Talking Vibes With Jared Bernstein

Jared Bernstein, former top Biden economist and all-round economic expert, and I bat around the puzzle of persistent negative economic sentiment. Recorded Wednesday.

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TRANSCRIPT:
Paul Krugman in Conversation with Jared Bernstein

(recorded 4/22/26)

Paul Krugman: Hi everyone. This week I’ve got Jared Bernstein with me for a talk about economic vibes. We had planned and hoped to have G. Elliott Morris in on the conversation, but he came down sick. So it’s just going to be two economists talking about why people are still so negative about the economy. Clearly this is very important for lots of purposes, but also just kind of interesting. So, hi Jared. Maybe you should lead off by explaining why it’s so compelling and then I’ll chime in. We’ve both done work on this, but you’ve done more.

Jared Bernstein: Yeah, well, to me, it’s personal because I was in the White House—in the Biden administration’s Council of Economic Advisers, as you know—during this period when what began to be called the vibecession arose. I associate that term with Kyla Scanlon. This was a situation where we were posting some good strong macroeconomic numbers. GDP was strong. It was above trend. We got back to full employment very quickly after the pandemic-induced recession. But there was a big spike in inflation. As that spike came down, we were rolling down the other side of inflation mountain in the second half of 2022, we thought that was a pretty good development, given how upset people were. But consumer sentiment, consumer confidence, people’s feeling about the economy—these vibes—just kept getting worse. And it seemed to me at the time that that shock, not just to inflation, but to the level of prices—how much prices went up—was more important than most economists were realizing. As you well know, people in our field think a lot about inflation and inflationary shocks. We think less about the level of prices and sort of take that as a given. So that struck me as quite important at the time. And I began to look into it in ways I’m sure we’ll get into.

Krugman: I mean, what was striking about it was that historically, there’s a pretty good relationship between consumer sentiment and macroeconomics. And way back they called it the misery index, which is the inflation rate plus the unemployment rate. It was designed by Arthur Okun, and it did a pretty good job. And then you added a little more sophisticated version of that, and it has historically done a pretty good job of tracking sentiment. But after 2022, even by these measures that had worked before, it looked like an economy that should have had people feeling a lot happier, but they weren’t. But let’s talk a little bit about price level because what always struck me, even from the beginning, was a question about: what period of inflation are we talking about? You know, why should it be the one-year rate of inflation that enters into the misery index as opposed to a two-year, or three-year, or four-year? That’s how we kind of started. In your recent work, you started by saying, “well, maybe with inflation over a longer period,” but this kind of morphed into this price level issue. So why don’t you tell me about that?

Bernstein: So, a couple of things to amplify points you were just making. My coauthor on a recent paper, Daniel Posthumus, and I made a model of consumer sentiment. And this works both on the Michigan version and on the Conference Board version.

Krugman: By the way, people should know that U. Michigan is the longest-standing regular survey of how people feel. But the Conference Board—I don’t know how far back they go.

Bernstein: It actually goes back to ‘62, and U. Michigan goes back to ‘52. But that’s kind of relevant for what I was about to say. So we built a model to predict the sentiment or confidence indices. We used the stock market returns, real consumer spending, inflation, and unemployment. Very simple. And we ran it from 1990 to 2019. It then predicts very well what the index does all the way back to the 1950s. So even though we ran it from ‘90 to 2019, it tracks the index very well. And then as you said, it breaks down in 2019. And as you well know, the ‘20, ’21, ‘22 inflation shock wasn’t the first inflation shock in our history. But it was the first one in this series where you see this big gap between how people should feel based on those variables, those predictors, and how they do feel.

And I do want to get this down early on: that’s a pretty complicated thing to explain—how people feel about the economy. You know, you ask ten economists what “vibes” mean, or pollsters, whatever; they’ll tell you ten different things. But I think what happened to prices is very important. But I want to be clear— and you’ve underscored this in some of your recent work— it’s not the only thing. So, there’s that.

I guess one other thing I’ll say: I have a particular set of experiences. I used to go out on WHNL, which stands for White House, North Lawn, and that’s where we used to go and talk to the cameras about how things were going. And no matter where we started, no matter what we were talking about, like a good unemployment report: “We just had 250,000 payroll jobs.” You know, “productivity is up, GDP inflation’s way down.” “Groceries had a 12% inflation rate. Now they have a 1.5% rate.” These are the things we were talking about out on WHNL, and it always got back to [the press saying], “Why do people feel so bad about the economy? They’re telling us things are too expensive. What are you going to do about that?” So that really got into my head.

Krugman: So your story is one that I have largely gone with. You did the hard work on the econometrics, which I have not, but again— you or I would say, “Look, inflation is way down.” They said, “What do you mean? Things cost so much more than they did in 2019.” And so you kind of introduced this “excess price level” as a story, which is very widespread. But why not that as opposed to just inflation over a longer period, or is there really a better story there?

Bernstein: Yeah. So, they’re quite similar. Inflation over a longer period is basically asking the question: how much did the level of prices go up over this period? So you raise a fair point. Most of what we talk about on inflation day is the change in the monthly inflation rate or, maybe, the yearly rate. But I think in some senses we’re circling around the same thing, which is people’s memory about prices. And that’s key to this research. It’s something I hadn’t thought enough about but I’ve more recently been kind of obsessed with, which is people’s memory of what things used to cost. And this gets you down an interesting set of questions.

So if that were the only thing in play here, everybody—including me and you—would be walking around totally depressed all the time because when I started driving, gas cost $0.60 a gallon. And, you know, right now it’s a $4 national average, but this increase from $0.60 to where it is now or any other price you want to focus on—that’s salient to the consumer market basket. It tends to go up very gradually. When you have a shock, like we did in ‘21, ’22, people have this set of prices still emblazoned in their head. I used to call it the “personal price vector,” which is this idea that we walk around knowing what the things we buy kind of cost. And when that gets shocked, you know, it’s really quite upsetting to folks, and it takes a while for them to acclimate. The question is, what do we mean by “a while”? And I’m still wrestling with that question.

Krugman: Yeah, I think there has to be a statute of limitations there somewhere. I mean, people aren’t pining for the days of 15-cent McDonald’s hamburgers. I started driving a lot earlier than you did. So, I don’t remember what gas cost, but I do remember a quarter to go to the movies. But obviously, at some point, people stop remembering. I’m probably going to get all nonlinear here, but I mean, we’re now five years on from the big price shocks from Covid. Admittedly, I am more affluent than most of the population, but I don’t remember what ground beef or eggs cost in April 2021, but I’m not sure that many people really do. So how is it that we are still feeling this?

Bernstein: Yeah. So this is something I think about a lot. And I think the answer is that it’s not just that we had that one shock—one and done, done and dusted. It’s that we’ve actually had a series of shocks and that people haven’t had time. A lot of this comes under the rubric of Trumpian chaos or, put differently, horrible crap that the Trump administration has thrown at the economy. You know, just really bad economic policy that has continued to fuel the shock that consumers have been experiencing. So, again, if it was one and done, I think people would be feeling better. But you get the Trump tariffs—that’s the big shock to prices. Now granted, we only import 11% of our GDP in goods. But walk down the aisles of Target and Walmart, and you’ll see a lot of those imports. So that’s in play. And now we have the shock of the war. I think there are some other factors in play. Social media amplifies this stuff in a way that it hasn’t in the past.

And, you know, actually, while I take your point about remembering what things cost—from talking to a few people, looking at some polling— actually, people do still remember at least what eggs cost, which was around $2 a dozen, or $1.50 a dozen. Although it’s not that far from that now, it’s closer to $2.50 or $3, depending on what kind of sale you can get. It wasn’t that long ago that it was four and five because of avian flu. So there’s been a lot of other shocks to prices in the interim. And I think that’s played an amplification role.

Krugman: Let me just say, people hate inflation. I mean, there’s a widespread view among economists—which, if you are not sufficiently cautious and laying it out, can sound condescending—but if you have a big increase in prices, but also a big increase in wages—which is kind of what happened during the Biden years—people should be saying, “Oh, I’m okay. My real income has kept up.” But they don’t. They think that they earned the wages and that the prices were done to them. Are you okay with that view, or do you think there’s something more going on here?

Bernstein: I think that view is correct. And that goes way back to research from many decades ago and has recently been updated by Stefanie Stantcheva, who shows precisely that people, right or wrong, kind of understandably feel like: “If I get a raise, it’s because of my hard work and I deserve it. If something happens to the price, that’s not me. That’s something somebody else did.” And in a world of politically intense partisanship and vicious social media, that “someone” became Biden. So, you get, “I got my raise, but Biden did this to my price.” And so I do think that plays out in both political and economic spheres.

Krugman: Something that I think I was quite wrong about was I thought that the bad vibes would kind of alleviate, or diminish, with the new president, much as I thought that there was a strong element of partisanship in moving those numbers, and that has not happened; if anything, it’s the reverse. And just a few hours before we had this conversation, I posted something about that. But what’s your view on that?

Bernstein: I have a strong view on this. And you captured it in your graphic this morning. I think that what’s happening to Trump—and this is not rocket science, by the way; if Elliott was here, he’d have more authoritative points on this, but I’m pretty sure I’m right. I think there are three groups in the electorate. There is the Never Trumpers, the Always Trumpers, and then this really key group in the middle that’s pretty dispositive in terms of which way they swing and it’s dispositive in terms of determining election outcomes. Some people call them “persuadables.” What I think of them, at least in the context of our conversation, are people who believed Trump when he said, “I’m going to lower prices on day one.” But these are folks, according to my theory which we’ve talked about so far—these are people walking around saying, “Damn it, I want my old prices back. I want my old interest rates back. I want my old mortgage rates back. And this guy not only is saying that he’s going to give them to me, but actually, the last time he was president, prices were lower and interest rates were lower. So let’s put him back and, you know, maybe we’ll get back there.” So they rolled the dice and they bet on the wrong pony. Whoops, I mixed the metaphor. But you get what I’m saying.

And now they understand that they’ve bet on the wrong guy and that their prices are right back to where they were. And in fact, inflation, if anything, has accelerated because of decisions Trump’s made. It’s not just that he’s ignored affordability or called it a hoax; it’s that he’s pushed hard in the wrong direction on these things. And this key middle group—which I think is behind some of the numbers you posted this morning—is very disenchanted by what they’ve seen.

Krugman: Yeah. Again, it’s hard to talk about this stuff without seeming condescending, but the people who swung to Trump in 2024 and swung hard against him now are disproportionately low-information, which—you know—that’s not a pejorative. It’s just a description there. He defines it as people who don’t know which party controls Congress. And I guess the argument is that they may well have actually kind of believed Trump, or at least either believed Trump’s promises, or just remembered that they were feeling pretty good in 2019.

Bernstein: I also want to be very careful not to sort of criticize anybody for being what looks gullible to an economist, because economists know that the only thing that really brings the price level down—meaning broad price deflation—is a deep recession, and nobody wants that. But people are getting jammed with all kinds of signals about how “I’m going to make your life better for you.” And I don’t think the media has distinguished themselves in helping people sort this out. So, you know, why not throw the dice and make a bet on someone who you think is going to do that kind of magic for you?

The problem that a lot of people face—the group that we’re talking about— is nobody ever seems to really help them enough. So that is a very important part of the agenda—what I call the affordability agenda—that I think we need to be working on and delivering on, you know, sooner than later.

Krugman: So, this is me being probably more partisan than you, despite the fact that you were actually in the administration, but I would have said that Biden did a lot to help people, that there were a lot of aid programs. I remember how worried people were about long-term economic scarring from Covid, and instead, we had this roaring recovery. And yet it didn’t seem to penetrate. People didn’t seem to give it any credit.

Bernstein: Well, the roaring recovery was real. I mean, you’ve been writing about this. I know we both admire Arindrajit Dube’s recent book, which is really a great documentation of the wage impacts back then. We wrote a chapter much like what Arin is saying in one of our economic reports for the President, where we documented the benefits of such low unemployment to folks. So, yeah, it’s true that we definitely were delivering some things that improve living standards, but some of them, based on just the political hurly-burly of the time, didn’t last long enough.

So the child tax credit was hugely important and took child poverty down to historically low rates. Cut it in half. And that was amazing. And by the way, it also underscores the point that whatever the child poverty rate is or the poverty rate in general, that’s a policy choice. And Biden chose to make it a lot lower. I thought it was the right policy choice. But, you know, it wasn’t okay with Joe Manchin, and so it went back up when that program ended.

And then when it comes to a lot of the investments, like building our industrial policy, building new computer fabrication plants, and investing in clean energy, that stuff takes a long time to pay off, and folks don’t really see that. And then when it comes to affordability, people were concerned with housing prices, healthcare, childcare, and the price of energy, which you highlighted this morning. And those were areas where we tried but weren’t able to do enough.

Krugman: The consumer price index— the standard measures of price level—do not include interest rates. I mean, the way we measure housing prices is by either rents or an estimate of what your house would rent for if it were rented; “owner’s equivalent rent.” And when I look at different things, one thing that really does stand out, the one thing where prices have effectively risen a lot more than wages, is in fact the mortgage payments. So how much do you think...? I mean, there was a paper by Larry Summers—though that doesn’t discredit the work— saying that was a big part. What’s your view on that?

Bernstein: I think that that is true. I mean, I think the point of that paper and my reference earlier to interest rates and mortgage rates is that this is the price of money. So it’s prices again. You know, “I want my old prices back.” Well, what’s the interest rate? It’s the price of borrowing. And so, yeah, I think that’s in play. But I think where that rubber meets the road is definitely in housing costs. Housing costs really went up very quickly over this period. And a very big part of this sentiment that we’re talking about—and this has been documented—is a lot of young people feeling like they’ll never be able to afford to buy a house. Which is very pervasive. That sentiment and that truth is very pervasive. And how do many young people start building wealth? Through home equity, through buying a home. So that’s a source of a lot of upsetness.

But it’s the rental side of the equation that was really giving folks a lot of problems back in the period when these negative vibes started to percolate—and still do. If you look at the numbers, the share of income that people are paying on rent, it’s 30, 40, 50% in some cases. And that makes it really hard to get by. So I think both the interest rate and housing costs are part of this puzzle. Absolutely.

Krugman: It’s one of those things, because if you look at rents, rents really shot up in ‘21, ’22 and then they really sort of flatlined after that. And I’m not sure that, at this point, rents are any higher relative to 2020 and before. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but I thought rents were actually not looking like that big a problem now.

Bernstein: Yeah, at least in terms of inflation. The shelter, or the housing component of the CPI is back to where it was pre-pandemic. So again, this is a level thing. So, this gets back to something we said before. I would go out to talk to the TV cameras, and I’d say, “Inflation was 9-10%. Now it’s 2%.” And people would kind of hear: “Ok, so the prices that I already don’t like—they’re not falling. They’re going up more slowly. And you want me to stand up and applaud for that?” And I think that dynamic has been in play in rental markets as well.

Krugman: I think that was an old John Kenneth Galbraith line where he said: “When people say inflation has fallen, they’re saying that things are getting worse more slowly.” Which is not really right, but on the other hand, it gets at this.

Bernstein: I would say that’s “not really right,” but just what you said. And I have this theory that I’m working on with some folks. I don’t want to lean too far into something that I haven’t empirically really fleshed out yet. But I think there’s something that goes on in this space when you have a shock to the price level. When instead of gradual movements in something people care about, if something’s getting bad, I guess it’s the boiling frog story. If something’s getting kind of bad, really slowly, you can learn to live with it. You can adapt. And if your income and wages are kind of going up at around the same rate, then you’re not really the boiling frog. You’re pretty comfortable and you’re getting along, or you’re pretty uncomfortable.

You know, you made an important point this morning: a lot of people are just always having a tough time. So you’re either doing okay or you’re doing badly. But at least it’s not a shock. You’re used to what you’ve been experiencing. And I think the interaction of a shock that’s that sharp, that quick, when you’ve had two decades of really low inflation—and this gets into the ‘70s story, which we should probably get into a little bit—that’s really a cluster mess for people’s thinking.

Krugman: Yeah. You did your estimates starting in 1990. So it’s really three decades. I mean, basically, Paul Volcker brought inflation way down in the ‘80s. But we used to think there was low inflation when it was 4%; but by the time he was finished, it got down to around 2% and stayed there for a long, long time. So only old codgers like me even remember a high inflation environment until what happened in ‘21, ’22. So, yeah. The shock aspect, I think, was really clear.

Bernstein: But, you know, first of all, I sat in gas lines in the ‘70s, so... A lot of our conversation, Paul, is two old boomers saying, “Well, I remember when things used to...”

Krugman: Yeah.

Bernstein: But you asked a good question in some correspondence we had, which was, “Why didn’t we have this kind of vibe shock when we had the late ‘70s, early ‘80s inflation shock? Because that was also a big shock.” And, again, that was when people like me were sitting in gas lines, which is pretty uncomfortable and unfamiliar an experience to most Americans. And you just didn’t see the kind of vibes gap that we see in the data now. And I think one of the reasons is because we hadn’t had 20 years with inflation. It was just very quiescent. Inflation below the Fed’s target of 2% for many of those years where we just didn’t have to think about it. We actually had a cascading series of shocks back then. So, I think the way we put it in the paper is that when people have been living with good weather for 20 years, a hurricane is way more upsetting to them than if they’re sort of used to storms.

Krugman: Yeah. And it turns out that the increase in the price level under Reagan’s first term and under Biden were actually shockingly identical. I mean, within fractions of a percentage point, equal. And yet, Reagan runs on “Morning in America,” and with Biden, everybody thinks, “I want the good old days of Trump back.” And that might just be stormy weather. Also, it’s just that people came into the Reagan era expecting [some inflation]. The U. Michigan median expected inflation over the next five years was, I guess, 7.4% or something when Reagan took office.

Bernstein: Right. When you start, it sets off a path dependency that you kind of have to live with. But, Paul, I actually wanted to ask you something about this, which is a little more forward-looking. This gets into some nerdy economic stuff that’s less about the vibes and more about inflation and those dynamics. It gets into the Federal Reserve a little bit, which is topical given that, you know, Kevin Warsh is in the news this week. And Chris Waller, one of the Fed governors, gave a speech that I thought was quite articulate on this point. There is some thinking now that because we’ve had this series of shocks—of course the pandemic, but then, you know, the war in Ukraine, which, by the way, was another energy shock. And now the war in Iran, which is yet another energy shock. And the tariffs, which is another price shock. Because we’ve had all these kinds of repetitive upward pressure on prices, the inflationary anchor— which I’ll let you explain— is at risk of getting dislodged. And that is something that I do worry a bit about. Could you talk about that? But also, you know, maybe clarify what the hell we’re talking about?

Krugman: Yeah. I think you probably have the same underlying model, although I think I may express it a little differently. But when we think about inflation—I guess one way to say this is that inflation is a process of leapfrogging—that a firm sets its prices, and then another firm sets its prices overlapping a bit, and then the next one and so on. And what prices are you going to set? Because you don’t change your prices every day, at least in most things. It’s partly catching up with price increases that have happened before, and it’s partly getting ahead of price increases that will happen. So you’re concerned about the prices that your suppliers will charge. You’re concerned about the prices that your competitors charge; it tells you how much you can get away with. We usually put this as expected inflation. But it’s actually both past inflation and expected future inflation that enter into determining what the current rate of inflation is. And the great, big story that we tend to have is that inflation, if you have a bout of it—even if you have a spike in prices because of something like Russia invaded Ukraine or the United States bombing Iran— it’s not as big a problem if it doesn’t get built into people’s expectations about future inflation.

But we’re always concerned that expectations will get un-anchored or that people will start to do what we think happened in the ‘70s. That people started to build expectations of future inflation into their pricing, and that that was extremely— you know, extremely costly to get rid of it. The severity of the ‘79 to ’82 slump was comparable to the global financial crisis. And the question, obviously, is: are we doing badly enough for that to happen? And, actually, I’d say there’s two forward-looking questions. I mean, we had a great experience, right? That’s part of what I want to get at. In terms of the things that macro economists were worried about, the ‘21-’22 inflation spike turned out to be kind of... everything worked out fine and expectations didn’t get un-anchored; the inflation was transitory, although transitory turns out to be longer than we thought. Slow, but in the end, the definition really should be functional by the time period. And in the sense that we did not need to go through an extended 1980s-style slump to bring inflation down. That was what we had all hoped for. But can we count on that happening again? And that’s the question. I mean, how much do you worry?

Waller, by the way, was a big dove. He was one of the people who basically kind of went after people who were predicting many years of high unemployment, saying, “No. You’re wrong.”

Bernstein: Yeah. So people who are interested in what we’re talking about should go read the speech that Waller gave late last week. It’s very clear and, I thought, incisive on these issues. So I’m worried, Paul, and I’m a historical dove. And when it comes to full employment and inflation balancing the Fed’s mandate. I’ve long worried about the full employment side of the coin. And now I’m worried a little bit more about the inflationary pressure side of the coin. Now, that may be because of my own PTSD from when I was going through this in the administration. But, you know, the Fed has been above its target for five years. That’s a long time. And inflation seems kind of stuck around where it is now.

Krugman: Look, if the target were 3% instead of 2%, the world would be fine. Obviously, wages and incomes would have to catch up to that. But I think that would happen on average. It’s a big statement.

Bernstein: Yeah. But if the Fed can’t get back to its target in a climate with a reckless and unchecked person in the White House whose instincts are highly inflationary—as is true of all authoritarians, regardless of what country they preside over— yeah, I’m worried about it. I’m worried about the anchor.

Krugman: I have turned a little more hawkish than I used to be. I used to be very critical of the 2% inflation target, which in many ways I thought was too low. And if we consult the history of how we ended up with 2%, it’s kind of weird and also kind of funny. I mean, it’s one of the few major things that you can really blame on New Zealand because they were the first to do it. But you know, there were a lot of arguments, particularly during the long slump after the global financial crisis, saying that 2% was too low. But now we kind of say: well, 2% is low enough that people just stopped thinking about inflation and 3% is starting to draw concern. We used to say 4% makes sense, and now I’m not sure that would be okay. And that credibility—the ability to get over the inflation shock, the supply chain, and Ukraine shock— I think had a lot to do with the fact that people really did not expect higher inflation on a sustained basis. I’m worried now that losing 2% unintentionally might be a serious problem.

Bernstein: Yeah, I share that concern. But let me ask you a question. And I should speak to this, too. But I want you to go first, which is: so we’ve talked a lot about what we think are driving these negative vibes. What do you think we should be doing about it? What is the right path? What is the best path forward to realign vibes with where they were pre-pandemic, at least?

Krugman: That’s a really good question. And a part of the answer is: what do you mean “WE,” white man? You know, who is “we” that should be doing what? Well, certainly not me. And at this point, not you unfortunately either.

Bernstein: No, that’s not correct. I’m very ensconced in policy efforts, which I’ll talk about in a minute, but you go ahead.

Krugman: All right. But, you know, a big part of the answer lies with the Federal Reserve. But also, there’s a very good chance that Congress will be in different hands in a few months and that the White House will be in different hands in 2029. But I mean: “don’t do stupid stuff” would be a good start.

Bernstein: That’d be a great start.

Krugman: Don’t launch unnecessary wars. Don’t politicize the Fed. But I do worry. I mean, we’re in the middle of an ongoing discussion in which you and Elliott have been making the point that it is about price levels. And then there’s a lot of people saying, “Does this mean that the vibes are going to be negative for the foreseeable future?” Are we in, among other things, for a political universe in which every president, of whatever party, has a disgruntled public because prices are too high, and so it’s always “throw the bums out” every four years? And I don’t know. I think this is one of the things that actually hinges a lot on what we think really is driving the vibes. And when is the statute of limitations on the price level that people expect? But it is a real concern.

Bernstein: Yeah. I mean, it’s funny. I myself framed this as like, the goal is getting vibes back to some level that they used to ride at. Really, the goal is much more a political economy goal, at least in my head, which is to help people be able to make ends meet in an economy that’s been growing at a good clip for a long time. I mean, we’re actually quite productive. We have good GDP growth. Even the unemployment rate is pretty low, even if job creation has been just about zero.

A lot of people justly feel—and this is not just a low-information sentiment—a lot of people justly feel like they’re just not getting their fair slice of the pie that they’re helping to bake. And so we have to reconnect their living standards to the growth in the overall economy. You said something decades ago that’s always stuck with me, which is: for way too many people, economic growth is a spectator sport, not a participatory sport. So what’s the linkage there? To me, it’s the affordability agenda. And this is what I’m working on at the Center for American Progress and at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, which is crafting an agenda—a policy agenda—and getting politicians interested in it (which is another part of the problem) that will help correct market failures and flaws in key areas of the household budget: health care policy—something you’re very familiar with. Child care. We have great plans in that space. Housing— we’ve already put out a plan that’s been quite positively viewed in that area. We have a great plan coming out on electricity prices. We tried to do a thing on groceries. That’s a lot harder because it really is pretty much a market good. But that’s the agenda. And I don’t think that people necessarily have to understand all the fine points on the policies. But you got to deliver and, you know, that’s a really heavy political lift. But I think that’s the connection that needs to be made.

Krugman: Yeah. I mean, I would say also that you have to be seen as trying to deliver that. That’s really kind of important.

Bernstein: Yeah, gotta get caught trying.

Krugman: Although there was sort of this question: were you and your colleagues bad salesmen?

Bernstein: Yes.

Krugman: Well, “could you have done something different?” is the question. I’m sitting right now in the heart of the communist, anarchist, Islamic world revolution, or whatever. You know, with the Mamdani administration in New York, which has very limited ability to affect these issues.

Bernstein: Right. Although the area where he does have more impact probably is housing affordability because that is a lot of local policy. But at least 100 days in, he’s been spectacularly successful and visibly trying to do something. I think Mamdani is exhibit A of what I’m talking about. He ran on affordability. And, you know, you can call it sidewalk socialism, but he’s filling potholes as well as delivering child care and working on housing. He is, I think, a model for exactly what I’m talking about. And look, yes, his powers are limited given where he sits. But however many months in, it’s working. Now, it’s way too soon to make any kind of a judgment. And by the way, yes, Mamdani is the most visible example of the model I just described in action, but it’s working as well or better than I could have hoped, at least thus far. But here in Virginia, we have a centrist governor named Abigail Spanberger, and there’s Governor Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey— both centrist Democrats running on similar policies. So this is not just a socialist thing.

Krugman: I know. It’s just, New York is sui generis on every level.

Bernstein: Including pizza and bagels, but that’s a different discussion.

Krugman: Well, it’s even more that I think it’s a lot easier to find Eritrean food, which I had here with friends the other day. But anyway, one of the things that worries me about this whole vibes episode is—aside from the political economy and all of that— it’s: what do we do in the next economic crisis? Because what strikes me is that when the supply chain issues became clear, when it became obvious that some things had been disrupted and that demand was really a very different mix from before, and that you started to see those container ships steaming back and forth, waiting for a berth and all of that, there was going to be a large and inflationary shock coming from that and that the right policy—assuming that you could keep inflation expectations anchored— was, in fact, to accommodate; to have a burst of inflation and then stabilize after that; that a one-time rise in the price level was actually exactly what the optimal policy model said you should allow. And it did happen and people hated it. And now I’m worried that we will do something stupid next time. Is that your concern as well?

Bernstein: Yes, but first of all, the concern about whether we will do something stupid is bearing out in real time. But I guess the way I would frame your question is: has Keynesian stimulus in a recession been discredited by what just happened? And I very much obviously hope that’s not the case. The supply shock, or what you described as the supply chain snarl-up part of the pandemic, was very sui generis, of course, and was a function of a 100-year virus. So that’s a lesson we don’t want to over-learn.

Adding to my worries about this is the reality that our fiscal outlook is actually as bad as it’s ever been, at least in my lifetime. Even though the kind of fiscal interventions we’re talking about—the Keynesian kinds of interventions we’re talking about—you’ll actually be fiscally worse off if you don’t do them than if you do do them because you’ll end up with worse GDP outcomes. But there will be those who will point to the debt and say, “We can’t do anything. Look at the magnitude of the debt.” So, yes, I’m very worried about that. And my only solace is that one definition of a Keynesian is a Republican in a recession. They all get very stimulative-oriented pretty quickly in that situation. So maybe just the power of a rising unemployment rate and its populist impact will drive better policy in that regard. But it’s a concern.

Krugman: Yeah. I would have said that Covid and Ukraine were unique events. Except now there’s Hormuz and you start Googling choke points and it’s not hard to think that maybe it’s not that unique an event right now.

Bernstein: I agree with you. And I do think that one of the things I’m trying to do—and I think you’re trying to do this in some of your work—is to just remind people what good economic policy looks like. It wasn’t that long ago, as you’ve said in numerous posts and in this conversation, where we applied a lot of economic thinking in the Biden years. And if you take away everything we’ve been talking about for the last hour—which is the negative vibes around the inflation and the price level—I think you’d have a good example of really pretty effective policymaking that helped not only increase the economy’s growth in its capacity, but delivered those bigger slices to folks who are helping to bake the pie and, in many ways, are the most economically vulnerable people. Whether it was the advantages to the poverty rate, whether it was lowering the uninsured rate, or whether it was simply helping to maintain a strong enough labor market that wage gains reached the bottom of the scale. So I guess my point is: we know how to do this, or at least we have an idea. We just have to really fight hard for the politics to get back there.

I guess the last point I’ll make on this—and we’ve talked about this as well— resistance is not futile, and people want something different than what they’re getting. That seems very clear.

Krugman: Yeah. And I wonder. A year ago we probably would have said: “Look, the Biden team by and large did good stuff, responded very well to the Covid crisis, and got totally savaged politically for their success.” And that meant that we might be taking all the wrong lessons. I have to say that one small silver lining to all of the crazy stuff now happening is that it does seem to be gradually making people think better of the previous experience and kind of understand a little bit. I’m not sure. I think the public is actually probably ahead of the political universe there... but I don’t know. Do you feel that people are more appreciative of what you all did now than they were before?

Bernstein: Well, it’s a good question. I run in circles that are maybe somewhat similar or adjacent to ones you do. And what I get a lot of, from at least the people I talk to, is, “You guys did a great job, and your messaging was terrible.” And, you know, we sort of referenced that a few minutes ago. I will agree that our messaging was far from optimal in that a lot of times we were talking past people. But I think there’s a difference between talking past people and lying to people. We were honest. But I don’t think there was some magic set of words we could have said that would have made things all that much different. And I think you made a similar comment a while ago.

So I do think that sentiment—“You did a good job, but you didn’t convey it”—is live. I don’t know what people are feeling. I think if you go out and poll people again—as Elliott would know—at this point, they might be saying Biden was better than Trump because Trump has turned out to be such a mess. But they didn’t agree with where Biden was—and they probably wouldn’t agree with where you and I are—on the economics.

At some level, vibes are a function of people’s faith in the government to actually have their back, to get behind them and lastingly help them. And it’s been a long time in the Trump years— Okay, it’s actually been a little over a year, but it feels like decades since that’s been the case. Joe Biden and his administration—which I was proud to be a part of— certainly worked hard to do that. And we can have good debates about how far we got. But we were trying and at this point, we have a government that’s not trying at all. And in fact, when it’s not self-dealing, it’s pushing in the other direction. So I don’t think it’s that heavy a lift to get back to a point where we’re trying to rebuild people’s faith in a government that actually does useful things for them. And that, to me, is a north star.

Krugman: Good place to end. Thanks for talking with me.

Bernstein: Thank you, Paul.

WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS

@scottjla on Twitter in reply to my pelican riding a bicycle benchmark:

I feel like we need to stack these tests now

AI generated image. A pelican is riding a bicycle along a dirt track, chased by a police car. The pelican looks panicked, likely because there is an astronaut (with prehensile toes for some reason) riding the pelican clinging on to where its ears should be. The astronaut is being ridden by a horse, with an equally wild expression. A slice of pizza and a can and a cowboy hat are falling next to them. A road sign in the background reads WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS.

I checked to confirm that the model (ChatGPT Images 2.0) added the "WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS" sign of its own accord and it did - the prompt Scott used was:

Create an image of a horse riding an astronaut, where the astronaut is riding a pelican that is riding a bicycle. It looks very chaotic but they all just manage to balance on top of each other

Tags: text-to-image, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, ai, generative-ai, slop, chatgpt

Quoting Romain Huet

Since GPT-5.4, we’ve unified Codex and the main model into a single system, so there’s no separate coding line anymore.

GPT-5.5 takes this further, with strong gains in agentic coding, computer use, and any task on a computer.

Romain Huet, confirming OpenAI won't release a GPT-5.5-Codex model

Tags: generative-ai, gpt, openai, ai, llms

Generative AI and Entrepreneurship

This paper studies how Generative AI (Gen AI) is reshaping the U.S. startup ecosystem. Exploiting the release of ChatGPT, we show that startups with greater pre-release Gen AI task exposure reduced employment within two quarters, primarily among junior and implementation roles. Displaced workers experienced longer unemployment spells and moved to lower-paying but less exposed jobs. Conversely, exposed startups increased productivity, scaled faster, and accelerated through financing rounds. Venture capital shifted toward frequent, smaller investments, boosting new firm formation. Overall, incumbent contraction was offset by new firm formation, leaving aggregate employment unchanged but shifting composition to senior roles.

That is from a new and important paper by Abhinav Gupta, Franklin Qian, Elena Simintz, & Yifan Sun.

The post Generative AI and Entrepreneurship appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

      

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The Week Observed: April 24, 2026

What City Observatory Did This Week

 

Happy Earth Day, Oregon:  Let’s commit to squandering tens of billions on highway expansion as greenhouse gases keep rising.  Despite legal pledges to reduce greenhouse gases to address climate change, Portland’s transportation greenhouse gas emissions are going up, not down.  State, regional and city governments have adopted climate goals that purport to commit to steadily reducing greenhouse gases, but we’re not merely failing to make progress, we’re going in the wrong direction.

In the face of these persistent failures,  Oregon is moving forward with plans to billions and billions dollars into three Portland area freeway widening projects. As a result, April 22 isn’t so much Earth Day as a macabre Groundhog Day, where every year we’re reneging in a bigger and more expensive way on our climate pledges, even as the crisis grows visibly worse.

Oregon’s economy continues at a 25-year high in per capita personal income as a percent of the national average.  The current debate surrounding Oregon’s “economic crisis” relies on a narrow reading of short-term data while overlooking broader, long-term evidence of success. Any “prosperity” strategy must start with an accurate assessment of where the state actually stands.

The Oregon Prosperity Council has recently been subjected to a barrage of unduly negative claims. However, the data tells a different story. According to the Brookings Institution’s “Metro Monitor,” Portland ranks in the top ten large metros for prosperity, while Bend is the number one performing mid-sized metro in the nation.  The most revealing measure of economic health is per capita personal income. In 2010, Oregonians earned just 88% of the national average. According to revised BEA estimates released April 9, 2026, we have climbed to 96%—the highest level in a quarter-century.

Oregon’s official econometric model—which is calibrated on post-2020 data—forecasts that our job growth will outpace the national average over the next decade. In fact, our economy has consistently outperformed these models, resulting in five consecutive “kicker” payments.

While external risks like federal tariffs or global instability could trigger a recession, Oregon’s pro-cyclical economy is catching up to the nation. These are not the symptoms of policy failure, but of a region reaching a new level of national competitiveness.

Must Read

Why Oregon should take the “high road” for economic development.  Oregon Governor Tina Kotek has appointed a Prosperity Council to offer advice on improving the state’s economy.  Two members of the council, Alice Dale and Robert Camarillo have submitted a white paper laying out a vision for raising incomes for all Oregonians as the centerpiece of any prosperity strategy.  The report counsels against an obsession with business climate rankings and tax cuts as a way to assure the state’s long term prosperity.  In a global, knowledge-based economy, states find economic success by bolstering talent and building quality of life.

Focusing on merely growing the economy, reducing taxes on the highest income earners or businesses, or relying on flawed business climate rankings, which are often biased and unreliable indicators of a state’s economic prosperity, miss the mark.  A highly educated and trained workforce is the single most powerful economic lever for increasing incomes.  Just like any smart CEO, Oregon should pursue a strategy of its own and ignore the low road of doing everything other states do, just more cheaply. Oregon should build on Oregon’s strengths, especially its unparalleled quality of life, and appeal to the smartest, hardest working, best-educated workers and the most innovative firms to help us build a high-skill, high-wage, high quality of life economy in the knowledge-driven world of the 21st century.

(City Observatory’s Joe Cortright was a contributor to the High Road report.)

You are what you consume.  An essay about consumption and identity.  Economist Blogger Noah Smith, of Noahpinion fame, has a provocative essay about how what we consume, rather than what we produce ought to have a more prominent and acknowledged role in defining ourselves.

Why should what you produce, rather than what you consume, be the most important thing about you? Why shouldn’t the fact that you race boats or watch anime or drink matcha lattes be what defines your identity? Why should I call myself a “writer” rather than a “science fiction fan” or a “rabbit dad”?

There are important parallels to a point Ed Glaeser made about the “Consumer City” two decades ago:  The economic rationale for cities is shifting from their advantages in production, to the advantages they afford in consumption.  Increasingly our well-being (and as Smith argues, our identity) is more about what we consume, including a range of non-market goods, services and activities.  Quality of life, rather than quantity of work, will become increasingly important.

Exposing the Congestion Cost Charlatans.  The invaluable and inimitable Todd Litman of the Victoria Transportation Institute once again does the homework to show how phony and contrived are the claims of the Texas Transportation Institute, and others who claim that traffic congestion costs us untold millions of hours and billions of dollars. Every year, they tell us traffic is getting worse and costing us more–even when travel times are down, and traffic congestion has lessened, largely due to post-pandemic changes in travel behavior.  In his usual workman-like fashion, Litman dismantles these false claims.  He notes three leading ways the congestion-costing industry cooks the books:

  1. The “Speed Compliance” Scam. Most studies calculate “delay” by comparing actual traffic to an economically absurd baseline: the free-flow speed of a 2:00 AM joyride. In reality, much of what TTI calls “congestion cost” is actually just speed compliance. By their math, a driver doing 55 mph in a 55 mph zone instead of 70 mph is “delayed” if the road was empty enough to speed.
  2. The Off-Peak Mirage.  They claim congestion is exploding, but the reported “growth” isn’t caused by peak-hour traffic getting slower; it’s caused by off-peak traffic getting faster. When mid-day speeds increase, the “gap” between peak and off-peak appears wider, allowing the industry to claim congestion has worsened even if your morning commute hasn’t changed in a decade.
  3. Exaggerating the Pain.  These reports rely on “value of time” estimates that treat every minute of a commute like a lost billable hour, while exaggerating fuel and emission impacts. The reports conceal the much larger loss of time due to longer travel distances in sprawling, car-dependent areas, and ignore the effects of induced demand, by calling for highway  expansions—like the Interstate Bridge Replacement—that only induce more driving and restart the cycle.
Meanwhile, the reports almost entirely ignore the one policy–road pricing–that’s been shown to actually reduce congestion.  But the purpose of these reports isn’t to shed light, or build understanding, it’s to rationalize throwing more money at highway building.  No one should be fooled.

 

In the News

Oregon Public Broadcasting quoted City Observatory’s Joe Cortright in their coverage “A battle is brewing over Oregon’s economic future.”  Disputing claims that recent job losses in Oregon are signs of a structural flaw in Oregon’s economy, instead their driven by, and largely mirror a dramatic slowdown in national job creation, which has fallen by 90 percent, from 2 million jobs in 2024, to fewer than 200,000 jobs in 2025.

“It’s like, yeah you caught a cold, that doesn’t mean something is fundamentally wrong with your health,” Cortright said. “You caught a cold when it was winter.”

Strong Towns republished our commentary on how Portland ought to pay for streets.

City Observatory’s Joe Cortright was interviewed on the Oregon Center for Public Policy’s podcast “Policy for People” discussing Oregon’s “business climate.”

 

Reading List 04/25/26

Ultra Robotics’ OP1, which mounts a humanoid-ish robot to a larger robot arm, via Jon Schwartz on Twitter.

Welcome to the reading list, a list of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at transformer steel manufacturing, textile engineering, bringing power plants online quickly, infrasound, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.

War in Iran

This week in Strait of Hormuz supply chain issues: a shortage of battery ingredients [Heatmap], the world’s top condom producer plans to raise prices by 20-30% due to petrochemical supply disruption [X], and Lufthansa plans to cut 20,000 flights due to rising jet fuel costs. [UPI]

And it seems like the closure might not be resolved any time soon. It could apparently take up to 6 months to clear the Strait of Hormuz of mines. [Washington Post]

Housing

The Economist on SB-79, and other efforts to stimulate the production of housing in California. “SB 79 rezones state land around busy public-transport stops to allow for taller residential buildings. It also slaps hefty fines on cities that try to deny such buildings a permit. It was amended more than a dozen times to appease rural lawmakers, unions and tenants-rights groups—and it still barely passed the legislature. The bill spent weeks on the governor’s desk, which gave his pro-housing allies the willies and Mr Pratt some hope. But on October 10th Mr Newsom signed the law and delivered a huge win to the ascendant YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) movement. The passage of SB 79 and more than 40 other housing reforms this year could be a turning point for a state that is crippled by its self-inflicted housing shortage.” [Economist]

Manufacturing

A good Substack post on transformers and why their various components – such as grain oriented electrical steel — are difficult to make. “Producing [GOES] is one of the most demanding metallurgical processes in heavy industry. The slab has to be reheated above 1,350 degrees Celsius to dissolve precipitate inhibitors that later pin grain boundaries, then cold-rolled to the final gauge, and finally decarburized in wet hydrogen to bring the carbon content below 0.003 percent. The entire coil goes into a high-temperature box anneal at 1,200 degrees Celsius for five to seven days, and during that week inside the furnace, through a phenomenon called abnormal grain growth, Goss-oriented grains consume the rest of the matrix and grow to centimeters across a sheet that is barely thicker than a credit card. Premium grades are then laser-scribed in transverse lines to refine the magnetic domains and cut losses by a further ten to fifteen percent. Each step is unforgiving, and a single deviation in composition, atmosphere, or timing ruins the whole coil.” [Frontier Map]

Also on the subject of steel, Did low-quality steel contribute to the sinking of the Titanic? “The steel used in constructing the RMS Titanic was probably the best plain carbon ship plate available in the period of 1909 to 1911, but it would not be acceptable at the present time for any construction purposes and particularly not for ship construction.” [TMS]

Greg Ip of the WSJ claims that the US is in a stealth manufacturing boom, though not one that’s creating jobs. “Since January 2025, manufacturing jobs have indeed fallen by about 100,000 workers, or roughly 0.6%. In the same period, though, manufacturing production rose 2.3%, and manufacturing shipments, unadjusted for inflation, climbed 4.2%.” [WSJ] But Noah Smith argues that no, we aren’t — most manufacturing indicators, once adjusted for inflation, show little to no growth. [Noahpinion]

Chinese electric car manufacturer BYD wants to open 20 dealerships in Canada this year. [GM Authority]

TSMC is apparently delaying using the latest and greatest ASML EUV machines — their High NA machines — because they’re too expensive. [Bloomberg] It’s not clear to me if this is a chance for Intel (who has purchased several High NA machines) to pull ahead, or if Intel overcorrected and made a bad call adopting them.

The changing ownership and subsequent evolution of two different US tool brands, Milwaukee and Craftsman. [Worse on Purpose]

Read more

AI in World Machine Theory

The basic premise of the World Machines theory I’ve been developing in collaboration with book club regulars is that we can describe how the world works at any given time in terms of three co-extensive machine-like planetarities, an ascendant one (the Dawn machine), a maturing one (the Day machine), and a declining one (the Dusk machine), with each WM having a nominal lifespan of about a millennium, and spending 400 years in the dawn stage, 400 in the day stage, and 200 years in the dusk stage.

This is of course a highly stylized, arbitrary, and contraptiony Big History scaffolding, and I’m not pretending it’s isn’t. But it is perhaps the very arbitrariness that makes it so useful to me as a canvas on which to situate much messier and more nuanced learnings from reading real history in our book club.

The WM framework is proving surprisingly expressive and capable of digesting a great variety of interesting ideas and historical phenomenology. I’m almost convinced WM theory can animate the prime radiant type core of a psychohistory project. We’re as gods, and might as well harbor ludicrous vibe-coding dreams inspired by long-in-the-tooth mid-century science fiction. Hence the World Machines Project. The link is to a tag index page on this newsletter with just my WM-tagged posts, but there will soon be a separate website that will compile writings by others besides me, and feature more comprehensive project information, a Seldon vault, etc.

Currently, the Modernity Machine (MM) is entering its Dusk stage, the Divergence Machine (DM) has reached its Day stage, and the Liveness Machine (LM)has just been born into its Dawn (links to posts about each in the link above).

We’re currently reading Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature in the book club, about the life and work of Alexander Von Humboldt (1769-1859) in our DM-themed 2026 book club. The construct of Nature™ that Humboldt invented (Wulf is right to credit him as the inventor of nature as we know it) is a fascinating attempt to thread the needle between MM-based and DM-based accounts of nature. There is both a kind of mechanistic clock-like integrity to his conception, and hints of the unabashedly divergentist conception that Darwin developed a little later. Notably, Humboldt’s model included both the non-living earth and life. His was an integrated vision of geology and the biosphere. He anticipated both evolution and plate tectonics.

Equally notable—despite being a member of the Jena German romanticism movement and inclined to emphasize subjectivity and poetry, his model doesn’t appear to have liveness to it, unlike James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis or the Varela-Maturana autopoiesis model that came a century later. Humboldt’s planet was a complex hybrid machine, but not a living one. His poetic sensibility did not extend to Gaian conceits afaict. He was too much of a true empiricist for that. And liveness as a non-allegorical planetary property had to wait for technology to get much more sophisticated than it was in Humboldt’s time (his life roughly coincides with the birth phase of the steam engine).

Specifically, I think the Liveness Machine being born today is only being born because real AI has emerged. While a degree of meaningful liveness might have been possible with pre-AI computing, I think it would have fallen well short of a World-Machine-grade dynamic, and still required a squinting allegorical imagination to appreciate. More importantly, it would have lacked the power to dethrone divergence as the dominant force shaping the planet. The core dynamic of the new Dawn machine would have been something else. Perhaps renewables driving an Energy Machine. But now it’s clear that the most leveraged use of energy, whether renewable or not, and regardless of the severity of the climate shock in store for us, will be to power AI. And AI will animate the planet-scale Liveness Machine. Whether it is a grimdark LM or a solarpunk LM, is tbd. By psychohistorical analysis.

So we’re now on track to create a living planet that will take no refined poetic or romantic sensibilities to appreciate. It will be a New Nature. And given how AI is speed running every technology cycle model, it might take much less than 400 years for the LM to switch from Dawn to Day phase, consigning the divergence machine to a premature retirement. In my kickoff WMP post, I noted:

The current Dawn machine, which I’m calling the Liveness Machine, starts with the cusp technology of generative AI, which is poised between a divergent non-living process, and a self-organized critical living process. Shoggoth-like basically. We’ll study it next year, so resist the temptation to jump the gun on it.

I don’t want to jump the gun myself, but I think it’s worth saying enough about liveness to contrast it with divergence for the purpose of characterizing AI correctly in WM terms. We can do that by listing the divergence vs liveness attributes of AI.

Divergence aspects

  1. Bespokification — AI lets us personalize our experience of technology to the point it makes it incommensurable with the experiences of others

  2. Solipsism — AI lets us retreat to personal, subjective, escaped realities

  3. Deep fakery — AI erodes trust and connection by allowing us to present arbitrarily rich deceptive surfaces

  4. Personal memory involution pressure — AI draws us into deeper dialogue with our archival selves, by articulating personal memories much better, making us retreat from live others

  5. Collective memory intermediation — AI buffers our ecoerience of collective memory compared to human media, through summarization, reinscription, bespoke renarration etc.

  6. Camera > Engine effect — AI draws us into a photographic spectatorial relationship with knowledge organized into alienized spaces, allowing for increasingly weird ontic-structure experiences of reality

  7. Permaweirding accelerant — AI accelerates divergent weirding forces of the Permaweird, making the world objectively weirder not just our subjective experience of it

Liveness aspects

  1. Ooziness — AI is oozy, like a primordial soup that harbors intensely reactive chemistry

  2. Strange loopiness — AI creates strange OODA loops (Claude Code being the earliest example) that refactor our identities when we surrender to them

  3. Configurancy catalysis — AI allows larger and more complex configurancies to cohere and persist, creating a whole ecology of new artificial life forms in latent space

  4. Memory revivification — AI makes all memories come alive, integrating them into the experience of the present and future

  5. Execution pull — AI pulls us into much stronger execution regimes, drawing us out from vita contemplativa regimes to vita activa regimes

  6. Intelligence media graph minds — rich context-level connections between individual solipsistic realities allows new kinds of transhuman egregores (what I’ve previously called graph minds) to emerge

  7. Superhistorification — AI densifies history, turning it into a gravity well, creating convergence forces in civilization that balance out divergence forces

On balance, I think divergence will dominate in the short term (2-5 years) but liveness effects will compound more steadily and dominate in the long term (>5 years).

Will AI save the U.S. fiscal situation?

A tenth of a percentage point of extra productivity growth — well within the range of plausible near-term AI effects — raises the fundamental value of U.S. government debt by $1.3 trillion. If markets fully priced this in, nominal Treasury yields would fall by about 70 basis points.

Half a percentage point of extra growth would raise the value of the debt by $6.5 trillion. For context: under the CBO baseline, the debt-to-GDP ratio rises from 100% today to 172% by 2055. Under the +0.5pp scenario, it stabilizes near 124%. Debt-to-GDP stops exploding. That is an enormous change in the fiscal outlook, and it comes from a rate of growth only modestly above the post-2000 average…

There is a second, subtler point. Because revenue scales as GDP^1.07, the fundamental value of the debt is a convex function of productivity growth. A +1pp growth shock raises value by 108%; a −1pp shock only lowers it by 87%.

That asymmetry means bondholders gain from uncertainty, not just from higher expected growth. If markets become more uncertain about AI’s long-run productivity impact, and that uncertainty is mean-preserving, Treasury valuations should still rise. Holding expected growth fixed, ±0.5pp of growth uncertainty is worth about $0.7 trillion in convexity value. Treasuries embed a long call option on AI, and the option is valuable even when the strike is out of the money.

Here is more from Hanno Lustig, with Howard Kung and James Paron.  Here is the full paper.  These are of course very important results, kudos to the authors.  Via the excellent Samir Varma.

The post Will AI save the U.S. fiscal situation? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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NASA reserves science payload space for Mars telecommunications mission

Blue Ring Mars telecom orbiter

NASA is reserving a small amount of space on a Mars telecommunications spacecraft for science, which could be one or more cubesats.

The post NASA reserves science payload space for Mars telecommunications mission appeared first on SpaceNews.

Space Force faces surge in demand for heavy-lift launches

An additional 25 ‘high-energy’ missions are being forecast for 2027-2029

The post Space Force faces surge in demand for heavy-lift launches appeared first on SpaceNews.

Saturday 25 April 1663

Up betimes and to my vyall and song book a pretty while, and so to my office, and there we sat all the morning. Among other things Sir W. Batten had a mind to cause Butler (our chief witness in the business of Field, whom we did force back from an employment going to sea to come back to attend our law sute) to be borne as a mate on the Rainbow in the Downes in compensation for his loss for our sakes. This he orders an order to be drawn by Mr. Turner for, and after Sir J. Minnes, Sir W. Batten, and Sir W. Pen had signed it, it came to me and I was going to put it up into my book, thinking to consider of it and give them my opinion upon it before I parted with it, but Sir W. Pen told me I must sign it or give it him again, for it should not go without my hand. I told him what I meant to do, whereupon Sir W. Batten was very angry, and in a great heat (which will bring out any thing which he has in his mind, and I am glad of it, though it is base in him to have a thing so long in his mind without speaking of it, though I am glad this is the worst, for if he had worse it would out as well as this some time or other) told me that I should not think as I have heretofore done, make them sign orders and not sign them myself. Which what ignorance or worse it implies is easy to judge, when he shall sign to things (and the rest of the board too as appears in this business) for company and not out of their judgment for. After some discourse I did convince them that it was not fit to have it go, and Sir W. Batten first, and then the rest, did willingly cancel all their hands and tear the order, for I told them, Butler being such a rogue as I know him, and we have all signed him to be to the Duke, it will be in his power to publish this to our great reproach, that we should take such a course as this to serve ourselves in wronging the King by putting him into a place he is no wise capable of, and that in an Admiral ship.

At noon we rose, Sir W. Batten ashamed and vexed, and so home to dinner, and after dinner walked to the old Exchange and so all along to Westminster Hall, White Hall, my Lord Sandwich’s lodgings, and going by water back to the Temple did pay my debts in several places in order to my examining my accounts tomorrow to my great content. So in the evening home, and after supper (my father at my brother’s) and merrily practising to dance, which my wife hath begun to learn this day of Mr. Pembleton, but I fear will hardly do any great good at it, because she is conceited that she do well already, though I think no such thing.

So to bed.

At Westminster Hall, this day, I buy a book lately printed and licensed by Dr. Stradling, the Bishop of London’s chaplin, being a book discovering the practices and designs of the papists, and the fears of some of our own fathers of the Protestant church heretofore of the return to Popery as it were prefacing it.

The book is a very good book; but forasmuch as it touches one of the Queenmother’s fathers confessors, the Bishop, which troubles many good men and members of Parliament, hath called it in, which I am sorry for.

Another book I bought, being a collection of many expressions of the great Presbyterian Preachers upon publique occasions, in the late times, against the King and his party, as some of Mr. Marshall, Case, Calamy, Baxter, &c., which is good reading now, to see what they then did teach, and the people believe, and what they would seem to believe now.

Lastly, I did hear that the Queen is much grieved of late at the King’s neglecting her, he having not supped once with her this quarter of a year, and almost every night with my Lady Castlemaine; who hath been with him this St. George’s feast at Windsor, and came home with him last night; and, which is more, they say is removed as to her bed from her own home to a chamber in White Hall, next to the King’s own; which I am sorry to hear, though I love her much.

Read the annotations

Making Sense of the Iran War

As the Iran war drags on, I wanted to share some thoughts on the proper context in which to see the conflict. Donald Trump lost this war in its very first days. Everything that has happened in recent weeks – the threats, the negotiations, the live on social media breakdowns – has simply been a matter of trying to get free of that fact. This isn’t a political attack. It’s simply an accurate appraisal of what we all see. More importantly, it is the only way to understand what is happening now. Everything that’s happening today and for weeks has been focused on breaking Iran’s hold on the Strait of Hormuz, something it didn’t have before the war started. That’s the definition of failure: fighting a war and continuing a war to clean up the mess the war of choice actually created. By this measure, the best way to achieve what is now the central war aim – opening the Strait – would have been simply not to start the war in the first place.

You can see the reality of the power balance in the visible fact that Trump wants negotiations and an end to the conflict more than Iran does. He keeps asking for them or demanding them. Iran holds back. They have the upper hand, notwithstanding all the vast damage to infrastructure, civilian and military, Iran has suffered.

It all comes back to the foundational fact that Trump lost control of the situation and lost the conflict itself in the first days. Everything since has simply been an effort to ignore or bluster through or deny that fact. Trump wants out of the war so he’s not willing to use the level of force that might prevail over the Iranian blockade. The Iranian leadership sees that just as clearly as everyone else. And as he waits he and the global economy sustain damage. He’s stuck and since he won’t recognize that fact the conflict and the massive damage to the global economy continues, even if the scale of the fighting, for the moment, doesn’t.

Sunlit arms of a Sunlit arms of a


Links 4/25/26

Links for you. Science:

After court loss, RFK Jr. gives himself more power over CDC vaccine panel
Wildlife trade drives animal-to-human pathogen transmission over 40 years
Protein and genomic language models uncover the unexplored diversity of bacterial immunity
This detox may erase 10 years of social media brain damage, researchers say. Studies show that taking even short breaks could reverse measures of cognitive decline. (paper here)
How rats conquered Earth
Trump administration drops court fight to cap NIH payments for research overhead costs
A natural molecule present in the human body protects against the flu

Other:

The Pure Joy of Joy: You can’t fake the happiness of Artemis II — or Zohran Mamdani
Why Would You Ask AI To Tell The Story Of Your Own Life?
Former ‘Lesbian’ ICE Deputy Director Accused of Secret Affair With 19-Year-Old Staffer, Now Running for Congress in Ohio
Wisconsinites Can Keep Watching Porn After Governor Vetoes Age Verification Bill
It’s Time To Grow Up
Hegseth: Full Metal Manhood
Has the Position of College Graduates Worsened?
They rescued D.C.’s munys. Then Trump took over. Inside the fight between the president and public golf
The New Defense Budget
What Was the Avignon Papacy and Why Is It in the News?
New York Times and WSJ editors continue to trivialize massive pro-democracy demonstrations. Analysis of “No Kings 3” front pages. Local editors continue to shine.
Trump Was Watching a U.F.C. Fight in Miami While Iran Talks Collapsed (uncharacteristically brutal for the NYT)
Having Failed to Win a “Marathon” [sic] without Training, Trump Announces Blockade of Iran’s Blockade
‘Grosse Pointe Blank’ At 25: How A Knock-Off Became A Groundbreaker In The Assassin-In-Existential-Crisis Comedic Subgenre
Your Kindle’s not obsolete, it just needs a jailbreak – and I’ll show you how it’s done
DHS deported a US citizen to Mexico after threatening him with prison time
D.C. school applications fall amid deportation fears and federal layoffs
Trump’s Interference With DC Arts Is a Boon to Baltimore
In Praise Of Cafe du Monde And Tourist Trap Eateries Everywhere
Eric Swalwell and the Death of Accountability. His sexual misconduct was an open secret. So why was he still seen as a rising star in the party?
Despite apocalyptic warnings, California fast food wage hike didn’t kill jobs
America’s booming annoyance economy
The creation of instant coffee
Crypto’s Midterm Open Marriage
DHS Paying Local Police Millions in Quieter Approach to Immigration Enforcement
Dark Money for Soft Power: The Trumpily named Campaign for America First International Assistance hopes to sway conservative voters to support the kinds of programs gutted by Trump’s DOGE.
Trump revealed his objective in Iran — 40 years ago
Purging Trump
‘Disgusting’: Trump’s Top Economic Adviser Brags About Killing 300,000 ‘High-Paying’ American Jobs
Notes of an Economist on Food Stamps
What Is ‘Narcissistic Collapse’? Experts See Familiar Hallmarks In Trump’s Latest Rant

Why shoplifting is bad

“Shoplifters of the world/ Unite and take over” — The Smiths

“When she wants something, man, she don’t wanna pay for it” — Jane’s Addiction

Seven years ago, when I wanted some toothpaste, I would walk down to my local Walgreens, grab a box of Crest off of the shelf, pay for it at the register, and walk home with it. Today, when I want some toothpaste, I open up Amazon.com and buy it in bulk. What changed? Amazon was just as good in 2019 as it is today. But now, when I walk into Walgreens, the toothpaste is locked behind a clear plastic case. In order to buy it, I have to call a store employee over to open the case for me.

That’s just too much of a hassle; the convenience of being able to walk into a store is canceled out by the inconvenience of having to stand there waiting for a human being to help me buy a goddamn tube of toothpaste.

People argue about whether there was really a nationwide epidemic of shoplifting in the U.S. in the early 2020s, and about whether that caused a wave of store closures. Some retailers claimed they were closing stores because of petty theft; some critics argued that this was a flimsy excuse. But no one can argue with those clear plastic cases covering the shelves. Those barriers, and the corporate investment and labor costs required to install and maintain them, are indisputably real. Numerator, a market research company, found the following in 2024:

Numerator, a data and tech company serving the market research space, has issued a new report—Unlocking Shopper Reactions to Secured Products—sourced from verified purchase data and a sentiment survey of over 5,000 consumers on their awareness of and reaction to merchandise being locked up in stores. Three-fifths of shoppers reported seeing locked-up merchandise on a regular basis, and 27% said they would switch retailers or abandon the purchase altogether instead of waiting for assistance for a locked-up product…

61% of shoppers reported seeing an increase in the number of products under lock and key over the past year. 33% have not noticed a change, and 7% say there are fewer items locked up now…35% of Western consumers say they encounter locks on the items they are trying to purchase almost every time they shop and 30% of urban consumers say the same…17% say they will switch retailers (10% online, 7% in-store), and 10% say they will abandon the purchase altogether. [emphasis mine]

When people cite numbers showing that shoplifting is down in San Francisco and many other metros since 2019 (despite almost doubling nationwide), you have to take into account the fact that a lot of merchandise is now being locked up. Unless companies are just stupidly wasting their money on those cases, and on the increased labor costs required to operate them, the existence of those cases is direct evidence that shoplifting has real costs.

If anti-theft barriers drive 5% of a store’s revenue to Amazon, that would mean that either A) theft would have caused the store to lose 5% or more of its revenue, or B) retail companies are being stupid and wasting money on anti-theft barriers. Chain stores like Walgreens and CVS are hyper-efficient optimizers — they really don’t like to make stupid decisions that lose money, and they have a ton of data and very good statisticians. Therefore, it’s extremely likely that theft imposes significant costs on many retailers.1

Who pays those costs? Maybe the shareholders of Walgreens and CVS just take a hit and see their share prices and wealth decline. Maybe their CEOs take a pay cut. Or maybe the stores cut wages and force their employees to work longer hours. Maybe they raise their prices, forcing regular people to pay more for toothpaste and shampoo and Advil. Maybe they close their least profitable stores — i.e., the stores in poor areas. Maybe poor people have one less Walgreens in their neighborhood to give them jobs and sell them their daily necessities.

In general, the cost will get divided up among those various people. But the pain will land much more on the poor and working class. Suppose that people start shoplifting more from Whole Foods, and it costs the company $20 million — 0.1% of its revenue. Now suppose that cost gets evenly divided — $5 million comes out of Jeff Bezos’ pocket, $5 million comes out of the salaries of the company’s executives and top managers, $5 million gets recouped by the company via price hikes, and $5 million gets saved via store closures and job cuts.2

Think about how much pain that would cause to each of the parties involved. If Bezos loses $5 million, he won’t even notice. It’s a rounding error on his wealth. The executives and top managers of Whole Foods will probably be slightly annoyed, but their lifestyles won’t change. Whole Foods’ middle- and upper-class customers will be a little more annoyed when prices go up. But the worst pain by far will land on the people who lose their jobs when stores close and staffing gets cut. $5 million is almost 100 employees.

Obviously some of the pain gets canceled out when shoppers go online instead. But online stores have a much lower labor share than brick-and-mortar retailers — if someone spends $1000 on Amazon instead of at Whole Foods, Bezos actually gets to keep a lot more of the money. And shoplifting does destroy some economic activity completely — regular people end up consuming less and getting paid less.

Every time you shoplift, in other words, you’re stealing from the people who work at grocery stores and drugstores and discount stores. You’re stealing from the communities that those stores serve. You’re contributing to food deserts. You’re raising unemployment. You’re making food less affordable for the most vulnerable. What you’re not doing is hurting rich people in any appreciable way.

If you’re shoplifting because you’re poor and desperate, the pain you’re causing to society might be worth it. But if you’re shoplifting because you’re a bored, arrogant multimillionaire with a chip on his shoulder, you’re just a rich person hurting poor people for fun.

Why am I writing this? Because in a recent roundtable discussion at the New York Times, leftist commentator Hasan Piker and New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino defended shoplifting — which interviewer Nadja Spiegelman renamed “microlooting” — arguing that it’s a way to strike out at the rich.

Here are some quotes from Piker, doing his usual shock-jock routine and endorsing theft of various kinds before admitting that he personally doesn’t steal:

Yeah, I’m pro-piracy all the way, like, across the board. Would you pirate a car? Yes. You know, if you could…If I could get away with it, if it was as easy as pirating intellectual property, I would do it…We’ve got to get back to cool crimes like that: bank robberies, stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature…I’m pro stealing from big corporations, because they steal quite a bit more from their own workers…Yeah, chaos. Full chaos. Let’s go…

I — ironically enough — I don’t personally do it. I never do it. When I was younger, I stole some Pokémon cards from a friend and my father punished me. And it was such a harrowing experience that I literally can’t even steal a candy bar. When we were in college, a lot of my friends used to love doing that…I would never participate in it. And I still can’t, to this day, participate in it.

And here’s Tolentino, recounting when she stole lemons from Whole Foods to help a family friend, and then defending the idea of shoplifting on a more systematic basis:

I will say, I think that stealing from a big box store — I’ll just state my platform — it’s neither very significant as a moral wrong, nor is it significant in any way as protest or direct action. But I did steal from Whole Foods on several occasions…[E]very week I would go get groceries for Miss Nancy, my now family friend who lived nearby…I’d be getting Miss Nancy all of her groceries, and…I forgot four lemons. And on several occasions I was like, I’m just going to go back, grab those four lemons and get the hell out.

Tolentino and Piker then engage in a long discourse about when it’s politically acceptable to steal things. Tolentino says it’s acceptable to steal from the Louvre. Piker says it’s acceptable to steal from big-box stores, but not from restaurants. Tolentino says it’s OK to steal from Ikea and Whole Foods if you give the loot to the homeless. Piker says that IP theft is OK, but stealing from a government-owned store is wrong.

It’s possible to see this as the amoral self-justification of two selfish rich people — petty millionaires resentful of billionaires, taking out their resentment by trashing the society around them. And sure, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some of that going on. But when you look closely at these people’s actions, they aren’t actually wanton thieves — Piker admits that he doesn’t personally steal anything, while Tolentino only admits stealing lemons for a family friend back when she was much less wealthy. They talk a big game about chaos and piracy and rebellion, but they’re mostly behaving like standard well-behaved highly-educated rule-following progressive coastal elites.

It’s also possible to see pro-theft rhetoric as part of American leftism’s intellectual heritage. The old European left had two basic factions — communists, and anarchists. The communists generally defeated the anarchists in Europe, but the American left is mostly descended from anarchism. Individual rebellion against the rules of society tends to be prized above collective action and hierarchy.

But what I really think we’re seeing is a combination of political posturing with a weird kind of effective altruism. Piker and Tolentino’s judgements of when stealing is OK and when it’s not OK are explicitly based on their judgements of when stealing is good for society, and when it’s bad. They envision a purely situational morality, in which people decide, moment-by-moment, whether to follow the law based on a sophisticated judgement of whether following the law will make the world a better place.

You could easily write down an economic model in which that sort of behavior is both rational and good. The problem is that it envisions every citizen as a sort of superhuman homo economicus, able to accurately make a complex calculation about the social costs and benefits when deciding whether or not to pay for every piece of fruit at Whole Foods.

In reality, that approach is doomed to fail. One big reason is that making decisions about whether to “microloot” usually requires a lot more knowledge about the workings of society than even the smartest human possesses.

Look closely, and you’ll see that Piker and Tolentino’s situational judgements sit on top of a gigantic stack of questionable assumptions about how economics and politics work. Piker says that stealing from a local diner is bad, probably because he implicitly assumes that the theft would come mostly out of the pocket of the restaurant’s independent owner, rather than out of the pocket of the restaurateur’s landlord or its corporate suppliers. But they both agree that stealing from a big-box store is OK because they assume the cost will come out of the pockets of corporate shareholders and executives.

Both of those assumptions are almost certainly wrong. Stealing from an indie restaurant will hurt corporations a bit; stealing from a big-box store will hit working-class employees and customers to some extent. Piker and Tolentino don’t understand much about how economics works, and they seem very confident in their simplistic mental model.

The second reason this kind of homo economicus approach to morality is dangerous is that there are tons of externalities involved. When you steal things, you probably give implicit permission to other people to steal things (and their reasons are likely to be less altruistic). You make stores more likely to install anti-theft barriers, which gives society a more militarized dystopian feel. Shoplifting forces marginally profitable stores to close, leading to vacant storefronts that attract crime, while depriving local governments of tax revenue to fund infrastructure and education. And so on.

It’s very difficult to calculate all of these externalities when you take each action. That’s probably why society has a social contract — a system of rules that we follow instead of calculating the results of each action from first principles. That social contract is often unfair, and we have many mechanisms dedicated to constantly revising it — democracy, the free press, and so on. But individual anarchism — the rejection of any social contract in favor of personal morality based on current assumptions — pretty much instantly runs into the hard limits of individual human knowledge.

Fortunately, if the decision is whether to shoplift five lemons or pirate a movie, the consequences of getting this sort of thing wrong won’t be catastrophic. Yes, shoplifting is wrong, but most people I know have done it at some point in their lives, and society hasn’t collapsed.3 But there are plenty of higher-stakes issues where the kind of fine-grained consequentialism advocated by Tolentino and Piker can have much more serious consequences.

For example, in the NYT roundtable, Tolentino says that blowing up a pipeline should be OK, but getting iced coffee in a plastic cup is morally wrong:

One thing that should be legal that isn’t — it’s interesting, because I have to regularly explain this stuff to a small child, and have so thoroughly explained to her that some things are against the rules, but they’re OK, depending on who you are. And some things are not against the rules, but they’re not OK. There are so many perfectly legal things I do regularly that I find mildly immoral. Like getting iced coffee in a plastic cup. I find that to be a profoundly selfish, immoral, collectively destructive action. I have taken so many planes for so many pleasure reasons; I have acted in so many selfish ways that are not only legal, but they’re sanctioned and they’re unbelievably valorized, culturally. So, maybe things like blowing up a pipeline, let’s say that.

Tolentino is obviously thinking purely about climate change when she says this — getting ice in a plastic cup raises emissions because ice and plastic are carbon-intensive, blowing up a pipeline lowers emissions by curbing fossil fuel use. But even if those assumptions are correct — and that’s a big if! — climate isn’t the only consequence in the world. Blowing up a pipeline can kill or maim innocent people. It can release toxic pollutants into the local environment. It can deprive local poor people of income that the pipeline owner agreed to share, and so on.

Piker, meanwhile, downplayed Luigi Mangione’s murder of health insurance CEO Brian Thompson in 2024, while accusing Thompson of “social murder”:

Brian Thompson, as the United Healthcare C.E.O., was engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder. The systematized forms of violence, the structural violence of poverty, the for-profit, paywalled system of health care in this country — and the consequences of that are tremendous amounts of pain, tremendous amounts of violence, tremendous amounts of deaths…[B]ecause of the pervasive pain that the private health care system had created for the average American, I saw so many people immediately understand why this death had taken place…[T]hat is the reason why, I think, the reaction to Luigi Mangione, especially by younger generations, was not so negative.

This life-and-death judgement also rests on a teetering tower of shaky assumptions. It assumes that health insurance companies — rather than providers — are chiefly responsible for high health care prices in America. In fact, as I wrote after Thompson’s murder, that’s just not true:

In fact, health insurers have consistently terrible profit margins; they are not giant pots of profit that could be used to pay for regular people’s treatment. Insurers are almost entirely a pass-through — it’s overpriced health services themselves that are responsible for the high cost of care in America.

Getting these things wrong can result in a lot of unnecessary violence, death, and conflict. Making excuses for terrorism and murder is a lot more consequential than deciding whether to steal a few lemons, and yet Piker and Tolentino are just as comfortable doing the former as the latter. Their mental models of economics and politics are a dense tangle of undergrad-level misunderstandings, leftist memes, and political talking points — victims of American progressives’ increasing epistemic closure. And yet they are arrogant enough to feel comfortable discarding all of society’s rules on a case-by-case basis in favor of their own personal calculations.

This is a bad direction for the progressive movement, the Democratic Party, and educated coastal elite culture in general. Yes, there are many arenas of human life in which modern society has overly constrained individual judgement with a thicket of rules and procedures. But stealing from stores, blowing up pipelines, and gunning down corporate executives are not good examples of situations where we need fewer rules and more individual judgement.


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1

Economists have tried to estimate these costs.

2

For simplicity’s sake I’ve assumed that Bezos owns 100% of Whole Foods, which isn’t true. But this assumption isn’t important to the point I’m making.

3

I have only shoplifted one thing in my entire life: a copy of Abbie Hoffman’s book Steal This Book.

Friday Squid Blogging: How Squid Survived Extinction Events

Science news:

Scientists have finally cracked a long-standing mystery about squid and cuttlefish evolution by analyzing newly sequenced genomes alongside global datasets. The research reveals that these bizarre, intelligent creatures likely originated deep in the ocean over 100 million years ago, surviving mass extinction events by retreating into oxygen-rich deep-sea refuges. For millions of years, their evolution barely changed—until a dramatic post-extinction boom sparked rapid diversification as they moved into new shallow-water habitats.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.

Saturday assorted links

1. Hedging the singularity?

2. Claude doing stand-up comedy, the video is AI too.

3. Thirty more lines from Empedocles have been found.

4. Latin America’s oil resurgence.

5. 25 dead at the Haitian Citadelle.

6. A paean to the earlier University of Chicago law school.

7. Can AI agents read a social science paper and write the code from scratch to reproduce its results?

8. Papers of Hayek are now accessible online.

The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Artemis II broke Fred Haise's distance record, but he is happy to pass it on

With the circumlunar flight of Artemis II, and the prospect of landing astronauts on the lunar surface within a few years, humanity is preempting an era where the imprint of visiting the Moon would be erased from living memory.

There are five men still alive who flew to the Moon on NASA's Apollo missions. All are now in their 90s. Between 1968 and 1972, 24 astronauts visited the Moon, and 12 of them walked on its surface. We'll have to wait a little longer to add to the roster of Moonwalkers, but there are four new names to etch on the list of lunar explorers.

The Artemis II astronauts, all in their 40s or 50s, flew a little more than 4,000 miles from the Moon, higher above the surface than the Apollo lunar missions. The four-person crew on Artemis II set a new record for the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth: 252,756 miles (406,771 kilometers).

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This is who's developing Golden Dome's orbital interceptors—if they're ever built

The US Space Force released a list Friday of a dozen companies working on Space-Based Interceptors for the Pentagon's Golden Dome initiative, a multilayer defense system to shield US territory from drones and ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missile attacks.

The roster of Golden Dome Space-Based Interceptor (SBI) contractors, some of which were previously reported, includes Anduril Industries, Booz Allen Hamilton, General Dynamics Mission Systems, GITAI USA, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Quindar, Raytheon, Sci-Tec, SpaceX, True Anomaly, and Turion Space.

The Space Force made 20 individual awards the 12 companies in late 2025 and early 2026 using an acquisition mechanism known as Other Transaction Authority, or OTA, agreements. OTAs allow the Pentagon to bypass federal acquisition regulations and cast a wide net to attract a larger number of potential contractors, and are especially useful for rapid prototyping. That is exactly what the Space Force wants to see with the first phase of the SBI program.

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Night markets in Taiwan

Night markets in Taiwan are like open-air food courts in which each seller sells a single food preparation.

 


 


This last photo, of a selection of freshly made breads that look like brains, reminded me of the old joke about why economists' brains are so expensive per ounce.
 

April 24, 2026

On April 25, 1945, delegates from fifty nations met in San Francisco to establish a permanent forum for international cooperation: the United Nations.

Even before the U.S. entered World War II, U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill and their advisors laid out principles for an international system that could prevent future world wars. In the 1941 Atlantic Charter, they declared that countries should not invade each other and therefore the world should work toward disarmament, and that international cooperation and trade thanks to freedom of the seas would help to knit the world together with rising prosperity and human rights.

Between 1942 and 1945, forty-seven nations signed the Declaration by United Nations, a treaty formalizing the alliance that stood against the fascist Axis powers. The treaty declared that signatories would not sign separate peace agreements with Germany, Italy, or Japan and would work together to create a world based on the 1941 Atlantic Charter.

In October 1943 the governments of the U.S., the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China declared that they would continue to cooperate with each other after the war ended, and that they recognized the need to establish an international organization, “based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all peace-loving states, and open to membership by all such states, large and small, for the maintenance of international peace and security.”

To create that organization, representatives from those four nations met at the Dumbarton Oaks estate in Washington, D.C., in late summer and fall 1944. They hammered out the Dumbarton Oaks Proposals for an international organization called the United Nations. Its purpose would be to maintain international peace and security by acting collectively to stop aggression and settle international disputes, to strengthen ties between nations, and to work together to solve problems.

The organization was based on “the principle of the sovereign equality of all peace-loving states,” and membership in it would be open to all such states.

In February 1945, President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, and General Secretary Joseph Stalin met near Yalta in Crimea to discuss the postwar world. The Allies had liberated France and Belgium, and the Germans had lost the Battle of the Bulge in late January, while Soviet forces were within 50 miles of Berlin. It was clear that the end of the war in Europe was coming.

At Yalta the three leaders hashed out the last pieces of the proposed United Nations and agreed that “a United Nations conference on the proposed world organization should be summoned for Wednesday, 25 April, 1945, and should be held in the United States of America.” Those invited to the conference would be “the United Nations as they existed on 8 Feb[ruary], 1945” and any associated nation that had “declared war on the common enemy by 1 March, 1945.”

On March 1 a visibly exhausted Roosevelt addressed the nation. “A conference of all the United Nations of the world will meet in San Francisco on April 25, 1945,” he said. “There, we all hope, and confidently expect, to execute a definite charter of organization under which the peace of the world will be preserved and the forces of aggression permanently outlawed.”

“This time we are not making the mistake of waiting until the end of the war to set up the machinery of peace. This time,” he said, in reference to the failed League of Nations after World War I, “as we fight together to win the war finally, we work together to keep it from happening again.”

Roosevelt explained: “The structure of world peace cannot be the work of one man, or one party, or one Nation. It cannot be just an American peace, or a British peace, or a Russian, a French, or a Chinese peace. It cannot be a peace of large Nations—or of small Nations. It must be a peace which rests on the cooperative effort of the whole world.

“It cannot be a structure of complete perfection at first. But it can be a peace—and it will be a peace—based on the sound and just principles of the Atlantic Charter—on the concept of the dignity of the human being—and on the guarantees of tolerance and freedom of religious worship.”

Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945 and less than two weeks later, on April 25, 3,500 people arrived at the San Francisco conference: 850 delegates and their staff and advisors, along with the staff of the conference. To follow developments, more than 2,500 reporters and observers were also there.

The conference organizers divided the delegates into committees to figure out how, exactly, to make the United Nations work. Together they wrote, and then adopted unanimously, the United Nations charter.

“We the peoples of the United Nations,” the preamble to that document began, are determined “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.” The document declares the signers “faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.” It calls for the maintenance of international treaties and international law.

The preamble also called for countries to live in peace with each other, uniting their strength to maintain international peace and security and making sure that “armed force shall not be used” unless it is in the common interest. As Roosevelt and Churchill had called for in the 1941 Atlantic Charter, it called for nations to work together “for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples.”

“To accomplish these aims,” the signatories announced, “[we] have resolved to combine our efforts.”

Notes:

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/moscow.asp

https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1943v01/d684

https://digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog/ss:21796682

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/moscow.asp

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-congress-the-yalta-conference

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/yalta.asp

https://www.un.org/en/about-us/history-of-the-un/san-francisco-conference

https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/preamble

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Purges at the Pentagon

Could this be the year where MAGA fades away?

Bunny, you’re seen.

This is a guest post from Jerry Rocha, a stand-up comedian and new local. You can follow him on Instagram here.

Could this be the year? Could these upcoming mid-terms be the elections where America, with an overwhelming number of votes, tells MAGA to eat shit?

So many signs are pointing to it, from polling to the numbers experts on cable news all saying their data is showing a blue wave, maybe even a historic one, is on the way.

I want to believe it, but I worry those number-crunching experts on cable news know just about as much as the gambling experts who have taken up all the talking head retail space on every cable sports outlet (By the way, it won’t ever stop there with the gambling bullshit. Sports was just the way in).

I’m sure the action on the mid-terms will be a rabid frenzy of bets and the smart money should be the fascists getting their asses kicked. My fear is that should have been the outcome every time a fascist asshole is on a ballot, and yet we’ve seen them win time and time again.

It’s so disheartening. Hillary should’ve beaten his ass (electorally). Biden should’ve beaten his ass by a much bigger margin than he did. Kamala should’ve beaten his ass, and instead there that motherfucker is, exposed as a sexual assaulter, exposed as a pedophile and all that’s happened is many of us seeing our dumbest friend or relative we have now making excuses for sexual assault and pedophilia.

How the fuck are they still okay with this shit?

It does seem that, thankfully, a few are peeling off, but what about the people who haven’t? The non-billionaires (not even close in so many cases) who are in no way benefitting from this asshole being in control … why are they still there?

If anyone has seen the brilliant John Sayles film Lone Star, then I’m sure you remember the cameo by Frances McDormand. If not, go watch it now. When I first saw the film, her character, Bunny, I thought was comic relief, a divorced woman who lived alone and whose home decorations and whose clothing and whose conversations seemed to all be centered around the Dallas Cowboys. Having been born and raised in Dallas, I just saw what I figured to be a funny caricature of a mega fan.

Then I saw the movie again and I had a completely different take on Bunny. What I initially thought as comic relief, I soon saw as the complete opposite. This was a tragic tragic individual who had no way to deal with her trauma and instead poured her existence into a football team.

Now, every time I see MAGA, I think of Bunny. It’s sad, knowing that there are people out in the world so lost and that damaged that they fall for that orange pile of shit and then say we’re the “deranged” ones when all the negative things he does are exposed.

It’s sad, but it’s also difficult to have empathy. We all have trauma, however, most of us don’t deal with that trauma in taking solace that people different than us are hurting.

And yet, it’s still paramount that some of them have pulled away from MAGA and more continue to pull away. So as much as I talk shit, I will also be happy to let any MAGA on the fence I happen to come across know how nice the water is on this side of the pool.

I will also hope the apathetic mostly left-leaning “both sides suck” political hipsters understand that if there was ever a mid-term election to show up to, this is the one.

The experts are saying the mid-terms will favor the Liberals. I’m cautiously optimistic. I suppose it helps that this is easily the worst president and administration we’ve ever had, and while I will sit here and hope that a big blue wave will be the case, I will also make sure I get my ass out there to vote. I will talk to everyone about how important it will be for them to go vote as well.

Although my cancer fight has left me mostly bedridden at the moment, I at least promise that my daily calls to the local GameStops will include some semblance of “please go and vote” talk.

The chances any MAGA decide to have a face turn and reject the evil is so unlikely, it would be if Bunny suddenly became a Washington Commanders fan, but in Rocky IV, the Russians in the middle of massive fight in Russia between one of their own and Rocky, started cheering for Rocky.

So… hope?

I do have faith that a change (for the better) is on the way.

I have no idea how many times these MAGA pukes have been on a ballot and won, but if it’s the third time, or seventh time or whatever time, let’s just hurry up and get to the time where it’s a charm.

The Pernicious Trade Account

The trade accounts are among the most pernicious statistics ever collected. It’s long been remarked, for example, that merely by calling something a “deficit” it seems bad even though a current account deficit is matched by a financial account surplus. Put that issue aside, however, because the real problems are much deeper. The international accounts make it appear that individuals, in their ordinary buying and selling, bind us all in a collective endeavor. The accounts take millions of voluntary, mutually beneficial transactions between individuals and firms and repackage them as a relationship between nations—as if “America” were buying from “China”. Many, many experts get this wrong—not just non-economists who are misled by terms like “deficits.”

Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek gives a truly excellent example in replying to a reader who asks:

The USA ran trade deficits for 50 years. Those were offset by foreigners’ investments in the USA. Foreigners expect returns on these investments. Doesn’t it mean Americans eventually have to pay those returns to foreigners?

Don’s answer:

No.

The only Americans who are obliged to pay anything to foreigners are Americans who borrowed money from foreigners. (This number includes U.S. citizens-taxpayers whose government borrowed money from foreigners.) But no such obligation exists for other investments that foreigners made in the U.S. – those other investments being equity investments in the U.S. (for example, foreigners buying a restaurant in Houston), purchases of real estate in the U.S., and holding U.S. dollars.
If, for example, the foreign-owned restaurant in Houston goes bankrupt, the loss is fully borne by its foreign owners; no American is obliged to pay anything on that account to foreigners.

Of course, foreigners do expect positive returns on all of their U.S. investments, regardless of form. But with the exception of Americans’ repayment of principal and interest on funds that they borrowed from foreigners, no returns that foreigners earn on their investments in America are paid by Americans. If the foreign-owned restaurant in Houston is profitable, those profits are newly created wealth – wealth that’s created by that restaurant’s foreign owners.

In the international commercial accounts, when the restaurant’s foreign owners realize returns on their restaurant – say, by being paid dividends drawn on that restaurant’s profits – it appears that Americans are paying foreigners. This appearance comes from the fact that dollars flow from the U.S. to abroad, and so are recorded as payments from America to a foreign country or countries. But this appearance is misleading. America, as such, doesn’t pay those returns to the restaurant’s foreign owners. Nor do any flesh-and-blood Americans pay those returns. Those returns, again, are new wealth created by the restaurant’s foreign owners; economically, those returns are paid to the restaurant’s foreign owners by the restaurant’s foreign owners.

But the international commercial accounts mask this economic reality. What appears in the commercial accounts as payments by America to foreign countries are no such thing. This accounting mistakes geography for economic reality. Untold confusion is unleashed by supposing that, just because these dollar-denominated returns are created in the U.S. and then sent abroad to foreigners, these dollar-denominated returns are necessarily paid by Americans to foreigners.

As Don says, the trade accounts commit a kind of category error: they categorize geographic location, a where, and treat it as a who, as if “nations” traded. But nations don’t trade, people trade. This confusion wouldn’t matter too much if the statistics stayed in the back pages of government reports. But they don’t. They land on the front page, they shape policy, and they frame negotiations. When a president claims that “we lost $500 billion” to “crazy trade” with China, he is reading the international accounts as a story about nations in competition. The accounting creates the narrative. the narrative creates the policy. Bad accounting leads to bad policy. We would, in fact, all be better off if the trade accounts simply disappeared.

The post The Pernicious Trade Account appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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★ Time to Serve Some Delicious Claim Chowder Regarding the Cook-Ternus CEO Transition

In May 2024, Bloomberg ran a feature story by Mark Gurman under the headline, “Tim Cook Can’t Run Apple Forever. Who’s Next?” The subhead: “John Ternus, the head of hardware engineering, is emerging as a potential successor to the CEO.” The nut grafs from that piece:

There’s no reason to assume that a change at the helm is imminent. Cook may be older than the CEOs of the other tech companies at the top of the S&P 500, but he’s hardly the oldest person running a major corporation. “If Trump or Biden can be president at 80, Tim Cook can be CEO of Apple for many more years. It used to be automatic that CEOs are moved out at 65,” says someone who knows him. “The world has changed.”

While Cook hasn’t given any indication how long he’ll remain in charge — other than telling Dua Lipa it would be “a while” — people close to him believe he’ll be CEO at least another three years. After that, they say, he’ll start a charitable foundation to donate the wealth he accumulated at Apple.

If Cook were to stay that long, people within Apple say, the most likely successor would be John Ternus, the hardware engineering chief. In a company whose success has always come from building category-defining gadgets, the ascension of a hardware engineering expert to the CEO job would seem logical. Ternus, who’s not yet 50, would also be more likely than other members of the executive team to stick around for a long time, potentially providing another decade or more of Cook-esque stability.

Ternus is well-liked inside Apple, and he’s earned the respect of Cook, Williams and other leaders. “Tim likes him a lot, because he can give a good presentation, he’s very mild-mannered, never puts anything into an email that is controversial and is a very reticent decision-maker,” says one person close to Apple’s executive team. “He has a lot of managerial characteristics like Tim.” Christopher Stringer, a former top Apple hardware designer, called Ternus a “trustworthy hand” who’s “never failed with any role he’s been elevated to.” Eddy Cue, the Apple executive known as Cook’s closest confidant, has privately told colleagues that Ternus should be the next CEO, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

Linking to Gurman’s report, I wrote:

I wouldn’t have linked to this if not for the above line about Eddy Cue. If Cue is telling people that, that means a lot. No executive at Apple is more juiced-in company-wide than Cue. Cook’s first action as CEO was to promote Cue, and Cue was arguably just as tight with and trusted by Steve Jobs.

It was two more years, not three, but Gurman was the first to report that Ternus was the guy at the top of the list.

There was no significant additional reporting between Gurman’s May 2024 Bloomberg report until November 15 last year, when the Financial Times published a blockbuster story under the headline “Apple Intensifies Succession Planning for CEO Tim Cook”, with four bylines: “Tim Bradshaw, Stephen Morris and Michael Acton in San Francisco and Daniel Thomas in London”. Bradshaw is the FT’s lead Apple reporter, and it’s no coincidence his name was first among the four. The article gets right to the point at the start:

Apple is stepping up its succession planning efforts, as it prepares for Tim Cook to step down as chief executive as soon as next year. Several people familiar with discussions inside the tech group told the Financial Times that its board and senior executives have recently intensified preparations for Cook to hand over the reins at the $4tn company after more than 14 years.

John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice-president of hardware engineering, is widely seen as Cook’s most likely successor, although no final decisions have been made, these people said.

People close to Apple say the long-planned transition is not related to the company’s current performance, ahead of what is expected to be a blockbuster end-of-year sales period for the iPhone. [...]

The company is unlikely to name a new CEO before its next earnings report in late January, which covers the critical holiday period. An announcement early in the year would give its new leadership team time to settle in ahead of its big annual keynote events, its developer conference in June and its iPhone launch in September, the people said. These people said that although preparations have intensified, the timing of any announcement could change.

So, per the FT in November, Apple’s plan was to name Ternus as the company’s next CEO “early in the year”, after their Q1 results (January 29) but ahead of WWDC (June 8). The halfway point between those dates was April 4; Apple announced Ternus as the company’s next CEO on April 20. Every single word of the FT report, in hindsight, was exactly correct. I can’t think of a way that their November story could have been more prescient. It was a home run. A report for the ages, like when CNet and The Wall Street Journal scooped the Mac’s transition to Intel processors on the eve of WWDC 2005.

My own take, back in November when the FT report dropped, was that it had the distinct aroma of a deliberate expectations-setting leak, and was almost certainly accurate:

That “several people” spoke to the FT about this says to me that those sources (members of the board?) did so with Cook’s blessing, and they want this announcement to be no more than a little surprising. [...]

I would also bet that Cook moves into the role of executive chairman, and will still play a significant, if not leading, role for the company when it comes to domestic and international politics. Especially with regard to Trump.

Cook moving into the position of executive chairman and continuing to play a leading role as the company’s political ambassador was my own speculation, and that proved out. Easy money, making that prediction.

One week after the FT’s report, in his Bloomberg “Power On” newsletter on November 23, Gurman wrote:

In October, I wrote that the internal spotlight on Ternus was “intensifying,” and that barring unforeseen circumstances he would be the leading candidate. But I didn’t put a date on when a change might happen. Then, around midnight two Fridays ago, the Financial Times published a report with three central claims: Apple is “intensifying” succession planning; Ternus is likely the next CEO; and Cook is expected to step down between late January and June.

The first two points are anything but revelations if you’ve read Bloomberg coverage and Power On, or have simply been paying attention to the realities of Cook’s age and tenure. The timing, however, is another matter entirely. It’s a huge deal that the FT did this: A respected publication should only predict the CEO transition date for a company of Apple’s scale with a high level of confidence — based on people legitimately in the know.

This is where I have concerns. Based on everything I’ve learned in recent weeks, I don’t believe a departure by the middle of next year is likely. In fact, I would be shocked if Cook steps down in the time frame outlined by the FT. Some people have speculated that the story was a “test balloon” orchestrated by Apple or someone close to Cook to prepare Wall Street for a change, but that isn’t the case either. I believe the story was simply false.

Gurman must be well and truly “shocked” by this week’s announcements, because as it turns out, Cook is stepping aside exactly “in the time frame outlined by the FT”. The FT’s report was not “simply false”. It was, in fact, completely true. The Financial Times, which truly is a respected publication (with no black marks on its record, like, say, Bloomberg’s to-this-day-still-uncorrected “The Big Hack” fiasco), obviously did have a high level of confidence in Apple’s plans, because they were, in fact, briefed by people “legitimately in the know”. Gurman’s reading comprehension is questionable as well, because the FT did not report that Cook would “step down” between January and June. The FT report spoke only of “naming a new CEO” and making an “announcement” between January and June. That’s exactly what happened. Nor is anyone “departing” — but a change in leadership will occur in the middle of the year.

In January, Gurman reiterated his stance that the FT was wrong:

It’s just a question of timing. The Financial Times reported last year that the change would happen as early as the beginning of 2026. But let me be clear: This seems unlikely.

By pooh-poohing the FT’s completely accurate reporting as “simply false”, Gurman wound up poo-pooing the bed. Calibrate the grains of salt with which you take his other reporting on Apple executive goings-on accordingly. A humble correction and sincere apology to the Financial Times — and Tim Bradshaw personally — are surely forthcoming in this weekend’s edition of Power On.1


  1. And the check, I’m sure, is in the mail. ↩︎

★ Norwegian Boating Licenses and Generational Law

The Norwegian Maritime Authority:

If you were born in 1980 or later and plan to operate a recreational craft of more than 8 metres in length or with an engine power of more than 25 hp, you need a boating licence. The boating licence is a certificate permitting you to operate Norwegian recreational craft of less than 15 meters in length (49.21 feet) in Norwegian territory.

That’s an interesting example of generational law. It kind of sucked, I’m sure, if you were from a family of mariners and were born in 1980 and your sibling was born in 1979. You got stuck having to qualify for a license and your sibling did not. But: this is very different from an outright ban on those born after a certain year. It’s a relatively gentle change, and the cutoff had to apply somewhere. (The state of Missouri has a similar law with a birth cutoff of 1984.)

This whole topic of generational law is fascinating. I’ve gotten more emails from readers — around the world — about my post on the U.K. ban on tobacco sales to those born in 2009 or later than just about anything I’ve written about recently. Lots of amazing feedback — including a note pointing me to the above Norwegian law. I’m replying to a bunch but can’t reply to them all, and but I’m thankful for every one.

What makes the Norwegian boat licensing cutoff unobjectionable to me is that it’s not binary. It’s not saying those born in 1979 can pilot a boat and those born in 1980 cannot. It’s only saying that there’s an additional restriction on those born in 1980. A generational restriction feels fundamentally different from a generational ban. A bunch of readers who support these generational tobacco bans point to other laws with age cutoffs, like when the age for buying alcohol changed from 18 to 21. I’m sure that sucked if you wanted to drink and were 18, 19, or 20 when the limit was raised to 21 in your state. (Or if you were 17, and went from being one year away to four years away with the swoop of your governor’s pen.) But everyone turns 21 eventually. Adults putting additional restrictions on the young feels to me entirely different than adults banning the young from ever partaking in something that they — the current adults who are imposing the restriction — can continue to do in perpetuity. It’s not just a violation of the idea that all adults are equals, but to me it’s just blatantly hypocritical.

If you tell me I’m not permitted to do something, but others are, it makes me want to do that thing. And it really makes me want to give the finger to whoever is imposing the restriction. Fine for you but not for me? Fuck you.

Also, grandfathering devices (old cars don’t need to meet new emission standards) or buildings (new buildings must have elevators for accessibility, but existing buildings aren’t required to add them) feels fundamentally different from grandfathering people.

To be clear, I support the intention of these tobacco laws, but I am highly dubious about their practical effect in addition to my objections to their fairness. Some people have a tendency to focus solely on intent and not on the practical effects of the law. That if the intent is good, the law must be good. I think laws are only good when their practical effects are beneficial. A well-intentioned law with no practical benefit is needless bureaucracy; a well-intentioned law with adverse practical effects is a bad law.1 I can’t help but think everyone who supports these generational smoking bans is stuck thinking of those below the age cut-off as the 17-year-olds they currently are. But they’re all going to be 40, 50, 60 years old eventually. It’s absurd to think about a 60-year-old man who needs to ask his 61-year-old friend to buy him smokes.

My spitball idea for a generational law to keep more young people from ever starting a tobacco habit — and thus, nicotine addiction — would be through scaled taxation. Require everyone, no matter what age, to present ID when purchasing tobacco. Set the tax rate on the year they were born, with significantly higher taxes the younger they are. But with no wild fluctuation from someone else who is a year or two apart in age. Start with the highest rate for 21-year-olds, and lower those taxes by a point or two for every additional year old someone is. In this structure, no adult would be forbidden from buying tobacco, but someone who is 21 would pay significantly more for a pack of cigarettes than someone who is 65 — but only slightly more than someone who is, say, 22 or 23. Keep increasing the base rate for everyone, every year, so that everyone, no matter how old, has to pay slightly higher prices year after year. Thus the starting price, for newly-turned-21-year-olds, would escalate annually. That feels fair, should reduce the demand for a black market, and I think would have the practical effect of decreasing the number of young people who ever start — while also minimizing the punitive costs for older adults with decades-long addictions.


  1. This is my objection to the EU’s DMA in a nutshell. ↩︎

★ ‘We Don’t Serve Their Kind Here’

George Lucas got so many nuances right in Star Wars. Little touches that said so much. One of the most overlooked is a moment that I vividly remember from first seeing it, on the big screen, as a kindergartener or thereabouts. It’s during the scene where Luke enters the Mos Eisley cantina. We still haven’t met Han Solo and Chewbacca. And while we’ve seen space ships and droids, stormtroopers and Darth Vader, Jawas and Tusken Raiders, every character we’ve seen in the flesh is a human. And then, boom, 45 minutes into the movie, we enter the cantina, and the joint is absolutely lousy with dozens of wild and wildly different aliens — including the band playing that iconic jaunty song. We suddenly learn just how diverse the galaxy really is. It’s one of the best and most memorable scenes in movie history.

The moment I’m talking about is when Luke enters with C-3PO and R2-D2, and the frighteningly gruff bartender barks at him:

                BARTENDER
      We don't serve their kind here!

Luke, still recovering from the shock of
seeing so many outlandish creatures, doesn't
quite catch the bartender's drift.

                LUKE
      What?

                BARTENDER
      Your droids. They'll have to wait 
      outside. We don't want them here.

Luke looks at old Ben, who is busy talking
to one of the Galactic pirates. He notices
several of the gruesome creatures along the
bar are giving him a very unfriendly glare.

Luke pats Threepio on the shoulder.

                LUKE
      Listen, why don't you wait out by 
      the speeder. We don't want any 
      trouble.

                THREEPIO
      I heartily agree with you sir.

As a kid, I didn’t get it. Why would you not want droids? Star Wars made robots seem so real, so fun. Why would you ban them? That scene has stuck with me for my entire life. I didn’t get why, but I understood what it meant about that galaxy: the underclass deeply resented droids. The bartender’s attitude wasn’t “Hey kid, I’m sorry, but rules are rules and they’re not permitted.” His attitude was “Get those fucking things out of here.

I think about this scene more and more lately.

XOXO Explore

Andy McMillan and Andy Baio:

Today, over 10 years later, and almost two full years after we retired the festival for good, we’re finally launching that website. Named after what we thought would be a throwaway title for a short-lived GitHub repo, allow us to introduce XOXO Explore. [...]

And, for the first time ever (!) on an XOXO website, we now have an actual About page, where we’ve attempted to explain what XOXO actually was, documenting the 12-year history of the festival and its related projects, and featuring a bunch of our favorite quotes from press and attendees over the years.

You’ll also notice the entire site is littered with floating visual ephemera: design artifacts, illustrations, animations, photos, and videos, all pulled from our vast archive of commissions and collaborations.

Conferences come and conferences go. But when they go, they tend to disappear. What a remarkable library, a record, XOXO Explore is.

 ★ 

New Zealand Passed a Generational Smoking Ban in 2022, But Repealed It Before It Went Into Effect

Eva Corlett, reporting for The Guardian in 2023:

New Zealand’s new government will scrap the country’s world-leading law to ban smoking for future generations to help pay for tax cuts — a move that public health officials believe will cost thousands of lives and be “catastrophic” for Māori communities.

In 2022 the country passed pioneering legislation which introduced a steadily rising smoking age to stop those born after January 2009 from ever being able to legally buy cigarettes. The law was designed to prevent thousands of smoking-related deaths and save the health system billions of dollars. [...]

The laws were due to be implemented from July 2024. But as part of its coalition agreement with populist New Zealand First, National agreed to repeal the amendments, including “removing requirements for de-nicotisation, removing the reduction in retail outlets and the generation ban”.

It’s interesting that this law passed in the first place, but I would argue that there are no lessons to be learned from it given that it was repealed before it ever went into effect. And it seemingly was repealed solely along left/right political lines after a change in the country’s parliament, not because the public had turned against this specific not-yet-in-effect law.

 ★ 

The people do not yearn for automation

The people do not yearn for automation

This written and video essay by Nilay Patel explores why AI is unpopular with the general public even as usage numbers for ChatGPT continue to skyrocket.

It’s a superb piece of commentary, and something I expect I’ll be thinking about for a long time to come.

Nilay’s core idea is that people afflicted with “software brain” - who see the world as something to be automated as much as possible, and attempt to model everything in terms of information flows and data - are becoming detached from everyone else.

[…] software brain has ruled the business world for a long time. AI has just made it easier than ever for more people to make more software than ever before — for every kind of business to automate big chunks of itself with software. It’s everywhere: the absolute cutting edge of advertising and marketing is automation with AI. It’s not being a creative.

But: not everything is a business. Not everything is a loop! The entire human experience cannot be captured in a database. That’s the limit of software brain. That’s why people hate AI. It flattens them.

Regular people don’t see the opportunity to write code as an opportunity at all. The people do not yearn for automation. I’m a full-on smart home sicko; the lights and shades and climate controls of my house are automated in dozens of ways. But huge companies like Apple, Google and Amazon have struggled for over a decade now to make regular people care about smart home automation at all. And they just don’t.

Via John Gruber

Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, nilay-patel, ai-ethics

Who's afraid of the money supply?

The Financial Times has an article discussing Argentine inflation, which remains stubbornly high in 2026:

Javier Milei’s push to bring down Argentina’s chronic inflation is stalling, with the monthly rate hitting 3.4 per cent in March — its highest level in a year — as economists warn that tackling the final stretch could be far harder than halting the crisis at its peak.

Inflation has fallen sharply from the double-digit monthly rates Milei inherited when he became president in 2023. But the monthly rate bottomed out at 1.5 per cent in May and hit 2.9 per cent in both January and February. . . .

The libertarian president, who wrote a book called The End of Inflation as part of his pitch to voters in 2023, has said inflation could soon “start with a zero”, meaning a monthly rate of less than 1 per cent.

But economists are sceptical, particularly as the energy price surge caused by the Iran war adds fresh pressure to already sticky price dynamics. Its annual rate of nearly 33 per cent is a long way from its peak of nearly 300 per cent, but still among the world’s worst.

Two things struck me about the FT article. There is no mention of the money supply and there is no explanation for why Milei has refused to ask the central bank to control inflation:

The government has resisted committing the central bank to an explicit policy of targeting inflation. In the absence of such a framework as well as the abandoned exchange-rate anchor, the process has lost its engine, argues Gabriel Caamaño, an economist at consultancy Outlier.

“The disinflation process is at an impasse,” he said.

Yes. But why?

Milton Friedman famously said that persistent inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, by which he meant a money supply phenomenon.

I’d say that high rates of persistent inflation are always and everywhere a money supply phenomenon.

I say “money supply”, because it is a tautology that inflation is a monetary phenomenon. After all, (by definition) inflation is literally the percentage decrease in the purchasing power of money. But while the value of money can change because of shifts in either the supply or demand for money, when inflation rates are persistently very high the cause is virtually always a rapidly expanding supply of money.

Here’s a graph from Trading Economics showing explosive growth in Argentina’s monetary base. Milei was elected in December 2023:

To be clear, it is not true that the inflation rate is exactly equal to the growth rate of the money supply. When inflation is slowing, as in 2024 and 2025, then real money demand tends to rise and inflation is usually less than the money growth rate. When inflation is accelerating, as in 2026, then real money demand tends to fall and inflation often exceeds the money growth rate. But over any extended period of time, the sort of extremely rapid growth in the monetary base that we see in Argentina will produce high rates of inflation. Notice the strong correlation between base money growth rates (annual averages) and inflation rates for the ten highest inflation countries in the mid- to late 20th century:

The question is why does Milei want the Argentine central bank to print so much money?

Read more

I’m Outta Here

Stop Saying You're a 'Traveler, Not a Tourist' - Business Insider

Not where I’m going

By the time you read this, I should be on the other side of the Atlantic. Robin and I will be tourists somewhere spectacular for a week, and we will not spend that time drafting posts. I won’t promise complete radio silence, but I’ll only weigh in, briefly, if the world is falling apart. (In other words, I probably will say something, but not much.)

Back on duty at the end of next week.

MUSICAL CODA

GPT-5.5 prompting guide

GPT-5.5 prompting guide

Now that GPT-5.5 is available in the API, OpenAI have released a wealth of useful tips on how best to prompt the new model.

Here's a neat trick they recommend for applications that might spend considerable time thinking before returning a user-visible response:

Before any tool calls for a multi-step task, send a short user-visible update that acknowledges the request and states the first step. Keep it to one or two sentences.

I've already noticed their Codex app doing this, and it does make longer running tasks feel less like the model has crashed.

OpenAI suggest running the following in Codex to upgrade your existing code using advice embedded in their openai-docs skill:

$openai-docs migrate this project to gpt-5.5

The upgrade guide the coding agent will follow is this one, which even includes light instructions on how to rewrite prompts to better fit the model.

Also relevant is the Using GPT-5.5 guide, which opens with this warning:

To get the most out of GPT-5.5, treat it as a new model family to tune for, not a drop-in replacement for gpt-5.2 or gpt-5.4. Begin migration with a fresh baseline instead of carrying over every instruction from an older prompt stack. Start with the smallest prompt that preserves the product contract, then tune reasoning effort, verbosity, tool descriptions, and output format against representative examples.

Interesting to see OpenAI recommend starting from scratch rather than trusting that existing prompts optimized for previous models will continue to work effectively with GPT-5.5.

Tags: ai, openai, prompt-engineering, generative-ai, llms, gpt

llm 0.31

Release: llm 0.31

  • New GPT-5.5 OpenAI model: llm -m gpt-5.5. #1418
  • New option to set the text verbosity level for GPT-5+ OpenAI models: -o verbosity low. Values are low, medium, high.
  • New option for setting the image detail level used for image attachments to OpenAI models: -o image_detail low - values are low, high and auto, and GPT-5.4 and 5.5 also accept original.
  • Models listed in extra-openai-models.yaml are now also registered as asynchronous. #1395

Tags: gpt, openai, llm

More on Sir Thomas Gresham (from my email)

…Double-entry book-keeping – John and I believe, with some evidence, that he may well have been the person to bring double-entry book-keeping to the UK from the Low Countries.  In turn an Italian invention of the 13th century…

Business exchanges rather than markets – Gresham certainly brought the idea of an exchange or bourse from Antwerp (in turn from Ghent) to England.  It really was a radical idea.  No phone directory, no advertising, no internet – we used to block of Cornhill with chains so merchants could meet at regular times in the mud and rain to establish ventures, principally voyages, and fund them.  The Exchange became more and more populated as the Low Countries fought with Spain.  People don’t bring money to a war zone (or a cybersecurity hazard).  Thus, it was the vessel into which poured the extensive wealth of the Low Countries and turned London from an outback sheep town of 30,000 at the beginning of the 1500’s to a city of over 200,000 by 1600.  Markets for cattle, sheep, produce, chickens, all existed – but a market for intangible things?

1st English Shopping Mall? – Gresham also brought the idea of a shopping mall to England.  We have many examples of similar complexes and galleria from ancient times, but not in England.  At the time it was the upper floor of his Exchange.  The concept of shops not adhering to a physical locality – Bread Street, Milk Street, Boot street, etc. – was more radical than it sounds to modern ears.  Amusing then to have England referred to in later centuries as “a nation of shop keepers”.

From Michael Mainelli, here is my original post on Gresham.

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That was then, this is now

Around Hormuz, however, the Portuguese always had to be on guard.  Many naturally protected sandy coves (khors in Arabic) practically invited “pirates.”  The Nakhilu, or Banu Hula, were Sunni arabic speakers on the Gulf coast of Persia whose descendants still inhabit the Gulf coast of Iran.  For decades they set up upocket ports in the many hidden bandars and byways of the mountainous shore and created an underground economy that rivaled Hormuz’s.  These “pirates” were a major drain on Portuguese revenue, regularly attacking ships that paid the feed for the cartaz, and docked at Hormuz.

That is from Allen James Fromherz, The Center of the World: A Global History of the Persian Gulf from the Stone Age to the Present.  From this same book I learned that Milton refers to the Straits in Paradise Lost, but under the name of Ormus:

High on a Throne of Royal State, which far

Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind[ia],

Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand

Showrs on her Kings barbaric pearl and gold,

Satan exalted sat, by merit rais’d

To that bad eminence

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The governance gap: Why orbital data centers need certification before they scale

For more than two decades in sourcing and supply-chain architecture, we’ve watched industries scale only when their supply chains become predictable, certifiable and repeatable.  Orbital and lunar data centers are now approaching that same inflection point. Hardware gets us into orbit; governance keeps us there. While we celebrate launch cadences, the orbital-grade supply chain is […]

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Astrobotic tests advanced rocket engine

Chakram

Astrobotic, a developer of lunar landers and suborbital rockets, has successfully tested an advanced rocket engine that could power those vehicles.

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Space Force awards up to $3.2 billion for Golden Dome interceptor prototypes

Contracts with 12 companies aim to test competing designs for boost-phase missile intercept from space

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Collections: Raising Carthaginian Armies, Part II: The African Backbone

This is the second part (I) of our series looking at the structure of the Carthaginian army. As we discussed last time, while Carthage has an unfair reputation for being an ‘un-military’ society, its military system was one of the highest performing in the ancient Mediterranean, able to produce vast and effective armies waging war on multiple fronts for prolonged periods.

Last time we surveyed the components of that military and then took a closer look at the role of Carthaginian citizen soldiers. What we noted was that Carthaginian citizen soldiers formed an important part of Carthage’s armies early in its history, and in its last decade, but at its height were generally not include in ‘expeditionary’ Carthaginian armies. I supposed that this is because Carthaginian citizen soldiers had their service restricted to Carthage’s North African homeland – because almost every time we gain visibility into Carthage’s wars there, we see citizen soldiers – but the evidence for this is extremely limited. What matters for us is that by the third century, Carthaginian citizens no longer make up a significant amount of Carthage’s military force outside of North Africa (though a handful still serve as officers).

That of course leads to the question: if Carthaginians weren’t the bedrock foundation of Carthage’s armies, who was? And this week, we’ll get to that answer, looking at the forces Carthage drew from North Africa. Our sources term them mercenaries, but we have more than enough reason to doubt that.

But first, as always, raising large armies of mercenaries, subject conscripts, vassal warlords and allies is expensive! If you too want to help me invade Italy with a multi-ethnic army of diverse origins in a doomed effort to stop the Roman Republic, you can help by supporting this project over at Patreon. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).

Conscripting Africans

Returning briefly to our schematic of the Carthaginian army in 215, the second largest single component of Carthage’s roughly 160,000 men under arms in that year were 50,000 African infantry, joined by at least 11,000 African and Numidian cavalry. We’ll discuss the Numidians next week for reasons that will be clear then. But it is clear that the backbone of Carthage’s armies were these African infantrymen.

Our Latin sources (like Livy) term these fellows Afri, ‘Africans,’ while our Greek sources, like Diodorus and Polybius, will call generally them λίβυες, ‘Libyans,’ though we ought to be clear here that most of these men are coming from what today is Tunisia, rather than Libya. At the end of the First Punic War, Polybius notes that these men made up the largest part of Carthage’s army, returning in defeat from Sicily (Polyb. 1.67.7) and as noted above they are present in substantial numbers in Carthage’s armies in the Second Punic War. It is hardly the first time for these fellows, though: North Africans are reported in Carthage’s armies from the Battle of Himera on forward.

I should note, I am going to pretty consistently call these fellows from here on in ‘Africans’ or ‘North Africans.’ First off, it is very clear that when our Greek sources say λίβυες, they mean the same thing as our Latin sources saying Afri (indeed, often in cases where Livy is just straight up translating passages of Polybius with only modest embroidering, the equivalence is clear); these are just two different languages’ terms for the same people. But I think ‘Africans’ may be more helpful here for the modern reader for two reasons: first, most of Carthage’s African infantry does not come from the territory of the modern country of Libya; most of them come from what today is Tunisia, so one doesn’t want to give the incorrect sense that these troops are ‘Libyan’ in the modern sense of the country of Libya (some of them are, but most are not). Second, I think ‘African’ also gives a sense of the wider notion of these fellows as primarily being from Africa – some are indigenous Berbers, some are Phoenician settlers, some are of mixed heritage and – to go by recent DNA studies – some are likely settlers of Aegean extraction, who have substantially adopted Punic (=Phoenician) culture. So they’re all Africans in the sense that they live in Africa (both in the modern sense of the continent and the ancient sense of the region around Carthage), but a relatively diverse group.

This map by Jona Lendering from Livius.org gives a good sense of Carthage’s empire at the start of the Second Punic War (218). In particular, it is handy for giving a proper sense of the part of Africa Carthage controlled. When we say ‘Africans’ here, we’re really talking about the inhabitants of the western half of that area of control, primarily – modern day Tunisia and north-western Libya. That’s also the territory the Romans will call ‘Africa’ (as in the Roman province); Carthaginian control, as you can see, only projects a relatively short distance inland, but that large chunky area around and south of Carthage was fairly densely peopled.

Our reception of these troops is, alas, I think quite badly bent by Polybius who – in driving some of his own arguments – allows some critical misconceptions to fester in his writing. Polybius, as a source, is usually relatively trustworthy, but while Polybius will almost never lie to you, he will often allow you to believe things that aren’t strictly speaking true – Polybius is a master of ‘lying with the truth,’ as it were and this is one case.

We’ve actually discussed this before, but to recap briefly: Polybius describes Carthage’s African troops as μισθοφόροι, misthophoroi, which has a broad meaning (‘wage-bearing, wage-receiving’) and a narrow meaning (‘mercenary’) and here, as in a few other places, Polybius is happy to be technically correct with the first meaning and then let the reader assume the second meaning (which is wrong). That’s because Polybius seems to be – we don’t have all of his work, but this seems to be a thread of it – arguing for the superiority of citizen soldiers over mercenaries in an effort to get the Greeks of his own day to reform their own militaries to rely more on the former than the latter. Carthage thus provides an opportunity for Polybius to drive his ‘mercenaries are bad’ argument and he does so, fudging the terminology as necessary.

Because Polybius is generally so trusted, that has led generations of scholars to carelessly assume that Carthage’s armies – and their North African components – were mercenary in nature, but that assumption is broadly wrong.1

Instead, Diodorus Siculus gives us a remarkable picture of Carthaginian recruitment in the early 400s, describing Carthaginian musters in 410 and 406. In 410 (Diod. Sic. 13.44.6), the Carthaginian muster has three phases: first there is mercenary recruitment in Spain – signaled by the word ξενολογεῖν, xenologein ‘to recruit foreigners.’ Then Carthaginian citizens are mustered with καταγράφειν, katagraphein, ‘to write down, register, record.’ If that seems an odd way to muster someone, it has the same basic meaning and etymology as our own ‘conscript’ which comes from con+scriptus, ‘to write together.’2 We actually use the same idioms, we’ve just forgotten that we do: someone who is conscripted is written down (in a list of soldiers), someone who ‘enrolls’ or is ‘enrolled’ in the military is being added to the roll (list) of names. So we would say Carthaginian soldiers here are being enrolled. Finally, Carthage’s North African subjects are mustered with ἐπιλέγειν, epilegein, ‘picked out, called by name.’

That last word is striking, because that isn’t a process of taking volunteers: the North African troops are being picked, in this case by Carthage’s generals. In the muster of 406 (Diod. Sic. 13.80.1-4), Diodorus shifts his vocabulary a bit and this time it is the Africans who are katagraphein‘d into the army, this time explicitly by Carthaginian generals who head out into non-Carthaginian North African subject communities to conscript soldiers. In short these soldiers are paid conscripts, serving (as we’ll see) long terms, their recruitment presumably part of the deal Carthage imposed on subject North African communities.

I should note that older scholarship3 often supposed that perhaps this system was later superceded, that Carthage may have stopped conscripting Africans and instead imposed harsher taxes and started hiring mercenaries. This would make Polybius right, but the problem is that no source says this and as noted before, it isn’t necessary either: Polybius is generally slippery with the term misthophoros. As a result, modern scholars tend to reject this argument and instead view Carthage’s African infantry in the third century (that is, during the Punic and Mercenary Wars) as paid conscripts rather than volunteer mercenaries.4 And I think that is probably correct, that these are troops levied from Carthage’s North African dependencies – probably with a mix of incentives and compulsion – who are then paid for their continued service and loyalty.

In terms of the makeup of these communities, they were clearly a mix: some of these are Phoenician colonial foundations, while others were indigenous Libyan towns, whose population would have been broadly Berber. In terms of the incoming settlers, recent genetic work has suggested that Phoenician colonization drew very widely, with Punic settlements often showing a lot of Sicilian and Aegean (read: Greek) population in the mix too and actually very little Punic ancestry. That latter point puts me a bit on guard, because our sources are very clear that they understand a lot of these populations to be Phoenician (=Punic) by culture and descent and to have cultural and familial ties back to the Levant and Syria and the material culture archaeology seems to confirm this. More work is clearly going to be necessary here: the c. 200 remains analyzed in the above-linked study is a big sample size for this kind of work, but could easily be thrown off by something as simple as different burial practices. That said, we know there was mixing between the indigenous Berber and settler-colonial populations and our sources sometimes pick out specific groups as being ‘Liby-Phoenician’ (λιβυφοίνικες in Greek; libyphoenices in Latin), ethnically blended groups mixing Phoenician and Berber heritage.

Terms of Service

Naturally, given our sources, we don’t have a great window into what the ‘terms’ of this military service were, but there are a few things we can sketch out. First, it seems like Carthage equips these soldiers out of its own stores. Appian (Pun. 80) gives the startlingly figure that prior to the Third Punic War (so Carthage has already been stripped of most of its empire by this point!), Carthage turned out 200,000 military panoplies (that is, sets of equipment); the number is surely exaggerated, but even a tenth of that number would imply large state armories in Carthage for maintaining its armies which – given that Carthaginian citizens don’t really serve outside of Africa – must be intended for this African ‘backbone’ force. It may also explain why, when Carthaginian citizens do serve, they seem indistinguishable from Carthage’s African levies (e.g. Plut. Tim. 27.5): they’re being equipped out of the same armories. So if you want to know what these guys carried, you can largely lean on the previous post for our evidence for Carthaginian citizen troops.

Via the British Museum (inv. 127214), a fifth century Phoenician scarab showing a warrior wearing a cuirass, greaves, a helmet, a large (round?) shield and carrying a spear, found in Sardinia. I’m reusing this because, again, we have almost no images of Carthaginian troops in their gear, making this one of the few visual reference points for what Carthaginian African or Citizen infantry might have looked like, in this case in the early 400s. You can see the shield isn’t quite a hoplite’s aspis – its shape is somewhat different – but otherwise, in heavy armor, with a large helmet, greaves and a spear, this fellow is clearly pretty heavy infantry, a match for any other heavy infantryman.

Mostly, this means that Carthage’s African troops served as heavy infantry, like Carthaginian citizens did. That’s certainly how Hannibal uses them: they are his heaviest infantry and form the backbone of his army. It also explains why they could loot Roman heavy infantry equipment and eventually reequip along those lines without a serious change in how they fought (Polyb. 3.114.1; Livy 22.46.4). Beyond that, it is almost impossible to give much detail to their equipment. Plutarch describes the Carthaginian battle line in 341 as having leukaspides, ‘white aspides,’ implying their shields were akin to the Greek aspis (round, dished) which fits with some of the very limited representational evidence we have, but perhaps with covers in hide rather than bronze (Plut. Tim. 27.4; 28.1). Later, Appian describes the Carthaginians during the Third Punic War as having thureoi (= the Roman scutum), so they may have switched to the Gallic/Roman oval shield at some point (App. Pun. 93). But on both cases these writers are not anything like eyewitnesses and give few details, so they could also both be wrong.

Soldiers from Libya also had a reputation as highly capable skirmish troops using javelins and we see hints of this too. Hannibal has a group of soldiers whose origin is never clarified, Polybius refers to as lonchophoroi (λογχοφόροι), lonche-bearers. This term has caused no end of problems, because W.R. Paton translates it as ‘pikemen’ (frustratingly un-fixed in the revised Paton, Walbank and Habicht (2010-2012) translation) leading a range of modern writers, especially popular ones, to misunderstand and imagine these fellows as Hellenistic-style sarisa infantry. But the lonche (λόγχη) is not a sarisa; the Greeks use this word very broadly to describe non-Greek spears, but most often to indicate kinds of dual-purpose thrusting-and-throwing weapons used by lighter infantry and cavalry. Arrian uses the word of the spears wielded by the Tyrians – fellow Phoenicians! – fighting Alexander at Tyre (Arr. Anab. 2.23.5) and Appian reports the Carthaginians preparing lonche for the Third Punic War (App. Pun. 93).

So these aren’t pikes – Carthage never utilized a Hellenistic-style pike formation – but rather a lighter dual-use spear. And let me just repeat that because I encounter this misconception all the time, so for the folks in the back: Carthage never utilized a Hellenistic-style pike formation and indeed, Carthage’s own tradition of close-order heavy infantry may also not have been a direct imitation or development from the Greek hoplite tradition either (the Greeks were hardly the only culture to stumble on the idea of ‘close-order infantry with spears and round shields‘). And indeed, if one looks even a little closely, the lonchophoroi are clearly a light infantry formation, generally deployed in a mixed group with Hannibal’s other elite light infantry, his Balearian slingers. We also get a reference to “light armed Balearians and Africans” at the Battle of Baecula with a different Carthaginian army, suggesting this sort of light infantry pairing may have been something of a standard (Livy 27.18.7).

So while most African infantry in Carthaginian service served as armored heavy infantry fighting in close-order, a small subset served as elite light infantry using lighter spears and often deployed alongside slingers. In this sense, the lonchophoroi may have filled a very similar role to Rome’s own velites: an integrated light-infantry javelin force that might scout or screen the main heavy infantry force. Hannibal’s combined force of Balearians and lonchophoroi at Trebia was 8,000, compared to probably something like 12,000 African ‘heavies,’ so there might have been something like 2 or 3 African ‘heavies’ for each light lonchophoros, which is quite similar to the Roman legion’s ratio of 2.5 heavy infantrymen (hastati, principes, triarii) to each veles.

Once recruited and equipped, these fellows evidently stayed in service for some time, perhaps for the duration of the campaign for which they were raised. They were probably gathered in Carthage itself to be marshaled and equipped. Notably, Polybius tells us that the families and possessions of the Carthaginian army returning from Sicily were initially waiting in Carthage itself (Polyb. 1.66), so it seems like these troops might leave their families in Carthage while out on campaign.

It’s also clear these soldiers were paid, though we don’t know the pay rates. What we do know, again from Polybius, is that like other mercenaries, most of their pay – their misthos (wages) as distinct from their sitos/sitonion/sitometria (maintenance pay) – seems to have been due at discharge, at the end of a campaign. That was, indeed, the problem that Carthage slammed into at the end of the First Punic War which led to the Mercenary War: the war being over, the arrears of their army suddenly came due at a moment when Carthage itself was basically bankrupt. That in turn might explain the willingness of African communities to put up with this conscription regime: at the end of each campaign, their men would normally come back with a whole bunch of cash in their pockets, essentially allowing each individual community to ‘recapture’ part of their tribute as it re-entered the community as settled misthos. That in turn, as Dexter Hoyos notes, might well have exacerbated the revolt against Carthage after the First Punic War: not only were the African troops incensed at not getting paid, but their home communities also felt cheated out of this economic bargain.5

What is clear is that African heavy infantry, supported probably in most cases by light infantry lonchophoroi were the backbone of Carthaginian armies. Even when Carthaginian armies are composed primarily of Iberian or Gallic auxiliaries, allies or mercenaries, they are constructed around an African ‘backbone,’ providing generals a reliable and loyal army component as the core of their army.

In battle, the Africans are often deployed in reserved positions. Hannibal tends (at both Trebia and Cannae) to put his Africans on the flanks, where their heavier formation provided strong structure to his army, but also where they avoided the brunt of the casualties. We’re told that Hannibal’s losses at Trasimene were concentrated among his Gallic troops (Polyb. 3.85.5) and at Cannae he evidently exposes his Gauls and Iberians and most of his losses (70%!) at that battle were taken by his Gallic troops, with the rest of the losses concentrated among his Iberians (Polyb. 3.117.6). At the Metaurus, Hasdrubal aims to win by attacking with his Iberian troops, holding his Africans in reserve and with his Gauls deployed simply to hold a hill on his left, suggesting both a lack of trust in his Gallic troops, but also a desire to avoid losses among his Africans (Livy 27.48, but see Lazenby (1978)). At Zama, Hannibal places his Iberians, Gauls and Ligurians (along with his skirmishers and elephants) in the front line, fresh African and Carthaginian troops in the second line and his own veterans in the final line (Polyb. 15.11; Livy 30.33). There’s a pretty clear pattern here in which Carthaginian generals aim to expend their Gauls first, their Iberians second and their Africans last.6

Carthage’s African troops are also frequently decisive, one way or the other. They are the heaviest infantry component in Carthage’s armies; our sources lead us to understand that they are as heavily equipped as any other kind of heavy infantry (hoplite, legionary, phalangite) in the Mediterranean at the time. Looking at our army figures from last time, we can also see that they are present in significant numbers in basically every Carthaginian field force during the Second Punic War. Polybius likewise reports that Africans made up the largest component of Carthage’s army at the end of the First Punic War, alongside Iberians, Gauls, Ligurians, Balearians and some Greeks (1.66.7).

It is hard to precisely assess the combat performance of these African troops, because they’re always deployed in mixed units. Certainly, as noted before, during Carthage’s Sicilian Wars, they seem to often be defeated by Greek hoplites, but equally – as noted – Carthage in that narrative seems to almost relentlessly ‘fail upward’ suggesting that perhaps Carthaginian (and thus African) military performance may have been somewhat better than our Greek sources let on. During the First Punic War, the Romans win nearly all of the open field engagements, but we never get a really detailed account of any of these battles, so it is hard to know what components of the Carthaginian army broke first.

During the Second Punic War, however, we do get some detailed battle narratives and what we see is that Carthage’s African infantry appear to be able to hold their own against Roman heavy infantry – quite clearly the best available at the time – pretty well. When Carthaginian armies are defeated, the Africans are generally the last to break; when they win, the Africans are often the key elements doing envelopment or holding key positions. On balance, then, I would say Carthage’s North African troops appear to be quite capable heavy infantry.

What Carthage doesn’t seem to have had was enough of them. We noted last time that at Carthage’s peak mobilization in 215, they had about 50,000 African infantry under arms. Michael Taylor in Soldiers & Silver (2020) looks more broadly at reported Carthaginian armies and estimated populations and concludes (and I think this is probably right) that this figure, around 50,000, probably represented the maximum sustainable mobilization from the North African population available to Carthage. That’s not bad – it’s far more than any Greek polis could manage – but hardly enough to rumble with alliances of Greek states (as in Sicily) or the major powers of the Mediterranean (like Pyrrhus or Rome in the Third Century) and so it would have to be supplemented.

And supplemented it was! And we’ll get to how in the next installment when we look at what we might term Carthaginian ‘vassals.’

Friday 24 April 1663

Up betimes, and with my salt eel went down in the parler and there got my boy and did beat him till I was fain to take breath two or three times, yet for all I am afeard it will make the boy never the better, he is grown so hardened in his tricks, which I am sorry for, he being capable of making a brave man, and is a boy that I and my wife love very well. So made me ready, and to my office, where all the morning, and at noon home, whither came Captain Holland, who is lately come home from sea, and has been much harassed in law about the ship which he has bought, so that it seems in a despair he endeavoured to cut his own throat, but is recovered it; and it seems whether by that or any other persuasion (his wife’s mother being a great zealot) he is turned almost a Quaker, his discourse being nothing but holy, and that impertinent, that I was weary of him. At last pretending to go to the Change we walked thither together, and there I left him and home to dinner, sending my boy by the way to enquire after two dancing masters at our end of the town for my wife to learn, of whose names the boy brought word.

After dinner all the afternoon fiddling upon my viallin (which I have not done many a day) while Ashwell danced above in my upper best chamber, which is a rare room for musique, expecting this afternoon my wife to bring my cozen Scott and Stradwick, but they came not, and so in the evening we by ourselves to Half-way house to walk, but did not go in there, but only a walk and so home again and to supper, my father with us, and had a good lobster intended for part of our entertainment to these people to-day, and so to cards, and then to bed, being the first day that I have spent so much to my pleasure a great while.

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How Will Gaming Centers Buck The 24-Hour Costs

Casinos don’t turn off. Not the lights, not the machines, not the air systems. Everything runs all the time, because that’s part of the experience. You walk in and it feels the same whether it’s morning or the middle of the night.

That constant activity comes at a cost though. A big one. In places like Las Vegas, casinos account for around 20% of all electricity consumption. And when you consider that everything runs 24 hours a day, it starts to make sense why both the financial and environmental costs are so high.

Why Casinos Use So Much Power

It’s not just slot machines and neon signs. Casinos are packed with things that need power. TV screens, sound systems, ventilation, cooling, and heating. All of it running without a break.

Lighting is the biggest piece of it. Everywhere you look, something is glowing or flashing. It’s designed that way on purpose. The environment keeps people focused on the games, not the time. But that alone can make up around 30% of the electricity bill.

Then there are the machines. Thousands of them. In Las Vegas, there are over 200,000 gaming machines, most running 24/7. They can use up to 35% of the total energy in a casino.

Put it all together and casinos end up using far more energy per square foot than places like hospitals.

The Price of Staying Open All Day

Running like this isn’t cheap. One large casino can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year just on lighting. That doesn’t even include everything else going on behind the scenes.

But it’s not just about money anymore. Energy use impacts the environment, and that’s something operators can’t ignore the way they might have years ago.

Greener Solutions Are Starting to Show Up

Some changes being made are pretty straightforward. Swapping old bulbs for LED lighting is one of them. It doesn’t sound big, but it works. Energy use drops, sometimes by as much as 30%, and the savings add up quickly.

There’s also smarter control over how energy is used. Sensors can detect when areas are empty and adjust lighting or air conditioning. It’s not about shutting things off completely, just scaling back when possible.

Solar Power and Renewable Energy

Solar power has started to play a role too. Casinos have a lot of roof space, so panels make sense. Some properties are already generating a portion of their electricity this way. Large installations can even cover around 20% of energy needs.

It’s not enough to run an entire resort, though. These places are huge, with hotels, pools, theatres, and packed gaming floors. Solar helps, but it doesn’t replace everything.

Water Efficiency Upgrades

Energy isn’t the only thing being looked at. Water use is another issue. Fountains, bathrooms, and cooling systems add up fast.

Low-flow fixtures are becoming more common because they’re easy to install and don’t take long to pay off. Some casinos are also looking into recycling water or using filtration systems to cut waste. There are even systems like geothermal heat pumps that reuse heat from the ground instead of relying on traditional energy.

The Rise of Online Casinos

There’s also been a notable shift away from physical spaces, at least for some players. Online casinos grew quickly when people couldn’t visit in person, and a lot of that stuck.

They still use energy, just in a different way, actually lowering the energy needed per player. For some players, going digital feels like a more responsible choice. And convenience plays a role too, which is just another great reason to check out popular gaming sites like Free Spins US to discover all the latest games.

Can Gaming Centers Really Go Green?

They can improve, but there’s a limit. Casinos rely on being always on. That won’t change.

What can change is how efficiently they run. Operators are starting to balance the need for 24-hour entertainment with greener energy use. Better lighting, smarter systems, some renewable energy mixed in. It won’t cut usage overnight, but it’s taking things in the right direction.

Photo: Abhishek Navlakha via Pexels


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Trump DOJ Attempts Climb-Down on Powell Investigation

Here’s U.S. Attorney for DC “Judge” Jeanine Pirro announcing that her office is dropping its investigation into the chair of the Federal Reserve:

Her attempt to save face here is accomplished by claiming the Fed Inspector General will take over her work. But, as various reporters have noted, Powell himself had already asked the IG to look into cost overruns. It’s not clear anything new is happening.

The question now, of course, is whether this will satisfy the GOP senators who predicated their vote for Trump’s Fed nominee, Kevin Warsh, on the DOJ dropping its Powell investigation. (Trump’s Fed meddling is of course not limited to the Powell investigation — his attempt to fire Lisa Cook, for instance, is still before the Supreme Court — but the investigation is where senators including, most outspokenly, the retiring Thom Tillis, R-NC, drew the line.)

At a hearing earlier this week, it became clear that Warsh’s nomination wasn’t going anywhere until the Trump administration backed off a little. We’ll see if GOP senators are willing to accept this as enough. (I’d be surprised if they didn’t.)

Strong Horse, Weak Horse

I mentioned this a bit earlier on Ari Melber’s show tonight when we were talking about the high-profile MAGA defections of Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Joe Rogan and others. I’ve seen various theories: It’s about the Iran War. It’s about AI Jesus. Yes, it’s about all those things, but as off-ramps more than causes or drivers. Trump looks like the weak horse and no one wants to bet on or be associated with the weak horse.

It’s primal. It’s particularly powerful if your loyalty and the political currency you operate in is power. People can see that Trump is faltering, not just politically and electorally but organically. Even his bloodcurdling threats of genocide and civilizational destruction tell the same story. He makes wild threats and then negotiates against himself, extends deadlines in the face of intransigence. Bracket the wild remarks and you see a man who is weak and flailing. He has visibly lost the instinctive ability he once had to hoodwink or jujitsu bad situations somehow to his advantage. That has emboldened his enemies. Increasingly it has demoralized his supporters. In that climate, new outrages that might have been sloughed off or inspired impassioned defenses start looking like potential off-ramps.

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The Vast Conspiracy

In a late-night Truth, Trump claims that the Southern Poverty Law Center was part of his grand, imagined conspiracy to steal the 2020 election, and writes that his DOJ’s politicized prosecution of the non-profit is a step toward overturning his electoral defeat.

(Hat tip to law professor and election expert Rick Hasen who, like us, is not really sure what Trump is going for here beyond a kind of bête noire word cloud.)

Links 4/24/26

Links for you. Science:

Does Gender-Affirming Care Make Mental Health Worse? The case of a rather poorly-done paper.
Lake sturgeon restoration in Milwaukee River reaches a milestone
These Chimps Began the Bloodiest ‘War’ on Record. No One Knows Why.
With New Charter, Kennedy Redesigns Vaccine Committee and May Sidestep Court Ruling
From Arsenic in Antifreeze to a Single Pill
The Plight of the Monarch
How RFK’s War on Fluoride Is Taking Over the Dentist’s Office

Other:

A.I. Isn’t People. How many Reddit posts does it take to learn to read?
No One Knows Where US Vaccine Policy Goes Next
America fought to defeat fascism. This ‘triumphal arch’ reeks of it.
AI is the boss at this retail store. What could go wrong?
The DNC expected big money after big Democratic wins. It never came.
Once Targeted By ICE, Minneapolis-Area School District Celebrates Return Of All Students
AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying. LLMs-gone-rogue dominated coverage, but had nothing to do with the targeting. Instead, it was choices made by human beings, over many years, that gave us this atrocity
The Trump Administration Is Killing The U.S. Forest Service So It Can Also Kill U.S. Forests
College Republicans director made racist and sexist remarks on live streams
Voting for Trump is costing Latinos their wealth
DHS attorney said agents in Los Angeles should have ‘started hitting’ protesters, emails show
ICE deports family, including deaf boy who wasn’t given his assistive devices
Evidence Grows That Google’s AI Overviews Have Eviscerated the Media Industry
How Elon Musk’s Sci-Fi Hyperloop Failed: Before his misadventures in government efficiency, Musk promised to revolutionize commuting with a subway that would speed passengers between DC and Baltimore in a matter of minutes. The project was a farce—and a sign of things to come.
What changed Trump’s mind on Iran? Who the hell knows?
Education secretary used fake photo in post about Black history icon
Just How Big Could Democrats Win In 2026?
EPA scales back oversight on how toxic coal waste is stored
Did Wisconsin Just Offer a Glimpse of a Post-Trump Future?
Descendants renew fight to save historic Black cemeteries in D.C.
She Followed Homeland Security Agents. Then Her Global Entry Was Revoked.
D.C. mayoral candidates want to build more housing — but investors don’t
Mass. must eliminate nonmedical vaccine exemptions
Bowser’s final D.C. budget includes $469M in cuts amid tough fiscal picture
New Republican Food Benefit Cuts Are Taking Effect
Tech Media Propaganda Operation Makes It Official, Goes In-House At OpenAI
Trump’s Capitalism
New York Radio Yutz Has Had It With Mr. Met’s Antisemitism
Why do media elites believe their own propaganda?
Dan Bilzerian Wants to ‘Kill Israelis’ and Thinks Judaism Is ‘Terrible.’ Now He’s Running for Congress. The influencer, once known as the “king of Instagram,” declined to answer when TMZ asked him whether Adolf Hitler was antisemitic

Some OK News on the Crime Front in D.C.

Since we last looked at D.C.’s crime data two weeks ago, we had a very bad five day stretch where six people were killed, including the daylight shooting of two teenagers (which would not have been prevented by the curfews the D.C. government has been debating this week). This increases the total to 19 homicides*. That said, at the same time last year, D.C. had 45 homicides, so we are still doing better. And D.C. is still on pace for another year of roughly one-third reduction in the number of homicides, as happened in 2024 and 2025.

Across the board, crimes are lower than at the same time last year, other than Assault w/Dangerous Weapon (and that might be a reporting difference), with ‘crimes against cars’ dropping precipitously. We are, however, seeing upticks in most categories this week, which is not entirely unexpected as the weather gets nice.

Here’s to hoping we have a quiet week this next week.

*Officially, we have had 21 murders this year, but two of the murders occurred in other years, with arrests that were not made until this year.

Growth is getting harder to find, not ideas

Relatively flat US output growth versus rising numbers of US researchers is often interpreted as evidence that ideas are getting harder to find. We build a new 45-year panel tracking the universe of US firms’ patenting to investigate the micro underpinnings of this claim, separately examining the relationships between research inputs and ideas (patents) versus ideas and growth. We find that average patents per R&D input are increasing, the elasticity of patents to R&D inputs is flat or rising, and there is no systematic evidence of a secular decline in patenting after controlling for research inputs. We then document a positive, significant, and fairly steady relationship between firms’ growth in ideas (patents) and labor productivity. Average firm growth after controlling for idea growth, however, declines. Together, these results suggest that innovative efforts play a key role in sustaining growth that has not diminished over the last four decades.

Here is the paper by Teresa C. Fort, Nathan Goldschlag, Jack Liang, Peter K. Schott, and Nikolas Zolas.

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Well, this is embarrassing: The Lunar Gateway's primary modules are corroded

For a decade, NASA promoted the idea of building a space station around the Moon known as the Lunar Gateway. It touted the facility as both a platform for exploring the lunar environment and testing the technology needed for deep-space habitation.

Like many major space projects, it faced delays. Originally, the first component of the space station was due to launch in 2022Later, it was decided that this module, to provide power and propulsion, would launch in tandem with a habitable volume known as the Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO) in 2024. This core was slated to be joined by another pressurized habitation module contributed by international partners I-HAB in 2026.

These dates, of course, have come and gone. And in March, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced that the Gateway was being "paused" so the space agency could focus on the lunar surface.

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Rocket Report: Artemis III rocket getting ready; SpaceX is now an AI company

Welcome to Edition 8.38 of the Rocket Report! The big news this week concerned the third launch of the New Glenn rocket. The first 15 minutes of the flight were exhilarating for Blue Origin, seeing a previously flown rocket take flight and then triumphantly land on a barge at sea. But then the highest of highs was followed by the company's first loss of an orbital payload, the AST SpaceMobile satellite being injected into a low orbit due to an upper stage failure. We've heard it was due to a valve problem, but that would be no scoop as it seems like it's always the valves that fail in this industry.

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

Canada's spaceport plans are not without critics. About a month ago, the Canadian National Defense Minister, David McGuinty, announced an “historic investment” of $200 million over 10 years to Maritime Launch Services for the lease of a dedicated “space launch pad” in Nova Scotia. But some local residents, including Marie Lumsden, are pushing back. Writing in the Halifax Examiner, Lumsden shares a photo of a small concrete pad at the end of a gravel road (the entirety of the spaceport). The residents have formed a group, Action Against the Canso Spaceport, because they have "genuine concerns about this project and the people behind it."

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The Wind in the Willows and reading out loud

The Wind in the Willows right? Kenneth Grahame, 1908.

We all know the children’s story inside-out. Mole and Ratty and gruff Badger and conceited Mr Toad with his motorcars and all their adventures.

I picked up the book as an adult - I can’t remember why - and it wasn’t what I expected.

This week I have been reading it again and it is again astonishing.

I mean… let me share some of the prose with you.

This is when Mole encounters the river for the first time.

Green turf sloped down to either edge, brown snaky tree-roots gleamed below the surface of the quiet water, while ahead of them the silvery shoulder and foamy tumble of a weir, arm-in-arm with a restless dripping mill-wheel, that held up in its turn a grey-gabled mill-house, filled the air with a soothing murmur of sound, dull and smothery, yet with little clear voices speaking up cheerfully out of it at intervals. It was so very beautiful that the Mole could only hold up both forepaws and gasp, “O my! O my! O my!”

There’s a chapter where they’re looking back on the summer just gone, and a description of the plant-life soars:

The pageant of the river bank had marched steadily along, unfolding itself in scene-pictures that succeeded each other in stately procession. Purple loosestrife arrived early, shaking luxuriant tangled locks along the edge of the mirror whence its own face laughed back at it. Willow-herb, tender and wistful, like a pink sunset cloud, was not slow to follow. Comfrey, the purple hand-in-hand with the white, crept forth to take its place in the line; and at last one morning the diffident and delaying dog-rose stepped delicately on the stage, and one knew, as if string-music had announced it in stately chords that strayed into a gavotte, that June at last was here. One member of the company was still awaited; the shepherd-boy for the nymphs to woo, the knight for whom the ladies waited at the window, the prince that was to kiss the sleeping summer back to life and love. But when meadow-sweet, debonair and odorous in amber jerkin, moved graciously to his place in the group, then the play was ready to begin.

They go out in the boat at night looking for a lost young otter. (A whole other story but they encounter the divine spirit Pan who intercedes with a miracle and then wipes their memories lest they suffer the rest of their lives in the shadow of that awe.)

A description of moonlight:

The line of the horizon was clear and hard against the sky, and in one particular quarter it showed black against a silvery climbing phosphorescence that grew and grew. At last, over the rim of the waiting earth the moon lifted with slow majesty till it swung clear of the horizon and rode off, free of moorings; and once more they began to see surfaces-meadows wide-spread, and quiet gardens, and the river itself from bank to bank, all softly disclosed, all washed clean of mystery and terror, all radiant again as by day, but with a difference that was tremendous. Their old haunts greeted them again in other raiment, as if they had slipped away and put on this pure new apparel and come quietly back, smiling as they shyly waited to see if they would be recognised again under it.

It’s just… it’s…

O my! O my! O my!


I asked ChatGPT to calculate some readability stats for me: the average sentence length is 18.5 words.

Sentence length in literature has been falling over the years (LanguageLog).

But it’s not the lengthy sentences that makes this prose work for me. It’s the rhythm.

And I don’t really get that from reading it dead on the page. It’s because I’ve been reading The Wind in the Willows out loud.


Some years back I read Ursula Le Guin’s book about writing, Steering the Craft.

The first chapter is all about the sound of your words:

"The basic elements of language are physical: the noise words make and the rhythm of their relationships."

She recommends reading out loud.

So I started reading out loud.

I would take a page of prose from a novel that I really loved, and I would read it out loud, and out loud again, and again, and again, and again, until I could make it sound as wonderful as I felt it was when I was reading in my head.

It’s so hard to do. And you learn so much about words and meaning with this practice.


So I doubt you’re reading this post out loud.

But that passage about moonlight above…

For me, it doesn’t work in my head. It’s okay. But when I read it out loud - to my kid, which is my excuse right now - to make it make sense to her ears and for the words to carry her, I have to read it in a certain way, and when I do Kenneth Grahame’s words loft me into the sky, swinging clear of the horizon and right up there, free of moorings, just like his moon.

And when I read his words about the foliage on the riverbank, out loud, I’m right there too.

Do me a favour. Read that moonlight paragraph out loud. Even if under your breath, but pause right now, take a moment and do that, read it out loud.

Then read all of The Wind in the Willows because it’s free on Project Gutenberg in Kindle format and everything, and if you have an excuse to read it to someone else then do that, it is transporting and majestic and gentle all at once, and it is a joy to have his words in your mouth and in the air and in your ears.


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Hiding Bluetooth Trackers in Mail

It was used to track a Dutch naval ship:

Dutch journalist Just Vervaart, working for regional media network Omroep Gelderland, followed the directions posted on the Dutch government website and mailed a postcard with a hidden tracker inside. Because of this, they were able to track the ship for about a day, watching it sail from Heraklion, Crete, before it turned towards Cyprus. While it only showed the location of that one vessel, knowing that it was part of a carrier strike group sailing in the Mediterranean could potentially put the entire fleet at risk.

[…]

Navy officials reported that the tracker was discovered within 24 hours of the ship’s arrival, during mail sorting, and was eventually disabled. Because of this incident, the Dutch authorities now ban electronic greeting cards, which, unlike packages, weren’t x-rayed before being brought on the ship.

Friday assorted links

1. Luis Garicano on the task is not the job.  And jobs and the Jevons paradox.

2. The lived experience of aphantasia.

3. Shruti on delimitation in India.

4. Why is Yi Yi so good?

5. Leibniz on symbolic computation, from the unpublished papers.

6. A History of Christian Political Economy, by Ballor and Matson.

7. Michael Tilson Thomas, RIP (NYT).

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Husband and Wife

Borat came out twenty years ago this year--closer to the breakup of the Soviet Union than to today--but it honestly feels like it's been even longer, somehow.

Stability of Interstellar ‘Big Dumb Objects’

‘Big dumb objects’ (BDOs) appear to great effect in science fiction. They come in all manner of sizes and shapes and they fulfill a wide range of functions. An early favorite of mine was Cordwainer Smith’s “Golden the Ships Were Oh! Oh! Oh!,” which I snagged on a long ago trip to a Chicago newsstand, where it appeared in an issue of Amazing Stories. It’s probably found most easily these days in The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith (NESFA Press, 1993), a collection that should be on every science fiction fan’s shelf.

Smith (a pseudonym for Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger, whose life was as remarkable as his fiction) goes to work on structures that are millions of miles long. I won’t say more for fear of spoiling the story for newcomers. More recent BDOs are better known, Dyson spheres and Dyson swarms are no strangers to these pages, and have been the subject of intense scrutiny by Jason Wright and his colleagues at Pennsylvania State University. The G-HAT (Glimpsing Heat from Alien Technologies) project scanned data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer satellite looking at tens of thousands of galaxies for the waste heat signature of possible Dyson spheres. The idea that megastructures might interest a hugely advanced civilization is reasonable, but we have yet to find evidence that Dyson spheres exist.

Larry Niven’s Ringworld posits a structure that circles an entire star but does not encompass it. A transit signature might give this one away if ever found; imagine the lightcurve. Niven and Gregory Benford later come up with the ‘shipstar’ concept that Greg described some years back on Centauri Dreams. This was an unusual re-thinking of the original ‘Shkadov Thruster,’ a device that could be used to move an entire star. See the Bowl of Heaven trilogy for more.

The work of Russian physicist Leonid Shkadov in 1987, the thruster design used asymmetric light pressure from a huge mirror to move an entire planetary system to a new destination. The physics works, but we’re moving at slow speeds, on the order of 20 meters per second after a million years. On the other hand, a truly long-lived species might find waiting a billion years to reach 20 kilometers per second, with a whopping 34,000 light years shift in position, to be plausible. Shipstar would be able to move considerably faster.

Image: An artist’s conception of the Benford/Niven ‘shipstar’ concept. Think of the ‘bowl’ as half of a Dyson sphere curved around a star whose energies flow into a propulsive plasma jet that moves the entire structure on its journey. Here the notion of living space may remind you of Niven’s Ringworld, that vast structure completely encircling a star, though not enclosing it. The difference is that in the ShipStar scenario, most of the ‘bowl’ is made up of mirrors, with living space just on the rim. Credit: Don Davis.

In conversations with Benford about his shipstar concept a few years ago, I learned that a solid Dyson sphere is unstable, and would need constant adjustment to maintain its position. Concerns over stability plague BDOs. Colin McInnes (University of Glasgow) looks at the problem in a recent paper, noting this about the Shkadov design:

In its simplest form a stellar engine can be considered as a single ideal ultra-large rigid reflective disc in static equilibrium above a central star… As the disc accelerates due to radiation pressure from the star, the centre-of-mass of the gravitationally coupled star-reflector system accelerates, leading to a displacement of the star.

Image: This is Figure 1 from a paper by Duncan Forgan (citation below). Caption: Diagram of a Class A Stellar Engine, or Shkadov thruster. The star is viewed from the pole – the thruster is a spherical arc mirror (solid line), spanning a sector of total angular extent 2ψ. This produces an imbalance in the radiation pressure force produced by the star, resulting in a net thrust in the direction of the arrow. Credit: Duncan Forgan.

That seems straightforward, assuming a civilization so advanced that it could build mirror structures of the needed size. Here too, though, we have stability problems. The McInnes paper is highly interesting, examining megastructure concepts and the possible ways of stabilizing them. While a uniform, rigid reflective disk proves unstable as a star-moving engine, a disk with its mass concentrated at the edges can be stable. Instead of a flat disk, we are looking at something much closer to the shape of a ring. Here passive stability is what we want – i.e., the object does not need continual adjustment by other technologies to maintain its position and function.

In the case of the Schkadov engine, we have this consideration:

…for an ideal reflector subject to gravitational and radiation pressure forces the gradient of these forces across the reflector will induce stresses. While the direction of the radiation pressure force is always normal to the reflector, the direction of the gravitational force will vary across the reflector moving from the centre to the edge. Therefore, while the component of the gravitational force normal to the reflector can in principle be balanced by the radiation pressure force, there will be an in-plane component of the gravitational force which will generate a compressive stress. A thin reflector will clearly be unable to support such compression. However, in principle a zero-stress reflector can be configured for a non-homogeneous, partially reflecting rotating reflector…

The math for a stellar reflector and a stellar ring are laid out in the paper’s appendices.

McInnes thinks that stability is useful as we investigate possible technosignatures in our SETI work, whether they be star-moving thrusters or energy-gathering Dyson objects. The assumption is that passive stability will be sought after because it is efficient and economical, not requiring control systems that must continually adjust position. Remember, too, that in searching for technosignatures, we have the possibility of finding megastructures like these that have survived the demise of their creators. Passive stability is essential for these objects to remain intact and detectable.

What McInnes calls a ‘Dyson bubble’ can likewise be stabilized. Here we’re talking not about a solid Dyson sphere but a constellation of discs, a ‘power swarm’ that allows a civilization to exploit most of the output of its star. The terminology can be confusing but bear with me. The author distinguishes between a cloud of small reflectors in orbit around the central star – huge in number, these form a so-called ‘Dyson swarm’ – and a ‘Dyson bubble,’ by which he means a smaller number of large reflectors in ‘statite’ configuration, so that instead of orbiting, radiation pressure exactly balances gravity. In other words, the ‘bubble’’ components stay stationary relative to the star.

Self-stabilizing techniques are challenged not only by gravitational and radiation pressure but also collisions between the myriad orbiting disks as well as outside perturbing forces. Over large timeframes, passing stars can disrupt the gravitational dance, while interstellar comets, whose numbers are likely to be huge, present a similar risk of disruption. Even so, there are ways around this:

…the Dyson bubble can remain stable when its self-gravity and a simple model of a diffuse background of scattered radiation are included in the dynamics defined in Section 6.4. However, there are now regions of the parameter space where instability can occur, primarily at the edge of the Dyson bubble driven by the diffuse background radiation. In addition, it has been shown that the self-gravity of the Dyson bubble is in itself sufficient to ensure passive stability in the absence of the diffuse background radiation, and indeed it enhances the stability of the Dyson bubble when the diffuse background of scattered radiation is included.

A Dyson swarm if properly implemented can also ensure passive stability. Reflectors must always be configured ‘normal’ (perpendicular) to the central star “…using slighting conical reflectors with the centre-of-pressure displaced behind the centre-of-mass.”

So there are ways of doing these things as long as we abandon the Shkadov concept of a uniform reflector disc in favor of a ring supporting the reflector, or in the case of the two Dyson options McInnes looks at, a dense cloud of reflectors stabilized through orbital mechanics, or a smaller assembly of reflectors in static equilibrium with radiation pressure from the star exactly balancing gravity. But here I’m more interested in the consequences in terms of hunting for technosignatures:

A Dyson swarm can be expected to generate a different technosignature to a passively stable Dyson bubble discussed above. For example, the motion of the discs in a swarm would imply a flickering of the observed luminosity of the central star, with a larger variation expected from a small number of ultra-large discs relative to a large number of small discs. Finally, while an orbiting swarm of reflectors will be susceptible to collisions (B. C. Laki 2025), collisions within a Dyson swarm could in principle be minimised using families of displaced non-Keplerian orbits, where the orbit planes of the reflectors can be stacked in parallel rather than being inclined relative to each other (C. R. McInnes & J. F. L. Simmons 1992).

And what of Shipstar? A recent conversation with Jim Benford reminded me that his brother Greg had worked out a way to stabilize the induced flare on the central star through intense magnetic fields, but as far as I know, this concept has never been rigorously investigated. From the technosignature standpoint, McInnes’ paper reminds us that stability problems can be overcome should an advanced civilization choose to build Dyson-class structures, or undertake star-moving of the Shkadov variety. How to engineer the stability of BDOs should continue to provide insight into possible technosignatures, even if the lack of any trace of Dyson structures despite intensive work at G-HAT remains puzzling. Next week I want to look at an even more recent stellar engine concept as presented by Illinois State University’s Michael Caplan.

The paper is McInnes, “Stellar engines and Dyson bubbles can be stable,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 546 (2026), 1-18 (full text). The Shkadov paper is “Possibility of Controlling Solar System Motion in the Galaxy,” presented at the 38th Congress of the International Astronautical Federation (IAF) in Brighton, UK. An English translation of the original paper was published in the Journal of Solar System Research Volume 22, Issue 4, pp 210–214 under the title “Possibility of Control of Galactic Motion of the Solar System.” The Forgan paper mentioned above is “On the Possibility of Detecting Class A Stellar Engines Using Exoplanet Transit Curves,” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, Vol. 66, no. 5/6, 2013 pp. 144–154. Preprint.

Playing dirty on Polymarket--Insider trading on information, and on manipulation

Here are news reports on two kinds of insider trading on prediction markets: predicting what you are (or someone close to you is) going to do, or predicting a measurement you can control.

From the NYT:

Soldier Used Classified Information to Bet on Maduro’s Ouster, U.S. Says
Federal prosecutors say that Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke, who was involved in the operation to oust Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela, used the information to place bets on a prediction market. By Benjamin Weiser and Jonah E. Bromwich
 

"A U.S. Army special forces soldier who helped capture Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela has been charged with using classified information to bet on the mission on Polymarket, a prediction marketplace, federal authorities said on Thursday.

"The soldier, Master Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke, who was stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, made more than $400,000 by betting on different outcomes related to Venezuela after learning of the operation, federal prosecutors and the F.B.I. said. "

##########

And from the WSJ: 

Unusual weather bets on Polymarket spur French investigation by Alexander Osipovich, Sam Schechner 

 "France’s national weather service is investigating irregularities at a monitoring station at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport after it reported anomalous temperature spikes. The spikes led to lucrative payoffs for some traders on Polymarket, the crypto-based betting platform.

...

"Every day, Polymarket lists contracts that allow its users to bet on the maximum temperature in dozens of cities worldwide. Its Paris contract is based on the reading at Charles de Gaulle airport, as reported by Weather Underground, an online weather data provider.

"On April 15, the temperature in Paris had reached 18 degrees Celsius in the afternoon and was cooling down in the evening when the airport gauge showed a brief, unexplained jump, hitting 22 degrees Celsius at 9:30 p.m. local time, Weather Underground data shows. Other nearby weather stations didn’t show a similar spike. 

"Just before the anomaly, xX25Xx placed cheap, long-shot bets on Polymarket that the maximum temperature in Paris that day wouldn’t be 18 degrees Celsius, when other bettors were more than 99% sure that the day’s top temperature would remain at that level.

"The airport weather station also registered a temperature spike around 7 p.m. on April 6. That day, a Polymarket account with username “Hoaqin” made nearly $14,000 in profit by betting that Paris temperatures would peak at 21 degrees Celsius, Polymarket data shows. Temperatures at Charles de Gaulle had been hovering at around 18 degrees in the late afternoon, according to Weather Underground data. 

... 

"In March, an Israeli journalist said he had received death threats from Polymarket bettors demanding that he revise his article about an Iranian missile strike on March 10. The details of his article were used to settle bets on whether Iran had carried out a missile, drone or airstrike that day.

"Soon after the incident, Polymarket explicitly prohibited insider trading and market manipulation on its international platform for the first time. The amended rules state that Polymarket users can’t trade contracts where they can influence the outcome of the underlying event.

"A similar prohibition is in place in regulated prediction markets such as Polymarket’s main competitor, Kalshi, as well as at Polymarket’s new U.S. platform. "

April 23, 2026

Yesterday Secretary of the Navy John Phelan spent the day talking to lawmakers about the Navy’s plans for new ships and about the Pentagon’s huge budget request only to get a call from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asking him to resign. Phelan is a billionaire businessman who had no previous military experience but who raised millions of dollars for Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.

Haley Britzky, Zachary Cohen, Kristen Holmes, Natasha Bertrand, and Kaitlan Collins of CNN report that Phelan’s close relationship with President Donald J. Trump has irked Hegseth, who saw Phelan’s direct communications with the president as an attempt to go around him. And Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, a close ally of Hegseth’s, wanted to take over shipbuilding and Navy acquisitions, jobs that normally fall to the secretary of the Navy.

As the title of an article by Drew FitzGerald, Lara Seligman, and Marcus Weisgerber of the Wall Street Journal noted earlier this month, Feinberg is a billionaire thanks to his career in private equity and now is mounting “his biggest takeover yet: the Pentagon.” Feinberg is pushing Congress to pass the $1.5 trillion military budget Trump wants while at the same time overseeing the newly created Economic Defense Unit (EDU) in the Defense Department. The EDU is directing government investment in private sector defense contractors and has cut deals for the government to start taking equity stakes in those businesses.

Greg Jaffe and Helene Cooper of the New York Times reported that Trump has been frustrated by Phelan’s inability to fulfill his demand for the first of his new battleships by 2028, an inability caused by the fact that the U.S. shipbuilding industry doesn’t have the capacity to do it. At a Wednesday meeting with Trump, Hegseth and Feinberg convinced the president that Phelan had to go.

According to the CNN reporters, Trump told Hegseth to “take care of it,” prompting his phone call to ask for Phelan’s resignation. But Phelan didn’t believe Trump knew of the request, so he called officials at the White House to ask if they had heard he had been asked to resign and whether Trump knew. At about 5:30, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell posted on social media that “Secretary of the Navy John C. Phelan is departing the administration, effective immediately.”

Still unconvinced, Phelan finally went to the White House to meet with Trump, who did not see him but later confirmed in a phone call that Phelan was out.

On social media yesterday, Trump posted two different New York Times pieces about the 2004 ratings for the television reality show The Apprentice, in which he starred as a business executive whose famous line was “You’re fired!” Today, on social media, Trump’s account posted: “John Phelan is a long time friend, and very successful businessman, who did an outstanding job serving as my Secretary Of The Navy for the last year. I very much appreciate the job that he has done, and would certainly like to have him back within the Trump Administration sometime in the future.”

Lara Seligman, Josh Dawsey, Alexander Ward, and Natalie Andrews of the Wall Street Journal noted today that Trump sided with Hegseth over Phelan, who was his friend and neighbor and raised millions of dollars for him. Phelan’s firing shows that Trump still supports Hegseth despite his missteps and high-level firings as Hegseth seeks to remake the Pentagon.

Dan Lamothe, Tara Copp, and Noah Robertson of the Washington Post note that Hegseth has purged the military of its most senior ranks, including “the top generals and admirals of every branch of service except for the Marine Corps and Space Force, several military lawyers and even the head of the Army’s chaplain corps.”

Today the Pentagon cracked down on the independence of Stars and Stripes, the newspaper charged with providing “independent news and information to the U.S. military community.” Stars and Stripes operates out of the Department of Defense. In order to make sure the paper protects freedom of the press and remains independent of the Pentagon rather than becoming a propaganda outlet, Congress provided for it to be overseen by an ombudsman who regularly reports to Congress. Today the current ombudsman, Jacqueline Smith, reported that she has been fired.

Smith has publicly criticized Hegseth’s crackdown on press freedom, and noted in a farewell column today that “[n]o one should be surprised that they’re kicking out the one person charged by Congress with protecting Stars and Stripes’ editorial independence. For nearly a year, Pentagon leadership has placed more and more restrictions on the mainstream media.” She said she “knew there would be perils for speaking out against Pentagon attempts to control the news” and urged Americans not to let Stars and Stripes “be controlled by Pentagon brass.”

While Hegseth is shaping the military to his own specifications and Feinberg is working to tie the government and an expanded military more tightly together, Republicans in Congress are trying to strengthen the power of the president over the American people for the next three years.

As Charles Tiefer of Talking Points Memo reported today, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) has proposed funding Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the parent agency for Border Patrol, through budget reconciliation, a process that cannot be filibustered in the Senate. Because Republicans control both the House and the Senate, this means things tucked into a budget reconciliation measure can pass without any Democratic votes.

Senate Democrats refused to fund ICE and CBP for 2026 until Republicans agreed to reform the rules for the agents’ behavior, including requiring them to get a warrant from a judge before breaking into someone’s home—as courts have always required before this administration—and to take off their masks.

But Republicans have refused to agree to those reforms and are turning to funding through budget reconciliation so they don’t have to negotiate. And rather than funding ICE and CBP for the year, as the rest of the appropriations bills do, Thune is proposing to fund them for the next three years, taking away Congress’s power to reform ICE and CBP by withholding funds not just for 2026, but for 2027 and for 2028. Even if Democrats take control of the House or Senate after 2026, they could not reform ICE or CBP, which would remain a growing force under the president’s control.

Today Thune also teed up a vote on a bill to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 for three years, until April 2029. Both Democrats and Republicans are concerned that the system for collecting information on foreigners who appear to pose a threat to the U.S. can also sweep in U.S. citizens, enabling the government to surveil citizens without a judicial warrant. They want to make sure there are stronger guardrails in place to keep the government within constitutional limits. The House has been trying to hammer out a measure with cosmetic reforms, but if it fails, Thune will try to pass a three-year extension of Section 702 with no reforms, taking away from Congress the ability to limit problematic government surveillance.

But the tide defending democratic values continues to rise.

On Tuesday, more than 100 former NASA astronauts announced they were launching Astronauts for America, a nonpartisan organization to protect American democracy. In an open letter introducing their organization, they noted that as astronauts, they “have sworn to defend the Constitution of the United States” and continued: “We are committed to science, evidence-based decision-making, public service, and the rule of law.” They vowed to speak out for American values and to work with lawmakers to protect those values: “the rule of law, constructive checks and balances, equal opportunity, and the peaceful transfer of power.” They reminded people that “[a] strong democracy makes all else possible: economic growth, national security, and our rights and freedoms.”

“I think we’ve all been getting concerned for quite a number of years about not being comfortable with the way some things are going,” Astronauts for America co-founder and former astronaut Linda Godwin told Adam Kovac of Scientific American. “It was powerful to find out that a lot of us felt the same way, and there’s a stronger voice together.”

Notes:

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/us-navy-secretary-john-phelan-what-happened-83bbc61a

https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/22/politics/john-phelan-navy-secretary-leaving

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/private-equity-billionaire-shakes-up-pentagon-7264fec0

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/04/22/john-phelan-navy-hegseth/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/04/23/stars-stripes-ombudsman-fired-pentagon/

https://www.stripes.com/opinion/2026-04-23/stripes-former-ombudsman-pentagon-trying-to-silence-21465037.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/23/us/politics/trump-navy-secretary.html

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/senate-republicans-have-a-plan-to-suspend-congressional-oversight-of-ice-for-trumps-whole-term

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/4344

https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2026/04/23/congress/mike-johnson-702-surveillance-00889135

https://www.astronautsforamerica.org/

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ex-nasa-astronauts-form-new-group-to-promote-u-s-constitutional-values/

X:

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SenatePress/status/2047220640336187420

Bluesky:

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paleofuture.bsky.social/post/3mk6jvgnufc2w

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Politics Chat, April 23, 2026

Politics Chat, April 23, 2026

Does reading do us any good?

Two people on a train, one writing and the other reading, sitting back-to-back on orange seats.

Stripped of easy moralising, literature makes us relish the search for truth in an age when many believe truth to be dead

- by Flora Champy

Read on Aeon

United Kingdom to Enact Smoking Ban Only for Those Who Are Not Yet Legal Adults

Ephrat Livni, reporting for The New York Times (gift link):

Britain aims to raise a “smoke-free generation” by permanently banning the sale or supply of tobacco to anyone born in 2009 or after, with a bill that was approved by Parliament on Tuesday.

The bill applies to people currently 17 years old or younger and aims to keep them from ever picking up the habit in their lifetime. The proposal is expected to soon go into law after the final formality of approval by King Charles III.

Lawmakers say that in practice, the measure means the age of sale for tobacco products will rise over time as the targeted demographic group grows older and could lead to a smoke-free society. The law will apply in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

I’ve never smoked and I’m strongly in favor of most — maybe all? — of the smoking bans and tobacco-related public health measures that have been passed in my lifetime. I can’t imagine going back to when smoking was permitted in restaurants, bars, airplanes, and public spaces. I’m also strongly in favor of stiff taxes on tobacco products to discourage their use.

But this U.K. law seems bonkers to me. To me, something ought to be either legal for adults or not. The idea that if you’re already 18 years old you can buy tobacco products for the rest of your life, but if you were born in 2009 or later, you’ll never be permitted to, is so contrary to my sense of fairness that I’m finding it hard to put my objection into words. All adults should be equals under the law. That’s my take in a nut. If smoking should be illegal, it should be illegal for everyone. I’ve never heard of a law like this anywhere in the world. It’s like they’re enshrining in law that everyone in the U.K. who is today a child is forever a child when it comes to tobacco. If there are examples of similar laws I’m unaware of, I’d love to hear about them. [Update: Brookline Massachusetts passed a town ordinance like this in 2021, and after it was upheld by the state supreme court in 2024, a few other MA towns have too. My cynical guess is that the only effect of this law is to annoy young Brookline smokers by making them drive a few miles to buy smokes, but if the actual effect is that fewer young Brooklinites (sp?) smoke, that’s great. But I also doubt that anyone in Brookline’s municipal government is going to commission a study to see if the law had any practical effect on smoking rates.]

Maybe the British are different, but there’s no way this law would work in America. First, I don’t think such a law would ever gain popular traction. But even if it did, it would just create a black market. At least when we banned booze, we banned it for everyone.

 ★ 

Which workers are using AI the most and best?

An FT poll of 4,000 workers in the US and UK shows adoption is heavily skewed towards the best-paid workers: more than 60 per cent use AI daily, compared with just 16 per cent of the lower earners.

Link here.  Note also that the youngest workers are not those who use AI the most, rather it is workers in their 30s.  Men in the workplace are using AI more than women are.  A very good piece by Madhumita Murgia and John Burn-Murdoch.

The post Which workers are using AI the most and best? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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The Secret Town in Texas That Might Save America

Over the past couple of years, one of the more ambitious experiments in American manufacturing has been taking place in Central Texas. It is called Proto-Town, and it has been something of a secret. …

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Welcome to Gas City

What is Gas City, you ask? It is Gas Town, but torn apart and rewritten from the ground up as an SDK for building your own dark factories. It enables you to deploy teams of collaborating agents in any topology, not just the hardwired original (and complex) Gas Town team shape.

Gas City released version v1.0.0 this week. It went to alpha test a few weeks ago and is ready for use today!

From Gas Town to Gas City

This is a pivotal moment in the Mad Max school of agent orchestration, a.k.a. Gaslandia, Gas Universe, Gas Nation, or the Gasosphere, depending on who you ask. It all began with Beads, which was like discovering oil. It continued with Gas Town, and we soon opened the Wasteland, a public commons board for federated work arbitrage and a budding private army. Gas City is the next step in that progression. I first predicted and described Gas City back in January, and it has finally arrived.

Disclaimer: I did not write Gas City. It was created by Julian Knutsen and Chris Sells, both of whom you can meet on the Discord. I am only lightly affiliated with the code, in the sense that I outlined my vision in a blog post, and they built it. But it’s exactly what I wished for, and it is being run by far more serious and disciplined engineers than me. I am all-in with Gas City, contributing myself, and this is our official new direction!

Gas City has deconstructed the entire Gas Town stack into composable, declarative building blocks called “packs”. You can use these to assemble arbitrary agent topologies, deploy them, sit back, and watch them work from a rich console. (Or tmux, if that floats your boat. That still works in Gas City!) Gas City is the supervisor plane that connects, manages, and coordinates these deployed mini-factories.

As its unboxing flex, Gas City comes with a fully functional “Gas Town” pack, which runs an exact replica of Gas Town. This is the default pack that runs on startup. So Gas City starts off as a drop-in replacement for the original Gas Town, and can import all your rigs and beads.

Both systems are backed by the powerful and peerless MEOW stack. MEOW, the Molecular Expression of Work, is a lightweight Beads-based framework that places Work front and center, as the first-class system primitive, creating a versioned knowledge graph of all your issues and tasks. Work is the currency that drives the Gas Universe ecosystem. It’s Beads all the way down, powered at the base of the stack by a unique git-versioned database called Dolt. Dolt was the magic that made our stack run smoothly.

Dolt is Gas City’s internal powerhouse

Gas City solves an enormous number of problems associated with spinning up long-running agentic worker “teams.” It builds atop the innovations and community contributions from Gas Town, giving you out-of-the-box, scalable, convenient access to agent identity, messaging, history, context, state, skills, roles, personas, and much more. And for coding agent maintainers, Gas City exposes a rich Factory Worker API. It’s a way to make your own agent the driver for Gas City.

Gas City is generally an improvement on Gas Town on all fronts, from code quality, to the services it offers. For instance it offers fine-grained model selection and switching at various levels, for cost control.

Gas City doesn’t aim to solve all your problems. You will need to wire it to your own sandboxing, MCP servers, and so on. But it provides you with a rock-solid and easy-to-use foundation to build on: one with a Discord community with thousands of active members.

This combination of tech stack and community makes Gas City, as far as I can tell, the only viable solution for building custom orchestrators backed by Git. You can build and run an entire business with it, tracking every step taken by any agent in a database with git version history. The forensics and auditing capabilities of Gas City are unparalleled, because of MEOW and Dolt.

What about maturity? Unlike Gas Town, which is an experiment run like a Wild West, Gas City is a rapidly maturing, enterprise-focused SDK for building and deploying autonomous agentic workflows. These deployments can be for anything: devops and monitoring jobs, ETLs, data pipelines, ticket queues, incident response, whatever you like.

Gas City is completely open-sourced and MIT-licensed. Built for enterprise, fun for tinkerers.

The rest of this post is about why you might want to try it yourself. This post is not about how to use Gas City; there is a ton of getting started material emerging, but a good start is the gastownhall.ai Discord general announcements.

The Light Factory

Everyone is buzzing about “dark factories,” so let’s start there.

A dark factory is any system in which coding agents are set up to work autonomously without humans watching. The name is frankly a little bit misleading. It just means background work. It’s only dark inside a dark factory because the work is happening in rooms where there are no humans present. But those rooms are allowed to have windows. Observability is a choice in dark factory design.

Gas City, like Gas Town, has chosen to maximize Observability. You can dive in and interact with any worker at any time, and nothing is ever hidden from you, nor from the agents, except for the guardrails you choose to install.

So then is Claude Code a dark factory? The terminology here, with factories and harnesses and so on, is all evolving fast, so there aren’t any reliable definitions yet. But Claude Code did not start life as a dark factory, because you were generally supposed to watch it while it works. It’s making overtures in that direction with subagents and agent teams, but they keep the lights off intentionally, presumably because it’s a consumer-facing product and it keeps it simpler.

Gas City takes a different approach: all agent workers are equally visible and addressable. The lights are on. Normally for the ephemeral “polecat” workers, you don’t bother looking at them. But unlike with coding-agent subagents, if you want to talk to your polecats, you absolutely can.

And so far, Gas City is the only dark factory that has been designed with the goal of creating other factories. The lights are 100% on when you’re working with the Mayor and Crew in Gas City, and you can dial them up as needed in the back rooms with the polecats and dogs. For this reason I have begun to think of Gas City as a Light Factory… or at least, a very well-lit dark one!

Gas City: The Light Factory

At first, dark factories were only used for writing code faster. They focused on the software development process, and basically replaced IDEs. And that’s still primarily how they are used today. I do see some shops making good headway into CI/CD pipelines and peripheral business processes. But dark factories are headed towards handling infrastructure, operations, and even core business processes.

Gas Town users soon realized that you could use Gas Town’s stack to create standalone orchestrators that had nothing to do with writing code. Gene Kim and I have talked to companies that are doing this, and I’ve also started myself. Running my online game Wyvern requires a bunch of routine maintenance that goes way beyond CI/CD.

For instance, when players in my game hit 25th level, a unique perk is they can upload custom images for that character. That perk is permanent operational debt that I’m saddled with. I have to monitor the “Hall of Fame” submission queue, visually scan the player-uploaded images for inappropriateness, and then approve and upload them into the game. I’ve automated much of it, but I still have to look at them and run the scripts to approve or reject.

A dark factory could totally do that. And it’s got nothing to do with writing code. It’s a business process.

So dark factories are a much broader concept than IDEs. They can automate and orchestrate any arbitrary process. But with what reliability?

Well, that depends on how robust your custom factories are, doesn’t it?

The Shape of Things to Come

In the very near future, devs will become shepherds, tending flocks of agents which do the ground-level work. It’s not really a manager job, because the workers are not humans; a coding agent’s cat doesn’t get sick and need to go to the vet in the middle of a sev-1 outage. But agentic workers do make human-like mistakes, and they respond well to being managed like people, by and large. They don’t need management. But they need guidance. Shepherding. Keeping-on-rails. That’s the new role for human builders and operators.

Engineers: Agent pack shepherds

As soon as I had this realization, the shepherd thing, I knew we’d discovered at least 2–3 new squares in my now-infamous “8 Stages of AI Adoption” diagram from Welcome to Gas Town:

Original 8-Stage Dev AI Evolution Chart (January)

At Level 8, you have mastered using an orchestrator to manage dozens of concurrent agents. As your experience grows, you begin to see the potential to use agent mini-factories everywhere.

After you deploy your first real one, you officially have a garden you’re tending. A tiny crew of agents, acting like employees. Your little factory team runs 24x7, which requires maintenance. You now have to keep it running, manage upgrades and patches, rotate the logs, and of course make sure it’s doing its job. But you don’t have to do the work yourself anymore! So it’s still a huge automation improvement… as long as you can keep it reliable.

You should almost never deploy a single-agent pack for a real business process. The reality is that any agent can go temporarily insane, at any time, and make a bad call. No matter how smart they are. We know now that hallucinations and false memories and forgetting are baked mathematically into all memory systems; there’s no avoiding it. So you should never just have one coding agent managing a piece of infrastructure. Not even for a low-stakes part of your business. You should always have at least two or three working together on a little crew.

This is exactly why dark factories are so attractive. With Gas City you can build any sort of adversarial group structure you like, for a team of collaborating agents. They can watch over each other. By catching each other’s mistakes, the agent group reaches a far more reliable consensus and outcomes than you can get from a single agent. That’s why we think of deployed orchestration as being fundamentally made of multi-agent teams: factories. Define your pack, deploy it, et voila — you are officially on the path to being an AI-native shop.

Orchestration-maxxing

Let’s look at what a specific small custom factory looks like in practice.

For my game’s player custom-image uploader, images are submitted via a website form, so it starts with an agent that wakes up on a hook and does the work. Then a second agent checks the first agent’s work. Perhaps the first agent makes a recommendation, and the second agent takes action.

I could add more agents to that pack, but I think two should be enough for this little workflow. It’s super low volume, low-stakes, not the end of the world if the agent crew messes up and approves a bad image. Adding that second agent, much like a second hash function, dramatically decreases the chance of some sort of collision. So in my pack, I declare the two agents, their identities, prompts, sandboxes, skills, and all the other stuff they need. Gas City can help you do this automatically, of course.

Two-agent pack handling Wyvern custom player image queue

A deployed Gas City pack is an AI-native business process automation. Once your pack is running, Gas City’s supervisor agent system will keep it going, even on remote machines.

At this point, with one deployment, you are officially at Level 9 on the AI Adoption Chart.

After you make your first one, you realize you want to use dark factories for everything. I want every damn NPC in my actual game to be an agent, yeah? Not first, obviously! I’ll have to build up to that gradually, just like you should, when you first start with AI factories. Pick low-stakes, easy wins, get them automated, and learn your lessons early on when getting burned isn’t so bad.

Level 10 of the AI Adoption is where you’ve deployed a bunch of agent packs, each with its own little world it’s managing. They have identities, consoles, you can check in on any of them, tweak their standing orders, you name it. They’re starting to be a handful. But you don’t need to build an orchestrator for them, since Gas City is the orchestrator. What exactly are you missing?

The problem is, in stage 10, you, the human, are the control plane. Once you have a few dozen of these deployed packs, you will start to become the bottleneck on curating them. Gas City manages them, and they’re all functioning correctly on their own, but how are they working together as an end-to-end system? They can all send messages to each other, but have you given them clear, practical guidance on when it’s appropriate to do so?

The answer to all your problems at Stage 10 is of course to slather on more Gas City. You build yet another crew, with a declarative Gas City pack, and its job is to manage a subset of your deployed packs. Maybe you spin up a couple of them, one for the cloud services, one for customer service. Area manager teams, basically. You evolve it into the shape of your problem.

Once you start building your way out of needing to hand-manage dozens of packs, you’ve officially graduated to Level 11, which is Factory Builder. You’re building a full custom orchestrator, a full dark factory, and you’re operating at the level of architect, curator, and shepherd.

The (currently) 11 Stages of AI Adoption

Your Gas City is the sum of those little factories you’ve created to run your business around the clock. No sick cats, no vets. Just the occasional wild worker hallucination. But your teams, if you build them right, will catch most mistakes. And all of it will be logged and auditable.

Reliability, friends, is a dial. You choose where to set it. More rounds of review, more backstops, more guardrails, more judges, and you can get agentic workers to be as reliable as you need them to be, at least up to some practical ceiling. I wouldn’t use it in situations where you could physically hurt people, e.g. in medical or navigation systems. Not in 2026. But we’ll build our way there, like engineers do, over the next couple of years.

That’s the new world. If you’re convinced already, then you’re done! You can just go play with Gas City. I’ll finish up by talking about how you can use Gas City to start chipping away at your SaaS problem.

Escape From SaaS Mountain

When I was a kid, my parents wouldn’t let me watch Escape From Witch Mountain (1975) for whatever dumb reason. Probably because it had “Witch” in the title and I was six. I’m still miffed about it, though. Who knows how much better-prepared I’d be for life if I’d watched it?

And now, I wonder, are investors and boardrooms watching Escape from SaaS Mountain? Or are their moms not letting them, too? Perhaps we’ll never know.

SaaS is in kind of a funny position right now. If you look at the pyramid from the top, at the SalesForces of the world, it looks like they’re fine, they just need to pivot to make their SaaS sexy to agents. Benioff did that recently with SF, exposing the whole platform headless and API-first, in exactly that: a bid to make SalesForce sexy to agents. That’s the new game for SaaS.

People look up there and say, oh it’s gonna be just fine, those are systems of record, nobody’s going to reimplement them. Nobody wants to pay the tax of maintaining those systems for security, compliance, performance, scalability, etc. Right? This is just the new Buy vs Build.

But then you look at the bottom of the SaaS pyramid and it’s like, oh crap, this stuff is disintegrating in real time. Just in this past month I was visiting an enterprise customer where the non-technical staff — non-technical! — have been rebuilding a $30k/year SaaS tool in-house on Gas Town. Their VP is now mapping out how to convert millions in annual SaaS spend into headcount, bringing those capabilities in-house as core competencies. The question they asked us was: how do we actually do this at scale?

From that perspective, it’s clear that some SaaS will be eaten, and the rest will have to pivot. The only question is how far up the pyramid people will be able to push, bringing it in-house. It’s going to take a few years to find out.

SaaS Mountain is showing some cracks

I’m going to share some stuff with you that will potentially change the way you think about SaaS forever. Much of it is credit to Brendan Hopper, Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

Atlassian, nominally, is an Australian company: a poster child for what the Aussies can accomplish when they put their mind to tech. But according to Brendan, it’s more complex than Australian versus American. Atlassian is staffed between the two continents, registered in Delaware, and traded on the NASDAQ — the ASX does not price tech companies as tech companies. About half their devs are U.S.-based, and they have strong incentives to have engineers in the U.S, such as tax code 174A. They serve pretty much all traffic out of the U.S.

For all practical purposes, and through no fault of their own, Atlassian is a U.S. company. Much love to Atlassian, but they have to be, because there is no other option. The center of gravity on the U.S. west coast is inescapable.

Every dollar of SaaS spent outside the U.S. has a portion extracted from a local economy and moved into California’s economy, which would now be the fourth largest economy in the world if it were a separate country. SaaS is moves money from the rest of the world into the U.S. And there’s no fighting it. If a big non-US tech company like Atlassian can’t, it’s going to be hard for everyone.

Another interesting thing about SaaS is that it grows to become the superset of all the features for all its customers. Most customers gradually recede to using 20% of the SaaS’s features, while subsidizing the remaining 80% for the other customers.

The implication is that you don’t need to reimplement all of SalesForce, just the parts you’re using. If you want to bring SaaS in-house, you only need to build the 20% of the features you need. And you also only need as much security, scaling, and compliance as is appropriate for your company, which is not necessarily the same as you need for a Fortune 100 company.

So SaaS is extractive, and expensive. Almost nobody is getting full value out of it, and all that value is streaming into Silicon Valley.

Yet another funny thing about SaaS is that the Venn diagram overlap with your own needs is always incomplete. Not only are you subsidizing features you won’t use, you’re also failing to get features that you would use. And when SaaS becomes dominant it stops innovating.

In short, SaaS began life as a way for everyone to get savings through specialization and economy of scale. And it has evolved into an extraction machine that’s ideal for almost nobody.

So you shouldn’t feel bad about de-SaaSing your company. Just start at the bottom.

The bottom of the SaaS pyramid is a rowdy place, a rough place. A lot of it isn’t even SaaS, it’s software on disks in a closet that someone is paying an annual license for. Construction, paralegal, medical, farming, biotech, environmental, there are hundreds of domains where ancient SaaS is still holding companies hostage, and not meeting people’s needs.

So the people are fighting back! As the models and tools get more powerful, people are beginning to bring their SaaS back in house. I hear VPs of Eng say, “We are spending $X million/year on SaaS. Let’s convert that to salaries and bring it in as a core competency.”

But until this week, there hasn’t been a viable path forward, aside from experimenting with building your own orchestration on raw coding agents. That is a long journey, and most people need help with it. Most of the orchestrator vendors out there are off building agent brains and persona libraries — interesting research projects, but not what you need to replace a piece of SaaS in production. To replace SaaS, you need the unglamorous stuff: declarative deploys, audit trails, version history, identity, and a memory layer that survives the inevitable agent failures. Those are the primitives that make in-housing tractable.

Enter Gas City: The ultimate de-SaaSer. It’s like de-lousing your company. It makes Build and Maintain a pragmatic choice, particularly at the bottom end of the pyramid. You build the replacement software, then set up agent teams to run it for you.

A small team of three to five human engineers running Gas City packs can credibly replace seven-figure SaaS bills, and the capability stays in-house as a compounding asset instead of leaking out as recurring rent. Yes, you own the uptime, security, and compliance now. But you only need the level of each that fits your company — not Salesforce-grade everything for a 200-person business. And Gas City’s audit trail, with every agent action recorded in a git-versioned Dolt database, is frankly better than what most SaaS vendors can produce when you ask for theirs. That’s your SOC2 story, sitting right there in the database, already written.

That’s the problem with OSS SaaS replacements today, and it’s why few have adopted them: they don’t run themselves. ChatWoot is a full-featured ZenDesk replacement, but you have to run it, and most companies can’t afford the operational overhead. SaaS has to evolve to be AI-native! It’s not good enough to be OSS. It has to have agents in it, running it, just like ZenDesk the SaaS handles everything for you as a service.

This implies that all SaaS worldwide needs to be rewritten/reenvisioned from the ground up to be fully agentic.

But where do you start?

That’s where Gas City gives you a refreshing leg up. You can start building bespoke Gas City orchestrators today. You’re not going to rewrite your business overnight. In fact it’s going to take years. You should approach the whole endeavor with appropriate levels of caution and even trepidation.

But you might as well start eating the elephant a bite at a time.

Next Up For Gaslandia

I had a set of projects in flight that were banking on at least Mythos-class models, which means they’re all on hold. Gas City will be the extent of my ambitions for a while. I plan to become a Gas City power user, not just for coding, but for running my own systems. I want to see that control plane emerge and understand how you can run a business with hundreds of collaborating agents.

Most other orchestrators I’ve seen have been able to be super high-ambition. Many lean heavily into the idea that agents, when put together, can just figure stuff out. And to a large extent, they can. But they are intentionally low-control systems. And when they fail, they go off-rails with no audit trail.

Gas City is a high-control system. It has high parallelism (Julian has had hundreds of concurrent workers in a city), but it uses structure to keep agent swarms organized. It’s still incredibly flexible and freeform when it needs to be; you can just tell a group of polecats to go solve any problem. But most work is spelled out, tracked, and governed carefully.

A key concept in MEOW is the formula — a reusable template for a unit of work. You write a formula once for a recurring workflow (triage an incident, review a player-uploaded image, rotate the logs, run the nightly ETL) and then pour it whenever you need that work done, instantiating a fresh molecule of beads that an agent crew can pick up and execute.

Over time, your library of formulas becomes a declarative inventory of every business process you’ve ever automated — version-controlled in Dolt, composable, and forkable by anyone on your team. That’s how Gas City turns undocumented workflow knowledge into a durable, shareable codebase.

When you express all your work in the MEOW stack, as Beads and Epics (typically harvested from an upstream system like Obsidian), and your agent actions are all recorded in both a database and version history, you wind up with infinitely more control over the outcomes.

In enterprises, controlling the outcomes is the holy grail. So I personally wouldn’t use any other orchestrator I’ve seen. They don’t have the federatable, versioned, queryable memory system that Dolt provides. They don’t have MEOW.

Everyone is suffering from tool overload. There are too many tools out there, and nobody can keep up with all of them. My life is so simple in comparison. I never look deeply at any new technology until it reaches a pretty loud public signal threshold. And I almost never have to, because the Gas Town ecosystem has solved so many of my problems.

The Gas Universe in general is a pretty reliable bet at this point. It integrates with everything. Beads has been out for six months, Gas Town for four months, and the Wasteland for two. And Dolt has been around for at least eight years, with enterprise-grade maturity. We’ve got over two thousand members on the Discord. The community has spoken: This is The Way. People love working with this system, despite its occasional quirks and frustrations. It’s more fun than anything else we know.

Should you switch from Gas Town to Gas City? Yes! Gas City aims to be better in every way. And Gas City hit 1.0 today, so you should be good to go. Make sure to complain loudly on the Discord if it’s not working for you! Help will be on the way.

Do you have to switch to Gas City? Nope, we have some new maintainers onboarding onto Gas Town this week to help with the load. We’re going to continue maintaining the O.G. Gas Town as long as people still need it.

See you all on the Discord at gastownhall.ai.

Gas City launches v1.0!

It's a big one

This week's edition of my email newsletter (aka content from this blog delivered to your inbox) features 4 pelicans riding bicycles, 1 possum on an e-scooter, up to 5 raccoons with ham radios hiding in crowds, 5 blog posts, 8 links, 3 quotes and a new chapter of my Agentic Engineering Patterns guide.

Tags: newsletter

russellromney/honker

russellromney/honker

"Postgres NOTIFY/LISTEN semantics" for SQLite, implemented as a Rust SQLite extension and various language bindings to help make use of it.

The design of this looks very solid. It lets you write Python code for queues that looks like this:

import honker

db = honker.open("app.db")
emails = db.queue("emails")
emails.enqueue({"to": "alice@example.com"})

# Consume (in a worker process)
async for job in emails.claim("worker-1"):
    send(job.payload)
    job.ack()

And Kafka-style durable streams like this:

stream = db.stream("user-events")

with db.transaction() as tx:
    tx.execute("UPDATE users SET name=? WHERE id=?", [name, uid])
    stream.publish({"user_id": uid, "change": "name"}, tx=tx)

async for event in stream.subscribe(consumer="dashboard"):
    await push_to_browser(event)

It also adds 20+ custom SQL functions including these two:

SELECT notify('orders', '{"id":42}');
SELECT honker_stream_read_since('orders', 0, 1000);

The extension requires WAL mode, and workers can poll the .db-wal file with a stat call every 1ms to get as close to real-time as possible without the expense of running a full SQL query.

honker implements the transactional outbox pattern, which ensures items are only queued if a transaction successfully commits. My favorite explanation of that pattern remains Transactionally Staged Job Drains in Postgres by Brandur Leach. It's great to see a new implementation of that pattern for SQLite.

Via Show HN

Tags: databases, postgresql, sqlite, rust

An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

It turns out the high volume of complaints that Claude Code was providing worse quality results over the past two months was grounded in real problems.

The models themselves were not to blame, but three separate issues in the Claude Code harness caused complex but material problems which directly affected users.

Anthropic's postmortem describes these in detail. This one in particular stood out to me:

On March 26, we shipped a change to clear Claude's older thinking from sessions that had been idle for over an hour, to reduce latency when users resumed those sessions. A bug caused this to keep happening every turn for the rest of the session instead of just once, which made Claude seem forgetful and repetitive.

I frequently have Claude Code sessions which I leave for an hour (or often a day or longer) before returning to them. Right now I have 11 of those (according to ps aux  | grep 'claude ') and that's after closing down dozens more the other day.

I estimate I spend more time prompting in these "stale" sessions than sessions that I've recently started!

If you're building agentic systems it's worth reading this article in detail - the kinds of bugs that affect harnesses are deeply complicated, even if you put aside the inherent non-deterministic nature of the models themselves.

Via Hacker News

Tags: ai, prompt-engineering, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, coding-agents, claude-code

Serving the For You feed

Serving the For You feed

One of Bluesky's most interesting features is that anyone can run their own custom "feed" implementation and make it available to other users - effectively enabling custom algorithms that can use any mechanism they like to recommend posts.

spacecowboy runs the For You Feed, used by around 72,000 people. This guest post on the AT Protocol blog explains how it works.

The architecture is fascinating. The feed is served by a single Go process using SQLite on a "gaming" PC in spacecowboy's living room - 16 cores, 96GB of RAM and 4TB of attached NVMe storage.

Recommendations are based on likes: what else are the people who like the same things as you liking on the platform?

That Go server consumes the Bluesky firehose and stores the relevant details in SQLite, keeping the last 90 days of relevant data, which currently uses around 419GB of SQLite storage.

Public internet traffic is handled by a $7/month VPS on OVH, which talks to the living room server via Tailscale.

Total cost is now $30/month: $20 in electricity, $7 in VPS and $3 for the two domain names. spacecowboy estimates that the existing system could handle all ~1 million daily active Bluesky users if they were to switch to the cheapest algorithm they have found to work.

Tags: go, scaling, sqlite, software-architecture, tailscale, bluesky

DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek's last model release was V3.2 (and V3.2 Speciale) last December. They just dropped the first of their hotly anticipated V4 series in the shape of two preview models, DeepSeek-V4-Pro and DeepSeek-V4-Flash.

Both models are 1 million token context Mixture of Experts. Pro is 1.6T total parameters, 49B active. Flash is 284B total, 13B active. They're using the standard MIT license.

I think this makes DeepSeek-V4-Pro the new largest open weights model. It's larger than Kimi K2.6 (1.1T) and GLM-5.1 (754B) and more than twice the size of DeepSeek V3.2 (685B).

Pro is 865GB on Hugging Face, Flash is 160GB. I'm hoping that a lightly quantized Flash will run on my 128GB M5 MacBook Pro. It's possible the Pro model may run on it if I can stream just the necessary active experts from disk.

For the moment I tried the models out via OpenRouter, using llm-openrouter:

llm install llm-openrouter
llm openrouter refresh
llm -m openrouter/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro 'Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle'

Here's the pelican for DeepSeek-V4-Flash:

Excellent bicycle - good frame shape, nice chain, even has a reflector on the front wheel. Pelican has a mean looking expression but has its wings on the handlebars and feet on the pedals. Pouch is a little sharp.

And for DeepSeek-V4-Pro:

Another solid bicycle, albeit the spokes are a little jagged and the frame is compressed a bit. Pelican has gone a bit wrong - it has a VERY large body, only one wing, a weirdly hairy backside and generally loos like it was drown be a different artist from the bicycle.

For comparison, take a look at the pelicans I got from DeepSeek V3.2 in December, V3.1 in August, and V3-0324 in March 2025.

So the pelicans are pretty good, but what's really notable here is the cost. DeepSeek V4 is a very, very inexpensive model.

This is DeepSeek's pricing page. They're charging $0.14/million tokens input and $0.28/million tokens output for Flash, and $1.74/million input and $3.48/million output for Pro.

Here's a comparison table with the frontier models from Gemini, OpenAI and Anthropic:

Model Input ($/M) Output ($/M)
DeepSeek V4 Flash $0.14 $0.28
GPT-5.4 Nano $0.20 $1.25
Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite $0.25 $1.50
Gemini 3 Flash Preview $0.50 $3
GPT-5.4 Mini $0.75 $4.50
Claude Haiku 4.5 $1 $5
DeepSeek V4 Pro $1.74 $3.48
Gemini 3.1 Pro $2 $12
GPT-5.4 $2.50 $15
Claude Sonnet 4.6 $3 $15
Claude Opus 4.7 $5 $25
GPT-5.5 $5 $30

DeepSeek-V4-Flash is the cheapest of the small models, beating even OpenAI's GPT-5.4 Nano. DeepSeek-V4-Pro is the cheapest of the larger frontier models.

This note from the DeepSeek paper helps explain why they can price these models so low - they've focused a great deal on efficiency with this release, especially for longer context prompts:

In the scenario of 1M-token context, even DeepSeek-V4-Pro, which has a larger number of activated parameters, attains only 27% of the single-token FLOPs (measured in equivalent FP8 FLOPs) and 10% of the KV cache size relative to DeepSeek-V3.2. Furthermore, DeepSeek-V4-Flash, with its smaller number of activated parameters, pushes efficiency even further: in the 1M-token context setting, it achieves only 10% of the single-token FLOPs and 7% of the KV cache size compared with DeepSeek-V3.2.

DeepSeek's self-reported benchmarks in their paper show their Pro model competitive with those other frontier models, albeit with this note:

Through the expansion of reasoning tokens, DeepSeek-V4-Pro-Max demonstrates superior performance relative to GPT-5.2 and Gemini-3.0-Pro on standard reasoning benchmarks. Nevertheless, its performance falls marginally short of GPT-5.4 and Gemini-3.1-Pro, suggesting a developmental trajectory that trails state-of-the-art frontier models by approximately 3 to 6 months.

I'm keeping an eye on huggingface.co/unsloth/models as I expect the Unsloth team will have a set of quantized versions out pretty soon. It's going to be very interesting to see how well that Flash model runs on my own machine.

Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, llm, llm-pricing, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, deepseek, llm-release, openrouter, ai-in-china

Millisecond Converter

Tool: Millisecond Converter

LLM reports prompt durations in milliseconds and I got fed up of having to think about how to convert those to seconds and minutes.

Tags: tools

What should I ask Luke Burgis?

Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him.  Excerpted (and edited) from a bio:

He is on the business faculty at Catholic University and has a background on both Wall Street and in the startup world, where he founded several companies. His first book, Wanting (2021), has been translated into 20+ languages and is selling more than copies than ever five years in. He is an expert on Rene Girard.  His new book, The One and the Ninety-Nine, is out from St. Martin’s June 16 — a theory of how identity gets formed or deformed under conditions of technological social contagion. He has a third book with a major publisher (on “technology as soulcraft”) in the pipeline with a major publisher. He also lived in Italy and for a while was studying to be a priest. He remains a true Catholic, and is the founder and director of the Cluny Institute.

Here is Luke on Twitter.  Here is Luke’s home page.  So what should I ask him?

The post What should I ask Luke Burgis? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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What I’ve been reading

1. Mason Currey, Making Art and Making a Living: Adventures in Funding a Creative Life.  The best overall book I know on the different methods top artists have used to keep themselves going financially.  It is perhaps more anecdotal and less theoretical than I would prefer, still a nice work.

2. Mangol Bayat, Mysticism and Dissent: Socioreligious Dissent in Qajar Iran.  A very good, clear, and useful book on different dissident religiouis developments in Iran, leading up to the Bahai faith.  Recommended, one of the best books I have found for grappling with the history of current Iran.

3. Lena Dunham, Famesick: A Memoir.  Not exactly my thing, so I did not finish it.  But it is pretty good, so if you are tempted give it a try.

4. Iain Pears, Parallel Lives: A Love Story from a Lost Continent.  A delightful story/indirect memoir, telling the tale of the lives and marriage of Francis Haskell, the British art historian, and Larissa Salmina Haskell, a Russian woman who survived the siege of Leningrad as a girl.  Pears had the full cooperation of Larissa, at an age where she doesn’t give a damn any more.  This story truly comes to life, and that is helped by Pears’s background as a writer of very good fiction.

5. Lázár, by Nelio Biedermann.  An excellent novel of ideas, in the style of earlier Continental literature, by a 23-year-old Swiss phenom.  It is very good in German, I have not sampled the translation.

The post What I’ve been reading appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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An Agricultural Mosaic in Taiwan

An array of green rectangular parcels of farmland in a range of hues is interspersed with several small towns.
Farms raising an array of crops form an agricultural mosaic across Yunlin County in this image captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9 on March 18, 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison

About 23 million people live in Taiwan, a Pacific island about the size of Maryland. Despite its size, the island produces a tremendous amount of agricultural goods per year—about $18 billion, according to Taiwan’s Ministry of Agriculture.

The average size of a farm in Taiwan (less than 1 hectare) is much smaller than in the United Kingdom (87 hectares) or the United States (187 hectares). Since much of the island is mountainous, only about one-quarter of Taiwan’s land is arable, and it is mostly located on the southwestern side of the island in the Chianan Plain. That amounts to 0.03 hectares of farmland per Taiwanese citizen—about half as much arable farmland as there is per person in the United Kingdom and one-tenth as much as in the United States.

The small plot size is apparent in this satellite image of farmland in Yunlin County in southwestern Taiwan, one of the island’s most productive agricultural areas. The modest scale is partly a result of past policies that limited the size of farms and partly a byproduct of cultural traditions that often lead to the division of farms into smaller parcels as property is passed from one generation to the next.

Located along the floodplains of the Zhoushui and Beigang rivers, Yunlin County is mostly flat, has fertile soils, and has easy access to irrigation water. The county, one of Taiwan’s main agricultural hubs, is known for producing a wide range of crops, including rice, sweet potatoes, peanuts, corn, sugarcane, garlic, scallions, coffee, fruit, and leafy greens. Farms in the county also raise millions of pigs, the most of any county in Taiwan.

A patch of farmland with much larger fields stands out north of Baozhong.
Areas with large fields were generally once part of sugar plantations.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison

Most crops in Yunlin County are grown in small rectangular plots defined by roadways and networks of irrigation canals. The exception is sugarcane, which was grown widely in the county in the early 1900s when Japan controlled Taiwan and established an expansive network of sugarcane plantations in the southwestern part of the country. These plantations were consolidated into the Taiwan Sugar Corporation after the conclusion of World War II, and the large plot sizes in the farmland north of Baozhong in the image above persist as a legacy of this period.

While the amount of sugarcane cultivated in Taiwan has declined in recent decades and many of the fields have transitioned to other crops, Taiwan Sugar Corporation still raises sugarcane around Baozhong. The company operates a railway that transports harvested cane to nearby Huwei, site of one of just a few remaining sugar refineries on the island. Although Taiwan also once had a large network of sugar railways that serviced thousands of kilometers of track and dozens of sugar refineries, the line that serves Huwei is the only one on the island that remains active.

Farm fields around Xiluo appear a darker shade of green than other parts of the image because of shade nets.
Farmers around Xiluo often use shade nets to protect crops from the elements.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison

Another area that stands out in the mosaicked agricultural landscape of Yunlin is located around Xiluo (above). Here the fields take on an unusual greenish-blue hue, largely because of the ubiquity of shade nets. Farmers use the nets to protect crops from heat, sun, heavy rains, and pests. They are generally deployed for specialty crops such as vegetables, fruit, and flowers. This area contrasts with the darker green region in the lower right of the first image, where rice is the dominant crop.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.

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Top 5 Free Data Recovery Software of 2026

In today’s digital world, data loss from your PC has become a common and frustrating issue. Whether due to accidental deletion, formatting, system failures, or any other reason, losing important files and folders from your Windows computer can put you in trouble. Fortunately, there are several free data recovery software tools available that you can try to recover your lost files in Windows without spending money. Choosing the right recovery software depends on your data loss situation, device type, ease of use, recovery limits, and required features.

In this article, we will explore the top 5 free data recovery software of 2026, their features, pros & cons, and best use cases to help you choose the right tool. Let’s get started!

Why Do You Need Data Recovery Software?

 While there are several DIY methods, like backups, which can help you recover deleted data, third-party recovery software offers a more powerful, reliable, and versatile solution. These free data recovery tools are popular because of certain features, including:

  • Cost-Effective Solution: Free tools let you recover lost or deleted data without any upfront cost, making them ideal for students and budget-conscious users.
  • Quick and Easy Recovery: Most free software offers simple interfaces and guided steps, which allow even beginners to recover files in a few simple clicks.
  • Supports Multiple Devices: Many recovery tools support data recovery from hard drives, SSDs, USB drives, memory cards, and even external storage devices.
  • Safe and Non-Destructive: Good recovery tools perform read-only operations, ensuring your existing data remains safe during the recovery process.
  • Preview Before Recovery: Many tools offer an in-built preview feature that lets you preview the recoverable files before restoring them, helping you recover only what you actually need.

2026 Guide: Top 5 Free Data Recovery Software Picks

Here are our best 05 free data recovery software tools which you can use to restore your deleted files on your Windows PC:

01: Stellar Data Recovery Free

Stellar Data Recovery Free is a versatile, free data recovery software that supports the recovery of files that are accidentally deleted or lost due to formatting and other reasons. The software supports recovery of deleted files of various types, including documents, photos, videos, and emails from multiple storage devices, including hard drives, SSDs, USB drives, and memory cards. The free version allows you to restore deleted files up to 1 GB without any additional cost. Its preview feature lets you preview the recoverable files before restoring them. 

Pros

  • Offers a clean and intuitive interface, which allows you to perform data recovery easily without requiring any technical knowledge or expertise.
  • Provides preview feature before recovery, enabling users to verify files and recover only necessary data, saving time and storage space.
  • Compatible with both Windows and macOS systems, making it a versatile solution for users across different operating platforms.

Cons

  • The free version supports data recovery of only up to 1GB of data, which may not be sufficient for users with large data loss scenarios.
  • Some advanced features, like partition recovery and unlimited data recovery, are restricted to the paid version, limiting full functionality access.
  • Deep scan feature can be time-consuming, especially when scanning large drives or severely corrupted storage devices with extensive data.

Best Use Case

Ideal for recovering recently deleted files, documents, photos, or videos from laptops, desktops, USB drives, or memory cards efficiently.

02: EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard Free

EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard Free is a powerful data recovery software, mainly known for its simple interface and high recovery success rate. You can use this free data recovery tool to recover deleted, formatted, or lost files from multiple storage devices, including hard drives, SSDs, USB drives, and memory cards. It offers both quick and deep scan modes, allowing you to recover recently deleted files as well as data lost due to complex issues like partition loss or system crashes.

Pros

  • Supports recovery of deleted files of various types, including documents, photos, videos, and emails, from differen storage devices.
  • Compatible with multiple storage devices, including HDDs, SSDs, USB drives, memory cards, and even formatted or corrupted partitions.
  • High recovery success rate and reliable performance make it a trusted choice among users demanding data recovery.

Cons

  • Advanced features like unlimited recovery and bootable media are available only in paid version, limiting full functionality in free version.
  • You may sometimes find upgrade prompts, encouraging the purchase of the premium version during the recovery process.

Best Use Case

Suitable for beginners needing a simple, guided recovery solution with reliable performance for small-scale data loss situations without technical expertise required.

03: Disk Drill Free

Disk Drill is a modern and feature-rich free data recovery software that you can use to recover deleted files on both Windows and macOS devices. The software is widely known for its clean interface and powerful scanning algorithms that combine quick scan and deep scan methods. You can use this software to recover deleted photos, videos, documents, and other types of files from various internal or external storage media. It also offers a file preview before recovery, allowing you to verify data before saving it on your device.

Pros

  • Supports recovery of deleted files from multiple storage devices, including HDDs, SSDs, USB drives, memory cards, and even mobile devices.
  • Includes the Recovery Vault feature that helps protect deleted files and improves chances of successful data recovery in future situations.
  • Supports multiple file systems like NTFS, FAT32, EXT, and HFS+, ensuring compatibility with different operating systems and storage devices.

Cons

  • The free version limits data recovery size, which may not be sufficient for users with large data loss situations.
  • Advanced recovery features and unlimited data restoration require upgrading to the paid version, significantly limiting functionality in the free version.
  • Performance may slow down your system during scanning due to high resource usage, especially on older or low-performance computers.

Best Use Case

Ideal for quick recovery of recently deleted files, photos, videos, or documents from personal computers, USB drives, or memory cards.

04: PhotoRec (with TestDisk)

PhotoRec, bundled with TestDisk, is a powerful open-source data recovery tool which you can use to recover files deleted due to several reasons, including formatting, damaged storage device, etc. Unlike typical free data recovery tools, it works through a command-line interface, which may seem complex to beginners. It is the best option to recover files deleted from severely corrupted, formatted, or damaged drives. Since it is completely free and open-source, there are no recovery limits.

Pros

  • Completely free and open-source software with no recovery limits, making it ideal for unlimited data recovery without any cost or restrictions.
  • Works on multiple platforms, including Windows, macOS, and Linux, providing flexibility for users across various operating environments.
  • Supports a wide range of file systems and file formats, ensuring compatibility across different devices and operating systems.

Cons

  • Does not provide file preview feature, making it challenging to identify and select specific files before the recovery process begins.
  • Lacks modern graphical interface, which may discourage users who prefer visually guided recovery tools with step-by-step instructions.

Best Use Case

Suitable for advanced users or IT professionals who need powerful, unlimited recovery tool for deep scanning and complex data recovery scenarios.

05: Recuva

Recuva, developed by Piriform, is a lightweight and completely free data recovery software designed primarily for Windows users. The software supports data recovery from hard drives, USB drives, memory cards, and other storage devices. This tool offers a wizard-based interface that guides users through the recovery process step-by-step, making it ideal for beginners. It can also perform deep scan of your storage device for locating hard-to-find files. Unlike many competitors, Recuva provides unlimited free recovery, making it a great choice for users who want a no-cost solution.

Pros

  • Simple and beginner-friendly interface with a guided wizard, making file recovery easy even for users with minimal technical knowledge or experience.
  • Supports efficient recovery from multiple storage devices, including hard drives, USB drives, memory cards, and external storage devices.
  • Includes deep scan feature for locating hard-to-find files, improving the chances of recovering data that standard scans might miss.

Cons

  • Deep scan process can be slow, especially when scanning large drives or searching for files in complex data loss scenarios.
  • Limited advanced recovery capabilities make it less effective for recovering data from severely corrupted, formatted, or damaged storage devices.

Best Use Case

Ideal for recovering recently deleted files, photos, documents, or videos from Windows computers, USB drives, or memory cards quickly.

Conclusion

Data loss on your device can be a distressing experience, especially if the lost data is valuable. Thanks for the aforementioned free data recovery software tools, which allow recovery of data lost from any internal or external storage media. Whether you are a beginner or an advanced user, there is a suitable option available for every need. Carefully check the features of these tools and select the one that best fits your needs. 

While free tools have limitations, they are often sufficient for recovering critical files. For larger recoveries, upgrading to a paid version may be necessary.


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4 ways the war in Iran has weakened the United States in the great power game

The Conversation logo

China and Russia may be the real beneficiaries of Washington’s latest Middle East conflict.

“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

Napoleon Bonaparte’s maxim may well have been in the minds of policymakers in Moscow and Beijing these past weeks, as the U.S. war in Iran dragged on. And now that a 14-day ceasefire between Tehran and Washington is in effect – with both sides claiming “victory” – Russian and Chinese leaders still have an opportunity to profit from what many see as America’s latest folly in the Middle East.

Throughout the weekslong conflict, China and Russia struck a delicate balance. Both declined to give Iran – seen to a varying degree as an ally of both nations – their full-throated support or sink any real costs into the conflict.

Instead, they opted for limited assistance in the form of small-scale intelligence and diplomatic support.

As a scholar of international security and great power politics I believe that is for good reason. Beijing and Moscow were fully aware that Iran could not “win” against the combined military might of the United States and Israel. Rather, Iran just needed to survive to serve the interests of Washington’s main geopolitical rivals.

Below are four ways in which the U.S. war in Iran has damaged Washington’s position in the great power rivalries of the 21st century.

1. Losing the influence war in the Middle East

As I explore in my book “Defending Frenemies,” the U.S. has long struggled to balance competing objectives in the Middle East. During the Cold War, this meant limiting the Soviet Union’s influence in the region, while contending with the development of nuclear weapons by two troublesome allies, Israel and Pakistan.

By the 2020s, the priorities in Washington were aimed at restricting the influence of the U.S.’s great power rivals – China and to a lesser degree Russia – in the Middle East.

Yet under Presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, China and Russia have sought to increase their footprint in the region through a variety of formal alliances and informal measures.

For Russia, this took the form of aligning with Iran, while also partnering with Tehran to prop up the now-ousted regime of President Bashar Assad during the Syrian civil war. Meanwhile, China increased its diplomatic profile in the Middle East, notably by acting as a mediator as Saudi Arabia and Iran restored diplomatic ties in 2023.

The irony of the latest Iran war is that it follows a period in which circumstances were unfavorable to Russian and Chinese aims of increasing their influence in the Middle East.

The fall of Assad in December 2024 deprived Russia of its one reliable ally in the region. And Trump’s May 2025 tour of the Gulf states, in which he secured major technology and economic deals with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain, was aimed at countering China’s growing economic and diplomatic influence in those countries.

With Washington perceived as an increasingly unreliable protector, the Gulf states may seek greater security and economic cooperation elsewhere.

2. Taking US eyes off other strategic goals

In expanding military, diplomatic and economic ties in the Middle East, Russia and China over the past two decades were exploiting a desire by Washington to move its assets and attention away from the region following two costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Trump’s decision to wage war against Iran directly contradicts the national security strategy his administration released in November 2025. According to the strategy, the administration would prioritize the Western Hemisphere and the Indo-Pacific, while the Middle East’s importance “will recede.”

In co-launching a war in Tehran with Israel, without any prior consultation with Washington’s other allies, Trump has shown a complete disregard for their strategic and economic concerns. NATO, already riven by Trump’s repeated threats to the alliance and designs on Greenland, has now shown further signs of internal divisions.

That offers benefits for China and Russia, which have long sought to capitalize on cracks between America and its allies.

The irony, again, is that the war in Iran came as Trump’s vision of the U.S. as the hegemonic power in the Western Hemisphere was making advances. International law and legitimacy concerns aside, Washington had ousted a thorn in its side with Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and replaced him with a more compliant leader.

3. Disproportionate economic fallout

Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, where some 20% of the world’s oil passes, was as predictable as it was destructive for U.S. interests.

But for Russia, this meant higher oil prices that boosted its war economy. It also led to the temporary but ongoing easing of U.S. sanctions, which has provided Moscow an indispensable lifeline after years of economic pressure over the war in Ukraine.

While a prolonged closure and extensive damage to oil and natural gas infrastructure in Iran and the Gulf states no doubt hurts China’s energy security and economy, these were risks Xi appears willing to accept, at least for a time.

And by building up a domestic oil reserve and diversifying energy sources to include solar, electric batteries and coal, China is far better positioned to weather a prolonged global energy crisis than the U.S. Indeed, Beijing has made strides in recent year to encourage domestic consumption as a source of economic growth, rather than be so reliant on global trade. That may have given China some protection during the global economic shock caused by the Iran war, as well as push the economy further down its own track.

The more the U.S. loses control over events in the strait, the more it loses influence in the region – especially as Iran appears to be placing restrictions on ships from unfriendly nations.

4. Loss of global leadership

Trump’s willingness to abandon talks to go to war, and the contradictory rhetoric he has employed throughout the Iran conflict, has weakened the perception of the U.S. as an honest broker.

That provides a massive soft power boost for Beijing. It was China that pressed Iran to accept the 14-day ceasefire proposal brokered by Pakistan. Indeed, China has slowly chipped away at America’s longtime status as global mediator of first resort.

Beijing has successfully mediated in the past between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and it attempted to do the same with Russia and Ukraine and Israel and the Palestinians.

In general, the Iran war adds weight to Beijing’s worldview that the U.S.-led liberal international order is over. Even if China benefited at some level from the war continuing, its decision to help broker the ceasefire shows that China is increasingly taking on the mantle of global leadership that the U.S. used to own.

And for Russia, the Iran war and the rupture between Trump and America’s NATO allies over their lack of support for it, shift world attention and U.S. involvement from the war in Ukraine.


“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. 

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When To See a Bipolar Disorder Therapist for Support

Bipolar disorder does not announce itself with a single, obvious sign. It builds gradually through shifting moods, disrupted sleep, and strained connections that slowly chip away at stability. Many people wait too long before reaching out, often because they are unsure whether what they feel warrants professional attention. The truth is, earlier support tends to produce better results. This post breaks down the specific moments when seeing a therapist becomes less of an option and more of a necessity.

Mood Episodes Are Becoming More Frequent

Everyone experiences emotional ups and downs from time to time. That is part of being human. But there is a meaningful difference between a rough week and a pattern of intense mood shifts that cycle with increasing speed. Manic highs that fuel sleepless nights, followed by depressive crashes that make getting out of bed feel impossible, point to something clinical. A mental health professional can evaluate these patterns and determine whether a formal treatment plan is needed.

Often, the people closest to someone notice these shifts before the individual does. A partner might point out erratic spending during a manic stretch, or a friend might flag sudden social withdrawal. That outside perspective matters. Working with a bipolar disorder therapist gives individuals a reliable framework for managing these cycles. Specialists in this area use evidence-based methods to help clients recognize triggers, build coping mechanisms, and develop routines that promote emotional balance over time.

Relationships Are Suffering

Mood instability ripples outward. During manic periods, impulsive remarks or restless irritability can damage even the strongest bonds. Depressive stretches often bring isolation, leaving loved ones feeling shut out. Over months or years, these cycles create a pattern of rupture and repair that exhausts everyone involved.

A therapist offers a contained space to examine how these emotional extremes affect the people around us. Practical tools, like communication exercises and emotional regulation techniques, make a real difference. In some cases, joint sessions with a partner or family member help rebuild trust and establish healthier ways of supporting one another.

Daily Responsibilities Feel Unmanageable

Missed deadlines, ignored bills, and mounting household tasks are clear signs that symptoms have started affecting everyday functioning. Mania can produce intense bursts of activity that burn out quickly, leaving projects half-finished. Depression strips away drive entirely, turning even minor obligations into exhausting ordeals.

Work and Academic Performance

A noticeable drop in output at a job or in coursework deserves attention. Difficulty in concentrating, gaps in memory, and unpredictable energy levels all interfere with consistent performance. A clinician experienced with mood disorders can help design strategies for staying on track during difficult stretches, including structured scheduling and energy management techniques.

Self-Medication or Risky Behavior Has Started

Reaching for alcohol, substances, or other high-risk outlets to blunt emotional extremes is a serious red flag. These habits offer short-term numbness but deepen instability over time. They also raise the likelihood of developing a co-occurring substance use condition, which complicates treatment significantly.

Therapeutic intervention targets the underlying emotional pain that fuels these choices. Cognitive behavioral techniques, consistent mood monitoring, and coordinated medication management work together to reduce reliance on harmful coping habits. Seeking support before these behaviors become deeply rooted improves recovery outcomes considerably.

A Previous Diagnosis Exists, but Treatment Has Lapsed

It is surprisingly common for people to step away from treatment after a period of stability. Feeling good can create a false sense of resolution, as though the condition has somehow passed. Bipolar disorder, however, is a lifelong condition. Symptoms almost always resurface without ongoing care.

Re-engaging with a mental health provider after time away is a practical and encouraged step. Treatment plans can be adjusted to reflect new life circumstances, updated research, or changes in symptom presentation. Consistent clinical engagement lowers the risk of severe episodes and reduces the chance of hospitalization.

Suicidal Thoughts or Self-Harm Urges Arise

This is the most critical signal, and it calls for immediate action. Depressive episodes tied to bipolar disorder carry a heightened risk of suicidal thinking. No one should sit with those thoughts alone. Crisis hotlines, emergency services, and urgent therapy appointments all exist for exactly this reason.

After a crisis passes, sustained therapeutic support helps build a safety plan and identify warning signs before they escalate again.

Conclusion

Asking for help is one of the most grounded, self-aware decisions a person can make. Whether mood episodes are accelerating, personal connections are fraying, or basic responsibilities have become overwhelming, a qualified therapist provides clarity and direction. Each session offers a chance to learn new tools, process difficult emotions, and build a more stable foundation. That first appointment is not the end of a struggle; it is the beginning of a more informed, supported way of living with bipolar disorder.

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Choosing the Right Medical Red Light Therapy System

There is a growing interest in medical red light therapy for improving health. Choosing the right device is not that easy. The effectiveness and potential use for home or clinic can be affected by several factors. Both individuals and healthcare providers need to evaluate their choices before acting on them.

Understanding Red Light Therapy

Red light treatment includes exposure to particular wavelengths of light. This therapy serves as an aid in recovery, minimizes pain, and enhances the appearance of the skin. Devices come in different sizes, power, and functionality. Understanding these distinctions allows users to make informed decisions about medical red light therapy systems.

Assessing Intended Use

Identifying the primary purpose for acquiring a red light therapy system is essential. Some units are suitable for home use, while others fit clinical environments. Home devices focus on convenience and ease of operation. Professional tools may offer higher intensity and advanced settings suitable for practitioners.

Evaluating Wavelength and Power Output

Wavelength is a critical factor in therapeutic efficacy. The majority of systems function in the 600 to 900 nanometer range. Each wavelength range targets varied tissues and conditions. Power output determines the depth and efficiency of what you’re treating; power output is measured in mW/cm2. Some systems have settings that enable users to customize sessions according to needs.

Examining Safety and Certification

When deciding on medical equipment, safety continues to be a primary concern. Therapy systems receive certification for their adherence to known health and electrical safety standards. Certifications from respected organizations can instill confidence in the user. By reading the product documentation, you can make sure the device can fulfil these needs. Check for components that enable heat regulation to ensure enhanced user safety.

Comparing Device Size and Design

There are different types of therapy devices that providers offer. Smaller units are for targeted treatments and ease of travel. Large panels are good for people looking for a broader treatment area or treating multiple regions at once. Design aspects, including adjustable stands or flexible arms, offer added ease and comfort while using the device.

Investigating Treatment Protocols

Many devices offer pre-defined protocols for some common issues. These settings can be used to simplify use and to help achieve reproducible results. Meanwhile, some devices allow you to manually adjust them, providing more control over session length and intensity to more experienced users. Glancing through the available settings allows users to find a system that matches their preferences. 

Considering Ease of Use

User-friendly design ensures therapy remains accessible to everyone. Clear instructions, intuitive controls, and simple interfaces support effective operation. Devices with minimal setup and maintenance requirements save time and reduce frustration. Evaluating these aspects can improve the therapy experience for all users.

Reviewing Customer Support and Warranty

A dependable customer support can help with queries and concerns during the use of the product. Check the warranty coverage and ensure it protects you against defects or malfunctions. Manufacturers that offer responsive support when needed and set clear policies show that they are committed to customer service. Users get a sense of security in their purchase decisions once they browse through these services before buying.

Analyzing Cost and Value

Comparing models that are priced similarly helps when trying to identify what works best for your budget. Basic functions and durability might be sacrificed in favor of a lower price, or, on the other hand, you can pay more for a more sophisticated piece of technology, with a longer warranty. Maintain a balance between affordability and functionality, to guarantee a value-for-money investment.

Seeking Peer and Professional Guidance

Users and medical professionals provide valuable feedback. Expert opinions, evaluations, and endorsements tend to expose either positive or negative characteristics of individual models. Consulting with a medical professional also ensures that the selected system aligns with health needs and safety standards. Getting a variety of viewpoints helps make good choices.

Conclusion

Choosing a medical red light therapy system can be difficult. However, paying attention to safety, performance, usability, and support can help users figure out the right device that suits their individual needs. Selecting the right device optimizes therapy outcomes, which leads to more satisfaction. All in all, be it for personal or professional use, with an informed decision, people can leverage the positive effects of red light therapy, hassle-free.


“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. 

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Gauging ‘Independence’ from Trump

Tuesday’s Senate confirmation hearing for Kevin Warsh, the recent forced resignations from the Cabinet and the poorly veiled entreaty to two Supreme Court justices to step down all point up anew the power of Donald Trump to name a team that is more committed to him than to doing the job.

Trump has a free hand, of course, in naming those who work in the White House and who offer direct counsel on policy and messaging. But things get messy fast when the job at hand is supposed to involve a certain distant expertise not governed by Trump’s expansive gut, whether health, education, defense or monetary policy.

The key question for senators at all the Cabinet-level confirmation hearings has been the same: Will you act independently of Trump or merely as his tool to dominate yet another area of government?

Despite a messy war with Iran that is goosing oil prices globally, Trump still expects that Warsh will bring about an immediate and significant drop in the basic borrowing rates that look to economists and financial experts as an invitation to sustained inflation or worse. Trump wants the investor class to have access to cheap loans and seems to ignore the predictable effect on consumer markets.

Quite apart from any judgments about Jerome Powell as Fed chair concerning monetary rates or economic forecasts, Powell will be remembered for standing up to Trump – which is why Trump wants him replaced even if any confirmation is delayed.

 Upset in the Cabinet

By contrast, other than for their publicly embarrassing confrontations with Congress, no one really understands why Kristi Noem was ousted as Homeland Security Secretary or Pam Bondi was forced out as a willing accomplice at using the Justice Department to pursue Trump’s perceived political enemies. It’s not as if any policies suddenly changed as a result.

Nor does this week’s departure of Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer spell any policy change, though it eliminates some bad publicity for her behaviors, a fate that may consume Kash Patel’s time as director of the FBI as well.

From all that is publicly shared about Warsh, a prominent economist, investment banker and former Federal Reserve governor who worked on the  navigating the 2008 financial crisis, he would be the type of candidate to sail through the Republican-majority Senate confirmation process, despite criticisms from ranking minority committee member, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.

The sticking point is his explanation of “independence,”

As with Todd Blanche, the former Trump defense lawyer serving as interim Attorney General, Warsh sees little wrong with Trump expressing strong opinions about how he, Warsh, would do the job at the Fed. Blanche says Trump should have opinions about who gets prosecuted by Justice, and that Justice should heed the advice. Warsh was seeking to be careful at his hearing about just how far to show deference to Trump as dictator of national monetary policy – an area set by law for review independent of the partisan concerns of a president.

Decisions by the Fed are supposed to reflect technical economic readings, not the political needs of a president facing an adverse mid-term election for a would-be quick-fix rate drop. But Trump wants the “lowest rates in the world” so badly that he has ordered the Justice Department to launch criminal investigation of Powell’s management of construction – and Fed board member Lisa Cook — in hope of forcing him out. Courts have ruled twice now that search warrants were unjustified because they reflected political concern, not crime.  At least one senator, Thom Tillis, R-NC, says he won’t support Warsh while unjustified charges still loom for Powell, himself a Trump appointee to the Fed chair.

No economic measure has improved for an incoming Warsh. Indeed, the war with Iran, tariffs, a budget bloated for deportation and military adventurism, and global pricing and shipping uncertainties will make any legit reduction in Fed rates more difficult to achieve. So, we know now that Warsh will become a focal point for whether Trump gets his way.

Disdaining Expertise

The problem for senators was crafting a way to gauge protestations of “independence” by Warsh or even on the questions involving economic direction at a time of so much uncertainty. It was easier to focus on the White House’s vocal anti-Powell campaign.

Indeed, senators questioned Warsh’s undisclosed personal investments and whether he has complied with required ethics declarations, his willingness to back limits over cybercurrency and AI, and the pace of Fed decision-making, but the main question kept coming back to queries that tried repeatedly to get at the independence issue.

Warsh’s attempts to say that he would not routinely follow Trump’s open demands on interest rates drew a healthy amount of skepticism from senators who noted that Trump makes clear his expectation of appointees.

What does not get discussion is how Trump goes out of way to disdain expertise in reviewing appointments. The problem with using loyalty as the only measurement consistently is creating continuing problems for Trump in health policies that kick people off Medicaid and close hospitals, in deportation campaigns that overrun legal boundaries, in environmental policies that ignore pollution to promote more oil drilling and on through the Cabinet positions.

There is too little sustained focus on the aims of these agencies, and a lot on the willingness of agencies to reinterpret their own authority to evade accountability.

In monetary policy, as with other areas, Trump starts with the desired conclusion and then skips over the available evidence – much as seemed to have happened in launching this war with Iran. For the Fed, he has decided that lower rates are what he needs, without regard to the voluminous economic review that the Fed undertakes.

The “independence” of the Fed is supposed to guarantee that expertise, not political ends, govern.


“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. 

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Multiple Days of Severe Weather from Thunderstorms and Wildfires