 bridge compared to the SR-520 bridge (138,000 vs. 58,000). The data also put the lie to claims that this is somehow all about Covid: both bridges saw a decline in 2020, but while I-90 fully rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, SR 520 has made up only half of the decline.
These data directly contradict claims that Assistant ODOT Administrator Travis Brauer made in testimony to the Oregon Transportation Commission on May 7, 2026. Without citing any data, Brouwer acknowledged that while traffic fell off after SR 520 was tolled, and traffic increased on the parallel I-90 route that somehow there was a “gradual increase” in SR 520 traffic, and that diversion was not “one-to-one”:
That is something that we’ll be bringing to you as part of this Level 3 work over time to understand what diversion looks like. And I will tell you, you know, I look back at, say, the tolling that was done on SR 520 across Lake Washington in Washington, and there’s a lot of ways it’s somewhat analogous. We saw after tolling was imposed on SR 520 a dramatic and instantaneous drop in traffic on SR 520 and that’s very consistent with what you will see in the level three traffic and revenue analysis. And yet, then what you see is a gradual increase in traffic going back to that route over time. What you see is that there are alternate routes to any toll facility that will see additional traffic. We saw that on the I-90 bridge, but it is not a one-to-one.
The reality, however, is that SR 520 traffic has gone down—and and stayed down—and not rebounded as the supposedly “conservative” investment grade analysis predicted. SR 520 is carrying 40,000 fewer vehicles than before tolls were introduced 14 years ago, a four times larger decrease than predicted in the IGA. Meanwhile, traffic on I-90 is about 20,000 vehicles per day higher than before tolling was implemented on SR 520, and the I-90 bridge carries a permanently larger fraction of cross-Lake Washington traffic that before. Tolls clearly produced sustained diversion, in addition to causing the total volume of traffic across Lake Washington to decline by about 20,000 vehicles per day.
The Highway 99 Tunnel in downtown Seattle (built to replace the capacity lost due to the removal of the Alaskan Way Viaduct) cost more than $3 billion. Originally, the project budget called for $400 million to be paid for by bonding toll revenues charged to tunnel users. After the project started construction in 2012, WSDOT admitted it had over-estimated potential toll revenues and the amount of bonds that could be supported from toll revenues was cut in half, to just $200 million, meaning more than 90 percent of the cost of the project was paid for from other state and federal funds.. Today, WSDOT charges time varying tolls of up to $2.80 for tunnel travel. About 50,000 vehicles per day use the tunnel.
In 2022: the State Treasurer found that toll revenues were sufficient only to cover interest payments on bonds, leading the outstanding liability still more than $200 million initially borrowed. The State Legislature bailed out the toll bonds by reallocating a portion of the settlement with construction contractors to help pay off bonds.
The Investment Grade Analysis of the IBR prepared by Stantec is based on Metro’s “Kate” regional travel demand model. A key way to check the accuracy of models is to compare their predicted levels of traffic in current years with actual data (compiled from traffic recorders). A key part of the Stantec Investment Grade Analysis was to check Kate’s predictions against current measured traffic levels. Stantec found that Kate seriously over-predicted existing traffic levels. (Technically the model is “poorly calibrated.”)
Model accuracy is expressed as the “root mean squared error” which reports the average percentage error in model predictions. The Stantec Level 2 analysis shows that the Metro Kate model is about six times less accurate than the Stantec Level 2 model. Kate has an RMSE of 14.5 percent, the Stantec model has an RMSE of just 2.5 percent.
| Comparison of Travel Demand Model Validation | ||||
| Model (Year) | Calibration Year | Scope | Metric | Error (RMSE) |
| Metro/Kate (2017) | 2015 | 32 Regional Cutlines | AWDT | 14.5% |
| Stantec/IBR Level 2 (2023) | 2015 | 32 Regional Cutlines | AWDT | 2.5% |
| CDM Smith/CRC IGA (2013) | 2010 | 11 Regional Cutlines | Hourly | 2.5% |
| CDM Smith/CRC IGA (2013) | 2010 | I5, I205 Bridges | Hourly | 0.8% |
The IBR continues to use the poorly calibrated Metro RTDM “for planning purposes” even though it substantially over-states actual traffic on the I-5 bridge. The Kate model is not merely less accurate: Stantec’s work shows that the model is significantly biased:
. . . limitations were identified in the RTDM assignment process that resulted in overestimated speeds and underestimated travel times along the I-5 and I-205 corridors near the river crossings. As such, additional refinements were performed to the base year 2015 traffic assignment to improve alignment with the observed data. These refinements were performed outside of the RTDM environment, in a base year toll model prepared using RTDM output like demand matrices, highway network, and relevant parameters. (page 3-5.)
By overestimating speeds and underestimating travel times, the model assigns more vehicles to I-5 than are actually observed. It seems clear that IBR prefers these higher forecasts because (a) they justify a larger project with more vehicle capacity, and (b) they create an inflated “no-build baseline” that systematically conceals or understates the travel-inducing environmental effects of the build alternative. The Kate model is dramatically less accurate than the Stantec model—it makes no sense to trust Kate’s results, embodied in the FEIS.
Washington’s experience with inflated “investment grade” traffic and revenue estimates isn’t an anomaly: “Standard Industry Practice” is to exaggerate traffic and revenue. The problem of over-estimating traffic levels (and associated toll revenues) is endemic. Bond rating agency Fitch issued a scathing report on toll forecast errors. They warned that over-estimating revenue is common in the industry and is a key cause of financial problems for toll-financed projects. The Fitch message, summarized in the trade publication, Toll Roads News, is clear and stark:
They [Fitch] call demand forecasting “a key vulnerability,” adding: “The probability of over-estimation remains high despite decades of experience with forecasting demand on transport projects. Many greenfield projects over the years across many jurisdictions have suffered from this… While other risks have been manifested in many cases, defaults on debt have largely been driven by under-performance relative to original projections.”
Investment grade forecasts also routinely suffer from optimism bias. The consulting firms preparing these estimates have strong incentives to satisfy their clients interest to be able to justify the maximum amount of borrowing for their facilities, which leads them to over-estimate likely revenues. Around the county dozens of toll roads and bridges have failed to produce expected revenues, leading to delinquencies, defaults, and bankruptcies. As international expert Robert Bain‘s comprehensive review of industry practice found:
“The standard of some traffic and revenue studies, supporting infrastructure investments worth billions of dollars, is truly appalling,” Bain said. “Forecasts are commonly used to ‘sell’ deals to potential investors, insurers or rating agencies — so they are exposed to manipulation.”
In 2010, the Oregon State Treasurer hired Bain author of “Toll Road Traffic and Revenue Forecasts: An Interpreters Guide” to assist in the financial analysis of the Columbia River Crossing. He found numerous flaws and biase—which prompted calls for the investment grade analysis that produced dramatically different results than the highway department projects. Specifically, Bain reviewed the CRC traffic and revenue forecasts prepared for the project’s environmental impact statement on behalf of the Oregon State Treasurer. He found:
The traffic and revenue (T&R) reports fall short when compared with typical ‘investment grade’ traffic studies. As they stand they are not suitable for an audience focussed on detailed financial or credit analysis.
The traffic modelling activities described in the reports are confusing and much of the work now appears to be dated. Although a number of the technical approaches described appear to be reasonable, many of the modelling-related activities seem to ‘look backwards’; justifying model inputs and outputs produced some years ago.
No mention is made in the reports of historical traffic patterns in the area or volumes using the bridges. This is a strange omission. Traffic forecasts need to be placed in the context of what has happened in the past. If there is a disconnect (between the past and the future) – as appears to be the case here – a commentary should be provided which takes the reader from the past, through any transition period, to the future. No such commentary is provided in the material reviewed to date.
Traffic volumes using the I-5 Bridge have flattened-off over the last 15-20 years; well before the current recessionary period. . . . the flattening-off is a long-term traffic trend; not simply a manifestation of recent circumstances. The CAGR for the period 1999 – 2006 reduces to 0.6%
Over-predicting traffic is commonplace for toll road studies, even those done for “investment grade” forecasts. Streetsblog reported that:In 2012, the Reston (Virginia) Citizens Association completed a study [PDF] examining traffic projections provided by engineering firm Wilbur Smith (the company that did the very wrong IndianaToll Road projections, now called CDM Smith). The group collected data from 26 toll road projects on which Wilbur Smith had produced the traffic projections. During the first five years that were forecast, traffic projections overshot actual traffic every single year, and by an average of 109 percent, according to the report. In short, investment grade toll revenue forecasts are not as wildly unrealistic as the promotional forecasts produced by state highway agencies, but they still consistently over-estimate traffic volumes and toll revenues on newly tolled-roadways. They are decidedly not unrealistic worst-case scenarios as portrayed by IBR officials. As a practical matter, the results of the IGA’s confirm that overall traffic levels will be lower, and diversion to un-tolled parallel routes (in this case I-205) will be higher than acknowledged
Nearly two months after first unveiling its big plans to establish a Moon Base at the lunar south pole, NASA leadership is set to provide an update.
On Tuesday afternoon, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman will discuss the work that has been happening behind the scenes and the preparations being made for the first few missions supporting the Moon Base.
“These are uncrewed, robotic missions to the surface. We’re also going to talk about some announcements related to some missions that will fly later next year and in 2028, including the first rover that someday, when our astronauts get to the surface of the Moon, will get to drive around it,” Isaacman said during an appears on Fox News Tuesday morning.
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage of the briefing beginning shortly before the news conference gets underway at 2 p.m. EDT (1800 UTC).
Isaacman will also be joined by Lori Glaze, associate administrator of the newly established Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate (HSMD), and Carlos García-Galán, the Moon Base program manager, which is now under HSMD.
This past Friday, NASA announced a new mission directorate realignment, which unveiled not only HSMD, but also the Research and Technology Mission Directorate (RTMD). The agency did not alter the Science Mission Directorate (SMD).
“NASA will integrate the Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate and Space Technology Mission Directorate into the new RTMD,” the agency wrote in a press release. “As a combined research, space technology, and aeronautics organization charged with nuclear power and propulsion development, RTMD will ensure NASA has the capabilities needed for the mission of today and the future.”
HSMD encompasses the former Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate and the Space Operations Mission Directorate.
Trump administration officials, confronted by overlapping outbreaks of Ebola and the hantavirus, have taken a more aggressive approach to locking down potentially exposed people than in past outbreaks, surprising many public health experts…
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drew notice during the Covid-19 pandemic for suggesting that the coronavirus should be allowed to spread freely among healthy people, and for arguing that mandatory quarantines and lockdowns were harmful to society.
Last week, however, he issued quarantine orders that cited public health laws for two passengers who wanted to leave the Nebraska facility and isolate in their home states.
Here is the full NYT story. Via Maxwell G.
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1. How did the United States bend the health care cost curve?
2. Why are you reading fewer books?
3. Dean Ball on the Papal encyclical. My interpretation is a little different, and I suppose more Straussian. The Pope is basically telling us that AI is here to stay. If the detailed analysis seems thin to you, there is no need to distract from that more important and more essential message. That the Pope presented this with Anthropic, and for that matter quoted Tolkien/Gandalf, and allowed the use of em dashes, does not harm my interpretation. And here is what Perplexity thought I would say.
5. A one-time treatment for bad cholesterol? (NYT) And a Twitter thread.
6. Those new service sector jobs?
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Many people used to think of their homes mainly as places to rest between busy schedules, social plans, restaurants, vacations, and nights out. Over the last several years, however, outdoor living spaces have started taking on a much bigger role in everyday life. Backyards, patios, and outdoor entertainment areas are increasingly designed to feel less like occasional-use spaces and more like genuine extensions of the home itself.
This shift has changed the kinds of upgrades homeowners prioritize. Instead of focusing only on appearance, people now pay far more attention to comfort, usability, atmosphere, and long-term enjoyment. Features that support slower evenings, outdoor dining, wellness routines, and relaxed social gatherings often end up being used much more consistently than expected.
Over time, many homeowners realize that certain outdoor upgrades quietly make staying home feel easier, calmer, and more enjoyable than constantly going out.
One of the biggest changes in modern outdoor design is the growing focus on wellness and recovery. Homeowners increasingly want outdoor spaces that help them mentally disconnect from stress instead of simply creating visually impressive backyards.
This explains why heat therapy spaces, quiet seating areas, and privacy-focused layouts have become so popular. Homeowners investing in luxury outdoor sauna setups often discover that these spaces quickly become part of regular evening routines rather than occasional luxury features.
The appeal usually comes from how naturally these environments support relaxation. Instead of planning complicated outings or dealing with crowded public spaces, people can step outside for a calmer experience without leaving home entirely.
As outdoor wellness areas become integrated into everyday life, many homeowners start viewing their backyards less as entertainment zones and more as personal recovery spaces.
Backyard hosting also tends to feel very different when cooking becomes part of the experience itself. Outdoor meals often create slower and more casual environments than traditional indoor gatherings because people naturally spend more time moving around, talking, and relaxing outdoors.
Cooking outside changes the rhythm of social events. Guests gather around grills, outdoor kitchens, prep stations, and seating areas more organically than they do during many formal indoor dinners. The atmosphere usually feels less rushed and less structured.
This is one reason outdoor cooking upgrades remain so popular among homeowners who enjoy hosting regularly. Equipment, maintenance tools, and supply for barbeque naturally fit into these outdoor-centered lifestyles where grilling and open-air dining become recurring parts of weekends and evening routines.
People often end up using these outdoor spaces far more frequently than expected once hosting begins feeling easier and more comfortable at home.
Many outdoor spaces fail not because they look bad, but because they are uncomfortable to spend time in for extended periods. Seating, airflow, lighting, shade, and spacing all dramatically affect whether guests actually want to stay outdoors for hours.
This is why functional comfort often matters more than highly decorative design choices. Softer lighting, durable seating, covered areas, and flexible layouts tend to encourage more relaxed gatherings than spaces designed mainly around appearance.
Homeowners also begin appreciating outdoor environments that adapt well to different situations. A backyard that works equally well for quiet evenings, small family dinners, or larger social gatherings usually provides more long-term value than spaces built around only one type of use.
The easier a space feels to enjoy casually, the more consistently it usually becomes part of everyday life.
One interesting shift many people notice after upgrading outdoor spaces is that staying home begins feeling far less limiting. Comfortable patios, outdoor dining areas, wellness features, and relaxing backyard environments can dramatically change how people think about free time.
Instead of automatically looking for restaurants, crowded venues, or expensive outings every weekend, many individuals begin enjoying slower evenings at home more often. Outdoor spaces provide a balance between social activity and personal comfort that many public environments struggle to offer consistently.
This becomes especially valuable during stressful or busy periods where people still want enjoyable experiences without dealing with traffic, reservations, noise, or overstimulating environments.
The emotional effect of having comfortable outdoor space available at any time often becomes much more important than homeowners initially expect.
One common mistake in outdoor design is assuming that larger or more expensive additions automatically create better experiences. In reality, many homeowners end up using simpler comfort-focused features far more consistently than dramatic statement pieces.
Comfortable seating, manageable cooking setups, quiet wellness areas, shaded patios, and practical lighting often shape daily enjoyment more strongly than oversized or highly decorative installations. Features that fit naturally into ordinary routines generally remain valuable much longer.
The same principle applies to hosting. Outdoor spaces that are easy to clean, easy to maintain, and comfortable during different weather conditions tend to encourage spontaneous gatherings much more often than complicated layouts requiring extensive preparation.
The less stressful outdoor hosting feels, the more frequently people usually invite others over.
As people spend more time balancing demanding schedules, digital overstimulation, and crowded routines, outdoor comfort increasingly feels tied to emotional recovery rather than luxury alone. Homeowners are no longer designing backyards only for appearances or occasional entertaining. Many now want spaces that genuinely improve everyday life.
This explains why outdoor wellness, casual dining, and relaxation-focused upgrades continue growing in popularity. The ability to unwind outside, host comfortably, cook casually, or disconnect from indoor stress without leaving home often provides lasting value long after the excitement of installation fades.
In many cases, the most appreciated outdoor upgrades are not the most extravagant ones, but the ones that quietly make ordinary evenings feel calmer, easier, and more enjoyable week after week.
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Bookkeeping services represent the process of financial management with precise organization and registration of all financial transactions of a business. It is an essential component when it comes to maintaining a clear image of the cash flow, profitability and overall financial health. Without bookkeepers, proper recordkeeping companies risk costly errors, tax problems and decisions based on incomplete information which might affect the business’s growth. The local companies from Austin have to keep up with the regulations but also with the quick pace of development which an experienced bookkeeper can do by providing strategic support and financial clarity. These services are ideal for small businesses, startups and also freelancers who want to save time, reduce stress and focus on growing the business without worrying about the financial part.
The Austin bookkeeping services represent the process of recording, organizing, and managing all of a business’s financial transactions. The main role of a bookkeeper is to maintain clear and up-to-date records so that you as the business owner have an accurate picture of your financial situation. These services are essential for any business in order for it to properly function, regardless of its size or field, because it underpins tax compliance and financial decisions.
Even though many people think that a bookkeeper and an accountant are the same thing, they have big differences between their roles. The bookkeeping focuses on the daily recording of transactions while accounting involves the analysis, interpretation and reporting of financial data as well as tax planning. Therefore, a bookkeeper has a fundamental role and the accountant builds essential aspects based on the other’s job.
The bookkeeping services usually include a wide range of activities such as recording transactions and documenting all income and expenses, as well as bank reconciliation which basically ensures consistency between internal records and bank statements. Also invoice management is one of their activities which involves issuing and tracking invoices as well as managing payments. Besides, financial reporting provides essential documents such as the balance sheet and profit and loss account that help evaluate business performance and can also support its growth in some ways.
Coursera also mentions ‘ Bookkeeping is the systematic process of recording, organizing, and tracking all financial transactions of a business, including sales, purchases, payments, and receipts, to maintain accurate and up-to-date financial records that support business operations, tax reporting, and decision-making. While bookkeepers used to keep track of this information in physical books, much of the process is now done using software. ’
If you have a local business, choosing Austin bookkeepers can bring a lot of advantages for any business regardless of its field and industry. One of the most important benefits is their knowledge of the specifics of Texas law, as well as tax regulations and any other financial requirements that can vary from state to state. Also, a local professional is already familiar with these aspects therefore reducing the risk of errors and penalties. Besides, they can provide advice suitable to the economic environment of Austin which everybody knows is a city known for its entrepreneurial dynamism.
Another major advantage is access to personalized services. Unlike the general and automated services, a local bookkeeper can better understand the specific needs of a business therefore coming up with different solutions suitable for them. The best part in choosing to hire or to collaborate with a local bookkeeper is that you do not have to pay for a standard pack of services, you can only pay for what you need. Whether it is about cash flow management, cost optimization or financial document organization services can be personalized based on industry, company size and long-term goals.
Also, Texas is an important hub for small businesses and startups and a bookkeeper in the area has direct experience working with such companies. This means that a local bookkeeper can offer you relevant support in growing your business by organizing everything that is financial. In a competitive market like this one, collaboration with a professional can make a huge difference in maintaining a solid financial base.
QuickBooks also mentions ‘ Bookkeepers help businesses manage their finances by monitoring different accounts, transactions, and reports. They collect, organize, and store the business’s financial records, including reconciliation, income, and cash flow statements. Bookkeepers also make it possible for business owners and accountants to build budgets, identify trends, and plan for the future. ’
Well, there is no such thing as the best bookkeeper, but you can select the best bookkeeper for your business and this is a decision that can directly influence the financial health of your business. First, it is essential to check a bookkeeper’s certifications and professional experience. A qualified and certified bookkeeper who has relevant experience in this field will better understand the specific needs of the company and will manage the complex financial situations more efficiently.
Another important criterion is represented by the reviews of other clients. The feedback from other clients can offer you a clear image of the level of professionalism, communication and reliability. Online platforms or direct recommendations from other local entrepreneurs can be extremely helpful in the selection process.
A professional is also careful with what technology they use because a modern bookkeeper should always be up-to-date and familiar with popular programs such as QuickBooks or Xero which allow the efficient and transparent monitorization of financial data. By using these programs that are strong financial tools you will have easier and quicker access to reports and can also reduce error risks.
Therefore, the bookkeepers play an important role in a company because they efficiently manage the finances offering clarity, control and support in making decisions. Working with a professional and local bookkeeper helps you avoid errors and comply with tax obligations. Choosing the right partner that is most suitable for your company, with experience and transparency, can significantly contribute to the long-term stability and development of your business.
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Update May 26, 12:21 p.m. EDT (1621 UTC) SpaceX confirms deployment of its 24 Starlink satellites.
SpaceX followed up a picturesque Falcon 9 launch from Cape Canaveral Monday morning with another from Vandenberg Space Force Base Tuesday morning.
The Starlink 17-37 mission, which was originally scheduled to launch on May 9, faced several launch delays throughout the month of May. The flight went through two previous booster assignments (B1097 and B1103) before SpaceX ultimately designated B1100 to fly the mission.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 4 East happened at 7:50:34 a.m. PDT (10:50:34 a.m. EDT / 1450:34 UTC). The Falcon 9 rocket flew on a southerly trajectory upon leaving the pad.
The Starlink 17-37 mission was the sixth flight for B1100. It previously flew the NROL-105 mission as well as four batches of Starlink satellites.
Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1100 landed on the drone ship, ‘Of Course I Still Love You,’ positioned out in the Pacific Ocean. This was the 198th landing on this vessel and the 615th booster landing to date for SpaceX.
Cuba? My first reaction when recent news brought this up was, “Um, okay, yes, communist government, oppressed people, past possible attacks on the U.S.” But to consider each of those: Communism? There isn’t much left of it in the world. Out of the three or four still claiming it there is China which is primarily a typical single-top-leader with a mix of some central planning and programs with a significant amount of free-market. There is North Korea which is a dictatorship. Even if you could describe Cuba as truly communist, so what? It’s not going to be leading a wave of other countries becoming communist. What do we care what form they take?
Oppressed people? That’s also true in countries all over the world that we don’t seem to care about. Even further, Viktor Orban in Hungary was transitioning the country to an oppressive authoritarian system and we supported him. Is it because Cuba is in our Western hemisphere? So is Peru where President Bukele is leading a harsh authoritarian rule, but we’re making deals with him to take the immigration rejects (to put it in terms that fit Trump’s attitude) that Trump wants to get rid of. And much of what the Cuban people suffer is simple poverty which the U.S. has played a big role in creating. We’ve had embargoes of varying degrees imposed on them since 1960, and of course much worse now since Trump has almost cut off their ability to import oil.
Attacks? They go both ways. The one that has just been refreshed after having long been dropped is a Cuban attack that shot down two U.S. planes over open water that killed four people. That was thirty years ago. A U.S. indictment of Raul Castro for that was just announced. Okay, if we can get Mr. Castro here, in his nineties, and try him, that might be justice. Does that require invading and capturing or killing other leadership in some hope of radical change? That didn’t work in Iran. The new leadership there is worse than the old, and the people didn’t rise up. The people of Cuba have had most of seven decades to rise up, so counting on that now seems unwise.
Attacks did go both ways. The worst was the bombing of a Cuban domestic flight killing 73 people, carried out by anti-communist exiles with connections to the U.S. The CIA later acknowledged knowing about it in advance, and the exiles have pretty much lived freely in the U.S. afterward.
If Trump invades and does…something, maybe insists they give the U.S. control of their sugar industry, does that make him look good? The strongest country in the world forcing one of the weakest to grant some concessions? Wow, what an accomplishment?
I thought with reading fresh material about the country and thinking through the situation and in writing this I’d have the reasons become clear. Other than the cynical assumption that it’s just for Trump, nope, no reason is clear. I end where I started.
So remind me again, why Cuba?
“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.
The post Remind Me. Why Cuba? appeared first on DCReport.org.
A sign of the times:(
The Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony Is Moving to Europe (after 35 years in the USA)
"Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that make people LAUGH, and then THINK. Organized by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), they celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative, and spur interest in science. Winners travel to the ceremony from around the world, to collect their prizes and be showered with paper airplanes. The first 35 ceremonies (1991-2025) all took place in Massachusetts: at Harvard University, MIT [The Massachusetts Institute of Technology], and Boston University. But now the ceremony is moving to Europe.
"Marc Abrahams, founder and emcee of the ceremony (and editor of the magazine), explains: “During the past year, it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country. We cannot in good conscience ask the new winners, or the international journalists who cover the event, to travel to the USA this year.”
This year’s ceremony is being produced in collaboration with institutions of the ETH Domain and the University of Zurich. Abrahams explains: “The city of Zurich and its institutions rapidly moved mountains (only metaphorically — in Switzerland it is illegal to physically move mountains) and committed to make this possible. Switzerland has nurtured many unexpected good things —Albert Einstein’s physics, the world economy, and the cuckoo clock leap to mind — and is again helping the world appreciate improbable people and ideas.”
My latest paper, A Test of the Coase Conjecture Using Prices of Electronic Books, with the excellent Tim Groseclose, has just been published. The Coase Conjecture is another one of Coase’s little ideas — the original paper is six pages — that has spawned hundreds of follow-up papers and thousands of citations.
The idea is simple. A monopolist of a durable good has a time-inconsistency problem. Set the monopoly price in period 1 and he will be tempted in period 2 to cut the price and mop up the customers whose valuations sit between the period-1 price and MC. But the same logic applies in period 2, and again in period 3, and so on — eventually the price unravels to MC. Consumers see this coming, the monopolist knows the consumers see it coming, and so the monopolist cuts price to MC in period 1. And since a “period” is just the interval between price changes, the whole unraveling happens — in Coase’s phrase — “in the twinkling of an eye.”
The theorists, most notably Gul, Sonnenschein and Wilson and Fudenberg, Levine and Tirole, formalized Coase’s insight and showed that under quite general conditions the logic goes through. Which is rather surprising, since, as Tim and I point out, Coase’s conjecture implies that many patents and copyrights are essentially worthless — a prediction wildly at variance with the facts. Other theorists, including Stokey, Ausubel and Deneckere, and Board and Pycia, have offered variants under which the Coase outcome does and does not obtain.
For all this theory, there have been almost no direct tests of the Coase Conjecture apart from a handful of lab experiments. Ours is one of the first papers to take the conjecture to the real world. We look at e-books, an unusually clean setting: digital goods are durable, marginal costs are low, resale is limited, and prices can be changed quickly. Using the prices of e-books that are in the public domain as a proxy for marginal cost, we ask: (a) do prices rapidly fall to MC, and (b) does the market clear in the first period? The answer to both is no. E-book prices begin well above MC, sales continue over many periods, and prices don’t even decline monotonically.
We reject the Coase Conjecture decisively.
The paper has an interesting history. The theorists (or the referees we guessed were theorists) praised the paper for taking the theory seriously but inevitably had a fillip to offer, distinguishing the world of pure theory from empirical tests. The empiricists, on the other hand, said our tests were too simple since no one takes the theory that seriously. It’s good to see the paper find a home!
We reject the Coase Conjecture decisively, but it remains to say why. We can rule out some explanations — it’s not rising MC, and it’s not the finiteness of buyers (which can support a perfectly price-discriminating Pac-Man equilibrium).
Two theories remain: 1) sellers can commit not to lower prices, and 2) the outside-options model of Board and Pycia. I prefer the former, my co-author prefers the latter. To me, commitment just isn’t that hard. The standard story is that profits are like cookies on the table and the monopolist can’t resist — but at least the people tempted by cookies get to eat the cookies! The Coase profits are illusory: the monopolist races to MC in period 1 precisely because they know they won’t resist later and as a result they don’t even get a taste of profit! Too clever by half. I say, show some backbone. Firms are *all about* commitment — to workers, consumers, contractors. Why not to a price? My co-author points out, however, that this is more Tabarrok-vibe than carefully laid out theory.
Tim likes the Board and Pycia model which begins with the plausible idea that consumers have outside options — if they don’t buy the book today, they will buy another book, rent the movie, or borrow from the library — and crucially, once they take the outside option, the consumer never returns to the market. You might think outside options would make it *harder* for the firm to set a high price, but Board and Pycia show in a very clever but extended argument that when you carefully work out the full equilibrium the opposite holds: outside options give firms a time-consistent incentive to set and keep a high price. Tim explains the argument further here (see also our paper for an intuitive breakdown).
In any case, the Coase Conjecture — at least as modelled by the theorists — fails in an environment most conducive to it.
A beautiful theory falls to ugly data.
The post A Beautiful Theory Falls to Ugly Data appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Last Friday, just before the long holiday weekend, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard resigned, effective as of June 30, citing her husband’s recent cancer diagnosis as the factor that forced her decision. A source told Jonathan Landay and Erin Blanco of Reuters that President Donald J. Trump had forced her out. Certainly, he has sidelined her.
Congress created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in 2004 after concluding that intelligence failures, including a lack of communication across agencies, had contributed to the vulnerability that permitted the 9/11 attacks. The ODNI is supposed to oversee the eighteen different intelligence agencies and to coordinate the information they produce.
Gabbard did not have deep experience in intelligence and had endorsed Russian talking points about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine when Trump named her director of ODNI. Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton called her “a hand grenade ready to explode.”
Gabbard ran into trouble with Trump by June 2025, when she released a video warning of “nuclear holocaust” because “political elite warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers.” They were bringing the world “closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before,” she said. She released the video days before Trump launched his first attack on Iran, and a former intelligence officer told Nick Schifrin of PBS that Trump considered the video an attempt to try to convince him not to launch the strikes.
Afterward, Gabbard seemed to try to regain Trump’s favor by backing his extremist pet projects, including accusing former president Barack Obama of leading a “treasonous conspiracy” and calling for him to be prosecuted over the FBI’s investigation of the ties between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russian operatives. She also oversaw an FBI raid at the Fulton County, Georgia, election headquarters during which the administration scooped up all the physical ballots from the 2020 presidential election, as well as ballot images, tabulator tapes, and the voter rolls from that election.
But she never recovered her standing with the president. As Shane Harris noted in The Atlantic, while Trump was preparing to invade Venezuela and extract its president and his wife, Gabbard was posting pictures of herself on a Hawaiian beach.
Trump stayed in the White House over the weekend, missing his son Don Jr.’s wedding in the Bahamas with a social media post explaining that “[w]hile I very much wanted to be with my son, Don Jr., and the newest member of the Trump Family, his soon to be wife, Bettina, circumstances pertaining to Government, and my love for the United States of America, do not allow me to do so. I feel it is important for me to remain in Washington, D.C., at the White House during this important period of time.”
Whatever else might be going on, Trump is under pressure to find a way out of Iran. Not only are prices skyrocketing owing to the rising cost of oil after Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz in response to attacks from the U.S. and Israel, but the clock has run out on any authorization he could have claimed for his military adventure in Iran, and Congress seems ready to force his hand.
Congress alone can declare war, but the 1973 War Powers Act permits the president to act against an “imminent” threat so long as he notifies Congress within 48 hours. Then he has 60 days to get congressional approval. That timeline ran out on May 1, and the administration claimed it didn’t need authorization because it had declared a ceasefire on April 7, although it continued to maintain a blockade against Iranian ports—an act of war—and to exchange fire with Iranian forces. Republicans in Congress appeared to accept that argument for a time. But last Thursday, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) had to send representatives home a day early to keep members from passing a war powers resolution that would order Trump to remove U.S. troops from his war on Iran.
The House and Senate will come back on June 2, and Trump clearly would like to have an agreement with Iran in place before they do.
Trump’s social media account over the weekend was active. He twice posted an image of himself leering over Greenland with the caption “Hello, Greenland!” and repeated suggestions that “China Loves Trump.” He posted an AI image of Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) as a devil (I think), calling him a “SLEAZEBAG” and a “Dumocrat,” and an image of eight lawmakers or officials in orange jumpsuits (except for Obama’s tan one), claiming they had “Caused tremendous damage through Weaponization!” And he posted a number of images of colorful fountains.
But much of the account’s attention this weekend was on Iran. On Saturday morning the account posted an image of Iran covered by a U.S. flag, and at 4:30 that afternoon, it posted that Trump had just had a call with leaders from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, Pakistan, Türkiye, Egypt, Jordan, and Bahrain, and then a separate call with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, about Iran. All the calls “went very well,” according to the post.
“An Agreement has been largely negotiated,” the post read, “subject to finalization…. Final aspects and details of the Deal are currently being discussed, and will be announced shortly. In addition to many other elements of the Agreement, the Strait of Hormuz will be opened.”
But Iran’s state media immediately posted that Trump’s claim that the strait would reopen as it was before the war was “not true,” adding that “it should be noted that American officials have acknowledged in multiple messages to Iran that Trump’s tweets are primarily for promotional purposes and media consumption within the United States, and they have recommended that no attention be paid to these statements.”
Firm details about the deal were scarce, but as journalist David Schuster posted, Al-Jazeera reported that the deal included “unfreezing billions in Iranian funds, lifting U.S. blockade, pulling U.S. forces away, reopening strait of Hormuz though with tolls to Iran, and allowing Iran to keep its enriched uranium.” “This would be a total U.S. surrender,” Schuster noted. Iran’s military spokesperson Ibrahim al-Fiqar posted an AI image of Trump kneeling before Iran’s supreme leader with the caption “The end.”
Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS), chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, immediately condemned the deal. He told reporters it “would be a disaster. Everything accomplished by Operation Epic Fury would be for naught.” Wicker urged Trump to “allow America’s skilled armed forces to finish the destruction of Iran’s conventional military capabilities and reopen the strait. Further pursuit of an agreement with Iran’s Islamist regime risks a perception of weakness. We must finish what we started. It is past time for action.”
By Sunday morning Trump was, once again, posting AI images of U.S. bombers attacking Iranian ships (complete with bodies flying through the air) and insisting that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated between the U.S., China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Iran during the Obama administration was “[o]ne of the worst deals ever made by our Country.” Under the JCPOA, Iran agreed to reduce its stockpile of enriched uranium significantly and allow inspections, in exchange for relief from some sanctions. The Strait of Hormuz remained open. Although inspectors said Iran was honoring the deal, Trump took the U.S. out of the JCPOA in 2018, and the following year, Iran resumed work on enriched uranium necessary for a nuclear weapon.
Trump added that he expected Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, to join the Abraham Accords, the deal hammered out during Trump’s first term under which the UAE and Bahrain formally recognized Israel. According to Barak Ravid of Axios, Arab leaders met Trump’s suggestion of such a recognition during the Saturday phone call with silence.
Then his account posted: “If I make a deal with Iran, it will be a good and proper one, not like the one made by Obama, which gave Iran massive amounts of CASH, and a clear and open path to a Nuclear Weapon. Our deal is the exact opposite, but nobody has seen it, or knows what it is. It isn’t even fully negotiated yet. So don’t listen to the losers, who are critical about something they know nothing about. Unlike those before me who should have solved this problem many years ago, I don’t make bad deals!”
This morning, Trump’s account posted: “I laugh at all of the Dumocrats, RINOS, and Fools who know nothing about the potential deal I am making with Iran, things that haven’t even been negotiated yet.” “[T]hey are losers! The deal with Iran will either be a great and meaningful one, or there will be no deal. It will be the exact opposite of the JCPOA disaster negotiated by the failed Obama Administration, which was a direct and open path to a Nuclear Weapon for Iran. No, I don’t do deals like that!”
Meanwhile, on Meet the Press Sunday, Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY), who last week lost the primary for reelection to his seat after Trump backed his opponent and Trump supporters threw a gobsmacking $35 million at the contest, reopened fire from a different direction. Massie has been key to demanding the release of the Epstein files, and the administration continues to ignore the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which required the Department of Justice to release all the files no later than December 19, 2025.
When host Kristen Welker, noting that Massie had named names from the files in the past, asked, “Can we expect you to name more names in the coming weeks and months?” Massie answered: “Yes.”
—
Notes:
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/10/tulsi-gabbard-nuclear-weapons-00396586
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/tulsi-gabbards-record-and-impact-on-the-u-s-intelligence-community
https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/05/tulsi-gabbard-resigns-odni-trump/687280/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/18/tulsi-gabbard-obama-2016-election-russia
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/24/world/middleeast/five-main-issues-iran-israel-nuclear.html
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/05/25/world/iran-war-trump
https://www.axios.com/2026/05/24/trump-iran-war-israel-muslim-countries-abraham-accords
https://armscontrolcenter.org/the-iran-deal-then-and-now/
https://www.newsweek.com/thomas-massie-promises-to-expose-more-names-from-epstein-files-11989729
X:
Ibrahim_alFiqar/status/2058297686391210087
Blueksy:
I cannot believe I'm saying this, but getting the literal Pope to canonize your product's specific technical limitations as a spiritual treatise is the single greatest act of vendor lobbying I have ever seen.
— Corey Quinn, on Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah's influence on Magnifica Humanitas
Tags: ai-ethics, corey-quinn, anthropic, ai
Dropped this morning by the Vatican: Magnifica Humanitas of His Holiness Pope Leo XIV on Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. This is a very interesting document. It's some of the clearest writing I've seen on the ethics of integrating AI into modern society.
Pope Leo XIV chose the name Leo in honor of Pope Leo XIII, who is known for his 1891 Rerum novarum encyclical on "Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor".
This story on Vatican News further clarifies the significance of that decision:
Meeting with the College of Cardinals for their first formal encounter after his election, Pope Leo XIV explained part of the reason for the choice of his papal name. "There are different reasons for this," he said, before going on to explain that he chose the name Leo "mainly because Pope Leo XIII, in his historic encyclical Rerum novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution."
"In our own day," he continued, "the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice, and labour."
And now we get Pope Leo XIV's own encyclical on the AI revolution. There's a lot in here, but the writing style is very approachable, including to non-Catholics.
(I listened to most of the encyclical on a walk with our dog, my first time trying the ElevenReader iPhone app. It worked very well: I pasted in a URL to the document and it read it to me in a very high quality voice, highlighting each paragraph as it went.)
Here are some of my highlights. In each case below emphasis is mine.
Here's a useful description of the interpretability problem for LLMs in section 98:
First, any statement regarding AI risks becoming quickly outdated, given the remarkable pace at which these systems are developing. Second, all of us, including those who design them, possess only a limited understanding of their actual functioning. Indeed, current AI systems are more “cultivated” than “built,” for developers do not directly design every detail, but instead create a framework within which the intelligence “grows.” As a result, fundamental scientific aspects — such as the internal representations and computational processes of these systems — remain, at present, unknown.
I liked section 83's description of the relationship between development and dignity:
For individuals as well as for nations, development is both a duty and a right. Minimum conditions are required for enabling every person and people to flourish in accord with their dignity, without being kept in a state of dependence or excluded from access to necessary goods. Development is truly human when it places people at the center instead of the accumulation of wealth, and when it concerns peoples as well as individuals. Justice demands the recognition of the rights of society and the rights of peoples, and includes a responsibility toward future generations. Development is not truly human if it increases consumption for some while shifting costs and burdens onto others, or relegates entire regions to subordinate roles, preventing them from realizing their full potential.
Baked in cultural biases and sycophancy get a mention in section 100:
In personal use, three aspects in particular deserve careful consideration: the ease with which results are obtained, the impression of objectivity and the simulation of human communication. The speed and simplicity with which information, complex analyses, media content and practical assistance can be accessed undoubtedly makes life easier. Yet they can also encourage excessive reliance and the search for ready-made answers, and weaken personal creativity and judgment. The apparent objectivity of the responses and suggestions these systems provide can lead us to overlook the fact that they reflect the cultural assumptions of those who designed and trained them, with all their strengths and limitations. The artificial imitation of positive human communication — words of advice, empathy, friendship and even love — can be engaging and at times genuinely helpful. However, for less discerning users, it can also be misleading, creating the illusion of a relationship with a real personal subject. When words are simulated, they do not build genuine relationships, but only their appearance. The artificial imitation of care or support can become particularly risky when it enters contexts where real relationships and emotional bonds are lacking.
101 touches on the environmental impact:
Current AI systems require enormous amounts of energy and water, significantly influencing carbon dioxide emissions, and place heavy demands on natural resources. As their complexity increases, especially in the case of large language models, the need for computing power and storage capacity grows too, which requires an extensive network of machines, cables, data centers and energy-intensive infrastructure. For this reason, it is essential to develop more sustainable technological solutions that reduce environmental impact and help protect our common home.
102 covers the risks of algorithmic systems making decisions that impact people's lives without "compassion, mercy, forgiveness":
The use of AI is never a purely technical matter: when it enters processes that affect people’s lives, it touches on rights, opportunities, status and freedom. Important and sensitive decisions — concerning employment, credit, access to public services or even a person’s reputation — risk being fully delegated to automated systems that do not know “compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and above all, the hope that people are able to change,” and can therefore give rise to new forms of exclusion.
105 emphasizes the need for human accountability in how these systems are applied:
For AI to respect human dignity and truly serve the common good, responsibility must be clearly defined at every stage: from those who design and develop these systems to those who use them and rely on them for concrete decisions. In many cases, however, the internal processes leading to a result remain opaque, making it harder to assign responsibility and correct errors. This is where accountability becomes crucial: the possibility of identifying who must “account” for decisions, justify them, monitor them, and, when necessary, challenge them and remedy any harm caused.
And 108 touches on the way AI amplifies the power of those with resources:
In fact, as with every major technological shift, AI tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise and access to data. In light of the common good and the universal destination of goods, this raises serious concerns, since small but highly influential groups can shape information and consumption patterns, influence democratic processes and steer economic dynamics to their own advantage, undermining social justice and solidarity among peoples. For this reason, it is essential that the use of AI, especially when it touches on public goods and fundamental rights, be guided by clear criteria and effective oversight, grounded in participation and subsidiarity.
That same section explicitly calls out data as something that should be thought of more as a public good:
[...] Moreover, ownership of data cannot be left solely in private hands but must be appropriately regulated. Data is the product of many contributors and should not be treated as something to be sold off or entrusted to a select few. It is necessary to think creatively in order to manage data as a common or shared good, in a spirit of participation, as Saint John Paul II already suggested regarding collective goods.
Given that Palantir is named after a Lord of the Rings reference, I can't help but wonder if the J.R.R. Tolkien quote from The Return of the King (section 213) was the Pope throwing a little shade at Peter Thiel.
The twentieth-century Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien, in the words of a protagonist in one of his novels, described our responsibility in this way: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.” The civilization of love will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization. For this reason, it is worthwhile pausing to reflect on some aspects of how we, each in our own way, can cooperate in building the civilization of love.
On 6th January this year I joined the Oxide and Friends 2026 predictions podcast episode to talk about predictions for 2026, 2029 and 2032. I wrote mine up here, with hindsight they weren't nearly ambitious enough - it's already undeniable that LLMs write good code, we've made huge advances in sandboxing and New Zealand kākāpō have indeed had a truly excellent breeding season.
There's one segment from the episode that I didn't bother to include in my write-up, but that I can't resist providing as a lightly-edited transcript here:
Bryan Cantrill: 37:13
I think that AI has created some real public perception problems for itself. And I think that you are gonna have one of the frontier model companies, this year, have a white paper explaining how the proliferation of AI will mean prosperity for everybody. They will be trying to make some economic argument - because this is gonna be a 2026 election issue, how we think of these things and how they are regulated and it's a big mess. There's more heat than light in this debate.
Simon Willison: 38:05
I'd like to tag something on to that one: I think that only works if they can sort of wash that through existing trusted experts. Sam Altman and Dario are constantly publishing essays about this stuff and nobody believes a word they say. Get Barack Obama's signature on one of these position papers and maybe you've got something people might start to trust a little bit.
Adam Leventhal: 38:27
Otherwise, it's just like "leaded gas is good for you", says Exxon.
Bryan Cantrill: 38:31
I mean, yeah. God. Obama... let's go with that, that's a great one because if it's like Bill Clinton everyone's gonna kind of roll their eyes, so it's gotta be someone who's got real credibility saying that this is gonna be broad-based... I'd say if they get that person to do it, it's gonna be revealed that that's also a bit crooked.
Simon Willison: 38:57
How about the Pope?
Bryan Cantrill: 39:01
The Pope is very into this stuff! That's a great prediction. We've hit pay dirt. The Pope weighing in on LLMs and their economic impact on the world.
Simon, I'm giving you full credit if the Pope weighs in believing that this is gonna be economic devastation.
My prediction here looks a whole lot less insightful given the Leo XIV/Leo XIII relationship, which I was unaware of when we recorded the episode!
Tags: predictions, ai, kakapo, generative-ai, llms, bryan-cantrill, ai-ethics
The UN’s special rapporteurs are experts charged with a singular mandate: to monitor the world’s worst human rights abuses
- by Alvina Hoffmann
Three findings emerge. First, improvements in aggregate tax competitiveness are positively and significantly associated with real GDP per capita growth, robust to a wide range of controls. Second, this aggregate effect is driven entirely by the corporate tax pillar; no other component displays a significant growth effect. Third, the corporate tax effect materializes contemporaneously and accumulates over time, with a statistically significant three-year cumulative effect of approximately 0.16 percentage points per one-point improvement in the corporate tax score. These results suggest that the full architecture of the corporate tax system, not merely the headline statutory rate, is what matters for growth.
That is from a recent paper by Michael Christla and Monika Köppl–Turyna. Via the excellent Samir Varma.
The post The corporate tax rate really matters appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
In April 2026, NASA’s Artemis program took humanity back to the Moon, providing a new look at Earth’s only natural satellite. As the world celebrates the return of Artemis II’s four astronauts, the lunar surface continues to play a critical role in missions much closer to Earth.
Since 1972, the NASA/USGS Landsat program has captured the longest continuous record of Earth’s land surface, collecting images that track everything from crop health to glacial change. But with such a long data record, how can scientists trust that images acquired today can be accurately compared to those from days, years, or even decades ago? They look to the Moon.
Unlike Earth, with its constantly changing weather, seasons, and landscape, the Moon is remarkably stable. With no atmosphere and virtually no surface changes, the Moon reflects sunlight in a predictable, consistent way. This stability gives engineers a reference to fine-tune Landsat’s instruments and be confident that the data are accurate.
Once a month, during the full Moon, the spacecraft turns its instruments away from Earth and points them directly at the lunar surface. Over the course of two orbits, the spacecraft maneuvers to image the moon 15 times. During each pass, Landsat captures detailed measurements of light reflected off the Moon’s surface, revealing any unintended sensor change, or “drift,” that needs correction.
The animation above shows the scans acquired by band 4 of the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9 on January 3, 2026. Each parallel scan was acquired by one of the 14 detector modules that comprise the instrument’s focal plane. The satellite maneuvers so that each module images the Moon, with one module capturing it twice.
This work is one piece in a complex puzzle called calibration, which is part of what makes NASA the gold standard of science worldwide. From before launch all the way to the end of a satellite’s life, engineers ensure that the data collected by the satellite is accurate and consistent. In addition to looking to the Moon, Landsat also looks to places on Earth where the ground is uniform, like the wide, pale expanse of the White Sands desert in New Mexico.
Scientists also collect measurements on the ground to check against those collected from space. For example, they ensure that surface temperature readings match those recorded by Landsat’s thermal band. All these efforts are part of what make a Landsat image different from photos taken by consumer cameras. Landsat images contain crucial information that scientists can use to map changes in habitats, tree species, agricultural patterns, and more.
Video and animation by Ross Walter, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Ross Walter and Madeleine Gregory, Landsat Project Science Support.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
Wild disturbances are on the rise, while land disturbed by human activity has been decreasing.
The crew of NASA’s Artemis II mission captured extraordinary images of our home planet during their journey around the far…
A series of nighttime satellite images revealed how moonlight reaching Earth varied throughout a total lunar eclipse.
The post A Full Moon Checkup appeared first on NASA Science.
1. Paul Mendes-Flohr, Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent. A beautifully written, first-rate intellectual biography of Buber. It is hard to imagine finding a better book on him.
2. Robert C. Austin and Artan R. Hoxha, Enver Hoxha: Twentieth-Century Tyrant. How did this strange story end up happening? This book offers the best set of explanations I have seen. But Hoxha himself remains a psychological cipher at the end of it all? It turns out he never thought Mao was much of an ideologue, being too influenced by Chinese culture and thought. Also I had not previously realize how much Albania’s growing youth population — with the most natalist demographics in Europe at the time — was considered a major threat to the regime.
3. Malachi Haim Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years 1902-1945. Such an excellent and high-level work. And the author is not afraid to accuse Popper of making everything about himself, and also writing on topics (Plato, Hegel, Marx) where he was less than well-informed. I had not known that Popper hated Toulmin’s Wittgenstein’s Vienna book, feeling that the actual Viennese environment at the time was far more positive and forward-looking than most intellectual historians were inclined to grant. Nor had I known how cut off Popper was during his New Zealand years, as there were no plane connections, New Zealand news did not cover foreign affairs very much, and the mail was painfully slow. Popper also wanted to turn the Mont Pelerin Society into a coalition group, including socialists. That did not happen.
4. Frank Callanan, James Joyce: A Political Life. An excellent, lengthy study, I now see Joyce as intensely political whereas I did not before. “His fiercely Parnellian critique of Ireland and Irish nationalism is only politically intelligible as written from within Irish nationalism. It is an argument addressed to Irish nationalists. The paradox of Joyce’s nationalism is that it is in his critique of nationalism that his nationalism is most evident.” As Italo Svevo once stated: “Joyce is twice a rebel, against England and against Ireland.”
5. Suzy Hansen, From Life Itself: Turkey, Istanbul, and a Neighborhood in the Age of Erdoğan. An insightful look into Erdoğan, Turkish Islamism, parts of Istanbul, and most of all how Turkey slid into autocracy. One of the best case studies I know of on how a fragile democracy can go away.
All of these books are very good. I’ve been seeing complaining in the press lately, and on social media, about the paucity of book reviews these days. Well, no one is stopping you from reviewing books! Just do it.
The post What I’ve been reading appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
An excellent and profound movie, large screen essential. I take this movie to be an engagement with the truths of German romanticism (set in Marburg, with Geothe and Rilke as relevant texts), and asking whether that romanticism decays over time, or simply morphs into new forms and thus renews itself, even in an age of high tech and near-universal measurement. The narrative swings back and forth between those two views like a pendulum, ultimately settling upon the notion of continuation. Was perhaps Stevie Wonder an influence too? The great Tony Leung stars, here is a trailer. Reviews are very positive but they do not seem to understand the film well?
The post *Silent Friend* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
What is a pair of headphones doing in the sky? Today’s image features the Headphone Nebula, also known as
