There is no getting around the fact that, in the last year, code has gotten much cheaper to create. AI is able to generate
reams and reams of code, often of reasonably decent quality, incredibly quickly. There is no point in pretending that
this isn’t the case.
At times, when confronted with this admittedly uncomfortable fact, I have seen people I respect say something like
“coding was never the problem.�
While I appreciate the sentiment, I don’t completely agree with that: certainly coding was at least part of the problem.
And that part of the problem has shrunk significantly with the advent of effective AI coding tools.
So what does raw coding becoming less important mean for software developers, people who, in the past, prided themselves
(and often compared themselves) on their ability to code?
One thing I see is that it means that understanding code has become more expensive. This is because when reams
and reams of code are generated, rather than emerging painfully from a particular programmer’s fingers, there is no
understanding of that code.
In as much as understanding that code needs to exist, it has to be done after the code is written, by reading the code.
Note that conventional wisdom is that reading someone else’s code is harder than writing your own code.
Some AI enthusiasts say “Who cares, you don’t understand the output of compilers.�
I think that is a category error for multiple reasons:
Compilers are deterministic; LLMs are, by design, not
Compiler workflows retain their original source code; LLM workflows typically do not
Compiler output is to a narrowly constrained domain (machine code); LLM output is not (generalized software)
I maintain that, in most cases and certainly for mission-critical software, developers still need to understand the
underlying code even if it is generated by an LLM.
And if code is generated by an LLM there is a stark danger: the LLM can produce code far faster than you, or anyone else,
can understand it. This is why I recommend incremental use of LLMs rather than allowing them to generate massive changelists
that neither you, nor anyone else, can understand.
(There are times when this can be appropriate, such as in a mechanical refactor, but it is extremely dangerous when new
semantics are being introduced into a code base.)
One movie scene that has been consistently coming back to me as I have watched AI garner more and more attention
is The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
from Disney’s movie Fantasia.
In this scene the apprentice decides to use magic to assist in the drudgery of cleaning. He enchants a broom which
then proceeds to start cleaning things up. Things appear to be going swimmingly for a while, until the broom starts
cleaning more and more vigorously, reaching a point where things start going swimmingly literally.
The chaos is resolved when the Sorcerer reappears and asserts control over the situation, glaring at the apprentice for
his foolishness.
This seems like an apt metaphor for the AI era: you want to be a sorcerer and not an apprentice.
Humans, generally, have a poor grasp of geometric and exponential curves.
(This is why they believe in fairy tales such as compound interest.)
The core danger of code being cheap is complexity, which I assert, without proof, tends to grow
at least geometrically and often exponentially with the size of a system.
Before LLMs there were prolific human coders.
Perhaps you have worked with one: they can write a lot of code.
I have seen prolific coders who lack a proper fear of complexity heap more and more code on top of an existing problem
until the whole system collapses into an unmodifiable steady state, where any change creates as many bugs as it fixes.
LLMs are incapable of fear of complexity, and are prolific coders.
To address this danger of LLM-generated code, I propose the subtractive, constraining engineer:
This engineer says no, closely examines LLM output, suggests simplifications and
generally retains a firm hand when dealing with LLM-generated code.
Rather than priding themselves on the code they create, they pride themselves on the code (and layers) they remove from
or prevent from entering systems.
This ethos is more sculptor and less builder.
Where the builder ethos still applies, to an extent, is at the system design level: a good engineer will need to know
how to compose components effectively to create systems. However, even here, I think that the subtractive mindset will
be useful: removing unnecessary components and system boundaries to simplify system deployment and inter-component interactions,
etc.
The subtractive engineer is a different kind of engineer than most coders have been in the past. I will admit that I
have always been sympathetic to the subtractive engineer mindset: I don’t mind saying no, I don’t mind polishing existing
systems rather than heroic rewrites, etc.
But, admitting my own biases, I believe this approach is a productive way to engage with LLMs that retains the art of
computer programming and properly acknowledges a dual reality: code has gotten much cheaper to create and complexity
remains our apex predator.
People across the country are offering a service on Facebook
Marketplace to disable the recording light on Ray-Ban Meta
glasses. They call it “Stealth Mode.” Joanna paid $100 for the
modification and went inside the growing business of turning smart
glasses into covert cameras. She investigates who is doing it,
whether it’s legal and what some are doing to try and stop it.
Of course there’s a market for this. But the true chef’s kiss is that the market to find people who offer the service is on ... Facebook Marketplace. Using a Meta platform to find people to hack a Meta device so you can surreptitiously record strangers. So perfectly Meta.
An artist’s rendering of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 lunar lander on the surface of the Moon. Graphic: Blue Origin
In the wake of the catastrophic explosion of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, NASA wants to find an alternative launcher for the first of the company’s Blue Moon landers.
In an interview with FOX Business on Thursday, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman described a “whole of government response” to the May 28 incident, which badly damaged Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral. “We are also de-coupling the lander from the launch vehicle and the pad itself,” he said.
“NASA is laser focused on the lander because we’re laser focused on our mission to return astronauts to the surface of the moon before 2028, and we’re gonna be able to keep that lander in development, progressing, so it’s available for our test mission in 2027, which is Artemis 3, and potentially available to meet our landing objectives in 2028,” Isaacman said.
“It’s a setback that happens in this business. It’s incredibly complicated. A rocket is a controlled explosion, whether you’re going to Earth orbit, 17,500 miles an hour, escape velocity, 25,000 miles an hour, it’s an awful lot of energy, things will happen. We have to learn from it and be ready to move forward.”
An agency spokesperson confirmed to Spaceflight Now that NASA would like to see the launches of the Blue Moon Mark 1 cargo lander and potentially the Blue Moon Mark 2 crewed lander move to a rocket that’s not New Glenn.
The New Glenn static fire anomaly triggered what was “the largest explosion” seen at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, according to Col. Brian Chatman, the commander of Space Launch Delta 45, which encompasses Cape Canaveral and Patrick Space Force Base. Chatman and officials with Blue Origin confirmed the night of the explosion that there were no injuries or fatalities as a result of the blast.
Isaacman and several senior engineers at NASA traveled to Florida the following day to speak with Blue Origin engineers and to survey the damage directly. At the time, Isaacman pledged NASA’s support of Blue Origin in helping to find the root cause and get back to launching New Glenn rockets “as soon as safely possible.”
“We have been saying for months at NASA that we are not going to sit on our hands and wait for the capabilities necessary to achieve the nation’s most pressing objectives,” Isaacman wrote in a post on X. “We are going to take an active role alongside our partners, just as we did in the 1960s, to overcome setbacks, remove obstacles, and deliver the intended outcomes.”
An aerial view of Launch Complex 36 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station showing the aftermath of the New Glenn explosion last Thursday. The rocket itself virtually disintegrated in the blast leaving its transporter-erector in wreckage on the concrete pad’s surface. The large gantry suffered structural damage near its base while the mangled remains of a lightning tower are visible to the right of the pad surface. A large processing hangar (at left) came through the blast without major damage, as did propellant tanks and distribution systems. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now
On Monday, June 1, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp also took to social media to share with the public that the pads propellant storage tanks were “all in good shape” and that the large support tower “can be repaired in place rather than torn down and replaced.”
Limp concluded his post by stating, “We will fly again before the end of this year.”
Not fast enough
Just days prior to the explosion at Launch Complex 36, Isaacman and others at NASA held a news conference to tout multiple missions that will help either directly build or test technologies needed to support a Moon Base at the south pole of the Moon.
Multiple missions were awarded to Blue Origin and its Blue Moon Mk.1 cargo lander, including the delivery of lunar terrain vehicles to the lunar surface to allow greater mobility for future astronauts on Moon landing missions, like Artemis 4, which is planned for 2028.
The Blue Moon Mk.2 crew lander, a larger version of the Mark 1 lander that includes a crew habitation volume, is slated to launch as part of the Artemis 3 mission as soon as mid-2027. NASA wants to see both it and SpaceX’s Starship lander dock with the agency’s Orion spacecraft to help buy down risk for future lunar landings.
An artist’s impression of an Apollo-era lunar module (left) and moon landers being built by Blue Origin (center) and SpaceX (right). Graphic: NASA Office of Inspector General
Blue Origin officials have said that the Blue Moon landers were designed and optimized to fly as a payload on the New Glenn rocket.
“One of the best things about that was being able to work with the New Glenn Team. Having the launch vehicle as the same company’s vehicle as the lander has allowed us to optimize the entire stack, the entire design,” said John Couluris, senior vice president of Lunar Permanence at Blue Origin during it’s NG-3 launch broadcast in April. “So we’ve gotten a lot more performance out of our lander thanks to New Glenn.”
During an appearance at CNBC’s CEO Summit earlier this week, Isaacman said the mass and volume of the Blue Moon landers leaves few options for alternative vehicles. “In terms of heavy lift, you know, real heavy lift, you’ve got, SpaceX and Blue Origin, and obviously one of them is down a pad right now.”
The Blue Moon landers were tailored to fit within the seven-meter diameter fairing of a New Glenn rocket. The Falcon Heavy payload fairing has a diameter of 5.2 meters and although the company has developed a taller version, it has not revealed any wider options. Additionally, SpaceX’s launch pads are not equipped to service a hydrogen-fueled lander like Blue Moon.
I look forward to pseudoscience like this finally getting some airtime on 60 Minutes. For 58 long years the program has been hopelessly biased toward actual science.
Back in 2011, when he was a tech columnist at The New York Times, Nick Bilton figured out that Apple was soon going to launch an Apple branded-television set, with no remote control. You’d just talk to it. This made no sense of course, as I pointed out.
Scott Pelley, in a statement posted on Instagram (which I’ll quote in full, as the original is locked behind a dickwall if you’re not signed in to an Instagram account):
There has never been anything in America like 60 Minutes.
The Sunday tradition is the most successful program of any kind in
history. For more than a decade, its innovative growth on every
major online platform has extended its reach to countless millions
around the world. This spring, at the end of our 58th season, 60
Minutes grew rapidly with an unheard-of 9% jump in viewers on CBS.
“60” has been the number-one program in America for decades
because our beloved audience finds integrity, quality, and
humanity in our stories. When stewardship of the program passed to
my colleagues and me, our responsibility was to expand
energetically into a new age of media technology while preserving
the values our audience expects. Now, the new owner of our network
is casting this legend aside, apparently to curry a moment of
favor with the Trump administration.
The waste is heartbreaking.
Last month, 60 Minutes lost its DNA when our entire senior
leadership and two of our best on-air correspondents were cruelly
fired without cause. Good people were silenced because they stood
up for our audience. They stood for fairness against the forces of
political bias; they stood for professionalism against chaos.
For my part, new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods
and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to
include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I
have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them.
Recently, politicians have been invited to choose correspondents
for interviews on the broadcast. Giving politicians control over
60 Minutes interviews is not how honest journalism is done.
Finally, incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new
management have wreaked havoc. In a case involving one of my
stories, the entire program came within 19 minutes of not
getting on the air at all.
At 60 Minutes, we have fought harder than anyone knows to save the
program that became an American icon. We owed that to our millions
of viewers. I am deeply moved by the thousands of wishes we have
received to “keep up the good fight.” Most of my colleagues at CBS
News are still in that fight. But now the collapse of values at
the top has become untenable. The leadership of 60 Minutes is no
longer recognizable. The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I
must leave as well.
I depart after 37 years at CBS with one emotion — a heart
brimming with gratitude for the men and women of CBS News who
encouraged and enriched my work, very often at the risk of
their own lives. I pray for a day when those people and their
ideals are honored again — a day when sanity, competence, and
courage return.
Paramount’s “Press Express” page promoting 60 Minutes still lists all eight correspondent from the 2025–2026 season, the program’s 58th. (Perhaps they fired the person responsible for keeping the cast page up to date.) In the order they appear on Paramount’s listing:
A big part of the brand for 60 Minutes is that the show doesn’t change. Someone who last saw it 40 years ago would instantly recognize it today. There’s no silly fucking theme song. There’s no glossy set. There’s a ticking stopwatch, a logotype set in Microgramma/Eurostile, and correspondents sit against a black background. And correspondents measure their tenure not by years but by decades. Of the original hosts, Harry Reasoner was there for 23 years (and left the cast only upon his death at 68 in 1991), Dan Rather was there for 38 years, Mike Wallace for 40, and Morley Safer for 48. 48 years! Of the current hosts, Lesley Stahl has been there since 1991. I graduated high school that year.
In just six months since David Ellison bought CBS and installed Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News, they’ve fired or lost half their on-air talent, and of the four who remain, Wertheim and O’Donnell are only part-time (O’Donnell’s title is “CBS News senior correspondent”, not “60 Minutes correspondent”), Whitaker is 74 years old, and Stahl is 84.
Behind the cameras, longtime executive producer Bill Owens resigned in protest of corporate interference a year ago, in the cowardly run-up to Ellison’s acquisition of CBS. Last week Weiss fired Owens’s successor, Tanya Simon, who had been with the program for 30 years, replacing her with Nick Bilton, who not only had never worked at 60 Minutes, but has never worked in TV news period. Weiss also fired executive editor Draggan Mihailovich, who’d been at the show for 28 years.
It seems untenable for Stahl or Whitaker to remain on the show. Pelley called it what it was in Bilton’s ham-fisted staff meeting Monday: the murder of the institution.
In a formal letter to Mr. Pelley, which was obtained by The
New York Times, Mr. Bilton wrote that the correspondent had been
“terminated for cause effective immediately.”
The letter is a must-read. No summary of it can capture just how pathetic a man Nick Bilton is. He disputes nothing Pelley said in the Monday staff meeting, and firing Pelley proves that Pelley was exactly right.
Mr. Pelley, in a telephone interview on Tuesday evening shortly
after he was fired, said he had devoted decades of his life to “60
Minutes,” which he said he still cared about deeply.
“I have been in combat in Afghanistan,” Mr. Pelley said. “I have
been in combat in Iraq. I have been in the war zone in Ukraine
multiple times, risking my life and the happiness of my family
because of my devotion to the broadcast.” [...]
Earlier on Tuesday, Mr. Pelley sent a statement to The Times that
assailed the new leadership of CBS News, writing that
“incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have
wreaked havoc” at the network.” He added, “The collapse of values
at the top has become untenable.” Mr. Pelley also wrote that
senior managers at CBS News had pressured him to insert bias into
stories for “60 Minutes” this past season, though he did not
provide details about specific segments.
I look forward to hearing those segment-specific details. It’s not hard to guess the direction that bias went.
Lingon makes scheduling apps, scripts, shortcuts, and commands
feel simple. Create a task in minutes, run it on a schedule, and
stay in control.
Lingon helps you run whatever you want whenever you want without
living in Terminal. Schedule apps, scripts, shortcuts, and
commands with a clear, friendly UI.
Run tasks at specific times, on intervals or at login. Optional
notifications make it easy to keep control.
Two separate apps. Lingon is the simpler Mac App Store version and
free to use, while Lingon Pro is the advanced one-time purchase
with extra power.
Lingon and Lingon Pro are great apps. I’ve been meaning to recommend them for a while.
Back in 2023 I wrote about a problem I was having with Maestral, the incredible “works like Dropbox in the old days” open-source Dropbox client, where Maestral would just silently crash once in a while and I wouldn’t notice for a while. Then I would notice, manually re-launch Maestral, and have to wait while Maestral synced. Or, worse, I’d put a podcast recording in a shared folder and walk away from my computer, and my editor would never get the file because Maestral wasn’t running. My write-up described how I solved the problem with a Keyboard Maestro macro that runs once an hour — it checks if Maestral is running, and if it isn’t, launches it (and writes to a log, to satisfy my own curiosity). Borg wrote to me after I posted that and — very politely — explained that Lingon would make that much simpler.
In addition to creating your own scripts and rules that run periodically, Lingon is great for inspecting all the login items and background agents on your system — whether they’re from Apple or third parties. Poking around at everything Google Gemini installed is what made me think to recommend Lingon today. At the very least you should install the free regular version. It’s just a great Mac utility from a great Mac developer. There’s nothing else like it.
Short story: Google Chrome installs an updater called Keystone on
your computer, which is bizarrely correlated to massive
unexplained CPU usage in WindowServer (a system process)1, and
made my whole computer slow even when Chrome wasn’t running.
Deleting Chrome and Keystone made my computer way, way faster,
all the time.
Long story: I noticed my brand new 16” MacBook Pro started acting
sluggishly doing even trivial things like scrolling. Activity
Monitor showed nothing from Google using the CPU, but
WindowServer was taking ~80%, which is abnormally high (it
should use < 10% normally).
Doing all the normal things (quitting apps, logging out other
users, restarting, zapping PRAM/SMC, etc) did nothing, then I
remembered I had installed Chrome a while back to test a website.
I deleted Chrome, and noticed Keystone while deleting some of
Chrome’s other preferences and caches. I deleted everything from
Google I could find, restarted the computer, and it was like
night-and-day. Everything was instantly and noticeably faster,
and WindowServer CPU was well under 10% again.
Not all Mac users, but many, found that just having Chrome installed slowed down their Macs dramatically. Completely uninstalling Chrome — and its pernicious background agents — solved the problem. This years-old “Chrome Is Bad” saga came to mind when I wrote about Google’s Gemini Mac app’s background agents.
It seems as though Google eventually fixed these Chrome bugs — or Apple changed something in a MacOS update that fixed the bugs for them — but I’ve never seen a full explanation of the problem and eventual solution. Does anyone know what happened here?
The main point is it never should have happened in the first place. A third-party app should just be a third-party app — not add components to your system software just so it can update itself when it isn’t running. Background agents and extensions are sometimes necessary to the functionality of a product. Checking for software updates to a browser or AI chatbot, when those apps aren’t running, is not necessary. The golden rule applies: imagine if every app on your system installed its own background agent to check for software updates. Chrome is a popular browser on the Mac, but it’s just a web browser. Other web browsers do just fine checking for updates from the browser itself when it’s running. If the user is actually using an app regularly, it’ll get plenty of chances to check for updates when it’s running. If the user isn’t regularly using an app, why in the world should that seldom-used app have software running all the time in the background?
This sort of chaos is why Apple keeps iOS locked down. There are no third-party login items on iOS that run in the background — let alone ones with no option to disable. No third-party app can do anything that causes the iOS window manager to consume 80 percent of the CPU while ostensibly idle. There are obviously trade-offs here. I rely on a Mac for my workstation because the Mac gives me the power to potentially shoot myself in the foot. But iOS is an order of magnitude more popular than MacOS because you cannot shoot yourself in the foot with it, even though that means you can’t use it do things that would require that power.
Two months ago Google launched a new native Mac app for Gemini. I’ve been trying it, on and off, since. It’s ... not bad. Certainly better than Claude’s Electron shitbox. But the Gemini app isn’t all that good, either. I’m sticking with ChatGPT, which remains far and away the best native Mac client to an LLM. (And ChatGPT is not that great of a Mac app — it’s just the closest to good of the bunch.)
The thing that really turns me off about the Gemini Mac app is Google’s gall. The Gemini app installs a background helper named “GeminiAppLauncher” in your login items. It also installs “GoogleUpdater” as a process with the privilege to launch in the background whenever it wants. Gemini never asks for permission to install either of these, and, most arrogantly, if you, as an informed user, remove either of them, the Gemini app silently adds them back. There is no setting in Gemini to disable this. There’s a mindset from some big companies that your system is theirs to play with at the system software level. Fuck that. Michael Tsai’s post on the Gemini Mac app links to this thread on MacRumors regarding this pernicious auto-installed and auto-reinstalled login item. Here’s another on Reddit.
Google’s approach to its Mac software is disrespectful and entitled.
I’d have been happy to keep the Gemini app installed if it just sat in my Applications folder when I wasn’t using it. But it doesn’t, and Google shows no signs of caring, so I just deleted it and uninstalled its background launch agents (in ~/Library/LaunchAgents/). Feels great, like I took a much needed shower.
(Sidenote: The Gemini Mac app is a native Mac app, but it is ... weird. Gus Mueller poked around at it and found that it’s the product of a Java-to-Objective-C converter that Google made, and much of it was originally written for Android.)
Jason Snell at Six Colors, looking ahead to WWDC next week:
These days, I’m getting emails pitching me for an endless stream
of new Mac apps. It’s quite remarkable because there was a
period five or ten years ago when it seemed like all app
development on Apple’s platforms was focused on iOS. Even more
interesting, these are all indie Mac apps that seem to be built
using native Mac frameworks, not the product of big corporations
that are just rolling their cross-platform development system
out everywhere. These apps seem to have a point of view and are
focused on the Mac.
Of course, it’s happening because of AI. [...]
Mac users — some of them developers, some of them people who have
never written software in their lives — are building apps that
fulfill their imaginations.
We now live in an era where, if you can dream an app, you can
probably build it. Especially Mac utilities. And who cares more
about native Mac software than Mac users? Certainly not those
companies that gave up on Mac development and focused all their
energies on giant cross-platform code bases to attract venture
investment and big payouts.
There are pros and cons to everything, but on the whole, AI-assisted programming has rejuvenated Mac development. It wasn’t moribund, but it was stagnant. And stagnation is the first step toward decline. Now it’s resurgent, and that’s a fun thing to see. And, I think, genuinely important for the future of the platform. I’ve been concerned for years that the biggest problem the Mac faces is that so many new apps for the platform weren’t Mac apps. The Mac has never faced a decline in popularity, but truly native Mac application development (and the skills) did. Now it’s turning around. Mac users are thirsty for Mac apps, and with AI, they can quench their own thirst and tell the dullards promulgating Electron bundles to pound sand.
So it’s plenty clear that Ken Calvert will walk away with the CA-40 primary, then enter the general as a huge favorite over Young Kim. Hell, I wouldn’t be 100 percent shocked if the state GOP urges Young Kim to drop out, endorse Calvert and save the party a bloodbath. But … what do I know?
Anyhow, with results pretty much in, here’s my list of Winners and Losers.
WINNER:
Ken Calvert: Look, I don’t like the dude. But he won in a landslide and he’ll likely cruise to a fairly easy November triumph. Truth is, the 40th (Young Kim’s old district) is far more 41st than 40th after Prop 50. So while Calvert winning isn’t surprising, I’m a little shocked by the margin …
LOSER:
Young Kim: I actually feel badly for her, because—politics be damned, and inconsistencies be damned, and MAGA pandering be damned—she’s genuinely thought of as a kind and decent sort. So to have it all come crashing down like this … I dunno. Sorta sucks. Also, Young Kim was very hard to paint as a villain. She just didn’t have that Dr. Doom thing in her.
WINNER:
Lisa Ramirez: She entered late, she didn’t have a ton of money or name recognition—and she’s not all that far behind Esther Kim-Varet. Most of all, Lisa walks away from this campaign genuinely liked and respected, and I suspect she’ll have a lot of party support should she run for another office. On a personal note, I very much admired her engagement skills. Lisa’s a real one.
LOSER:
Joe Kerr: Certainly not the way he wanted to go out. Joe was the Democratic candidate two years ago, and now he’s the Chris Kirkpatrick of this election. That said, I do believe he’d be an outstanding member of a city council or safety board. Sincerely.
WINNER:
Esther Kim Varet and Family: I joked with someone—have the Varets moved back to LA yet, or will it be next week? Now Esther is free to return to the big city, free to roam the streets and talk art, free to be with her people and complain about all the chain restaurants “down there.” Honestly, I just never got the feeling she felt like OC was her place; her peeps. So, now she can go home and be happy.
LOSER:
Jeff Pearlman: Multiple reasons. First, what am I going to do with my free time? Second, my coverage of this race—while well-intended—was pretty erratic. I’m new to political writing. It’s not sports. It takes more of a longer view. You learn.
WINNER:
Perry Meade: Candidate early on, wise enough to ditch this train. The kid has a super bright future in politics, should he aspire toward it.
LOSER:
Nina Linh: The most … befuddling candidate. I don’t think I ever saw her not look down at her notes. Will wrap this circus with less than 2,000 votes. Making her Chris Kirkpatrick’s stunt double, Biff.
WINNER:
Handel’s: The finest ice cream spot in Orange County no longer has to compete.
Last night, in an unsigned opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court expanded its finding in the recent Louisiana v. Callais decision. That decision overturned decades of law to declare that states could not construct majority-minority voting districts, as they had done under Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act to ensure Black voters had the opportunity to elect members of Congress who would represent the interests of the Black community.
After handing down the Callais decision, the Supreme Court sent a case involving Alabama’s map back to the state. One lower court had ruled the 2023 map unconstitutional because it violated the Fourteenth Amendment and, in diluting Black voting by spreading Black voters across three districts, eliminated a majority-Black district in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
As Lawrence Hurley of NBC News reported, on May 26 a panel of three judges reaffirmed that the map showed intentional discrimination and was unconstitutional. The state took the case to the Supreme Court, and last night the right-wing justices allowed the state to use the 2023 map, saying it was likely to win its case that the map was lawfully drawn.
And so, Alabama will likely replace a Black Democratic lawmaker with a white Republican, using a map that previous courts have said violates the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
Republican lawmakers currently in power appear to be trying to grab as much power as they can as President Donald J. Trump deteriorates both personally and politically.
Today, a day after visiting the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for what the White House said was a six-month physical that he said went “PERFECTLY,” the nearly 80-year-old Trump appeared in public for the first time since May 27. He seemed tired and vague.
In the House of Representatives, where Secretary of State Marco Rubio was testifying before the Foreign Relations Committee about Trump’s 2027 budget requests for the State Department, Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) played a video of Trump sleeping in two Cabinet meetings as Rubio was talking, and asked how the president could make good decisions about war if he couldn’t stay awake even during public events.
Rubio insisted he had never seen Trump asleep in a meeting, although in the instances Lieu showed, the president was sleeping in a chair directly beside him. Lieu accused Rubio of lying to Congress.
The weekend’s promises of an end to the war on Iran have fizzled, and the economy is slowing under the pressure of higher oil prices. The administration announced on Monday that it is dropping tariffs on imported farm and construction equipment from 25% to 15% to ease prices, proving—as critics have maintained all along—that the tariffs are in fact raising prices.
On Sunday, when Shannon Bream of the Fox News Channel asked Director of the National Economic Council Kevin Hassett about a Wall Street Journal report that delinquent credit card balances are at their highest level in 15 years as people use their credit cards for necessities, Hassett centered not the American people but the credit card companies. “We talk to the CEOs of the credit card companies all the time, and we do see some increased stress like the numbers that the Wall Street Journal quotes, but for the most part…there’s not any kind of…financial threat to the credit card companies.”
Americans trying to navigate rising prices by putting necessities on their credit cards were not likely to be concerned about how their financial pain might hurt credit card companies.
As Trump and the administration falter, the MAGA leaders Trump has installed in the government are pushing their agenda as fast as they can. Russell Vought, the co-author of Project 2025 who directs the the Office of Management and Budget and who therefore has the power—although not the authority—to ignore the laws Congress has passed for the expenditure of money, proposed last Thursday, May 28, that political appointees in his office should have final say over research grants, including those for the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and other governmental science agencies.
The proposal promises to root out “a ‘woke’ policy agenda that deliberately favor[s] certain identity groups over others.” In addition to submitting scientific research to political approval, the new rules would also stop international research collaboration unless it was approved by political appointees.
Aligning with Project 2025, which criticizes federal science programs for paying too much attention to climate change, the Trump administration is also tearing out a $368 million deep-ocean observation system along the Pacific and Atlantic Coasts that monitors marine ecosystems, coastal environments, and the ocean currents that affect climate change. Eric Niiler of the New York Times reported that the U.S. began operating the system in 2016 and expected it to continue for 25 years.
Democrats have pledged to fight the plan to tear out the observation system.
While those empowered by his 2024 win are pushing through their agenda, Trump himself appears to have abandoned any pretense of governing and is focusing on his Ultimate Fighting Championship ring in front of the White House—today he suggested making it permanent—and the painting of the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Today he showed to reporters images of how the Reflecting Pool is longer than skyscrapers are tall and that he is having it painted “American Flag Blue.”
He is also trying to cement control over the government. Today Trump signed an executive order stripping nearly 10,000 career civil service workers of their protected status, making it possible for the president to fire them at will. This move was introduced late in Trump’s first term but rescinded under President Joe Biden, and was a key part of Project 2025.
Trump’s announcement yesterday that he is nominating the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, William Pulte, as acting director of national intelligence (DNI) illustrated that he is willing to pervert one of the most important positions in the U.S. government to his own whims. Pulte has no experience in intelligence, but he has demonstrated a willingness to persecute Trump’s perceived political enemies. By making him an acting director, Trump can get around the requirement for Senate confirmation.
But lawmakers who will have to face the voters in November appear to be getting queasy at being tied to Trump’s actions. Pulte’s nomination could be a bridge too far. The nomination threatens the renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which expires on June 12. Right-wing influencer Jack Posobiec has called for Pulte to take control of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to “start digging in on the domestic side of terrorism as well as the international,” and Democratic lawmakers have said they will not renew the controversial Section 702 of FISA with Pulte as DNI.
Section 702 permits intelligence agencies to collect the communications of foreigners operating outside the U.S. without a judicial warrant. But in the process of that collection, the communications of U.S. citizens often get swept up. As Joseph Gedeon of The Guardian notes, the FBI used Section 702 to investigate protesters in the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who has led the charge against renewing FISA without significant protections for American citizens, warned that Pulte could use Section 702 as a political weapon, abusing surveillance powers for purposes of blackmail, smear campaigns, or attacks on lawmakers, nonprofits, or activists. Legal analyst Joyce White Vance added that Pulte could use his position to seize ballots or election equipment. Wyden urged lawmakers to refuse to reauthorize FISA “without strong new safeguards for Americans’ rights.”
Mark Warner (D-VA), the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and the person who can deliver the necessary Democratic votes for the renewal of FISA, warned that Pulte’s nomination could doom the measure’s reauthorization. Even Republicans, including former Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), are objecting to Pulte, citing his lack of intelligence experience, which the law requires for a DNI head, as a deal-breaker.
House Republicans are also starting to balk at the administration’s actions.
Meredith Lee Hill and Calen Razor of Politico reported today that House leaders had to push back votes today when Republicans didn’t show up from their holiday week. The House has been at work 43 fewer days in this congressional session than the Senate has as Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has avoided pushback against Trump in the House by keeping members away from Washington. The Republican majority in the House is so slim that attendance issues have forced Johnson to delay votes to prevent Democrats from defeating bills. Now that members don’t want to go on the record either against Trump or for him, the ability of the House to get through the work it needs to is in jeopardy.
Johnson’s slipping control over the House showed today when the House voted to pass a resolution, introduced by Democrats, telling Trump either to stop further strikes against Iran or to get congressional approval for them. Johnson sent House members home early before the Memorial Day holiday to keep such a measure from passing, but today it did, by a vote of 215 to 208. Although Johnson warned that the resolution was “very dangerous” and would “weaken” Trump’s ability to find a way out of the conflict, members passed it, likely noting that according to a recent New York Times–Siena College poll, 64% of registered voters think Trump’s decision to go to war was wrong, while only 30% approve of it.
Shortly after passing that measure, the House rebuked both Trump and Johnson a second time when it advanced a measure that would aid Ukraine in its war to repel Russia’s invasion by a vote of 218 to 204. If the measure now passes the House and then the Senate, it will provide $8 billion in loans and $300 million in security aid.
Trump does not appear to be taking his loss of power well, retreating to the traditional Republican position that anyone who disagrees with him is a communist. This afternoon, he posted on social media: “Communists always do well with the Voters or, as they would say, THE PEOPLE, in the Early Years! But, in the end, the Country, State, or City, GOES TO HELL! Great Violence proceeds at levels never seen before, and the entity dissolves into Poverty, Squalor, and Crime. Remember, breathtaking ‘Popularity’ first, and then, guaranteed DEATH AND DESTRUCTION! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
So, with the CA-40 race pretty much a wrap, here’s a final message of kindness, decency, compassion from Esther Kim Varet, Los Angeles’ finest OC savior.
She posted it on her socials …
And here are the things I wanna say:
• 1. This is, without fail and without surprise, the least-classy “I’ve lost” message I’ve ever seen. And it 100 percent meets the standards of the crumb who wrote it. Some people just … suck. They’re entitled and tone-deaf and without a sliver of self-reflection.
• 2. Esther, you were never the best candidate in this race. Only the wealthiest.
• 3. Esther, you inflicted endless cuts upon yourself with your rudeness, your cattiness, your tone-deafness, your arrogance, your impulsiveness. The only reason you gave people to vote your way was money. That’s it—money. Otherwise, you just presented as a unique-level asshole. Which this final post reinforced.
• 4. Esther, you were literally taking money from Republicans—who wanted you in the race.
• 5. Esther, calling Lisa the “enemy from within” says it all about you. One. Hundred. Percent.
• 6. Esther, nobody liked you. Which is remarkable. Nobody. Liked. You. And, initially, I thought, “It’s a matter of messaging. That can be fixed.” Nope. Nobody liked you because you’re not likable. You’re the mean kid in school. The bully. The child who shows up in Dior sneakers and mocks those wearing Keds. You didn’t lose because other candidates took out your knees. You lost because you took out your own knees. You behaved as if all of this was beneath you; as if this election should have been handed to you; as if we were fortunate to have you.
• 7. Esther, do you at all find it curious that—despite spending roughly four times the amount of money—you barely finished ahead of Lisa? Isn’t that a bit strange? A tiny bit weird. Maybe, just maybe, if winning was THE thing, you’d have donated all your funds to Lisa’s campaign and stepped out of the way.
• 8. Esther, it’s time to return to LA. Your political standing here is zero. Less than zero. It’s over. I hope one day, maybe decades from now, you’ll muster up enough introspection to look in the mirror and understand what happened; why this happened. Regional political candidates don’t necessarily have to be humble, but they do need to at least present humility.
• 9. Esther, how many campaign managers did you run through? Was it four, five or six? I lost count.
• 10. Esther, how many social media randos did you attack? Was it 50, 60 or 100? I also lost count.
• 11. Lisa Ramirez, keep your head up. You ran a noble campaign. When I mentioned you last night at a meeting in Irvine, people applauded. Literally applauded. You put up a good fight as an underdog, and you have a future in this business. Be proud.
• 12. Esther, good news. This is the last time your name will ever appear on this site. You’re cold product. You’re Vanilla Ice at the Freedom Concert. You’re the Alf puppet.
So one of our turf’s most interesting races is State Assembly District 72, which involves former Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe and a Huntington Beach City Council member who is 17 bricks shy of a load.
That would be Gracey Van Der Mark, aka one of America’s few Latinas to also go to bat for QAnon. And, in her time on the HB City Council, Gracey has supported book banning, MAGA plaques, corruption, cruelty and remarkable ineptitude. She is as Trumpy and Trump gets, but also incompetent with a capital V.
Put differently …
As I write this, it appears likely Kluwe and Kooky will be battling it out in November …
And while I am thrilled for Chris, I think it’s important for Democrats (and other reasonable people) to really get involved here. Chris is, truly, a great dude. Smart, intellectual, overflowing with decency, integrity. He’s the rare NFL vet who doesn’t like talking about the NFL. He’s much more into issues, solutions.
But, to win the general, he’s going to need three things:
Fourteen months ago, Donald Trump announced that he was starting a trade war by imposing sweeping tariffs on almost every nation in the world. His move caused shock waves, and not just because of the economic impact.
The Trump tariffs were clearly illegal — taxes imposed not via proper legislation, but by invoking an obscure existing law intended to deal with economic emergencies, even though no emergency existed. Also, by imposing these tariffs unilaterally, Trump was violating many decades’ worth of solemn U.S. agreements with other nations, including our closest allies. So “Liberation Day” marked the end of rule of law at home — goodbye separation of powers, hello a monarchical system in which the president does whatever he wants. And it also marked the transformation of the United States into a rogue nation that holds its erstwhile allies in contempt and can’t be trusted to honor its promises.
The initial shock has faded, largely because there have been so many outrages since, from pogroms at home to the disastrous war in Iran. And the Supreme Court, after dragging its feet for many months, eventually, grudgingly, ruled that the illegal tariffs were, in fact, illegal, and will have to be refunded.
But Trump officials kept many of the tariffs in place using another obscure law, this one intended to deal with balance of payments emergencies, although again no such emergency existed. This invocation of “Section 122” will probably also be ruled illegal at some point, but in any case the law sets a 150-day time limit on such tariffs, so the Trumpists needed another dodge.
Yesterday it came in the form of “Section 301” tariffs on 60 trading partners, including the European Union and Japan. Section 301 is titled “Relief from Unfair Trade Practices.” So what are the unfair practices the Trumpists say the whole world is engaging in?
The answer is that the Trump administration is accusing other countries of “failure to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor.”
Notice the wording. They aren’t accusing the European Union itself of employing slave labor. Even the Trumpists aren’t willing to lie that shamelessly (yet). No, the claim is that the EU isn’t doing enough to stop countries that do employ slave labor from selling their goods in Europe.
Everyone, and I mean everyone, understands that the alleged justification for these tariffs is a lie. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the EU is less diligent about opposing the use of slave labor than the US. For that matter, there is no reason to believe that Trump and his minions have any particular objection to slave labor. This is nothing but a transparently, one might say sneeringly, bogus rationale for continuing to flout both US law and international agreements.
Why do Trump’s minions keep using legal tricks and lies to impose tariffs? There is, after all, no reason they couldn’t simply ask Congress to impose tariffs through normal legislation. But doing so would run into three problems, from Trump’s point of view. First, Congress might balk. Second, at minimum an attempt to pass legislation would require hearings, in which the weakness of the administration’s arguments would become obvious. Third, one of the reasons Trump loves tariffs is that he gets to issue decrees at will, none of this pesky nonsense of consulting with the legislative branch; having to follow the Constitution would spoil his fantasies of omnipotence.
So here we go again, with another round of tariffs that will probably be ruled illegal some months from now.
Why doesn’t Trump just back down? After all, the tariffs aren’t achieving their stated objectives. Remember how Trump was going to revive US manufacturing?
The tariffs are also deeply unpopular, with an overwhelming majority of Americans believing, rightly, that they have raised prices:
But for Trump, backing off on the tariffs would amount to admitting failure. And if you believe he’s going to do that, I have a quick, easy victory over Iran you might want to buy.
May was a big month! The highlight was a cycling trip around Lake Konstanz, passing through Konstanz, Bregenz Austria, Stein am Rhein in Switzerland, and Meersburg.
A farm in Bodenseeufer, Germany
We passed a lot of operating agriculture, growing apples, strawberries, and other fruits.
The route is very continuous, mostly flat, and popular with retirees. It's very idyllic riding: lots of protected and separated lanes. There are some interesting regional differences in the riding. Swiss drivers were noticeably more aggressive and gave a lot less space to bikes, but the Swiss infrastructure was really nice when it was off-road. Also it was interesting to see that the vast majority of other cyclists on most of the route were on ebikes. This only changed when we were close to hip cities and we'd notice more young people on high-end road bikes.
Münster St. Maria und Markus
Taking the ride in 40-60 mile days left a lot of room for checking out the towns, food, and views. It was very easy being vegan in Germany, and significantly harder in Austria and Switzerland. Some highlights:
KERVAN Imbiss in Konstanz: cheap, delicious vegan kebabs
Insel Mainau: beautiful botanical garden on an island, recommended to follow up with Biergarten St. Katharina, a beer garden in the woods
The Pile Dwelling Museum in Uhldingen-Mühlhofen-Unteruhldingen: very aesthetic museum plus recreations of pile dwellings
In Zurich: the Swiss National Museum was gigantic and featured the best-integrated high-tech exhibits I've seen
On the final evening we took a cable car up to Panorama Restaurant Falsenegg and it delivered on the name
Reading
I read The Technological Republic the book by Alex Karp and one of his employees. It was terrible as expected: part sales-pitch, part standard-issue MAGA cultural critique, part implied defense of just war. The last part was the most interesting to me, because Karp spends so much time grandstanding about his intellectual background and telling protestors to quiet down and have a real discussion, and this book confirms that he can't actually have that conversation. He has nothing to say about the moral complexity or justification of war.
It's surprising that the only critical reviews I could find of the book are from other right-leaning sources. Providence, an American Christian Realist magazine, found it too weak. The Independent Institute didn't like it based on their Libertarian principles. I guess it's just so far from any left-wing thought that nobody bothers to read it.
Democratic governance rests on a bargain so old we’ve forgotten it’s a bargain at all. The governed have something the governors need: labor, tax revenue, military service, consumer spending. This dependency is the source of democratic leverage. The whole system functions because power is distributed, and it’s distributed because the people at the top need something from the people at the bottom.
I'm still trying to avoid writing about AI, but this piece by Owen McGrann was worth the time. It takes a lot of points that I've long agreed with and stitches them together into a coherent but miserable whole.
On the bright side, I'm just finishing reading Intermezzo and it's wonderful. A totally rejuvenating and inspiring novel.
Listening
Cheekface is a ~9 year old band in the tradition of Cake, They Might Be Giants, etc. They've got some great hits - part sardonic and ironic, part euphoric and ultra-light pop choruses.
Watching
Adam Neely's talking about AI and music again, and like always, it's very worth watching. The generational element is especially interesting here: just like the commencement speakers getting booed, there's a consistent theme where Gen Z (and millennials, to some extent) are rejecting the AI hype while older generations are optimistic and coincidentally in a position to benefit from it.
"despite the severity of the allegations — an affair that raised serious blackmail risks, attending openly partisan events, and lying to investigators when caught — the Eleventh Circuit and the Judicial Conference both concealed the judge’s identity. They even adjusted the very minor sanction to allow the judge “to word the letters of apology vaguely so as to ensure that a letter could not be ‘used against [the Subject Judge] in some way.’”
...
"The Eleventh Circuit thought it had been so clever in anonymizing its report. The reports don’t include a name or a district, and refer only to “Subject Judge” throughout. The reports even assiduously avoid identifying the judge by gender, proving that even conservative judges can figure out how pronouns work with minimal effort. And yet the reports failed to obscure a number of details that made working out the judge’s identity possible.
...
Handing the reports into two different AI models and turning on all the “deep research” modes, the bots churned for several minutes comparing the reports to publicly available information. Both models delivered lengthy reports reaching the same conclusion. So how did these models do it?
...
"the models instantly filtered out the entire state of Florida. The official reports are littered with references, in varying contexts, to the office of “District Attorney.” Florida uses “State Attorneys” for its local prosecutors. After that, the bots noted that the sanction barred the judge from ever serving as chief judge of their district — meaning the judge was not senior status and not currently the chief judge. The report indicates that investigators spoke with clerks dating back to 2020, disqualifying anyone elevated after that. Discussing the judge attending a DA’s primary victory party, the bot pointed out that the judge had claimed to know the candidate based on their time at the office, narrowing the scope to judges with state prosecutorial experience who overlapped with a sitting DA who won a primary. And had martinis at the victory party. The AI models decided that matched with Atlanta’s Fani Willis. [as the DA]
Once it narrowed the list down, the bot also searched the dockets of possible judges to match the claim in the reports that the high-ranking law enforcement officer did not materialize into a conflict because no cases involving that police department showed up on the judge’s docket.
For good measure, the bot went ahead and took a guess at the officer’s identity too.
In about 10 minutes of work, the AI unraveled all the work these judges put in to keep this confidential. With nothing but a couple of published court documents and the open web. In the time someone might brew a cup of coffee, the most basic possible workflow defeated the Eleventh Circuit’s entire anonymization strategy."
Hackers are convincing Meta’s AI support chatbot to let them take over other peoples’ accounts:
A video posted on X showed the step-by-step process to hack someone’s Instagram account. The hacker allegedly used a VPN to spoof the targets’ presumed location to avoid triggering Instagram’s automated account protections. Then, the hacker opened a chat with Meta AI Support Assistant and asked the bot to add a new email address to the target’s account. The chatbot can be seen sending a verification code to the email address provided by the hacker; the hacker then shares the verification code with the chatbot, which prompts the chatbot to show a button to “Reset Password.” The hacker enters a new password and takes over the victim’s account.
[…]
On Monday, Instagram spokesperson Andy Stone said in a reply to Wong’s post and others that the issue was now fixed. It’s unclear how many Instagram users had their accounts improperly accessed.
It’s not that easy. Probably this particular tactic is now blocked. But there are others, many others, and they cannot be blocked as a class. The real problem is that LLM chatbots are not trustworthy enough for this application.
A few more nuggets to report out of the Chicago U.S. Attorney’s office. Yesterday the DOJ released what it referred to, rather grandiosely, as a “rare special report” about grand jury appearances. It was basically a statement and and defense by U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros himself to charges that he was himself involved with the tainted grand jury which brought charges against the so-called Broadview Six. It’s a bit convoluted, even for someone like me who’s followed the case pretty closely. The “report” starts by arguing that one transcript reference that appears to refer to the “USA”, i.e., the US Attorney, was actually a transcription error. So, as the “report” puts it, a classic case of mistaken identity. It seems like that may be right, though it’s not clear to me that anyone was actually referring to that bit of transcript. In any case, the “report” leads with that, making it seem like any claims that Boutros has dirty hands is just wrong and there’s no there there.
I read an account of this “report” and then shortly after the pretty aggressive/smackdowny statement from Broadview Six defense attorney Chris Parente, Boutros’ current main antagonist.
Here’s that statement.
The U.S. Attorney has now acknowledged having personal contact with the Broadview 6 grand jury—on the date they delivered the indictment in this case. As the transcript demonstrates, U.S. Attorney Boutros asked these grand jurors, who previously refused to return an indictment, to ‘raise their hand’ if they had personal feelings on immigration cases, and informed them there would be a ‘different procedure’ for them. This was one week after the AUSA dismissed grand jurors who voiced dissent in the Broadview 6 case presentation.
Of all days for the U.S. Attorney to make a rare appearance before the grand jury, that he would be present on the day he likely knew this case would be re-presented speaks for itself. Despite this interaction having occurred in October, none of this information was disclosed to the defense or the public before this afternoon. It is only being revealed now because of the demands of the Broadview 6 defense team for transparency on this U.S. Attorney’s engagement in the grand jury process.
I was more than a little confused by this. Because where did he admit this? Is Boutros off the hook or deeper on the hook?
So it turns out that the “report” leads with the transcription error and then goes into this fairly technical distinction between Boutros not having any contact with any grand jurors but then sort of parathetically noting that he’d done little greetings to thank the grand jurors for their service. In other words, Boutros’s flat denials hang on appearing as a prosecutor vs appearing in a kind of ceremonial role to thank grand jurors for their service.
It’s one of those greetings that Parente is talking about. And yes, it’s right there in the report, just kind of buried at the end. The day the grand jury would finally bring its indictment on the third try, after certain grand jurors had already been removed to make it easier to bring the indictment, Boutros showed up to speak to a grand jury which (from what I can tell) had already been sitting for like a year to talk with them. He thanked them for their service and then said this (emphasis added) …
But we also recognize that these are trying times, these are emotional times. You can’t help but turn on the news, read the newspapers, or for those of you who use TikTok and Instagram, and there’s stuff in there all the time. So my question to you, and again, I’m gonna do this in all the grand juries, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. If there’s anyone here who is struggling with a certain type of cases, such as the immigration cases or other cases where they do not believe that they can set aside their personal, their personal emotions, that they cannot listen and deliberate honestly and objectively, I would ask that you raise your hand and identify yourself, because we have a different procedure for that.
I’m no expert on what’s kosher and not before a grand jury. I don’t think this amounts to misconduct in itself. Boutros didn’t quite ask if jurors had “personal feelings on immigration cases”, as Parente’s statement puts it. He framed the comment as personal feelings that would prevent them from being objective. But pretty close. And the point here isn’t whether Boutros is personally guilty of misconduct, at least as I understand it. It’s whether he was part of, aware of, or involved in the effort to jam this high-profile, political retribution indictment through this grand jury. And yeah, this nugget seems to say that he was.
There are a lot of details here and it can be kind of confusing. But here’s the big picture. They need to get this indictment. A week earlier, the lead prosecutor has to commit serious misconduct to try to get the indictment. Now they’re back a week later to try again. Boutros shows up to talk to this long-sitting grand jury and, after some platitudinous remarks about the importance of grand juries, invites people who have strong feelings about immigration to leave. As it happens, no one raised their hands. But it’s very hard to believe that that was just random. It seems highly, highly likely that Boutros knew about what had already happened and was showing up to do what he could to help the process along.
For now, score one for Parente.
(As I said in yesterday’s post, if you’re a lawyer in Chicago and you’ve got more information on this, get in touch with me.)
Republicans will never turn on Trump. He’s gobbled up too much power in the architecture of the Republican Party. Even as his national approval numbers have continued to tumble, Trump has upped his ritual slayings of Republican incumbents, some for lack of total loyalty and then some, like John Cornyn, just for — well, let’s just say it — for the fuck of it. So it’s not just that he has too much power. The party’s elected officials are now overwhelming his people. When you see a breakdown between the White House and Republican majorities on Capitol Hill, it doesn’t come with any fingerprints. It’s almost like a black hole. Things that were going to happen just suddenly don’t happen. Or things disappear without a really obvious explanation.
The White House’s maybe-backaway from the Trump Thug Fund is an example of that. Todd Blanche says the Trump family’s immunity stays. They might try bring the fund back at any moment. But for now they’ve shelved it or are claiming they have. And the court ruling against it isn’t a sufficient explanation. They get those all the time. They’re abandoning it because it’s simply too unpopular on Capitol Hill.
John Thune has been telling Trump that. Even Axios this morning ran an item on “Thune’s breaking point.” And it even seems like it may have been Mike Johnson, no doubt in the most worshipful way, who delivered the final message on the Thug Fund. This isn’t a matter of anyone on Capitol Hill seeing the light or finding that the Thug Fund was a bridge too far for them. It’s simply too unpopular. Each new cash-out/corruption gambit measurably increases the danger that Senate Republicans will lose their majority next year. The House may already be a foregone conclusion.
It’s not that Republicans are breaking with Trump in any showy way. They’re not becoming less MAGA. It’s that Trump’s behavior is no longer in any alignment with their electoral interests. They’re not turning against him. That’s impossible. They are — particularly in the Senate — just getting less eager, less willing to make votes to back his latest farcical demands.
With all our doom-saying about how nothing matters, there’s a reason Trump’s popularity and power have ebbed this steeply. The mix of the ballroom, the Thug Fund and perhaps now the triumphal arch together amount to a kind of slavering, militant, Marie Antoinette-ism that is simply impossible to defend outside of maybe the hardest-core MAGA base, which is maybe 25% of the population or less. Too little attention has focused on the way this period of cash prize/retribution overdrive already at least temporarily sidelined Trump’s new immigration funding bill.
Everyone is rightly skeptical of any claim that Trump is finally losing his hold on the GOP or that some older version of the GOP is reemerging. You should be skeptical of that because it’s not happening. And that’s not what I’m arguing. Trump really has whittled down the GOP until it’s overwhelmingly made up of MAGA acolytes. But everyone wants to get reelected. It’s a response to Trump’s new focus over the last four or five months, one that was already significantly a response to his diminishing popularity. Trump is focused almost exclusively on retribution, demonstrations of untrammeled power, and cashing out as much money as possible before 2029. Defending his GOP majorities or doing anything to make it easier on Republicans to win reelection doesn’t seem to play into his calculus at all. Even his election-rigging moves — like housing nepo-baby Bill Pulte to oversee the U.S. intelligence community — seem more focused on 2028 than 2026. He seems completely indifferent about the midterms. He’s doubling down on the least popular, most toxic parts of his agenda.
In a way none of this is new. Trump has never cared about the Republican Party to the extent it exists separate from himself and his political fortunes. It’s just that he and the party haven’t been as clearly at odds with each other until now.
In very different language, and coming from his own vantage point, Jamelle Bouie has a piece up in the New York Times today which points in the same direction as I’ve been arguing here in various posts. The gist version is this. The current Project 2029 efforts are a mix of messaging/positioning efforts and policy proposals. Those may be solid or promising on their own terms. But they are inadequate. Trump broke the old system, which has existed in an evolving form since the 1930s and 1940s. You need to build a new system, a new vision and mechanism of public power in its place. As Bouie puts it, “A Project 2029 that has nothing to say about either the Senate filibuster, or an ideologically captured Supreme Court, or extreme partisan gerrymandering — among other concerns — is not a Project 2029 worth the time or effort.”
I’m flagging this because Bouie is one of the best and I want to highlight this article. But this is a position that is clearly enough distinct — structural reformers, reconstructionists — that it really needs to be seen as such in the world of Democratic politics, at least through 2029. When that happens, public arguments become more coherent. It provides clarity to voters.
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When Acting Attorney General and committed Trump toady Todd Blanche told a House committee on Tuesday that the Justice Department has decided that on second thought, it isn’t going to set up a “weaponization fund” to give payouts to supporters of Donald Trump who were prosecuted for their crimes — especially the violent thugs who tried to overthrow the government on January 6 — Rep. Grace Meng, who was questioning Blanche, seemed genuinely taken aback:
You can understand her surprise: Here was a case in which the Trump administration has decided not to do something spectacularly corrupt that President Trump clearly wanted very much to do. How could such a thing have happened?
The quick rise and fall of his plan for an insurrectionist slush fund shows that Trump is still constrained by public opinion — not always, not as much as he should be, but in meaningful ways that are important to understand.
Few things are more important to Trump than being able to act without constraint, to do whatever he wants. Not only has he worked to destroy any institution or procedure that might limit his power or impose accountability for his misdeeds, but sometimes he comes right out and says it. “I have an Article II, where I have to the right to do whatever I want as president,” he said during his first term. More recently, he was asked whether there are constraints on his power in foreign affairs, and he responded, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” In other words, nothing.
But it’s not true.
Like a lead balloon
Even after Trump’s long campaign to rewrite the history of that dark day and rehabilitate the army of anti-American goons who stormed the Capitol and tried to overthrow the government, the slush fund idea was shocking. Not only did Trump already pardon them all — including those tried and convicted of specific violent crimes — but now they would be getting payouts with your tax money.
There has been a steady stream of stories about corruption and abuse of power over the last year and a half, some of which have gotten plenty of press coverage, including Qatar gifting Trump a $400 million plane and him tearing down the East Wing of the White House to construct a golden ballroom. While the public opposition to those kinds of moves has been strong whenever it is measured, that opposition wasn’t enough to stop him. But this time it was. So how is this different?
The first part of the answer is that there was an immediate, bipartisan elite rejection of the slush fund. While Republicans have mostly lined up to defend the other examples of Trump’s corruption, including all the ways he has sought to enrich himself and his family (many of which can be classified as outright bribes), the reaction this time didn’t fall down so cleanly on partisan lines.
While the more shameless lickspittles among them trooped to Fox News to defend the idea, many other Republicans were immediately critical. “So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops?” said Sen. Mitch McConnell. Blanche went to Capitol Hill to talk to Republican senators about it, and he received an “incredibly hostile” response. “I mean, my God, do you see where this would head? These people don’t deserve restitution; they, many of them deserve to be in prison,” said Sen. Thom Tillis.
We’ll discuss why the idea got that response from Republicans in a moment, but the fact that it did changed how the idea would be understood by the public. As political scientist John Zaller explored in his seminal 1992 book The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion, the public is highly responsive to elite cues: They see what position is being taken by those they trust (politicians from their party, media figures they like), and then align themselves accordingly. When a controversy falls clearly along liberal/conservative lines among the elites, the public will follow.
But in the case of the slush fund, the visible opposition from some prominent Republicans made the partisan valence less than clear. That allowed Republican voters to have a different opinion than the president without feeling that they were violating their sense of identity.
But that in itself wouldn’t be enough to make Trump pull back. After all, he does unpopular things all the time.
It’s the corruption
When the news of the slush fund dropped, Democrats were extremely focused and aggressive in their media strategy, to a degree they don’t always achieve. They were loud, they talked to every news outlet they could about it, and they repeated the same simple message over and over: This is corrupt. Trump wants to take your money and give it to insurrectionists who ransacked the Capitol and beat up cops. The fact that the slush fund is almost impossible to defend on any reasonable grounds didn’t hurt.
Most importantly, Republicans who are terrified of losing their majorities in both houses understood immediately how this fits in with the rest of the political problem they face. Corruption is emerging as one of the central themes of the midterm elections, along with Trump’s seeming indifference to the tenuous conditions of people’s lives. People are struggling to pay for gas and groceries and health care, the economy feels like it’s spinning its wheels, and meanwhile Trump is waging an idiotic war in Iran and building himself a ridiculous ballroom. Now on top of that, he wants tax money for criminals? It all fits together.
You can see why a GOP congressman from a swing district wouldn’t be eager to have that dominate the news, when he’s trying to convince voters to send him back to Washington so he can keep the status quo in place.
So behind the scenes, Republicans in Congress communicated to the White House that the slush fund was developing into a PR disaster. They’re almost certain to lose the House, and the Senate is looking vulnerable, too. This is making it much worse — as did the runoff victory of Ken Paxton in Texas, whose presence as a national figure only reinforces the corruption issue (even if he winds up winning). Senate Majority Leader John Thune eventually told the White House to shut the slush fund down, which they did.
We shouldn’t overstate what kind of victory this is. Among other things, as part of the same agreement that was going to create the slush fund, the IRS pledged to end tax audits for Trump and his family, now and forever — tantamount to telling them it’s cool if they’ve committed tax evasion, which they probably have. And there may still be ways for Trump-affiliated criminals of various kinds to get payouts with your money.
Nevertheless, it does demonstrate that even now, there are times when Trump is faced with public anger and he backs down. That in itself is worthy of note — and the episode vividly demonstrates how frightened Republicans in Congress are about what might happen in November. Which they should be.
Thank you for reading The Cross Section. This site has no paywall, so I depend on the generosity of readers to sustain the work I present here. If you find what you read valuable and would like it to continue, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
AST SpaceMobile expects Blue Origin’s recent launchpad explosion will delay its direct-to-smartphone constellation by three to six months, investment bank William Blair said in an equity research note, pushing initial commercial services into the first half of 2027.
ESA and China recently launched the joint SMILE magnetosphere mission after a decade of cooperation, but despite similar goals, another collaboration appears distant.
Europe is rapidly rewriting its security architecture. Faced with Russian aggression, mounting doubts about long-term American commitment and growing pressure to shoulder more of its own defense burden, European states […]
Muon Space announced a Starship-class satellite platform June 3 designed from the ground up to meet the demands of the emerging orbital data center market, with an initial launch slated for 2028 after securing customers.
NASA is working on a streamlined management approach for a nuclear electric propulsion demonstration mission the agency wants to launch in two and a half years.
China is establishing an industrial policy framework to support a push to build space-based computing infrastructure, with the emergence of influential coordinating bodies.
I’ve just added a couple of new charts to the self-absorbed Stats section of the site. Both are on the money page, and those will be updated at the end of each year.
§ First I’ve got one showing how much I’ve spent each year on music over the past 30 years: CDs, downloads, and streaming. Here’s an image of the current state of it:
Amount spent on music listening per year
This doesn’t include spending in cash, which I didn’t track, and was more common in the early years when buying CDs. I mainly made this chart because I wondered how my spending now compared to previous years. I’m kind of pleased it isn’t really less that it used to be (the missing cash spending aside).
I didn’t include spending on gigs, or contributions to radio stations, because while they’re music, they feel like a different kind of thing than buying music to own (sorry, I mean buying a licence to play files).
Of course, if we take inflation into account, my spending has dropped: the £299 I spent on CDs in 1997 is the equivalent of £605 now. But then the cost of an album has dropped too – new CDs back then were costing me around £12-£14, or £24-£28 now, compared to an MP3 download today being more like £8-£12.
I stopped paying for Spotify last year, and I’m not sure my spending on downloads has increased proportionately. We’ll see. I’m sure you can’t wait.
§ The other chart, inspired by wondering about the missing data for buying CDs with cash, is of how much I withdrew from bank accounts in cash each year:
Amount withdrawn in cash per year
Unsurprisingly this has dropped to practically zero because, despite being slightly resistant to the decline of cash at first, I very rarely use it now.
But I was surprised how much cash I was taking out years ago – averaging £89 per week in 2002 (£170 today)! I’m not sure if the drop after that is a result of switching more to card payments and/or reducing my spending in general, which I did a bit after buying my first flat around then.
§ The data for both charts only starts in August 1996 so that year is underreported.
I think I started recording this data when I got an Apple Newton MessagePad 120, then a 2000. I think I used the PocketMoney program which is still going today on various platforms. In 2001 I got a Palm Vx from work and think I continued with the same app, transferring data across.
At some point I switched to using Moneydance on my Mac, managing to import the PocketMoney data into that. I’m still using Moneydance today to laboriously keep track of my spending, savings and investments. It’s a reassuring habit at this point and I’d feel adrift if I didn’t input data from my statements or banking app each month.
Randy Shoup set out to be an international lawyer. He studied in West Berlin when there was still a wall around it, spent a year at Stanford Law, and had what should have been the perfect summer internship on Sand Hill Road. Instead he spent it watching inventors light up whiteboards with brilliant ideas — then being told his job was just to write them down. That summer broke something open. He went back to Oracle that fall and never looked back. Kent and Randy dig into what it means to need to make things, why the people who wrote the original distributed systems playbook aren’t panicking about AI wiping it clean, and how Jevons paradox explains what happens when cognition gets cheap.
The present and also future of mankind is a world where reasonably high levels of self-discipline are needed to do well. The journalist Daniel Akst pointed this out in his 2011 book Temptation: Finding Self-Control in an Age of Excess, and we are now living it full force.
I would rather cope with that world than face the full nanny state, backed by modern, AI-intensified surveillance techniques to boot. Concentrating more power in political authorities hardly solves the basic problem. If marijuana and sports gambling can manipulate weak individuals, so can unscrupulous political leaders. A greater realization of individual weakness does not translate into a case for more government action; if anything, it suggests the opposite. Better to allow our social problems to fester in a more decentralized fashion, rather than reinforce our social pathologies through a manipulative and dysfunctional leader at the very top.
In the longer term, we may need to look to medications, such as GLP-1 drugs and their offshoots, which seem to curb some forms of addictive behavior beyond the appetite for food. Alternatively, some individuals may choose self-surveillance, with self-imposed penalties for bad or addictive behavior. Perhaps your AI, or a hired third party, docks your bank account every time you puff on a joint. I am not convinced such services ever will become popular, but that should be taken seriously as an indicator of what people really want to do. We can at least give them better options for self-constraint. If they rarely choose such options, then perhaps for many of those people, marijuana consumption is not a matter of weakness but a very well-established preference, whether we like it or not…
In short, it is time to realize that paternalism is far less workable than in times past. Our government does not have the credibility, the control over information, or the control over our lives to pull it off.
I do understand that is in some significant ways bad news, as voluntary choice is overwhelming some of us with bad outcomes.
My response is to start by accepting some steps backward, holding paternalist tyranny at bay, and hoping some longer-run cultural and technological adjustments will make this all more workable.
If you have a better solution, I would love to hear it.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly promoted as educational tutors, yet most evaluations focus on domains with a single ground truth. Many disciplines, however, hinge on judgment: reasoning, weighing ambiguity, and reaching defensible conclusions. Law provides a sharp test. We conducted a blinded evaluation of short-answer tutoring in contracts courses with sixteen U.S. law professors. Participants created 40 representative questions, wrote answers, and judged 2,918 anonymized comparisons between human and LLM responses. Professors rated LLMs far higher than their peers (average win rate = 75.33%), with models performing similarly to the best instructor. LLM responses were also rarely flagged as harmful (3.53%, vs 12.06% for professors). Preferences for LLM answers were consistent across evaluators and reflected shared professional standards. Our evaluation can be reliably extended to additional models by employing a separate LLM as a judge, rendering expert agreements an effective, scalable method to evaluate AI tutors in judgment-rich domains.
“far”. That is from a new paper by Alejandro Salinas, et.al. Via Andrew Curran. And via John Chamberlain:
Artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) tools are capable of mass-producing academic finance papers that are nearly indistinguishable from human-authored research, according to a new study published in the Journal of Economic Literature.
C’mon people, get ready. I know it is difficult to admit when your human capital has been devalued, but that time is upon us. In particular, being prolific is no longer such a comparative advantage in academia. You might run to the “but I know what questions to ask” cope, but I implore you to solve for the equilibrium. What is the equilibtium wage for merely asking questions?
Of course academic life and projects will continue, but the real rewards will go to people doing new, innovative, and hitherto impossible projects with AI.
One of the first images transmitted back to Earth from the Artemis II mission was a stunner. In a single image, Earth’s full disk appears amid celestial phenomena that illustrate its place in the solar system. And although the visible hemisphere appears to be awash in sunlight, it is actually lit by moonlight. The astronauts’ vantage point provided a rare opportunity to capture nighttime features—most notably lights from human habitation—from a new perspective.
An Artemis crew member captured the photo from the Orion spacecraft after it completed the translunar injection burn, which sent the spacecraft out of Earth orbit and on a trajectory toward the Moon. In the photo, Earth eclipses the Sun from Orion’s perspective, leaving only a small sliver of its bright light visible around the bottom right edge. Green auroras, caused by charged particles from the Sun interacting with Earth’s upper atmosphere, glow around the north and south poles (lower left and upper right, respectively).
The Sun’s light also produces the fuzzy glow, known as zodiacal light, that appears to the lower right of Earth. This phenomenon comes from sunlight reflecting off interplanetary dust. Skywatchers on Earth may see it at certain times of year around dawn or dusk as a faint column of light extending up from the horizon. Data collected by NASA’s Juno spacecraft on its journey to Jupiter suggest that Mars may be a significant source of the dust particles that produce zodiacal light. Earth’s other planetary neighbor, Venus, appears as the bright object in the bottom right of the image.
April 2, 2026
On Earth itself, city lights are evidence of human activity. Bright areas appear in Spain, Portugal, and northern Africa (lower left), sub-Saharan Africa (center left), and Brazil (center right). Digital camera technology—with help from the illumination of a full Moon—made it possible to see these and other details of Earth’s surface and atmosphere in low light. The crew set the camera’s ISO to 51,200 to make it highly sensitive to light. For comparison, an ISO setting of 100 or 200 is common for daytime photography.
Previous nighttime views of Earth taken from spacecraft may look very different from this photo but have also inspired and enlightened. For instance, the Apollo 12 crew photographed Earth eclipsing the Sun in 1969; astronaut Alan Bean would go on to depict his impressions of the event in paintings.
More recently, astronauts aboard the International Space Station have photographed the planet at night from low Earth orbit, while NASA’s Black Marble nighttime lights product suite uses satellite observations to produce science-quality records of nighttime lights at daily, monthly, and yearly time scales. Those programs provide sustained data records, while the Artemis II photo is distinctive as a single human-captured full-disk view showing many low-light features at once.
Cindy Evans, senior exploration scientist in the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Division at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, was working in the Science Evaluation Room during the Artemis II mission and was one of the first people on Earth to see the image. Evans was struck both by its beauty and the perspective revealed by all the visible solar system features. “I love the image so much because it was taken with Earth in moonshine, and shows Earth as a solar system body, a dynamic planet interacting with the solar wind, and a place harboring life,” she said.
The image is scientifically valuable, as well, said Miguel Román, Deputy Director for Atmospheres and Data Systems at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “It speaks powerfully to the breadth of what NASA does across science and human exploration,” he said. Román studies artificial light at night, as viewed from space, as a measurable signal of human activity.
“[This photo] reminds us that Earth at night is visually compelling, physically complex, and scientifically underexplored,” Román said. “I see this image as a glimpse of what Earth science can become in the future.”
NASA images prepared for Earth Observatory by Lauren Dauphin. Story by Lindsey Doermann.
A former NASA engineer named John Muratore sat on console as launch director in early September 2016 as propellant flowed onto a Falcon 9 rocket in Florida. Ahead of a planned launch two days later, SpaceX was preparing for a static fire test of the vehicle.
Then, all of a sudden, the rocket exploded. "It came out of nowhere, and it was really violent," Muratore said. This fireball resulted in the destruction of the rocket, much of its launch site, and the AMOS-6 satellite already attached to the vehicle.
Nearly a decade later, on May 28, Blue Origin conducted a static fire test of a new rocket, with its larger New Glenn vehicle a few miles down the Florida coast. The company had gotten further into its test, reaching engine ignition, before its rocket also exploded.
Up betimes, and studying of my double horizontal diall against Dean Honiwood comes to me, who dotes mightily upon it, and I think I must give it him.
So after talking with Sir W. Batten, who is this morning gone to Guildhall to his trial with Field, I to my office, and there read all the morning in my statute-book, consulting among others the statute against selling of offices, wherein Mr. Coventry is so much concerned; and though he tells me that the statute do not reach him, yet I much fear that it will.
At noon, hearing that the trial is done, and Sir W. Batten come to the Sun behind the Exchange I went thither, where he tells me that he had much ado to carry it on his side, but that at last he did, but the jury, by the judge’s favour, did give us but 10l. damages and the charges of the suit, which troubles me; but it is well it went not against us, which would have been much worse.
So to the Exchange, and thence home to dinner, taking Deane of Woolwich along with me, and he dined alone with my wife being undressed, and he and I spent all the afternoon finely, learning of him the method of drawing the lines of a ship, to my great satisfaction, and which is well worth my spending some time in, as I shall do when my wife is gone into the country. In the evening to the office and did some business, then home, and, God forgive me, did from my wife’s unwillingness to tell me whither she had sent the boy, presently suspect that he was gone to Pembleton’s, and from that occasion grew so discontented that I could hardly speak or sleep all night.
Transportation megaprojects experience massive cost overruns in part because state agencies and consultants never meet scheduled deadlines.
The now-$15 billion Interstate Bridge Project is two-and-half years behind schedule. The Abernethy Bridge, in construction, is now two or even five years behind schedule, with construction expected to extend to 2030.
Agency officials routinely deny or conveniently forget promised deadlines. IBR Program director Greg Johnson told a joint Oregon-Washington legislative committee on September 15, 2025, that he never said a critical Record of Decision step would be done in the Summer of 2023.
Mr. Johnson’s claim is demonstrably false. The video recording and submitted files that are part of the legislative record of a December 15, 2020 hearing–before the same committee–show exactly this date (Summer 2023) for the the completion of the NEPA process (consisting of a final EIS and a Record of Decision).
And in in March 2023, Johnson claimed that the “Record of Decision” would be completed by “the end of 2024.”
IBR is not just a little late: It now appears that the earliest a record of decision will be released is mid -2026 more than two and a half years late.
These delays contribute to driving up project costs–and creating more billable hours for consultants.
Dissembling about schedules is part of a long-standing practice of the Oregon Department of Transportation, which always claims it is “on schedule”–meaning the current, revised schedule, not one announced earlier.
City Observatory reported on September 15, 2025, that the Interstate Bridge Project was more than two and a half years behind schedule in producing a required environmental impact statement. We pointed out that when the project was revived five years ago, officials promised that the environmental review would be finished in about two and a half years, by the summer of 2023.
At the September 15, 2025 meeting of the Joint Oregon Washington legislative committee on the I-5 bridge, legislators asked the reasons for the delay. Program Administrator Greg Johnson claimed that they had never promised “Record of Decision” by 2023. Here is a condensed version of a question from Senator Khan Pham and answer by Mr. Johnson (the full colloquy is appended to the end of this commentary).
Senator Pham: I know In 2020, when we first started, we were told that we’d have a Record of Decision by 2023 and then, and it was moved more to 2025 and now it looks like the earliest we could have a record of decision would be April of 2026 which is two and a half years later than what we were told in 2020. . . . .
Greg Johnson
Thank you. Okay, thank you, Senator Pham, for the question. I don’t think that there was ever anything from this program that said we would get to a Record of Decision in 2023.
Johnson’s statement is untrue. There actually was something from the IBR program that did in fact indicate that a record of decision would be produced in 2023. It comes from a testimony Mr. Johnson and IBR made to the very same joint Oregon-Washington legislative committee that met almost five years ago, on December 15, 2020. Here is a screenshot of Mr. Johnson’s presentation showing the project schedule. This schedule called for the NEPA process to be complete by “Summer 2023” (the green dot in the fourth row, labelled “complete NEPA, begin right-of-way acquisition”).
OLIS Video, December 15, 2020 (click to view)
Here’s what Mr. Johnson said on December 15, 2020, as this slide was displayed:
. . . we’re looking at the initiation of the NEPA process. We have established the program office already, so we are moving into that planning phase of satisfying the federal NEPA requirements and making sure that we are getting input from both communities.
We are looking at a next major deliverable will be a draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement that will have looked at alternatives and narrowed those down. And finally, in the 2023 timeframe, a final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement, which we will be submitting to the federal government for a an approval of a record of decision. (emphasis added)
The “Record of Decision” completes the NEPA process: As Johnson testified to the legislative committee on September 15, 2025, the issuance of the record of decision is the final step in the environmental review process:
. . . we’re hoping to have achieved that milestone [issuing the final supplemental EIS] early in 2026 and soon to follow on the heels of that will be an amended Record of Decision and that will complete the Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement . . .
What this means is the Interstate Bridge Project is not a few months or even a year behind schedule, due to recent developments. Instead, it is certain to be at least two and a half years behind its original schedule: the Record of Decision should have been completed two years ago, in the summer of 2023; it now appears that the ROD will not be released for at least another six months, until April of 2026.
These delays, as the IBR project regularly tells us are playing a key role in driving up costs. While that’s a problem for taxpayers, it actually means more billable hours for the consultants working on IBR: the fact that the environmental review process has taken more than two years longer than anticipated means that they’ve billed even more.
A history of vague assurances about schedule
This is nothing new: IBR officials have always offered up misleadingly vague statements claiming to be on schedule, even as the project fails to meet its own deadlines. For example, asked at a June 10, 2024 legislative hearing whether the project would start construction in 2025—something that plainly isn’t going to happen—project director Greg Johnson seemed to answer in the affirmative, but really said nothing “we are on a good path to get this project underway”:
REP. MCLAIN: Okay, so this is normal stuff. We’re still on on . . . basically we’re one or two months slowed down, but we’re still on line to get construction started in 2025 with all of the things that you’ve presented today, as far as getting our work done on our permits, etc, correct?
GREG JOHNSON: Yes, we are still on track to uhhh . . . we’re moving some things around, and you’ll see a presentation later about our proposed delivery process that we put forward to the industry to get input on. We are, we are on a good path to get this project underway.
(Emphasis added)
In reality, even fifteen months ago, it was apparent that construction would not start in 2025, and with these delays, it is almost certain that construction cannot start in 2026, either. But Greg Johnson always says he is on schedule, even when announcing delays. It is something he has been saying for years. For example, in October, 2023, The Columbian reported that Johnson claimed the project was “on schedule”:
I-5 bridge environmental impact statement delayed, again — this time until 2024
Administrator: ‘We’re still on time and on schedule at this point’
The goalposts are in a nearly constant state of movement. Recall that in 2020, IBR officials said the NEPA process would be complete by 2023. In March 2023, IBR director Greg Johnson said that they would have the record of decision by the end of 2024.
Columbian, March 10, 2023
Now, in 2025, Johnson insists that the record of decision will be next April. As long as you keep producing a new schedule—and conveniently forgetting about the previous ones—you can always claim that you are “on schedule at this point.” This practice is essentially built-in to the scheduling documents, which have this footnote:
“The IBR Program Plan is a PLANNING TOOL and represents the current plan to progress the work. This plan is subject to frequent change and adjustment. No dates are concrete until they have been actualized.”
In practice, what this means is, nothing in the schedule is actually “scheduled” until it has been “actualized” meaning, completed. It’s a meaningless and circular definition that allows them to assert that they’re always on schedule.
Similar re-writing of history about the Abernethy Bridge Project
ODOT always claims that its projects are under-budget and on-schedule. Take their largest current project, widening and seismic improvements to the I-205 Abernethy Bridge. In a November 2025 letter to the Oregon Transportation Commission, Director Kris Strickler stated:
The project team is actively managing risks to on-time and on-budget completion of the project.
Strickler’s letter implies the project could still be on-time and on-budget. In reality, the project already is way over budget and a year behind schedule. The project was scheduled to be completed in 2025 according to ODOT reports 2024;
In late 2024, press reports say ODOT announced it was postponing completion from Fall 2025 to Fall 2026. In late 2025, ODOT claimed the project may be done in “Winter 2026,” (by which they actually mean the fourth quarter of calendar year 2026, not the first quarter), while the schedule of payments to the project’s construction contractor continues through the first quarter of 2027. In the latest (June 2026) presentation to the Commission, the staff now say that construction will continue until the end of 2027. That doesn’t include additional work needed to mitigation soil liquidation risks to three of the bridge’s piers, which is likely to last until 2030, and cost an additional $130 million. The project is hardly “on time”–it is between two and five years late: not finishing in 2025 as ODOT promised, but either in 2027, or as late as 2030.
As we’ve noted at City Observatory, ODOT’s original “cost to complete” estimate for the project was less than $250 million, then doubled to almost $500 million, and the rose further to $622 million and then $750 million, and most recently $815 million, and ODOT has acknowledged it could go higher. It’s at least a year, and half a billion dollars too late to be talking about delivering this project “on-time and on-budget.”
Appendix: Longer Colloquy Between Senator Pham and Mr. Johnson
Transcribed from the legislative recording of the September 15, 2025 meeting of the Joint Oregon-Washington I-5 Bridge Committee.
Senator Pham: I know in 2020, when we first started, we were told that we’d have a Record of Decision by 2023 and then, and it was moved more to 2025 and now it looks like the earliest we could have a record of decision would be April of 2026 which is two and a half years later than what we were told in 2020. . . . I’m just concerned, because this is driving up costs for Oregon and Washington taxpayers. When we miss our deadlines, it really does have an impact on our transportation budget as we try to find the funding for to make up for the increased costs. So can you tell me a little bit more Director Johnson about the reasons for these delays and what we can do to hold our contractors more accountable to meeting our original the deadlines that have been promised, so that way, we can kind of make sure that we’re delivering the most efficiency for our taxpayer dollars in this moment of really constrained budget.
Greg Johnson
Thank you. Okay, thank you, Senator Pham, for the question. I don’t think that there was ever anything from this program that said we would get to a Record of Decision in 2023. In 2022, we reached a modified, locally preferred alternative, which is the first step of getting us into the Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement process. And this is a complex process that there are a lot of elements that are not under our team’s control, that we have to react to certain, certain things that come our way. But you’re right. We originally promised that we would have a Record of Decision in 2025. That did not happen because we had elements that had to be revisited by our federal partners and our team. So we have been partnering with our federal partners, they understand the the timelines to get this and the importance of the timelines, but these are complex issues that we are dealing with. We cannot skip steps, so we are making sure that we are checking every box so we don’t have to go back and repeat steps. So yes, we originally assumed that we would have a Record of Decision this year. That did not happen.
You’ve all seen the video of that United 767 hitting the light pole as it landed in Newark back on May 3rd. The footage from inside the careening bread truck is startling.
How it happened, exactly, is still being investigated. But I’ve been asked to speculate, and so I will:
Runway 29 at Newark is short. Long enough, under most conditions, to accommodate a 767, but short enough to require extra concentration from the crew. The runway’s threshold is also unusually close to the highway, lessening the margin for error.
One way or another, flight 169 drifted below the glide path and impacted the utility standard at the edge of the highway.
It’s possible they were “ducking under,” as we call it. That is, intentionally sneaking just a touch below the normal angle — to take advantage of as much pavement as possible and avoid landing long.
This technique, while not unheard of, is usually discouraged, and in some cases prohibited by the airline. We always pull up the performance data prior to landing, which tells us how much runway is required. It accounts for wind, surface conditions, and so on. If you’ve crunched the numbers correctly, there shouldn’t be a need for improvising.
In its flight manuals, United had a short-runway policy that while it didn’t encourage ducking under per se, it recommended that pilots adjust their touchdown aiming point to one closer to the threshold. This policy had, in fact, been rescinded only days before the Newark incident. Whether the pilots were clear on this, or if it played a role, is uncertain.
Even if they were ducking under, they still shouldn’t have hit the pole. Somehow they ended up lower than they intended.
Or, for whatever reasons, it was entirely inadvertent. Sometimes an approach gets unstable and you fall a bit low. This isn’t terribly uncommon. If you’re unable to correct in time, you’re supposed to break off the landing and go around.
There is no ILS approach to runway 29 — a system that sends out a vertical guidance signal, called a “glide slope,” that pilots track to the runway. Instead there are what we call “non-precision” and/or “visual” approaches. These come in different flavors, and while they’re very routine, and still plenty precise, they’re more complicated. The descent path is handled differently, and slipping low is perhaps more likely than it would be with an ILS. And winds were quite gusty at the time, adding to the difficulty.
Were they ducking under? Did they sink too and neglect to go around? Did they even realize what was happening? Was there time?
I don’t know. Any of that is possible. Or something else.
These are just guesses and conjecture, and I’m not implying that anyone was negligent or reckless. Eventually we’ll have more info.
I landed on runway 29 many times, but it was years ago when I flew regional turboprops. What’s short for a 767 isn’t so short for a 19-seater.
Meanwhile, Instagram is full of reels showing purported “close calls” at the edge of 29, insinuating that the runway is unsafe and that planes are routinely almost crashing. These scary-seeming videos are mostly just tricks of angle and perspective. And as I noted earlier, the runway’s threshold is close to the highway, meaning that jets on a perfectly normal glide path can appear “low” when in fact they’re right where they should be.
The aircraft at Newark was a 767-400, largest variant of the 767 family. United and Delta are the only two carriers in the world that fly these models. United inherited its -400s from Continental Airlines when it merged with that carrier in 2010.
The -400 was a bespoke collaboration between Delta and Boeing. Delta wanted a widebody to replace its aging L-1011s, for use mainly in high-density domestic markets. Speaking of short runways, the -400 was once a regular visitor at La Guardia.
The jet was later shifted onto international routes. Flight 169 was coming from Venice.
During probate in Washington State, the court oversees the legal process of validating a deceased person’s will, paying debts and taxes, identifying assets, and distributing property to beneficiaries or heirs. While probate can help ensure an estate is handled properly, it can also take time, involve court costs, and create stress for family members. Many individuals choose to plan ahead with estate planning tools to reduce or completely avoid probate whenever possible.
Washington State is known for its strong legal protections, growing communities, and increasing focus on estate planning and asset management. Families across the state often seek ways to simplify the transfer of property and reduce complications after a loved one passes away.
Because probate laws can affect how assets are handled, understanding the process is important for anyone planning their estate or helping family members navigate legal matters. Many people researching how to avoid probate in Washington State are looking for ways to save time, reduce expenses, and make the transition easier for their loved ones.
What Is Probate?
Probate is the legal process that takes place after someone dies. The purpose of probate is to ensure the deceased person’s assets are properly managed and distributed according to their will or state law.
If the person had a valid will, the court generally confirms its authenticity and appoints the executor named in the document. If there is no will, the court appoints an administrator to manage the estate according to Washington’s intestacy laws.
Probate may involve court supervision depending on the complexity of the estate and whether disputes arise among family members or beneficiaries.
What Happens During Probate in Washington State?
Filing the Will with the Court
The probate process usually begins when the executor files the will and other required documents with the local probate court. This officially opens the estate.
The court may then appoint the executor or personal representative responsible for managing the estate.
Identifying and Valuing Assets
The executor must identify all assets owned by the deceased person. These may include:
Bank accounts
Real estate
Vehicles
Investments
Personal property
Business interests
Some assets may require professional appraisals to determine their value accurately.
Paying Debts and Taxes
Before beneficiaries receive assets, the estate must pay outstanding debts, taxes, and administrative expenses. Creditors are typically notified and given time to submit claims against the estate.
The executor is responsible for reviewing and resolving valid debts using estate funds.
Distributing Assets to Beneficiaries
After debts and taxes are handled, the remaining assets are distributed to beneficiaries according to the will or state law if no will exists.
Once all responsibilities are completed, the probate process can officially close.
How Long Does Probate Take?
The length of probate varies depending on the estate’s complexity, court schedules, and whether disputes occur. Some probate cases may finish within several months, while others can take a year or longer.
Factors that may delay probate include:
Family disagreements
Missing documents
Complex assets
Creditor claims
Tax issues
Proper estate planning can often reduce delays and complications.
Ways to Avoid Probate in Washington State
Create a Living Trust
A revocable living trust is one of the most common ways to avoid probate. Assets placed inside the trust are managed privately and transferred directly to beneficiaries after death without court involvement.
Living trusts can help families avoid delays and maintain privacy.
Use Beneficiary Designations
Certain assets allow direct beneficiary designations, including:
Retirement accounts
Life insurance policies
Payable-on-death bank accounts
These assets typically transfer automatically to the named beneficiaries outside of probate.
Joint Ownership of Property
Property owned jointly with rights of survivorship may transfer directly to the surviving owner without probate.
This is commonly used for homes, bank accounts, and other shared assets.
Transfer-on-Death Deeds
Washington State allows transfer-on-death deeds for real estate in some situations. This legal document allows property to pass directly to a beneficiary after death without probate proceedings.
Why Estate Planning Matters
Estate planning helps individuals maintain greater control over how their assets are handled after death. It can reduce stress for surviving family members, minimize legal complications, and potentially lower administrative costs.
Without proper planning, loved ones may face longer probate processes and unexpected legal challenges.
Consulting with an estate planning attorney can help individuals create documents that match their personal goals and financial situation.
Key Takeaways
Probate is the legal process of managing and distributing a deceased person’s estate.
Probate in Washington State may involve validating wills, paying debts, and distributing assets.
Probate can sometimes be time-consuming and expensive.
Living trusts are one of the most effective ways to avoid probate.
Beneficiary designations and joint ownership may also help bypass probate.
Estate planning can reduce stress and simplify asset transfers for families.
Consulting an estate planning attorney can help create an effective long-term plan.
An ideal attorney helps accident victims handle legal claims, negotiate with insurance companies, and pursue financial recovery for their losses. Choosing the right attorney can make a major difference in how smoothly your case moves forward and how strong your claim becomes.
The right legal guidance can help you recover fair compensation after an accident. This helps reduce the stress that often comes with medical bills, paperwork, and insurance disputes.
However, many people rush the process and make avoidable mistakes, such as hiring a lawyer without personal injury experience, choosing based only on fees, or failing to review client feedback. Understanding these common mistakes can help you avoid unnecessary problems later.
Hiring a Lawyer Without Personal Injury Experience
One of the biggest mistakes people make is assuming any lawyer can handle a personal injury claim. In reality, personal injury law involves detailed negotiations, insurance claims, medical documentation, and liability rules that require focused experience.
A lawyer who regularly handles injury claims is more likely to understand:
How to calculate damages properly
What evidence strengthens a case
How insurance companies try to reduce payouts
When to negotiate and when to go to court
Choosing someone with direct experience in personal injury law can improve both confidence and case strategy.
Focusing Only on Advertising
A well-known advertisement does not automatically mean a lawyer is the best choice for your case. Many people hire the first attorney they see on television or social media without researching further.
Instead of relying only on marketing, look into:
Client reviews
Case results
Years of experience
Communication style
Availability for consultations
A lawyer’s reputation should come from consistent client satisfaction and professional results, not just visibility.
Choosing Based Only on Low Fees
It is understandable to think about costs after an accident, especially when medical expenses start piling up. Still, choosing a lawyer purely because they charge the lowest fee can sometimes backfire.
An experienced personal injury lawyer may have stronger negotiation skills, better resources, and access to expert witnesses when needed. The focus should be on value and quality of representation rather than simply the cheapest option available.
Not Asking Questions During the Consultation
Many people stay quiet during consultations because they feel nervous or overwhelmed. But this is the time to gather as much information as possible.
Consider asking questions like:
How many similar cases have you handled?
Who will manage my case directly?
What challenges do you expect in my claim?
How often will I receive updates?
What is your approach to settlements?
A trustworthy lawyer should answer these questions openly and professionally.
Overlooking Reviews and References
Client feedback often provides insight that advertisements cannot. Reviews can reveal whether a lawyer is responsive, organized, and supportive throughout the legal process.
While no attorney will have perfect reviews, repeated complaints about poor communication or lack of transparency should not be ignored. Reading testimonials and checking references can help you make a more informed decision.
Waiting Too Long to Hire a Lawyer
Delaying legal help can hurt a personal injury case. Evidence may disappear, witnesses may become harder to contact, and important deadlines could be missed.
Speaking with a lawyer early allows them to preserve evidence, communicate with insurers, and guide you through the process before mistakes happen. Acting quickly often puts clients in a stronger position overall.
Key Takeaways
Choosing the right personal injury lawyer is not something to rush. A little research and careful attention at the beginning can save a lot of stress later.
Keep These Points in Mind:
Look for lawyers with personal injury experience.
Do not rely only on advertisements.
Pay attention to communication style.
Avoid choosing solely based on low fees.
Ask detailed questions during consultations.
Read reviews and client feedback carefully.
Contact a lawyer as early as possible after an accident.
The mobile entertainment industry in the Philippines is rapidly evolving, propelled by users’ growing preference for faster and easier digital experiences on their smartphones. Among the standout names gaining remarkable traction is Jili, primarily through its interactive and engaging offerings on the GameZone platform. This notable growth is not accidental but rather the result of evolving user behaviors, mobile-first content consumption, and strategic platform exposure. As digital habits continue to change, content that prioritizes convenience, speed, and strong visual appeal becomes increasingly vital, positioning Jili as an essential player in the entertainment ecosystem.
The Mobile-First Movement Accelerating Jili’s Growth
The mobile-first consumption trend is one of the most influential forces fueling Jili’s expansion. Modern users prefer instant, on-the-go entertainment rather than prolonged sessions on desktop or other traditional devices. Platforms optimized specifically for mobile—with intuitive navigation, rapid loading times, and responsive controls—naturally attract larger audiences, meeting the growing demand for seamless mobile-friendly content.
User engagement commonly takes place during brief moments throughout the day, such as commutes, breaks, or waiting periods, increasing the need for content that loads swiftly, is easy to browse, and allows for quick exits with minimal friction. Jili’s portfolio is carefully tailored to this type of consumption, enabling users to flexibly interact with entertainment while fitting neatly into their busy lifestyles.
Further enhancing its mobile-first suitability, JiliPH ensures that its content performs smoothly across different devices and network conditions. Optimized technical design reduces buffering and lag, providing a frustration-free experience critical to sustaining mobile users’ attention.
Visual Appeal and Rapid Interaction Boost User Engagement
In today’s competitive digital space, capturing user attention within seconds is essential. Clear, compelling visual design paired with swift interaction cycles plays a key role in maintaining interest and encouraging ongoing engagement.
Jili’s content delivers sharp graphics, smooth animations, and instantaneous feedback to craft a captivating and dynamic interface. Such visual fidelity and responsiveness combine to create an immersive user experience that invites longer sessions.
However, overloading platforms with complex visuals or heavy effects can impair performance and tire users more quickly. That’s why maintaining a balance—favoring clean, efficient design and prioritizing speed—is crucial to maximizing engagement without sacrificing quality.
Users tend to gravitate towards systems that respond immediately to their inputs, reinforcing a sense of control and satisfaction. These responsive interaction loops significantly contribute to Jili’s appeal on GameZone.
Accessibility Enhances User Adoption and Satisfaction
Ease of use stands as another major factor behind Jili’s increasing user base. Platforms that are easy to navigate and understand from the first interaction foster longer engagement and stronger loyalty.
Jili’s straightforward layouts and predictable navigation flow reduce barriers, allowing users of varying technical skill levels to access content comfortably. By simplifying interaction models and eliminating unnecessary complexity, Jiligame meets consumer demand for convenience.
In addition, cross-device compatibility ensures consistent, high-quality experiences across a wide range of smartphones and network environments. This inclusivity broadens the content’s reach and enables a diverse audience to engage without technical difficulties.
GameZone’s Ecosystem Amplifies Jili’s Reach
GameZone plays a pivotal role in boosting the visibility of Jili’s content by providing a thoroughly integrated platform environment. Bundling multiple entertainment categories into one mobile-optimized hub reduces user effort, enabling seamless content discovery without having to switch between apps or sites.
This ecosystem approach increases exposure, giving Jiligame slots and other content types greater opportunities to attract new players naturally. The platform’s strong reputation as a regulated and licensed operator builds user trust, helping reduce hesitation to try unfamiliar offerings.
GameZone’s intuitive navigation and responsive design further enhance the user experience, supporting longer engagement times and encouraging exploration across diverse content.
Variety Keeps Users Coming Back
Sustaining user interest over time requires the continuous introduction of diverse entertainment options. Repetitive or overly predictable content often leads to declining engagement, while variety motivates users to return repeatedly.
Jili’s extensive range of themes, pacing differences, and interaction styles appeal to a broad audience with varying preferences. Whether users seek quick play sessions or more immersive experiences, the content library accommodates these needs effectively.
Regular updates that include new game mechanics, visual refreshes, and reward structures maintain excitement and novelty, encouraging a loyal user community.
Responsible Use for Balanced Digital Enjoyment
Promoting responsible consumption underlies healthy digital entertainment growth. Balanced screen time paired with meaningful social interaction helps prevent fatigue and supports sustained user well-being.
Extended, uninterrupted gameplay sessions can lead to tiredness and decreased focus, emphasizing the importance of moderation. GameZone follows licensing and regulatory frameworks, including PAGCOR guidelines, to implement safe access policies.
These measures foster trust and stability, enabling users to enjoy content confidently and responsibly. A focus on user protection not only benefits individuals but also sustains a thriving community around platforms like GameZone and providers such as JiliPH.
Conclusion: Elements Driving Jili’s Strong Presence
Jili’s continued rise within the mobile digital entertainment space stems from a combination of effective mobile-first strategy, rapid and intuitive interaction designs, clear and appealing visuals, and high accessibility. Along with GameZone’s ecosystem that enhances user discovery and engagement, these elements collectively foster growth.
Adapting to evolving user habits and platform structures ensures Jili remains poised to meet future demands. Emphasizing convenience, responsiveness, diversity, and responsible access guarantees its ongoing relevance in the Philippine digital entertainment industry.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Q1. What is Jili on GameZone? Jili is a digital entertainment provider featured on GameZone, delivering mobile-optimized, interactive content designed for user convenience and captivating visuals.
Q2. Why is Jili gaining popularity? Its growth is powered by mobile-friendly accessibility, rapid and smooth interactions, appealing visual presentation, and alignment with users’ desire for quick and engaging entertainment.
Q3. How does GameZone support Jili? GameZone provides a centralized, mobile-optimized platform that simplifies content discovery and offers trustworthy, user-friendly navigation, leading to greater exposure for Jili’s offerings.
I always sort of knew that metaverse hype roughly coincided with the Covid lockdown and our collective period of isolation and loneliness, a year-plus stretch when we relied mostly on computer platforms for nearly all socializing. But here in 2026 it’s now clear that metaverse hype and lockdown-induced isolation exactly coincided. They didn’t roughly overlap; they exactly overlapped. So much so that I’m now wondering if any of the “metaverse” hype would have happened if Covid hadn’t happened. Facebook still likely would’ve renamed itself, because they’d so poisoned the “Facebook” brand itself, but maybe to something other than “Meta”.
We allowed the necessary initial emergency lockdown to extend indefinitely because it seemed like maybe we could get by for a long stretch using technology. The extended lockdown never would have happened if the Covid pandemic had broken out 20 or more years earlier. In 2020 and 2021, we could squint and say, sure, maybe kids can “go to school” via Zoom. We never would have kept all kids home for an entire year pre-Zoom. But the truth is Zoom “school” wasn’t much better than no school at all. Same for Zoom “work collaboration”, and Zoom “friend gatherings”. It was an illusion that today’s technology is even close to a sufficient substitute for being in each others’ physical presence. The siren call of “the metaverse” was exactly what we craved — technology that would be a sufficient substitute for real-world experiences and socializing. The best audience for snake oil are people with actual ailments. And during Covid, we were all ailing socially.
Michael M. Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullin, reporting for The New York Times (gift link):
CBS News faced a fresh wave of turmoil on Monday after Scott
Pelley, the “60 Minutes” correspondent, laced into the show’s
newly hired executive producer during a staff meeting and accused
Bari Weiss, the network’s editor in chief, of “murdering” the
longstanding Sunday news program.
In an extraordinary exchange, Mr. Pelley, his newscaster’s
baritone sometimes shaking in anger, told Nick Bilton, the new
executive producer, that he had “slender” qualifications for his
new job and questioned the network’s commitment to the future of
the program, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by
The New York Times.
The 10 a.m. gathering, held at the program’s Midtown Manhattan
headquarters, was intended as a formal introduction to Mr. Bilton,
a tech journalist and filmmaker who was appointed last week as
part of a major shake-up at “60 Minutes.” CBS fired Tanya Simon,
the previous executive producer, and her deputy, along with Sharyn
Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, two of the show’s correspondents — an
event that Mr. Pelley referred to as “Black Thursday.”
It’s worth noting that the night before the firings, 60 Minutes won two news Emmys. It’s even more worth noting that 60 Minutes’s TV ratings were up 9 percent year-over-year, and digital video views doubled. In both quality and popularity, the show is thriving, not struggling. (See also: The Late Show With Stephen Colbert was, by far, the top-rated late night talk show.)
“Broadcast is an ice cube that is melting, OK?” Mr. Bilton said,
saying the show had to adapt. “Bari loves this institution,” he
added. “She loves ’60 Minutes.’”
At that, Mr. Pelley interrupted.
“She is murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” the correspondent said. “She does
not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been
doing exactly that.”
Mr. Pelley added: “She has no qualifications for her job; you have
slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made
at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic, so why should we
expect that any of this is going to be any better?”
International Sea Level Satellite Observes El Niño Precursor
PIA26710
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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International Sea Level Satellite Observes El Niño Precursor
MP4 (1.10 MB)
Description
Sea level height data from the international Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite collected from March to May 2026 show higher, warmer water moving from the western Pacific Ocean to just off the coast of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. This phenomenon is known as a warm Kelvin wave, signified in this animation of the data by yellow, orange, red, and white. The emergence of Kelvin waves in the early part the year is a signal that an El Niño event is likely to follow.
In early 2026, measurements from Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich showed a small Kelvin wave forming around Micronesia in late January and dissipating by mid-February. The wave shown in the animation emerged in early March, then moved east over time. By mid-May, the seas around Peru were more than 5.9 inches (15 centimeters) higher than long-term averages. Because water expands as it warms, a rise in elevation of an area of the ocean indicates increasing temperature.
The additional heat at the sea surface can change the circulation patterns of energy, water, and air in the atmosphere, which can affect weather. El Niños can cause heavy precipitation in some regions and deficits in others, influencing daily life and commerce around the world.
Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, named after former NASA Earth Science Division Director Michael Freilich, is one of two satellites that compose the Copernicus Sentinel-6/Jason-CS (Continuity of Service) mission.
Sentinel-6/Jason-CS was jointly developed by ESA, the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), NASA, and NOAA, with funding support from the European Commission and technical support on performance from the French space agency CNES (Centre National d’Études Spatiales). Spacecraft monitoring and control, as well as the processing of all the altimeter science data, is carried out by EUMETSAT on behalf of the European Union’s Copernicus programme, with the support of all partner agencies.
A division of Caltech in Pasadena, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory contributed three science instruments for each Sentinel-6 satellite: the Advanced Microwave Radiometer, the Global Navigation Satellite System – Radio Occultation, and the Laser Retroreflector Array. NASA also contributed launch services, ground systems supporting operation of the NASA science instruments, the science data processors for two of these instruments, and support for the U.S. members of the international Ocean Surface Topography Science Team.
To learn more about Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, visit:
Sea level height data from the international Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite collected from March to May 2026 show higher, warmer water moving from the western Pacific Ocean to just off the coast of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. This phenomenon is known as a warm Kelvin wave, signified in this animation of the data by yellow, orange, red, and white. The emergence of Kelvin waves in the early part the year is a signal that an El Niño event is likely to follow.
But, wait, there’s more: in addition to the fall releases, The
Information reports that Meta also has a pair slated for December,
codenamed “Mojito VIP.” There are also two prototypes being tested
in the fall, according to the report, including one called
“Artemis” and another called “SSG,” which is short for
“supersensing glasses.”
The Information previously reported that the “supersensing”
pair would have always-on cameras capable of looking at your
surroundings without you having to prompt the voice assistant or
activate the camera with a button. The idea here is that, with a
constant stream of visual information, the smart glasses could be
a kind of ambient virtual assistant that remembers where you left
your keys or other vision-based reminders.
Spitball: Meta’s entire business is predicated on knowing as much about people as possible. Their interest in building out a virtual “metaverse” world was motivated by the fact they could track everything people do, see, say, and hear there. That didn’t play out so they’re pivoting to building out devices that will let them track everything people do, see, say, and hear in the real world.
One more bit of “metaverse fever dream” follow-up. The one company in the field that Nick Heer doesn’t mention is Apple, makers of the best-known (albeit not best-selling) virtual reality headset. Think and say what you want about the Vision platform (I still think it’s the first inning of a long game), but no one at Apple ever once gave a hint of endorsing “metaverse” hype. In fact, as I’ve noted before, at a 2022 WSJ event, seven months before Vision Pro was announced and over a year before it was released, Joanna Stern asked Greg Joswiak and Craig Federighi:
Stern: You have to finish this sentence, both of you. The
metaverse is...
I recently attended a talk where one of the presenters made some pretty…astonishing claims about what they had achieved by the pure, uncut power of vibe coding. Difficult engineering problems solved, backlogs cleared. Rewrites that would have aken a year or more in the beforetimes, now whipped out in a few short weeks of prompting. Afterwards, wandering around the conference, I caught a lot of excited chatter:
“I can’t wait to make my teams watch the recording of this talk. My engineers are SO resistant to the idea of shipping code without reading it. Finally, some proof they can’t ignore!”
“Mine are too. It’s so frustrating. People are just so stuck in what they know. I think they’re just scared of being replaced, you know?”
The talk was fantastic. The presenter made it all sound easy, breezy and oh-so-fun.
The problem is, I know lots of other people at his company, and they described these projects as a horror show. Yes, they allowed, some progress was made, and some of it was pretty cool, but he also left a long, fiery trail of chaos in his wake. Months later, some teams were still grinding through waves of cleanup work.
(Please don’t @ me to ask if I am subtweeting your talk. I am subtweeting MANY TALKS. This is a composite.)
I keep thinking back to this episode — the highly selective version of the story that was told on stage, and the room full of AI enthusiasts who seemed to be eating it up with a spoon, uncritically, because it so validated everything they wanted to be true.
I keep thinking about the certainty they took home with them, and wondering how that energy fed into conversations with their teams.
People are retreating into camps and circling the wagons
There is a yawning chasm opening up between…oh, let’s call them the enthusiasts and the skeptics, although the battle lines are drawn in many different ways. Both groups are tense, frustrated, and a little scared, and as a result, they have stopped talking to each other. Instead, they talk about each other — as roadblocks, as caricatures, as threats. It’s all,
“THOSE people are AI-pilled and don’t understand software”, vs
“THOSE people hate AI and don’t want to move fast.”
This is not a situation where one side is right and the other is huffing paint. (O, that it were!) Each side is grappling with a real, alarming, escalating threat to the company’s existence, and the closer they look the more (again: real, alarming) evidence they find.
The enthusiasts are not wrong. We are starting to see real, non-imaginary, discontinuous leaps in capabilities from teams that lean in hard to working with AI. And this does not feel like a normal technology cycle where you can wait for the dust to settle; teams that sit this out while competitors are hustling could be out of business before the dust settles. That’s a real, existential threat.
The skeptics are also not wrong. When you ship code faster than engineers can read it, in domains where nobody has full context, you are making withdrawals from a trust account that took years to build. Reliability degrades, institutional knowledge evaporates. You end up with systems nobody understands, products burbling into incoherence, and on-call rotations that grind people up and spit them out. That is ALSO a real existential threat.
I am writing for solid teams that are doing the work
Before I go any further, I want to be clear about who I’m writing for. This is not about teams whose management chain is disconnected from engineering realities or paying for McKinsey consultants, or teams with low engineering discipline and trust.
I am not writing for tiny baby startups with no customers or revenue, and I am not writing for behemoths who are on the verge of busting through the red tape to finally get a Claude license.
I am writing for relatively high-performing teams that are transforming from pre-AI to AI-native. These are teams with engineering discipline and skill who care deeply, who are struggling precisely because there are so many legitimate, competing threats and no obvious answers.
I’m talking about the happy case, in other words. It’s still hard as shit.
There is no natural feedback loop connecting enthusiasts with skeptics
The wins are real, the costs are real. This ought to be a fruitful source of tension, where skeptics and enthusiasts join up to solve hard problems with their powers combined, Powerpuff Girls-style.
The problem is, the wins and costs are happening to two different groups of people. There is no natural feedback loop.
That conference talk I mentioned? I doubt the speaker was intentionally misleading us. They might not even know about the tire fire in their wake. It has become very easy to do things without context or mastery, and the downstream costs are often invisible to the person who incurs them. All they see is the win.
The skeptics have the opposite problem. They cannot avoid hearing the enthusiasts’ claims, even if those try. But when those claims seem to get bigger and blowsier and less tethered to reality, the skeptics react with escalating cynicism. They hear the enthusiasts, but they no longer believe a word they say.
I have lost track of the number of engineers who have said to me, in exasperation, “I don’t WANT to be an AI hater. I studied AI in school! I think it’s neat! I feel like I’m getting backed into a corner where I have to be a hater because I’m the only one left who gives a shit about reality! Is any of it real?”
Ok, that’s fair. I’ll show my work. Here is my north star example of what “good” looks like.
No, it’s not all hype (the Fin story)
I have long looked up to the Fin (formerly Intercom) engineering org. When Christine and I put together our AI mandate1 last year, we drew a lot of inspiration from a piece by Darragh Curran, CTO, called simply “2x”, where he challenged the R&D org to double their productivity in the next 12 months.
He recently published some results, showing that they exceeded their goal — they 3x’d their output in 9 months (defined by total # merged PRs divided by total people in R&D). (Yes, PRs are an imperfect representation of reality. I know this, you know this, he knows this. He talks about it in the piece, which you should absolutely go read.)
The results are mixed, which makes a fascinating read. Product defect backlog shrunk by over half. >2x product changes, 39% faster from idea to shipped. Code quality provisionally starting to improve, after a long, scary 18 months of decline. Downtime down by 35%.
That is a real, non-imaginary, discontinuous forward leap in capabilities. This did not happen because AI is magic. It happened because Fin already had exceptionally high engineering discipline, fast feedback loops, and a culture of experimentation and measurement.2
If you want to know what engineering teams founded pre-AI can expect to achieve by embracing AI, there you go. This should be well within reach for the rest of us.
We can fix this
First, a reminder. We care about the same things. We are on the same side. None of us are assholes.3
And we need each other desperately. To chart a safe path between the Scylla of missed windows and the Charybdis of systems melting into slop, we need eyes on both threats as we coordinate, synchronize, and pull together. Hard.
In order to do that, we need to do two things: knit our fractured realities back together, so we are rowing the same damn boat, and apply some engineering rigor to the problem.
First: Tell the whole story. Talk about the wins, and talk about what they cost us
The first move is to mend the gap in shared reality. Tell the whole story. You’re allowed to celebrate and get excited about big wins and advances with AI — but invite reflection on the costs and downstream consequences. People are also allowed to surface costs and consequences, but don’t leave out the context of what was achieved or attempted. Be very clear that your shared goal is to figure out how to collectively deliver more wins, bigger wins, with fewer unpredictable costs, not to clamp down on innovation.
This sounds simple. It isn’t. By default, wins get trumpeted in one setting (blog posts, conference talks, all hands) and costs bubble up in others (SRE team meetings, on call, retros, complainy DMs, grumbling over whiskey).
The result is that both sides may feel like they are being unfairly silenced. You might not think that “we aren’t even allowed to criticize AI” is a sentiment that can be widely held at the same time as “all we EVER DO is complain about AI”, but it can and it does. The asymmetry isn’t malicious, it’s structural, and it must be fixed.
If you’re an enthusiast, start here. Next time you do something big that you’re genuinely excited about — “in my spare time over the weekend, I finished a migration we gave up for dead two months ago!!” — YAY, AWESOME POSSUM! GO YOU! Get excited! Tell your coworkers! But ask around to see if there were any unintended consequences on other teams, and include that too. Or tuck in a “P.S., if there was any downstream cleanup work, I’d love to hear about it.” Especially if there’s a power dynamic and people might be afraid to speak up: make it easy. Invite feedback.
And if you’re a skeptic, doing cleanup downstream of someone else’s great AI vibe coding triumph, don’t just mutter bitterly to your fellow travelers. Bring this up in a responsible, friendly way to the person who caused it, or surface it in the same forum as it was announced. Close the loop. It’s how we learn.
Tell the whole story. Normalize this. It’s a steam valve for anger, it makes people feel seen, it bends towards less expensive wins, and makes a better story. It also — crucially — builds the shared reality that makes the next step possible.
Second: Treat this like an engineering problem, not a rhetorical one
Once you’re operating in the same reality, you can have the real conversation. Right now, it tends to go like this.
Enthusiast: “Let’s ship without code review! Company X is doing it. This is clearly where the world is headed. Why do you hate the future?”
Skeptic: “Are you fucking kidding me right now? I’ve got people I’ve never heard of submitting diffs in crayon and you want me to just auto-accept this shit? Your father was non-technical and your mother had a face like a donkey, and together I guess they made you.”4
Both can be right (minus the face thing). Yes, the field is directionally moving toward software factories and AI-validated diffs. Yes, it may be absolutely unthinkable to start auto-accepting diffs given the current state of your codebase and guardrails. Both of those things are more likely true than not, in fact.
But “what’s wrong with you” and “that will never work” are conversation stoppers dressed up as positions. (Remember, you are both very smart and you are on the same side.) The productive version of this conversation is:
“What would it take for you to feel comfortable shipping code to production without reading it?”
Better evals? Better tests? Better feature flags, guardrails, observability? Work on decoupling dependencies and reducing blast radius? Start with something small and out of the critical path? What is the work we need to do to prepare? What comes first, ordering-wise? Can we put that on the roadmap?
Approach this like an engineering problem, not an epistemological debate. What would it take? Start there.
Engineering discipline has never been more vital
As Nathen Harvey said in the 2025 DORA report: “AI is an amplifier. It magnifies the strengths of high-performing organizations and the dysfunctions of struggling ones.” AI will not solve for a lack of discipline, tooling gaps, or management that is disconnected from reality. If you want to leverage AI effectively, you need to invest in your engineering discipline and effectiveness.
AI is not a replacement for engineering discipline, let alone a shortcut to it. (I realize that is the biggest understatement in the universe.)
Your skeptics are the people you need to metabolize and operationalize these changes in a way that will keep customers from leaving and employees from quitting. But they can only participate constructively when they trust that they are going to be listened to and taken seriously.
Even if you’re an enthusiast, do you care about reliability, customer happiness, product coherence, retaining great employees, and improving engineering outcomes? If so, you should be able to find common ground with other people who care about these things. Align on reality, take a step, check in; rinse and repeat.
You don’t need to trust or think that each other is right about everything, but you must believe that you inhabit the same reality, share some of the goals, and that each of you are reasonable actors, capable of changing your minds.
Stick close to reality, not hypotheticals or maximalist stances
When battle lines get drawn and sides get dug in, there are many temptations to escalate: to argue against the maximalist version of an argument you read on the internet, or to demolish the weak, straw man version of what your colleague is saying because you can, even though you know they kind of have a point.
It doesn’t help. Try to engage with what your coworker is actually saying, not what some moron said on HN using some of the same words.
A few small tactical bits:
Mind how you talk about other people to each other. If you privately represent others’ concerns as unserious or unsophisticated (“they’re just clinging to what’s familiar”) to your allies, you quietly influence each other to write them off.
Don’t deny anyone’s lived experience. That is the fastest way to shut someone down and make sure they stay shut off to you. Debate the facts, but let them come to any updated interpretations of their personal experience in their own sweet time.
Get your own psychological needs met. Try to spend time with your team members as human beings, even if it’s just over zoom. A lot of people are massively stressed out and stretched thin right now, and sometimes it can help just to name it and offer a little extra grace. But you can’t give grace if you are running on fumes yourself.
Go pick a fight on Reddit, if you must. Don’t take it out on your colleagues, and don’t project the worst, stupidest version of the Internet’s stance onto them. Deal with reality together. It’s hard enough without borrowing trouble.
The credibility of expertise, the moral authority of ownership
If you want ownership and accountability, you need feedback loops. Feedback loops connecting cause with effect are how we learn and make sense of the world. As we write in the upcoming Observability Engineering (2nd ed):5
“Feedback loops that are timely, precise, and relevant enable self-awareness in humans and self-governance in teams. They generally produce the right sociotechnical system behaviors without needing constant correction or oversight.” — Chapter 25, “Systems Thinking for Software Delivery.”
Ultimately, I believe there is a kind of moral authority someone earns by owning the consequences. If you’re the one left holding the bag, you should generally get final say over what goes in that bag. Which means software engineers who own the code should be, at minimum, extremely involved in defining the conditions for the code they agree to support.
But if you want to have sway over what gets shipped, if you want your critique to land, you must have the standing to deliver it. You must be a credible authority on the topic at hand — AI, in this case. So you should be highly motivated to become one. Ground yourself in expert knowledge of the new ways. Make it fervently clear that you’re on board, you see the opportunity, and you want to help everyone get there.
If you’re just arguing against the new ways from a position steeped in the old ways, I’m not sure why anyone should listen to you.
The engineers who shape how AI gets used will be the ones with credibility: they understand the opportunity, the stakes, and the tradeoffs, and they own enough of the consequences to have standing when they push back. Earning that position takes work, but it is work worth doing.
This is the leadership challenge of the present moment
If you’re a senior leader, job #1 is don’t sink the boat. Keep moving forward as you steer the craft between all manner of icebergs, islands, breakers, and other watery graves. Being late to AI and grinding your team down into a pulp are two especially grim risks we must steer between
.
Note I said “leaders”, not “managers”. Some of the most effective leaders of the moment are staff+ engineers, who cannot make anyone do anything, but without whose judgment and good faith nothing gets done. So much of this challenge is about enlisting hearts and minds and building trust. This is often best done by peer counsel.
As management, sometimes you have to ask people to do things they disagree with or go in a direction they don’t love. That’s part of the job. If a hard call needs making and you don’t make it, if you waffle and waver over not wanting to hurt anyone, that’s dereliction of duty.
But forcing something through should always be the last resort. If people are pushing back, they probably have good reasons and you should understand them. Most people can be brought along, with a little understanding. Do the work to bring them.
And if you do end up laying down the law, you better be right. Reality had better back you up, and fast. Because if you forced them into doing something they knew was wrong and wouldn’t work, they are going to resent you for the rest of their life.
And you will deserve it.
~charity
P.S. Thanks to the people who reviewed this draft: Zach McCoy, Dave Williams, Josh Parsons, Emily Nakashima, Graham Siener, Christine. Special thanks to Quail Lincoln and Fred Hebert, who I can always rely on to pick a friendly fight, and to the entire Honeycomb engineering, product, and design crew, whose talent and skill are second only to the size of the hearts and their determination to do right by each other. I am grateful to be in the boat with all of you
They also had over a decade of building in-house AI expertise, and they were “lucky” enough to have had a near death experience as a company, which cleared the deck for them to lean in hard on a left pivot. As Janis Joplin might say, sometimes freedom means nothing left to lose.
Maybe from Esther Kim Varet, maybe from her husband, maybe from a cousin or uncle or dog. Maybe from her third campaign manager, or her fourth, or fifth. Or is it sixth?
Whatever the case, it will come.
“You caused this to happen …”
She will be referring to this website, and her underwhelming showing in the CA-40 congressional race, which—as of this moment—has her a distant third to the two (inevitable) Republicans, Ken Calvert and Young Kim …
Esther, as y’all know by now, moved here from Los Angeles to save our souls. A Los Angeles art dealer and gallerist, she literally relocated her family to Orange County to become a member of Congress. She spent money, hired staffers, rented an ice cream truck, plastered her name all over the place. But she also, from Day 1, offended the living fuck out of people with arrogance, condescension, rudeness. She labeled herself an “apex predator,” dumped on her Democratic opponents, made enemies like Louisville Slugger makes bats. She and her crew responded to pretty much everyone who criticized her—but never with, “I admire your opinion, even if we disagree,” and usually with some sort of insult, or block, or smackdown.
And here’s the crazy part.
The crazy, crazy, crazy part.
Esther Kim Varet spent millions on this race. Lisa Ramirez, the warm immigration attorney, spent, oh, $300,000. And, as we speak, Esther is barely beating her. Like, b-a-r-e-l-y.
So what does it all mean?
• 1. A Democrat was never, ever, ever going to win this seat. Never. The rejiggered-under-Prop 50 40th is mostly Calvert’s old district (the 41st), and Calvert (pardon me as I vomit in my mouth) is popular there. The 40th is also plus-nine Republican—which is a far cry from, oh, plus-six or plus-seven. It is a district the Democratic Party knew it could not capture. In many ways, it was designed for them to lose. Even if a singular Democratic emerged from the primary, they would be roadkill for Calvert.
• 2. Young Kim will advance to the general, but she knows (and Calvert certainly knows) she’s squirrel stew. The good news: The two Republicans will spend millions bashing one another and tarnishing their brands. The bad news: As shitty as Young Kim can be, she’s moderate compared to the Ted Cruz-ish Calvert, a culture warrior douche with a love of MAGA. Oh, well.
• 3. This probably feels like a loss for Lisa Ramirez, but it’s not. Again—she was not going to win this election. But she performed extremely well, considering the limited dough and late entry. As a political insider said to me this morning, “If she were smart, she’d jump into a local race this November. Community college board, city council, fucking water board. Anything to get started.” I agree. I believe, truly, Lisa can be a political star. Her resume, her disposition, etc. This was a really good jumping off point for her.
• 4. I’ll miss Joe Kerr. I don’t care what anyone says, I believe he’s a good dude. And Esther’s efforts to have him remove RETIRED FIREFIGHTER from his ballot ID was just stupid, petty JV-level nonsense. I believe, ultimately, Joe thought he’d be good at this job. Which matters.
• 5. Am I alone in never before hearing of Claude Keissieh? Who has—a website?
• 6. Like many of you, I’m learning as I go along. The CA-40 was confusing from jump. The race began before Prop 50, changed 100 ways, had candidates come and go, arrive and depart, rise and fall. Remember Paula Swift? Remember Christina Gagnier? Remember Perry Meade? Remember Butch Huskey? Where have they all gone? What have they all become? I initially got sucked into the idea that a Dem might win, then realized it was silly, then got sucked in again, then realized it was silly, then …
California politics are strange.
• 7. In all seriousness, running for office sucks. I’ve witnessed it up close. The banal conversations, the ceaseless handshakes, the introductions to people you’ll never remember, the money requests. It’s thankless, tiring, emotionally draining.
Officials in the Trump administration have worked hard to restrict the access of members of Congress to the detention centers it has established across the country. Although lawmakers have a constitutional duty to oversee executive agencies and courts have reiterated their authority to conduct unannounced visits to federal immigration facilities, officials have repeatedly tried to limit that access.
Last May they went so far as to arrest Mayor Ras Baraka of Newark, New Jersey, for trespassing after he waited inside the gate of the privately operated Delaney Hall detention center where a staffer had asked him to stand after he accompanied three members of Congress to Delaney Hall, and then stepped outside when asked to leave. After they dropped the charges against Baraka days later, they charged Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) with assault for her actions during a skirmish that broke out when immigration agents arrested Baraka.
On May 11, 2026, Todd Lyons, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), tried again, issuing a memo that calls congressional visits “disruptive” and saying ICE will facilitate meetings of lawmakers with people in detention only if the lawmaker can specifically identify the individual in detention and provide “valid proof” that the detainee consents to a visit. Any such visit, they said, will require two days’ advance notice.
On May 22, after writing public letters to call attention to the crowded and unsanitary conditions inside Delaney Hall, the largest detention center in the Northeast, about 300 detainees began a hunger strike to demand the immediate release of young, elderly, and medically vulnerable detainees and to bring attention to the fact that immigration judges are ignoring their cases, leaving them incarcerated.
While much of the protest focuses on the horrific conditions inside the facility, the detainees themselves have focused on their lack of access to the legal system. They wrote: “We see with deep helplessness and frustration that our due process, rights, and defense have been violated, disregarding benefits granted under the 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments of the UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION.”
“We are certain that we are not being processed equally under immigration laws and the Constitution….. We have seen judges in this detention center who are ready to carry out deportations and mass expulsions without properly reviewing cases. We live with anguish and fear of appearing in court. We are witnessing how judges are disregarding decisions of federal judges, for example not honoring HABEAS CORPUS rulings decided by a FEDERAL judge, depriving us of our liberty.”
They asked for help from senators and members of Congress and said, “[W]e trust in God and believe that justice will be done under the law of the United States of America, since it is a sovereign and constitutional country respected worldwide for upholding human rights.”
Since the Delaney Hall detainees began their strike, supporters outside have gathered to show support. Federal agents have clashed with them repeatedly, pepper-spraying Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) among others. MAGA activists went to the site to counter-protest, and Mayor Baraka established a curfew near the facility. Late last week, Governor Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, deployed New Jersey state troopers after White House advisor Tom Homan—a former consultant for Delaney Hall operator GEO Group—threatened to send “tactical units” to New Jersey if the situation continued. The troopers arrested dozens of protesters.
Today New Jersey attorney general Jennifer Davenport sued the GEO Group for refusing to allow inspectors into the facility in violation of state law. “If the GEO Group—with a $1 billion government contract—has nothing to hide and the conditions inside Delaney Hall are as safe and as sanitary as this private corporation and the Trump Administration claim, then there is no legitimate reason why my health inspectors are being kept from full access throughout the building,” Sherrill said. “The people of New Jersey deserve transparency and accountability, and I will continue using all the power of this office to advocate for the detainees and their families.”
In a May 29 interview with me on American Conversations, Senator Kim said that “the detainees were actually very clear with me… they’re concerned about the conditions, but the main reason they’re pushing forward right now, on this hunger strike and broader protest, is about the lack of forward movement when it comes to their cases. I remember one of them ran out of the room when I was talking to them, to go grab a piece of paper off a bulletin board…. The paper, when they brought it back, was about the court docket for the following couple days. And it showed that…this past Tuesday, when the courts opened up after the holiday weekend, this one judge that they are put in front of has 74 cases before her in just that one day, just on Tuesday. She had 74 cases on her docket. You know, I did the…math. I mean, that’s roughly about five minutes per case, if that’s everything is perfectly aligned…. [I]t’s just a…farce. This is not actual justice. This is not actual… legal proceedings as per our Constitution, and as per our laws.”
The destruction of the rule of law in Delaney Hall is part of the Trump administration’s destruction of the rule of law across the United States. This morning, Trump announced he is appointing the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, William Pulte, to become the acting director of national intelligence in addition to his job at the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The director of national intelligence is the nation’s top intelligence official, and federal law requires that the director have “extensive national security expertise.” Pulte has none.
What he does have is willingness to use the power of the government to persecute Trump’s perceived political enemies. It was Pulte who came up with the scheme of going after Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook and New York attorney general Letitia James by accusing them of mortgage fraud. He also advocated investigating then–Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell for alleged overruns in the renovation of Federal Reserve buildings.
Today, under pressure from Senate Republicans who recognize that the optics of Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund will hurt Republicans in the midterms and demanded the removal of that funding from the budget reconciliation measure they are working on to fund ICE and the Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Trump appears to have dropped that demand. But acting attorney general Todd Blanche told members of Congress today that he would not commit in writing not to proceed with the slush fund, and that the Department of Justice is not dropping the plan to provide Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization broad amnesty for any laws broken in past tax filings and a pass on future audits.
Just after midnight this morning, Trump posted that his criminal conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records and the civil fraud judgement against him in New York for manipulating his financial statements to get better tax and insurance rates be dismissed, saying he was “an innocent man who has been horribly treated.” As Sophie Brams of The Hill noted, he also called for criminal charges to be launched against New York attorney general James and Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, who brought the successful lawsuits.
Today the new secretary of homeland security, Markwayne Mullin, refused to assure a U.S. Senate Appropriations subcommittee that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would follow court orders. Repeatedly, he told Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) that DHS “will never break the Constitution, and we’re not going to break the law.” But he refused to agree that they would follow court orders. “If we didn’t think courts were politicized, then I would probably be able to answer that,” Mullin said. “But we see courts over and over again that use their bench for their political opinion, not just the rule of law.”
Kyle Cheney of Politico reported last month that the Trump administration has lost nearly 10,400 court cases over DHS immigration detentions while prevailing in about 1,200. That translates to a 90% loss rate. More than 425 judges—an overwhelming majority of them—have decided against the administration. Cheney notes that even a majority of the judges Trump himself appointed have decided against the administration on immigration.
In February, then–DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin explained away the administration’s dismal record by saying that “many activist judges have attempted to thwart President Trump from fulfilling the American people’s mandate for mass deportations.”
But Judge Joseph R. Goodwin of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia wrote: “Antiseptic judicial rhetoric cannot do justice to what is happening. Across the interior of the United States, agents of the federal government—masked, anonymous, armed with military weapons, operating from unmarked vehicles, acting without warrants of any kind—are seizing persons for civil immigration violations and imprisoning them without any semblance of due process…. It is an assault on the constitutional order.”
Today, after Mullin wouldn’t agree to obey the courts, suggesting instead that “we’ll hold each other accountable” if ICE breaks the law, Senator Murphy said: “Listen, if you’re a Republican or Democrat on this committee, you should be really, really freaked out.”
Former Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino, who oversaw the operations during which federal agents shot and killed American citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti, joined white nationalist Jared Taylor at a conference of far-right activists and influencers in Portugal over the weekend. As Marion Solletty of Politico reported, in an interview before the conference, Bovino embraced the white nationalism of the Great Replacement theory that says white Europeans and white Americans are in a fight to save their civilization from Black and Brown people.
He claimed that of the 342 million people in the U.S.—he said there were 420 million—100 million are undocumented immigrants who must be removed. But, he added, “our main battle is not with undocumented immigrants or unassimilated immigrants: it is with the bureaucrats of the status quo and the timid politicians, determined to suspend action or wait for the next election cycle.”
“If there is inspiration gained from the U.S. Border Patrol model and method,” he said, “then fantastic.”
According to Feynman’s approach, in this context, people should try a different restaurant each night until they find one that exceeds a particular threshold that reflects a desired quality.
In Feynman’s equations this threshold is not fixed. Instead it declines more and more rapidly as the number of days left in the city reduces. In other words, as the days go by there is increasingly less motivation to hunt for an amazing dining spot, because the time you will have to enjoy it has decreased.
“The thresholds are being guided by the best thing you might be able to find if you kept looking,” said Griffiths. “If you have a long time to look, finding something amazing has a lot of value because you can go back many times.”
Feynman’s approach assumed there is equal possibility of finding any restaurant within a fixed range of quality. However the researchers also explored other scenarios.
“We showed that if the distribution of restaurants varies, then the strategy you should follow will change too,” said Griffiths.
Here is the full story, and here is the PNAS article. I think of that as a pretty pessimistic approach to the problem. In most locales you should be able to find lots of very good restaurants, so if you find a quality place early on you do not return to it, rather you keep looking for more, in fact feeling emboldened by your early success. Maybe this algorithm applies to Cuba?
Growing older can change strength, balance, memory, and stamina, yet personal dignity should stay intact through each stage of later life. Many older adults value familiar rooms, steady routines, and the ability to make ordinary decisions without feeling rushed. Families usually want support that protects safety without taking over. Care delivered at home can preserve comfort, identity, and social connection while easing daily strain for relatives and reducing avoidable disruption.
Daily Life Stays Familiar
Home surroundings often steady an older adult during periods of physical or cognitive change. Familiar furniture, neighborhood sounds, and established habits can lower stress and support orientation. After relatives notice skipped lunches, medication mix-ups, or unsafe walking, many begin exploring senior home care as a practical next step. Services may include companionship, light household tasks, and watchful assistance, helping aging adults keep authority over daily life while receiving support where it has the greatest effect.
Safety Without Losing Choice
Falls remain a major source of injury in later life. Federal public health data show that millions of older adults experience a fall each year, with many needing emergency treatment. Support at home can lower risk during bathing, dressing, transfers, and walking. A trained helper may spot dim lighting, uneven flooring, or loose cords early. Those simple corrections can protect mobility without stripping away personal control.
Health Routines Become Easier
Medication schedules grow harder to manage when vision changes, memory lapses, or fatigue affect concentration. A steady caregiver can prompt prescriptions, encourage hydration, and help maintain meals with adequate protein, fiber, and calories. Recovery after illness or surgery also tends to go better with regular observation. Families feel less anxious when someone notices poor appetite, daytime sleepiness, or unusual weakness before a small issue becomes acute.
Companionship Matters Too
Isolation can affect more than mood. Research has linked chronic loneliness with depression, cognitive decline, disturbed sleep, and poorer cardiovascular health. Regular conversation, shared meals, card games, or short walks can improve engagement and emotional steadiness. These interactions may look modest from the outside, yet they often restore interest in the day. Meaningful contact reminds older adults that their preferences, memories, and presence still matter.
Families Receive Relief
Relatives who provide care often carry several roles at once, including work duties, parenting, transportation, and household management. Over time, that strain can produce sleep loss, irritability, back pain, and emotional exhaustion. Extra help at home gives families room to recover without stepping away completely. Time together can focus more on conversation and less on chores. That shift often improves relationships across the household.
Support Can Adjust Over Time
Needs rarely stay fixed for long. One season may call for meal preparation and a few hours of companionship each week. Later, assistance with transfers, toileting, or overnight supervision may become necessary. Home support can expand gradually as health status changes. That measured approach gives older adults continuity and gives families time to weigh future choices carefully. Stability during transitions can reduce fear and protect confidence.
Dignity Lives in Small Decisions
Respect is often expressed through ordinary choices. Selecting clothes, deciding meal times, or choosing a favorite radio program can reinforce identity and self-worth. Good care should protect those decisions whenever safety allows. Attentive helpers ask, listen, and respond instead of assuming. That habit preserves participation in daily life. Independence is rarely absolute, yet many parts of it can remain intact with the right assistance.
Community Ties Stay Stronger
Remaining at home can make it easier for older adults to stay connected with faith communities, neighbors, clubs, and family events. Continued participation supports mood, memory, and a sense of purpose. Transportation help may prevent missed appointments or social visits. Staying involved in familiar circles can reduce withdrawal after illness or bereavement. Those ties often encourage stronger engagement, steadier emotions, and a better quality of life.
Planning Early Helps Everyone
Families often wait for a fall, hospitalization, or serious scare before discussing home support. Earlier planning usually leads to calmer decisions and clearer expectations. It also gives older adults more voice in schedules, routines, and personal priorities. Honest conversations can reduce conflict later. Starting before urgent need appears allows time to match services with real concerns and to build trust gradually across the family.
Conclusion
Dignity in later life rests on safety, choice, familiar routine, and human connection. Support provided at home can protect those essentials while helping older adults remain in surroundings that feel secure and meaningful. Families often gain relief, better communication, and stronger confidence that their daily needs are being noticed. With thoughtful assistance, aging does not have to mean surrendering control. It can remain a period shaped by comfort, respect, and preserved independence.
Jacob Kimmel returns to the show. And he might have cured the hangover and liver disease. NBD.
Kimmel is the co-founder and president of NewLimit and one of the deepest thinkers in the longevity field. His company has been working to reverse the aging process in the body and has seen some stunning results with a new therapy that undoes liver damage in mice. We’re talking old mice that shrug off the effects of too much booze as if they were teenagers and that exhibit recoveries from long-term alcohol abuse.
The results have been good enough to help NewLimit raise another $435 million from the likes of Founders Fund and Thrive Capital. They’re also good enough to have NewLimit kick off a human trial of the therapy next year. And I’ll drink to that.
We discuss all of this on the podcast and then go much deeper on the longevity field, bio-tech and the collision of AI and biology.
The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you like the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.
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Timestamps
0:0) Intro 3:50 What Is Epigenetic Reprogramming? 7:16 Growing a Whole Animal From One Old Cell 13:06 Meet Ambrosia, the AI Hunting for Youth 22:44 $435 Million and the Race to Human Trials 29:26 The Drunk Mice That Skip the Hangover 36:48 Inside the First Human Trial 43:14 Will There Ever Be a Hangover Pen? 49:39 Beyond the Liver: The Delivery Problem 1:03:27 Answering the Skeptics 1:12:42 Will OpenAI Become a Drug Company? 1:23:53 The Health Story Bigger Than AI? 1:35:00 How Far Behind Is the US vs China? 1:53:10 Can We Build Computers From Neurons?
At a hardware happy hour in the Mission — I dragged our social media editor Armaan along, half-expecting to be the only woman there — I met a different kind of tech bro. You know the usual kind: young, in either a startup t-shirt or, for the more elevated type, Carhartt. He’ll tell you about his agentic recruiting startup (YC W25) and a Big Sur retreat he did with a friend of a friend of Peter Thiel. I didn’t find that poor chump here.
Hardware nerds, I’ve decided, are my favorite kind. Humble, maybe because building physical things stomps the ego out of you. They always bring their latest gadget and like to twiddle with their laser-cut objects as if they were fidgets for this tactile brand of engineers. Tell people in this crowd you’re interested in actuators and the reaction is near-unanimous: a quiet, excited yessss. That’s the magic word. Actuators — and for extra zest, American-made actuators. Watch a party-goer set down his imported beer and lean in.
“I love actuators,” one founder at the party said in earnest. He runs a robot arm company and had just learned that Westmag cofounder David Hansen bought one of his machines. “What are you going to do with it?” he asked. “Tear it down,” Hansen said, to get at the precious actuators inside.
WESTMAG IS not a merch store, but they’re likely to send you t-shirts if you say the magic word. It’s a startup that makes electric motors and actuators right here in the U.S. of A. Its main office is in South San Francisco, known as the Industrial City, a neighborhood dotted with bland, one-story office buildings and piles of rusted rebar. Semi-trucks slug their way from the nearby highway into warehouse parking lots.
Past the Taco Bell and next to the Refrigeration Supply Depot, you can find Westmag’s tiny workshop filled with Chinese machinery. The CNC machines, the metal stamping tools, even the Unitree robot sitting on the couch in the lobby are all from China. That’s the problem Hansen and his cofounder Jordan Sanders are trying to solve.
“China gets to do all the fun stuff. I really like factories… So we get to steal back from China all the fun stuff, which is manufacturing,” Hansen tells me.
Westmag’s office featuring its China-made robotic companion.
The device you’re reading this on almost certainly contains an actuator. By the end of this story, you’ll start seeing them everywhere — in your car, your camera, your vacuum. They are the small, unheralded engines of modern comfort. More to the point, for the future of industry, they are the foundation of modern hardware, making robot arms move, factories hum and weapons weapon. Most of them are made in China.
That fact, which people naively ignore, is one of the major obstacles sitting between the U.S. and its grand reindustrialization dreams. The U.S. can assemble all the humanoids and self-guided missiles it wants, but if it doesn’t make the motors and actuators inside them, it stays dependent on whoever does. Right now, there are shockingly few folks figuring out how to tackle this uncomfortable, if not existential, truth.
It’s the people, like Hansen, who are weird enough to love actuators who might give the U.S. a real shot at a future it builds itself.
HANSEN, 41, STANDS six foot four, often sporting a backwards cap and a jade fishing-hook necklace, a Māori token for safe travels. As such, he sticks out like a sore thumb on a Chinese factory floor. He’s been called “forward” by Midwest manufacturing standards, but I find the directness is part of his charm. Formalities bore him, he says. He prefers to get straight to the point — how are we going to fix this mess?
He grew up, in his words, a robot kid. Hansen’s last company built self-balancing bikes and motorcycles back when you couldn’t just buy a cheap robot actuator off the shelf. So, they made everything themselves, by hand-winding the wire, placing the magnets, and building the electronics and gearing from scratch. Then, in 2024, the company took a nosedive. That’s when he started tweeting.
Hansen went back through his old company archives and posted all the secrets — innards of actuators, factory photos, his own predictions about where prices were headed. “Half my tweets were just screenshots from AliExpress,” Hansen says. His network now — Westmag’s customers, other founders and enthusiasts — all derived from his constant actuator posting. He became known as the motor guy on X. Jeff Bezos even follows him.
By late 2024, Hansen figured he should probably get a job, except, as he put it, “I’ve never had a job.” So instead, he drove around the country talking to robotics and drone companies, where he kept hearing the same complaint: every shop has a guy sitting alone trying to build motors in-house, it never works, and everyone’s stuck buying from China. “People just kept telling me, ‘I need a solution. What are you going to do about it? You know all the problems. What are you going to do about it?’” Hansen says. One of those people was Sanders, an old friend who’d backed the failing motorcycle company and stuck around as an advisor. They started Westmag, short for Western Magnetics Company, last May.
Jordan Sanders (left) and David Hansen (right) in the Westmag HQ.
The pair’s first round of funding came when Nat Friedman — former GitHub CEO, prolific angel investor, current Meta executive — slid into Hansen’s X DMs last April. He paraphrased the message from Friedman for me: Hey, I’ve invested in several companies, spent some time on robot actuators lately, talked to a lot of teams, would love to chat.
The first idea the gang kicked around with Friedman was to, well, just go buy a motor factory in China. “He’s like, ‘Do you want to just go to China next week?’ And I was like, ‘Absolutely. Yes. Not going to ask my wife. That’s just a yes,’” Hansen says. They didn’t end up going. The problem, Hansen realized, is that you can’t actually buy a Chinese motor factory because the factory isn’t the thing.
“If you want to buy a motor factory or an actuator factory, you can’t just buy the factory, you have to buy the neighborhood,” Hansen tells me.
The suppliers in China cluster so tightly that each neighborhood itself functions as the production line — pick up one shop and you’ve got a building full of equipment and none of the complementary knowledge that made it work. So Friedman funded the $1 million pre-seed for another version of the plan: acquire the machines piece by piece, haul them across the Pacific, and rebuild the factory in San Francisco.
Standing up this production stateside requires, as Hansen likes to quip: “A bucket of money. The biggest one.”
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So far, investors and politicians seem to get the point — but in moderation. Last August, Westmag raised an $11 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Founders Fund, Lux, and Menlo participating. Michigan’s Governor Gretchen Whitmer also visited the Westmag HQ and announced the field trip on LinkedIn, touting her work on “the future of American manufacturing.” Westmag and America, though, still have much to do.
“By the end of this year we’ll be in the tens of thousands of motors per month,” Sanders says, only for Hansen to interject, “Which is not enough.” And to which Sanders agrees, “Which is not enough for our customers.”
WHAT IS an actuator? When I asked Sanders, he got lost trying to turn the definition into a haiku. So, while he thinks about that, I guess I’ll be the one to tell you.
It’s part of a machine that turns energy — electric, hydraulic, pneumatic — into motion. An electric actuator, which is the one we care the most about here, is usually a package of three things: a motor (the thing that spins), control electronics (that tell it how fast and how hard), and gearing (that trades speed for torque so it can push or hold weight). Actuators can move in a straight line or in a circular motion, known as linear or rotary, respectively.
What makes them so special is their broad use in manufacturing things like a plane’s landing gear, sewing machines, your car’s seat adjusters. Just about every machine that moves is thanks to an actuator. I will repeat: these parts are largely manufactured in China.
China’s dominance in actuator manufacturing traces back to two industrial markets that happen to need the same part. The first is drones, which use motors in their propellers. One report estimates Chinese companies “control 90% of the consumer drone market, 70% or more of the enterprise market, and 92% of the state and local first responder market.” (Ipreviously wrote about a startup working to revive the U.S. drone industry.)
The other, bigger one is electric vehicles. China’s rush to go all-in on electric vehicles gave it exactly the industrial stack that motion-based hardware runs on: batteries, power electronics, sensors, precision motors, and the rare-earth magnets that sit at the heart of any electric motor. Tens of millions of EVs later, China controls both the assembly and the whole supply chain beneath it, down to the magnet processing. Chinese automakers produced roughly 60% of all electric cars sold worldwide in 2025.
There is a blossoming third industry here: robotics. China accounted for nearly 90% of the humanoid market last year. It’s still a really tiny market, with somewhere between 13,000 and 18,000 humanoids sold around the world in 2025. But those robots require a load of actuators, which eat up between 40% to 60% of the cost of a building one.
Some analysts (and, of course, hardware nerds) expect the humanoid market to explode in the coming years. I’m personally not betting on a humanoid feeding my cat for me by 2030, but American startups like Figure and Agility are very much making the explosion assumption. If you think drones, electric vehicles and robots will matter in the future, then the United States has a problem. Or, in the words of my boss Ashlee Vance, “We’re so fucked.”
SINCE YOU definitely listen to our podcast, you probably noticed I’ve gone from U.S. manufacturing skeptic to acolyte. Once you visit companies like Ulysses and Brinc, it’s hard not to leave the warehouse realizing how fucked we really are. Even the guy taking on China by himself, Elon Musk, is buying Chinese actuators for his humanoids. It doesn’t take a huge leap in logic to wonder how screwed we would be if, say, China invades Taiwan and trade ties are cut off.
The good news here is that designing motors and actuators is not a dark art. Many people know how to make these things, and the schematics for them (including Chinese designs) are pretty easy to find. The trick is committing to some standardized designs and then pumping them out by the millions.
Take, for example, the story of MIT researcher Ben Katz. He open-sourced his own motor design and watched it get cloned into China-made products on AliExpress — an outcome he openly called a dream. That’s because China did what America hasn’t figured out; took a useful architecture and built a shitload of them, cheaper and faster than anyone else.
No one who does business with China would say this aloud, but we have come to the part of the program where the U.S. must now steal — or borrow, if your sensibilities prefer — from the P.R.C. Instead of having each hardware start-up try to show off with its own approach to motors and actuators, the U.S. needs to mimic China and piggyback off the same standardized, openly available designs and then fire up the mass production.
“We are grounding our motor and actuator designs in what is already in-demand at scale, which are the motors and actuators that are being produced in China,” Sanders says.
The process of making one works something like this: a stator, the stationary core of the motor, is a hunk of about 30 razor-thin sheets of electrical steel, pressed, stacked, pressed again, then powder-coated in green (Westmag is trying to make theirs orange like the company logo, which Hansen admits is “going to be an engineering task” since the coating isn’t heat-rated). Westmag stamps those sheets themselves now, uses a machine to wind the wire, and will soon also cut its own magnets down to size — going, as Hansen puts it, “up to cutting metal, but not melting metal.” The steel comes from the US or Japan.
The real barrier that has held the U.S. back from motor and actuator glory is cost. The Chinese-style designs are optimized for things that are cheap in China and expensive here. Hansen holds up a motor part machined from a solid block of aluminum. In China, he says, that costs about as much as the raw block — the labor rounds to nothing. “Go ask [SendCutSend CEO] Jim Belosic to do that. It’s very expensive to do,” he adds. (Belosic also invested in Westmag, and SendCutSend sponsors Core Memory).
Westmag’s gamble is that the expense is only temporary — a function of low volume, not American inadequacy. Hansen’s argument runs like this: at a big enough scale, the cost of almost anything drifts down toward the cost of its raw materials, the steel, the copper, the magnets, and the labor premium that makes a single American-made part pricey shrinks toward nothing. “You can reach efficiencies of scale with almost any widget once there’s enough of them,” he says.
Hansen calls this the “dumb-guy, smart-guy” approach. Don’t try to improve the motor, just try to make it, because building it is what teaches you to be good at it. This, Sanders adds, requires resisting the Silicon Valley urges to “disrupt” and “revolutionize” and convince people that you’ve outthought a whole industry.
“[You can] use a woo-woo AI to optimize perfectly, but there’s a ceiling to what you can do and it turns out it just doesn’t matter,” Hansen says. “You just have to make something first. Make a bunch of something first and then once you have the machine, which is actually the factory running, then you can optimize stuff.”
The company has already partnered with high-volume customers, though they wouldn’t name exactly who, to jump right into its scaling bet. The plan is to make motors by the tens of thousands a month, then actuators, then as the theory goes, the math stops looking insane. “We started the company with a thesis: if you can aggregate the demand across companies, now it actually might make sense to build it here,” Sanders tells me.
Not everyone in the actuator business believes that. About 400 miles south, another startup is making the opposite bet — that trying to mass-manufacture a commodity in the United States is a patriotic fantasy, and that the smart move is to keep the clever part here and build the rest somewhere cheaper.
TOM BARON was 20 years-old when he started throwing up blood.
He didn’t dwell on the episodes at first. Baron prided himself on working hard and figured puking blood might just be part of the job. “When you’re 20, you don’t think ‘I’m sick,’” Baron says. “You think you’re being a little bitch.”
And so the puking went on for months. Then, one day, Baron took a boat ride with some friends, fell out of the boat and discovered that he couldn’t stay afloat despite being a strong swimmer. This incident finally drove him to the hospital where doctors diagnosed him on the spot with a collapsed lung. It took another few weeks to find what caused the lung to collapse in the first place, which was a very rare cancer (stage-four) in his peritoneum, the lining of the abdomen. He went through twelve surgeries in about six weeks. Doctors tried to move him to hospice. Then Johns Hopkins took him on.
“They were like, ‘Hey kid, basically you’re probably going to die, but [we’ll] try out some cool stuff on you if you accept,’” Baron says. He had a sixteen-hour operation — surgeons cut out every cancerous lesion they could see, then circulated heated chemotherapy inside his abdomen for the duration. It worked. He’d passed his five-year remission mark three weeks before we spoke.
Before the illness sidelined him, Baron had been in constant motion. He moved around the country a lot as a kid, the result of his Navy pilot father. After high school, he went straight into the workforce. His first gig was writing attitude-control software for small satellites and prototype engineering for a climate-tech company. He founded a few small startups with “minor exits” before he spent six years at MITRE, the federally funded research outfit that functions, in Baron’s words, as a pseudo extension of the government. His job was to get loaned out to agencies and build prototypes, much of it drone work, which took him to Colombia and a string of other far off places.
After recovering from the brunt of his cancer ordeal, Baron welcomed his first child. The series of massive life moments rearranged his sense of what to do with his time. He didn’t want to spend it getting passed around government agencies and away from his family. He wanted to do something bigger. So he left MITRE and landed at a defense startup called Mach Industries. That’s where he met Christian Mochen and Carlo Dela Rosa, the trio that would cofound Atlas Motion Systems and open a second front to pursue America’s actuator dream.
THE THREE MEN codified their shared love for motors and actuators while sitting around a bonfire constructed in the Mach parking lot. Beers were being passed and shop was being talked. Baron would grumble that his government work always suffered because it revolved around small numbers of bespoke parts. Suppliers didn’t feel like doing custom tweaks for low volume orders, which, in turn, limited innovation. Mochen had similar issues only from the opposite extreme. He’d mass produced cars at Toyota and Tesla and couldn’t demand the requisite attention even with all that heft. “Magnet sourcing was a huge issue even at Tesla,” Mochen says. “Although Tesla had an arm in China, for our U.S. plants, they still wouldn’t give us the best-grade magnets they had.”
America, they decided then and there, needed to control its motor and actuator destiny and that would mean controlling the entire motor and actuator supply chain. And that would mean doing something drastic. They quit their jobs, incorporated in February, and — with $300k of their own money and a $4.5 million pre-seed investment — Baron got on a plane to the Philippines to build a factory.
WESTMAG’S ANSWER was to build in America and bet that scale would eventually drag the cost down. Atlas looked at the same problem and drew the opposite conclusion. “We make them where it makes sense,” Mochen says. “The Philippines is a treaty ally of the United States, the unit economics make sense, and it benefits the average American taxpayer at the end of the day.”
What Atlas found in the Philippines is the thing Westmag wants to import: a neighborhood. Atlas’ factory is clustered near manufacturing hubs for Toyota, Nidec, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Honda, Dyson — close enough that Baron calls it “a little mini-Shenzhen effect.”
The neighborhood effect makes the expert labor cheap and readily available. Baron says that 77,000 English-speaking engineers graduate from Filipino universities every year. He added that hiring a CNC machinist at Mach took six months. In the Philippines, they post a job and have ten qualified people by the end of the day.
The difference also shows up in those pesky costs. Baron says they sent one machined part to Protolabs, a U.S. shop with global manufacturing hubs including China, and paid $3,500 for ten pieces. They sent the same part to a local shop in the Philippines and got fifty pieces for $16. “Better quality,” Mochen adds. “And faster.”
The way Atlas runs splits the company across an ocean. The California side — an arm in Long Beach, Calif. — handles the high-variability, low-volume work. Which brings us to what Hansen might describe as some woo-woo AI software, and what Atlas likes to call Vector.
Vector is the software system the Atlas team built to spin up and iterate new motor designs in five to ten minutes from a common set of raw inputs. It’s centered on an in-house, physics-based AI model trained on every piece of motor designs Atlas could feed it. Open-source architectures, the team’s own internal designs, academic papers, and expired patents.
An actuator design spun up on Vector — minus all the proprietary information.
For example, a customer gets on a call and says they need a motor that hits a certain RPM at a certain voltage and fits inside a thirty-millimeter slot. Today, Mochen says, that customer would normally have to compromise on their custom specs and opt for a standardized piece because designing a new motor from scratch requires six months of work “with four cross-functional engineers or engineering teams,” by which point the customer may have moved onto a different design entirely, making the ordered part obsolete.
The Vector software generates the geometry, runs the finite-element and electromagnetic simulations, produces a spec sheet, builds the bill of materials, and cross-checks against Atlas’ own warehouse inventory so the team knows what they actually have on hand to build it. Then it models the new motor against the customer’s own platform, like a drone, to predict performance before anything is assembled. Whatever they prototype on a test stand in Long Beach gets fed back into the model to train it.
Once a design is locked, the architecture moves to the Philippines for mass production at a facility Atlas owns outright. “We’re not using subcontractors out there,” Mochen says. The bread and butter is motors and actuators, specifically the brushless DC motor, the kind that spins a drone’s propeller. Design in America, build at volume in Asia, keeping both ends in-house.
How long would I have to wait to get an Atlas motor in-hand? Mochen and Baron squirm at the question. “If it’s a net new design that we just don’t have any inventory for … it would take you around eight weeks to get your motor,” Mochen says. They’re trying to bring that down to a week, which they say requires fresh funding to pull off.
It also requires boots on the ground. Baron moved his family out to Manila in the early months of Atlas to stand the operation up. The third cofounder, Dela Rosa — who’d built a manufacturing plant in India for the defense company Shield AI — is on the ground there now.
“In California, as soon as you get a warehouse, there’s all this temporal overhead that goes into building out a factory,” Baron says. “Whereas in the Philippines, we get the keys to the spot, we’re able to get through the bureaucracy fairly quickly, and our people are renovating the factory as soon as we get the keys, and we’re ready to put machines in within three weeks of opening the lease. Which I don’t think would be possible, frankly, in California.”
IT’S BETTER for America to manufacture abroad, according to Baron. In fact, trying to build everything in the United States is, in his words, a little silly.
Not because he’s against it — he’s careful to say he isn’t — but because he thinks it misreads where American advantage actually lies. “One of the U.S.’s biggest assets is that we’re quite well-liked around the world, despite what the news would have you believe,” he says. The Filipinos, he believes, would rather work with Americans than with the Chinese. As Baron sees it, America will win back manufacturing dominance through its allies, not by walling itself off from them.
“The thing we want to do as a company is project commercial power throughout the world,” Baron says. He adds that DJI and BYD are kind of the reverse of us. “They project Chinese commercial power by making the best products in the world in their categories… Silicon Valley should strive to do the same, which is, build things the entire world wants, not things the Department of War can subsidize with their high premiums. We want to make something people in India, Poland, Nigeria want to buy — and we have customers in those places.”
For all his certainty about where the work should happen, Baron isn’t smug about the personal toll of it. “I would like to manufacture in the U.S. It sucks to fly 15 hours to Manila,” he says. His wife and kid are there now, and though his father immigrated from the very same town decades ago, it isn’t exactly home for him yet. He’d rather make things in California or Texas. He just doesn’t think the math adds up for the moment. So, instead of hand-wringing in an American factory about costs, Baron believes the best way to tackle China’s dominance is to play the game internationally.
“The story will be written that we failed to recapture our ability to make our own robots, and we essentially lost our sovereignty and became subjugated to those who did — or the story will be that we recaptured it and maintained our sovereignty,” Baron says. “That’s our worldview, and why we think it’s so important.”
PEOPLE IN the American Hardware Clan have known about the motor and actuator crisis for some time. It’s been right up there with the battery crisis, the drone crisis and the solar crisis. All of these are technologies America helped invent and needs but can no longer make in very meaningful quantities. Since the U.S. still has no answer to BYD in batteries or DJI in drones, you might ask why people are suddenly taking motors and actuators so seriously.
Like everything at the moment, the answer revolves around AI. Many people view humanoids and their ilk as the inevitable physical manifestations of AI technology. And it’s here that things turn more personal and intimidating than batteries and solar cells. Americans can tolerate their electric stove being “powered by BYD,” but will they accept a Chinese-made humanoid next to them on the factory line or in their home? The U.S. military would seem to want to draw the line at its soldiers of the future having all their joints and limbs produced in Shenzhen.
“If you are AGI-pilled and you think that AI is going to get out of data centers and it’s going to be embodied and it’s going to be in robots, then that’ll be the biggest industry in the history of the world and we don’t need just millions of actuators,” Hansen says. “We need billions of them. And if you want to control your own destiny, you have to own your supply chain.”
Fortunately, the American manufacturing renaissance is picking up steam, and some of the best-capitalized private companies in history are taking notice. Sam Altman said on our very own podcast that OpenAI will manufacture its own actuators. The startup recently even posted an open role for an actuator design engineer “focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics.”
For its part, the U.S. government has been working its way down the supply chain to weaken China’s stronghold — first chip fabs, then EVs, then drones — each one with a different mix of tariffs, export controls, procurement bans and subsidies. Actuators may be next, even if Washington hasn’t quite said so. “Smart government folks have looked around and been like, ‘What else does this apply to?’ So it’s chip fabs, drones, what comes after drones? And we’ve been running around telling everyone: inside every robot actuator is a drone motor. China is really good at robots because they got really good at drone motors,” Hansen says.
So far, there is no CHIPS-style act for actuators, no targeted subsidy, no Department of Energy motor-fab program. The de facto sanctions on China-made drones put startups like Westmag and Atlas in a better position, but it doesn’t prevent American drone companies from buying motors from China.
On that point, neither Atlas nor Westmag would name their customers. That reticence is something I first picked up listening to Ashlee ask hardware startups whether they make their own motors — and watching the bashful faces that question tends to produce. My read is that some companies may claim to build it all themselves when, in reality, they’re buying from startups like these two, or buying the parts from China and clicking them together stateside. “We don’t want to neg someone’s narrative,” Baron says when I ask about this.
Two customers, the biggest of them all, would be the government and defense primes. Planes, ships, drones, all of them need motors and actuators. Westmag went to Michigan to convince the once-great-manufacturing-hub to fork over government cash to reshore this production. “What’s interesting is the government suddenly being into our shit. There’s a lot of motion right now,” Hansen says. Westmag declined to share whether they’re on track to receive federal funding.
Meanwhile, the Atlas cofounders aren’t opposed to federal funding, but they think becoming a defense contractor is essentially a trap. “Over the next 18 months, with the demand being shoved into the industry by the drone dominance program right now, there’s going to be a lot of subsidization efforts that allow companies to come in and solve the problem the wrong way,” Mochen says. That is, not utilizing ally nations and becoming a globally dominant industry.
Strip both ideas down and the disagreement is simple. Westmag thinks American means American soil. Atlas thinks American means American owned. One of those might even turn out to be the right answer for the next century of hardware in the U.S.
Thanks for reading Core Memory! This post is public so feel free to share it.
I want Datasette Agent to be able to generate and execute Python code safely. This alpha is looking promising so far. GPT-5.5 has so far failed to break out of the sandbox!
I'm at the Microsoft Build conference today, held at Fort Mason in San Francisco. There are California Brown Pelicans diving into the water directly behind venue!
My latest sandboxing experiment: This alpha package bundles a lightly customized WASM build of MicroPython with a wrapper to execute code in it via wasmtime.
Taking old cars and turning them into electric vehicles is not a new idea. Tinkerers and car enthusiasts have been doing this for decades. Tesla, in fact, can trace its origins back to AC Propulsion,…
When you click to spin a casino reel or place a bet online, you’re trusting something you can’t see: math. Regulated platforms rely on strict algorithmic audits to make sure online casino fair play isn’t just a promise, it’s enforced.
Every day, millions of people log in to online sportsbooks and online casinos expecting the system to operate honestly. Behind that expectation sits a dense framework of regulatory oversight, code verification and mathematical testing, all designed to keep outcomes fair and systems secure.
The Invisible Rules of the Digital Floor
As soon as you enter a legal online casino, everything changes. There are no real dice or wheels spinning around; all you get are random number generators, highly complicated algorithms designed to provide unpredictable numbers and thus dictate outcomes of games played, whether it’s a hand dealt out of a deck of cards or where a virtual ball lands.
These algorithms are constantly put under scrutiny at independent labs. Thousands upon thousands of test cycles are completed to demonstrate that the outcomes have the correct probability distribution.
The moment something changes, the moment the code is slightly modified in a way that would introduce any bias into the system, all compliance systems are notified straight away. Why? Simple – every single gambler gets their turn to get lucky through purely mathematical means.
How Established Platforms Maintain Algorithmic Integrity
To see how this works in practice, look at how major platforms operate. When you use a well-known platform like Jackpot City, you’re interacting with software that has already passed multiple layers of external validation. Like other regulated operators, it uses games developed by independently certified licensed providers.
This matters because the game logic doesn’t sit with the casino itself. It runs on secure developer servers, meaning the online casino operator can’t tweak outcomes or adjust payout rates behind the scenes. So when you play on Jackpot City, the odds you see are the odds you get.
You’ll often notice seals from testing bodies such as eCOGRA. These aren’t just decorative; they signal that the underlying systems have been audited and approved. Platforms like Jackpot City also publish structured reporting data, making it easier for auditors to confirm that player protection standards are actually being met.
For many experienced users, Jackpot City serves as a benchmark for judging whether other online casino operators meet the same level of compliance.
The High Stakes of Code Certification
This process does not occur only once; online casino operators are expected to provide full software builds for continuous analysis without prior notice. Before getting a chance to enjoy any gaming service, it will undergo forensic auditing and independent testing not only of game results but also of the code logic that produces them.
Several measures are employed in licensed environments to safeguard games’ integrity:
– Cryptographic signatures guarantee that the code cannot be tampered with after the approval stage
– Return-to-Player ratios are continuously monitored to make sure actual pay-outs meet theoretical expectations
– Server isolation ensures that game logic is invulnerable to outside influences
– Geographic restrictions make sure that platforms comply with applicable laws
The described measures are critical in ensuring a clear division between technological performance and financial concerns. In other words, it means business objectives will not affect games’ operations.
The Power of Real-Time Data Auditing
In modern times, regulatory bodies not only look at past occurrences but also examine current activities. Regulatory bodies analyze live feeds pulled directly from the operator, recording all processes and results in real time.
Should any of the games start running outside their statistically certified norms, they are immediately flagged. As a result, investigations take place and the problem is usually isolated to either the software or the system level.
For you, it means you no longer have to rely on the operator’s integrity. Modern systems work in your favor and help ensure you get fair play. All of these oversight systems operate in the background, allowing them to detect issues without affecting you. The penalty for violating any rules will be severe.
Demanding Transparency in Digital Entertainment
As online betting expands, the role of the user becomes more important. You’re not just a participant, you’re part of the pressure that shapes the industry. Choosing licensed, audited platforms reinforces the value of transparency.
When you expect clear information about how games work and how they’re tested, online casino operators are pushed to meet that expectation. Over time, that pressure moves the industry away from opaque systems toward ones that can be independently verified.
The future of online casinos depends on that shift. When platforms are required to expose how their systems operate, trust becomes easier to maintain. And when trust is backed by continuous external verification, every wager rests on something solid: consistent, measurable fairness.
In the end, algorithmic accountability isn’t just a regulatory requirement. It’s what allows the entire system to function in a way that feels reliable, transparent and sustainable for everyone involved.
Another day of many errands and meetings, so another short, informal post.
Donald Trump will never admit that his gratuitous Iran war has been a total disaster. But the debacle has clearly broken him. So we are now saddled with a president who has given up governing, but will maintain his grip on power wherever he can. And his power will be exclusively focused on rage and revenge.
Hence Trump has appointed Bill Pulte as the acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI), a position critical to national security.
The word “acting” is crucial. The statute creating the position of DNI explicitly requires that the appointee “shall have extensive national security expertise.” Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has no background in anything related to national security. So Trump is trying to bypass a Congressional confirmation process that would put Pulte under the spotlight. Even Republicans might shed their slavish obedience at this point, given Trump’s plummeting poll numbers and his betrayal of John Cornyn.
But pointing out that Pulte is unqualified for his new job doesn’t convey the extent to which Trump is trolling America with this new appointment.
For Pulte isn’t merely unqualified for a sensitive national security position. He’s unqualified, intellectually and morally, for any government position. All he has are the qualifications that matter to Trump: he is a shameless lackey and willing hitman for Trump’s vendettas.
Who is Pulte? He’s a wealthy nepo-baby, the grandson of the founder of PulteGroup, the nation’s third-largest residential builder. He likes to present himself as the face of the family business, but as a devastating New York Times profile last year explained, he was pushed off PulteGroup’s board in 2020. The family’s charitable foundation has issued a statement that “Bill Pulte does not represent, nor is he a spokesperson for, all members of the Pulte family, in any capacity.”
The Times goes on to note that
These days, one of Bill Pulte’s primary connections to the residential real estate business is a group of five aging mobile home parks he owns in Florida, some badly in need of repair.
How has Pulte handled his falling out with his family?
Mr. Pulte has spent years battling with his aunt, the foundation’s president, over his grandfather’s legacy and other issues. In social media posts he has called her “totally fake and phony” and has written that she “defecates” about him and his late grandfather’s legacy on the foundation website.
Thousands of nasty political posts on social media landed Pulte a powerful post in the Trump administration. And while his former role in his family’s business may have led to his appointment as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, his real job has been weaponizing the agency as a tool against Trump’s perceived enemies — weaponization that is being investigated by the Government Accountability Office as a potential misuse of authority. Pulte confected false claims of mortgage fraud to try to push out Lisa Cook, the only black woman on the Federal Reserve Board. He has leveled similar trumped-up charges against Letitia James, New York’s Attorney General, and several Democratic politicians. And he pushed groundless fraud accusations against Jerome Powell, the former Federal Reserve chair, who stood in the way of Trump’s attempt to politicize monetary policy.
Pulte is a bumbling hatchet man: so far none of his attempted lynchings have succeeded. But for Trump, willingness to engage in unethical behavior is all that matters.
What will Pulte do as America’s senior intelligence official? You might think that even someone like Trump, who has no desire to serve the national interest, who sees wars only as ways to enrich himself and distract from his domestic woes, would want accurate intelligence. After all, if you’re going to wag the dog, you don’t want the dog to bite back the way it has in Iran.
But Trump appears to have given up on governing — even governing aimed at consolidating his own power and legacy. He wants to punish everyone he imagines has wronged him but has lost all interest in making the government work, even for nefarious purposes. So he don’t need no intelligence, just someone who will indulge his rage. And that will be Pulte’s job.
Just to be clear, I am by no means saying that Trump’s descent into rage-madness has ended the threat to U.S. democracy. The Koch-backed Federalist Society, which now controls the Supreme Court, is going all in on rigging U.S. elections with the goal of locking in permanent Republican rule. The architects of Project 2025 are marching ahead with their goal of turning the federal government into a spoils system that answers only to billionaires and their political pawns. Politicization of research funding is getting very close to destroying a scientific community that took generations to build.
But Trump himself is, at this point, little more than a festering ball of anger and hate.
I wrote the other day about Uber blowing its 2026 AI budget in four months, and how that wasn't particularly surprising given they would have set that budget in 2025, before anyone could have predicted how popular token-burning coding agents were about to become.
Natalie Lung for Bloomberg:
The rideshare giant is limiting all employees to $1,500 in monthly token spending per AI coding tool, an Uber spokesperson said in response to a Bloomberg News inquiry. That means spending on one tool doesn’t have a bearing on the budget for another. The limits, which have been instituted in recent months, only apply to agentic coding software such as Cursor or Anthropic PBC’s Claude Code.
A $1,500 monthly limit per tool strikes me as a rational policy response to over-spending, and much more sensible than those tokenmaxxing leaderboards encouraging employees to compete for as much AI usage as possible.
It's also interesting in that it hints at a real dollar value for what Uber is getting out of these tools. If we assume two actively used tools per engineer that's $3,000 * 12 = $36,000 cap per engineer per year. Levels.fyi lists the median yearly compensation package for Uber software engineers in the USA at $330,000.
That means each employee's AI spending cap is ~11% of that median compensation package.
I noted that my own token usage comes to about $1,000/month against each of Anthropic and OpenAI - which currently costs me just $100 per provider thanks to their generous subsidized plans for individual subscribers. Those plans are no longer available to larger companies like Uber.
Their new policy means if I were working at Uber I'd still have ~$500/month of tokens to spare for each of those tools, given my current usage patterns.
Microsoft announced two new text LLMs this morning - MAI-Thinking-1 (reasoning, 1T parameters, 35B active, available to "select early partners") and MAI-Code-1-Flash (137B Parameters, 5B active, "purpose-built for GitHub Copilot and VS Code to deliver high performance and lower cost [...] rolling out to GitHub Copilot individual users in Visual Studio Code"). I've not been able to try either of them just yet.
It's very interesting to see Microsoft releasing models with such low parameter counts, especially given how expensive larger models are to access right now. They claim MAI-Thinking-1 "is preferred to Sonnet 4.6 in our blind human side-by-side evaluations", which is impressive for a 35B model seeing as I frequently run models larger than that on my own laptop. (UPDATE: I got this entirely wrong, see note below.)
We trained [MAI-Thinking-1] from the ground up on enterprise grade, clean and commercially licensed data, without distillation from third-party models.
It is built end-to-end by Microsoft using clean and appropriately licensed data.
I would very much like to learn more about this "appropriately licensed" data! Could these be the first generally useful code-specialist models that didn't train on an unlicensed dump of the web? (Update: the answer is no, see note below.)
Update: My initial published notes got the size of the models wrong. I misread Microsoft's announcements and interpreted the MoE active parameter count as the total parameter count, but the model card for MAI-Code-1-Flash lists it as 137B with 5B active and the MAI-Thinking-1 technical paper reveals it to be a 1T model with 35B active.
I deeply regret this error.
Update 2: That technical paper describes the training data in some detail from page 80 onwards. It has the same licensing problems as all of the other major LLMs: it's trained on a crawl of the public web:
The majority of our web HTML corpus comes from a proprietary crawl. After initial page discovery and selection, approximately 1.2 trillion pages are crawled and parsed. [...] In addition to Microsoft standard policy Sec. 2.4, we apply UT1 block list (Prigent, 2026) to remove adult content and piracy-related domains. In all, this filtering reduces the corpus from 1.2 trillion pages to 794 billion pages. Given the prevalence of AI-generated content on the web, we also score pages with a proprietary AI-content detection model and use manual inspection to identify domains with extensive AI-generated content; those domains are filtered out of the training corpus.
[...]
We process Common Crawl with the same pipeline. [...] After filtering, deduplication, merging with the proprietary web corpus, and a final round of exact-URL and content-level fuzzy deduplication, the Common Crawl portion contains 24.2 billion pages.
I did not cover this one at all well, which is somewhat ironic since I was at the Microsoft Build conference when I wrote this up! I'm sorry for not digging deeper before publishing my initial notes.
The race to field China's first reusable launch vehicle is far less predictable than a similar competition that played out in the United States a decade ago.
There was never any real question of which company would develop and demonstrate the first reusable orbital-class rocket in the United States. SpaceX landed a Falcon 9 booster for the first time in 2015, and a little more than a year later, it launched it back into space. It took nearly 10 years for anyone else to do the same. Blue Origin celebrated its first orbital-class booster landing last November with the successful recovery of one of its New Glenn boosters, followed by a relaunch of the same rocket in April.
In China, several companies and state-owned enterprises have a realistic shot at landing an orbital-class booster stage this year. For a time, it seemed like China's new crop of privately funded launch companies might have the advantage in accomplishing the first landing of an orbital-class booster. But Monday's launch of China's Long March 12B rocket, backed by the nearly unrestricted resources of the country's vast state-owned aerospace enterprise, suggests the industry's legacy players may now have a leg up.
Every week, I try to summarize the D.C. crime stats, because we only seem to talk about crime in cities when the numbers get worse, not when they’re getting better. As I point out, D.C. has seen large decreases in four categories: homicides, thefts of cars, thefts from cars, and robberies (muggings). Homicides seem to be part of a multi-year decline, as in the last two years, homicides have dropped by a third each year, and D.C. seems on pace to do that again; likewise, robberies also have dropped consistently over the same period. The car-related categories have experienced huge drops, which would be expected with a bunch of armed guardsmen walking around. Few people are going to try to boost a car when there are more eyes on the street.
But that has been mostly supposition on my part. A recent analysis by the Niskanen Center seems to support my supposition (boldface mine):
We argue that MPD’s improvement was driven not by headcount but by a tactical shift toward proactive, upstream enforcement — though the department left significant gains on the table by failing to concentrate that enforcement where and when crime was most severe, or to adjust dynamically as crime patterns shifted. We also examine the August 2025 National Guard deployment, which added roughly 2,000 uniformed personnel to D.C.’s streets virtually overnight, and find that it produced a real but narrow improvement: a 24 percent reduction in opportunistic property crime in the first six months, with no measurable effect on violent crime…
Washington, D.C.’s recent crime history contains three lessons that speak directly to the national debate about policing.
…police headcount is not all that matters. Crime fell in D.C. as MPD shrank to its smallest size in half a century. This is counterintuitive only if we assume that the effectiveness of a police department is mostly a function of officer count. It is not. It works through how officers are deployed, what they do when on duty, and whether their activities are concentrated in the places and times where they can actually prevent crime.
The second is that MPD figured this out. The shift toward upstream, proactive enforcement between 2022 and 2025 — fewer officers, more arrests, different kinds of arrests — represents a strategic pivot that contributed to a decline in crime. This is not visible in standard staffing statistics, but it is visible in arrest composition data. Giving credit where it is due requires looking beneath the headline numbers.
The third is that the National Guard deployment demonstrated both the promise and the limits of presence-based policing. It worked — but on the wrong kind of crime, in the wrong places, and at enormous cost relative to what a targeted approach could achieve. Property crime deterrence through visible uniformed presence in public spaces is real. But violence in D.C.’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods requires something more targeted, more sustained, and more strategically aligned with the actual geography of harm.
One thing worth noting is that the Bloomberg/Bowser school of public safety is predicated around making areas that are visited by out-of-city workers and tourists appear safe because police scare away ‘undesirables.’ This can have some beneficial side effects (e.g., fewer car-related crimes), but it doesn’t necessarily make the rest of the city safer without other policy changes. This is one reason why we see the National Guard patrolling some of the safest neighborhoods in D.C.
Anyway, food for thought. And get the Guard out of the D.C.
"On June 9, 2025, after the [NY State] Assembly approved the bill, Ms. Netherland was in the State Senate chamber, watching the aye votes mount, and seeing it pass.Gov. Kathy Hochul signedan amended version in February; it is scheduled to take effect Aug. 5.
“A breakthrough moment,” said Kevin Díaz, president of Compassion & Choices, which has spearheaded the long campaign for such laws. After almost 30 years — Oregon’s law, the first in the country, was enacted in 1997 — the addition of two populous states means that almost a third of Americans will live in one where medical aid in dying is legally available. “It shows that there’s broad support for this model,” Mr. Díaz said.
Polls consistently back that claim. APew Research Center surveylast spring found that almost two-thirds of respondents didn’t consider the practice “morally wrong,” either because they thought it was acceptable or not a moral issue."
In case you forgot, Bill Pulte is the Federal Housing Finance Agency head who proved his loyalty to the president by combing through the mortgages of Trump’s enemies, such as New York Attorney General Letitia James and Fed Governor Lisa Cook, for things that the DOJ might be able to prosecute. It’s unclear what intelligence community credentials he has, though, given the way he used his power at FHFA and as chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that question is probably missing the point.
Though the role is acting, acting heads can end up serving for quite a while. Pulte is replacing Tulsi Gabbard.
We are now well into the post-Voting Rights Act period, with ruthless attempts at racial gerrymandering unfolding across the South. The latest development came yesterday evening, when the Supreme Court deployed a twisted logic to effectively halt an Alabama election already in progress so state officials can hold it under a map that dilutes the Black vote.
Against that backdrop, we wanted to make sure you didn’t miss this TPM story, from about two weeks ago now, in which the families of civil rights activists who died in the months before and immediately after the passage of the Voting Rights Act talked to us about what the Supreme Court’s April ruling eviscerating it means to them. This kind of work is not always the splashiest political reporting, but we think it’s important. It’s the kind of thing your memberships make possible. So thank you.
As the son of Viola Liuzzo, who was shot dead by Klansmen while driving to Selma, tells us in the piece:
“My mother did not give her life. Her life was taken and it shocked the nation enough that they passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965,” he said, adding that the Supreme Court and Trump administration were “working tirelessly to go back to the ‘60s.”
While the AP has not yet called the race, it now appears clear that Democrats have avoided a nightmare scenario they contemplated in the days after Eric Swalwell’s campaign for governor dramatically imploded: That some two dozen Democratic gubernatorial candidates might split the vote, creating room for two Trump-aligned Republicans to advance to the general election in the state’s top-two primary system. The state is notoriously slow to count votes, but, this morning, Trump-endorsed Fox commentator Steve Hilton (R) and former HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra (D) currently have the top two spots. The other major Republican in the race, Sheriff Chad Bianco, trails as a distant fourth.
Today Illinois Sens. Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth called on Chicago U.S. attorney Andrew Boutros to resign charging that his office is adrift in chaos and official misconduct.
On the one hand this is unsurprising. This is a major and growing scandal. It implicates a Republican president. They’re Democrats. And the office has been at the leading edge of policies (Midway Blitz, mass deportation generally) that are deeply unpopular — certainly in Chicago and to varying degrees across the state. So, as I note, to some agree it’s a predictable development.
But there are some additional threads I want to remind you of.
The person behind the key grand jury misconduct in the Broadview Six case was Sheri Mecklenburg. She was the original lead prosecutor and bailed on the case in March for a position as a DOJ detailee working on the Senate Judiciary committee, working under Durbin. It’s still a bit of a mystery what’s behind Mecklenburg’s actions. Her reputation is as a professional and if anything a political liberal. Ideally we shouldn’t be judging assistant U.S. attorneys through that prism. I note it here to note that her background shows little that would explain her committing disbarment-level misconduct on behalf of a case like this absent a lot of outside pressure.
Durbin’s office dismissed her the day after there news broke. I don’t think she would have discussed her own misconduct with Durbin’s staffers. But she may have discussed the general climate of the Chicago office and other misconduct.
One of the Broadview Six defense attorneys, meanwhile, Chris Parente, says that Boutros had contact with the tainted grand jury itself (a claim which Boutros denies). Parente was the one pushing hardest to see the grand jury transcripts. I’ve always had a hunch that that he knew something bad was in those transcripts. He’s a veteran of the same office. People talk.
On Tuesday, Boutros’ office released a “rare special report” again adamantly insisting that he has “never appeared before any grand jury hearing or deliberating evidence on any matter since becoming U.S. Attorney on April 7, 2025”
An additional part of the equation here is that there’s lots of evidence that Mecklenburg’s misconduct was known to many in the office for months. The fact that it was known and there was no attempt to unwind the case tells me this kind of misconduct or level of misconduct became widespread under Boutros and the pressure to back up Midway Blitz.
We’re looking for answers to all these questions. As we report this story out, I’m very interested to hear from lawyers in Chicago who know the players and especially some of the many assistant U.S. Attorneys who’ve left that office over the last year. You know things. We want to know them. See our tips page for how to contact us and if necessary how to use encrypted communications to do so.
The rapid expansion of human and robotic activity in low Earth orbit makes critically important the need to implement effective space traffic management (STM). This will be one of the […]
The U.K. government is exploring sending British astronaut John McFall to Vast’s planned Haven-1 space station in a mission it says could make him the first person with a physical disability to live in orbit.
Impulse Space has raised $500 million to expand production of orbital transfer vehicles and other spacecraft to support growing commercial and government demand.
BOULDER, Colorado — Researchers are calling for increased attention and better protection against the rising introduction of exotic materials into Earth’s atmosphere from satellite and space hardware re-entry, especially in […]
Paris, France – May 2026 – The 2nd edition of Novaspace’s Space Situational Awareness (SSA) report points to a pivotal decade ahead, with cumulative global spending projected to reach $61 […]
The great joy of having built a successful business that employs a broad team of talented people is that I get to fish for exactly the kind of problems that most interest me, most of the time.
Usually, this coincides well with the needs of the business. When we moved out of the cloud, I spent months getting Kamal off the ground, so we didn't have to get mired in the complexity of Kubernetes. Fun problem to solve!
And of course, the origin story of Ruby on Rails is that Basecamp gave birth to it all back in 2003. Because I simply wanted Ruby to work well for the web, and we needed a platform to build the business.
But sometimes it's also a bit further afield. We had our big clash with Apple over the App Store's monopoly abuses back in 2020, but it wasn't until 2024 that I severed our exclusivity with the Mac on the engineering side by moving to Linux, and ultimately building Omarchy.
I don't always get to choose, of course. There are occasionally urgent problems that just need our, and therefore my, full attention as a company, or humdrum issues that I just happen to be best qualified to tackle. But this is increasingly rare because of all those great people we've managed to assemble at 37signals.
And that's how it should be! Building a successful business should yield dividends beyond just the financial ones. It should afford you more opportunity to press your comparative advantage, so you spend most of your time on the projects that stimulate a little Call of the Wild.
Never to the point of being too good for anything, mind you. Taking out the trash is still everyone's job some of the time. But mostly, I want to be sitting by the pond of interesting problems, fishing for the ones that catch my eye and hook my motivation.
“We’re accumulating code faster than we are accumulating trust.” Sometimes a phrase just hits. Yes, we can create code faster now, but software is bipedal—code & trust go together. One without the other just hops along awkwardly.
Trust is as tricky as code. Both are asymmetrical. Code works or it doesn’t. One mistake in a long string of good decisions is the same as just a mistake. Trust accumulates slowly & evaporates in an instant. The difference is that in software sometimes you can repair the mistake in time proportional to the time it took to make the mistake. Trust is irreversible. Once gone it’s hard-to-impossible to get it back.
XP offered faster accumulation of functionality than folks were used to, but it didn’t suffer from the lack of trust we see among genie pioneers. I never thought of it this way before but XP manufactured trust. But how? What is a trust factory? We’ll go from practices to principles to values.
Practices
I’m going to go through XP Classic here, not that newfangled XPAI that folks are talking about, since the new set of practices is not yet settled.
Practices build trust:
Programmer testing. Thorough automated testing demonstrates trustworthiness to the rest of the team. It also builds trust within the programmer.
Pairing. Pairing builds trust between programmers. The reduced defect count & improved structure build trust with the rest of the team.
Continuous integration. Integrating small sets of changes, optimized for safety, reduces gotcha moments for the rest of the team.
Weekly planning. Demonstrating concrete progress to those who depend on it builds trust, as does honestly reporting hiccups.
Customer on the team. All the little interactions during the day—asking domain questions, getting clarification, offering alternatives—build trust.
Continuous deployment. Knowing that your code is running correctly in production adds to your own confidence. Knowing that everyone else operates under the same constraint adds to your confidence in each other. Customers seeing small changes appear nearly instantly builds their trust.
Refactoring. When improving structure reduces defects or reduces future effort, it builds trust.
Observability. Knowing that you’ll be alerted to malfunctions builds trust, as does the skin in the game of knowing that you’ll be alerted encouraging prudence so you avoid those malfunctions.
What I notice about this list that I didn’t expect is that each practice that creates trust also encourages trustworthiness. If I know I’m going to get paged in the night, I’ll do the work to reduce the chance that I’ll be paged in the night. If I know I’m going to be writing tests, I’ll do the work to make writing tests easier. I wonder if this is a general feature of the trust factory? We’ll find out
Principles
XP builds on a coherent set of principles aligned with producing value with software. Not surprisingly, given the topic of this essay, they also align with producing trust.
Humanity. Acknowledging that we are all humans with needs creates trust, in part by encouraging folks to be more honest and clear about their needs.
Mutual benefit. Looking for win/wins let’s everyone relax & quit trying to grab more than their share of the pie.
Improvement. Acknowledging that today isn’t perfect but it’s better than yesterday & tomorrow will be better still encourages folks to trust each other.
Flow. Seeing concrete progress frequently encourages trust, even when things are going slower than we’d like.
Redundancy. When we address difficult problems several different ways we increase the chance that the problem won’t erode trust.
Sure looks like the same effect is at work. Trust encourages trustworthiness. I’ll be treated with human respect so I treat others with human respect. Others benefit me so I’m encouraged to benefit others.
Does the same process work at the level of values?
Values
Values are the vaguest level of describing XP but contain the most purpose. How do values encourage trust?
Communication. Saying things that need to be said in ways that can be received builds trust.
Simplicity. I’m getting iffy about simplicity as a value since successful systems always end up complicated, but having pieces that are easily described builds trust.
Feedback. Knowing that you’ll be listened to encourages honesty, even when the topic is difficult.
Courage. Acting from vision & purpose in spite of fears encourages the team to trust each other.
Respect. Seems obvious to me.
Once again, creating trust creates the conditions for creating more trust.
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Software development that focuses on trust as much as features has always been rare. We are now shifting to individuals interacting individually with the genie (I call this the single player problem. Trust, as the opening quote points out, lags features. This mismatch is unstable, unsustainable. When it corrects it’s going to be painful. How does single player augmented development as naively practiced erode trust?
Genies “care” about satisfying prompts, not purposes. Generated software often doesn’t behave correctly in circumstances that are the least unusual. Thinking, “This works,” & then, “Oh no, it doesn’t,” erodes trust.
Encouraging single player development eliminates most of the little chances to build trust.
Purely reactive project management, the natural style when on the feature hamster wheel, risks tactical progress but strategic failure.
The genie ignores optionality & future change. Walking off the end of the productivity pier is a big trust breaker.
So?
I’m not saying trust is all that matters. I’m saying trustworthy behavior resulting in trustworthy software resulting in trust is the path to effective augmented development.
I’ve been guilty of saying, “The program is the truth.” At one level this is true—whatever we think the system does, what the system actually does is what the system actually does. However, the software system is, as points out, a symmathesy, a human-technical system. We are in it, cannot help affecting it, we can only influence not control it.
What would trust-optimized augmented development look like?
Slow development to ensure that the damn stuff actually works.
Slow development to include structural improvements that expand options.
Slow development to encourage frequent person-to-person interaction.
Slow development to reinforce & update long-term purpose.
That’s how you go faster. More chances to build trust->more focus on trustworthiness->more trust.
In 2019, there were about 150,000 people working in autism therapy. Six years later, there were 654,000—more than the number of people who work in mining and logging, or telecommunications, or at the US Postal Service.
At Compleat Kidz, a fast-growing chain of autism clinics based in North Carolina, the policy is firm: Naps cannot be longer than seven minutes before children are awakened to resume therapy. The company says this is necessary to prevent fraud since clinics can be paid only when children are awake and getting services. But it also allows the clinic to bill insurers or Medicaid for more hours.
This paper examines how expanding the legal definition of sexual assault affects fertility and sexual behavior, using a panel of European countries. I find that switching to tacit consent-based legislation reduces fertility by about 4% relative to the mean. This effect is driven by a decrease in couple formation and an increase in abortion rates. Supporting evidence is consistent with a behavioral channel in which more risk-averse individuals withdraw from dating and partner markets following the reform, altering the composition of those who remain active toward a pool that is less precautionary. Consistent with this compositional shift, contraceptive use rises among younger women but declines among older age groups, while condom use falls among young men. Finally, an analysis of appeals court verdicts in Sweden following the adoption of consent-based legislation shows a decline in unanimous guilty verdicts, indicating challenges in assessing tacit consent. These results are consistent with a simple framework in which heterogeneity in risk perceptions and precautionary behavior in dating and partner markets, including reduced participation by some individuals, helps explain the observed decline in fertility following the reform.
From late May into early June 2026, a broad, slow-spinning storm churned north-northwest over the Philippine Sea toward southern Japan. Typhoon Jangmi’s rainbands unleashed torrential rainfall across a vast swath of the region, triggering flooding concerns in several areas.
The VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on the Suomi NPP satellite captured this nighttime image (above) of the storm at about 16:40 Universal Time on May 30 (1:40 a.m. Japan Standard Time on May 31). Around that time, the typhoon produced sustained winds of 120 kilometers (75 miles) per hour, based on 1-minute averages reported by the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC). That’s equivalent to a category 1 storm on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale.
The image shows a detailed view of the eyewall and eye, with a diameter that is on the larger end of the spectrum, according to Scott Braun, a research meteorologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. There is also an area of low-level rotation on the southeastern side of the eye, producing a feature known as a “mesocyclone” that is partially obscured by high-level clouds. Though they appear striking, the features are fairly typical, Braun noted.
The second image shows a wider view of the same storm one day later. The VIIRS on the NOAA-20 satellite acquired this image at about 16:40 Universal Time on May 31 (1:40 a.m. Japan Standard Time on June 1), when the storm was a slightly stronger typhoon with sustained winds of 130 kilometers (80 miles) per hour.
In both images, Jangmi’s eye was still located south of Okinawa. However, the storm’s outer cloud bands already reached over land as the storm moved north. Forecasts called for the storm to make a close approach to Okinawa and then turn northeast toward the Amami region around June 1-2. It was expected to continue delivering large amounts of rain, especially along the nation’s Pacific coast, according to news reports.
The chief executive of Blue Origin, whose large New Glenn rocket exploded spectacularly less than a week ago at the company's launch site in Florida, vowed Monday night that the company would launch again before the end of 2026.
Writing on the social media site X, Blue Origin's Dave Limp said the company had been able to complete a preliminary survey of the LC-36A launch site.
"Now that we’ve had access to the pad and integration facility, we can share a bit of good news," Limp said. "The propellant farm, oxygen, liquid hydrogen and LNG tanks are all in good shape. This is good luck because these are very long lead items. The water tower is also good."
Getting around space, as it turns out, is kind of a big deal.
On Tuesday, Impulse Space, a company dedicated to improving space mobility, announced it has raised $500 million in Series D funding. Since it was founded five years ago by SpaceX veteran Tom Mueller, the company has now raised more than $1 billion.
"Timing is everything," Mueller said in an interview about the new round of funding. By this, he means the company has found its way into a lot of markets.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket soars away from Vandenberg Space Force Base during the Starlink 17-47 mission on June 3, 2026. Image: SpaceX
Update June 3, 11:50 a.m. EDT (1550 UTC): SpaceX confirmed deployment of the 24 Starlink satellites.
SpaceX is set to launch a batch of its Starlink V2 Mini Optimized satellites on a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base Wednesday morning.
The Starlink 17-47 mission added another 24 broadband internet to its low Earth orbit constellation. There are currently more than 10,000 satellites in orbit.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 4 East is scheduled for 8:40:39 a.m. PDT (11:40:39 a.m. EDT / 1540:39 UTC). The Falcon 9 rocket will fly on a south-southwesterly trajectory upon leaving the pad.
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage beginning about 30 minutes prior to liftoff.
SpaceX will launch the mission with the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number B1088. This will be its 16th flight after launching missions, like NASA’s SPHEREx, Transporter-12 and NROl-126.
More than eight minutes after liftoff, B1088 will target a landing on the drone ship, ‘Of Course I Still Love You,’ positioned in the Pacific Ocean. If successful, this will be the 200th landing on this vessel and the 618th booster landing to date.
An aerial view of launch complex 36 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station showing the aftermath of the New Glenn explosion last Thursday. The rocket itself virtually disintegrated in the blast leaving its transporter-erector in wreckage on the concrete pad’s surface. The large gantry suffered structural damage near its base while the mangled remains of a lightning tower are visible to the right of the pad surface. A large processing hangar (at left) came through the blast without major damage, as did propellant tanks and distribution systems. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now
Despite a spectacular launch pad explosion last week, Jeff Bezos’s rocket company Blue Origin said Tuesday the damage was not as severe as initially feared and that the company plans to resume New Glenn rocket launches by the end of the year.
Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp, in an overnight post on the social media platform X, said propellant tanks at launch pad 36 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station made it through the blast in good shape, as did a nearby processing hangar. The main support gantry, while damaged, can be repaired in place.
“Now that we’ve had access to the pad and integration facility we can share a bit of good news,” Limp said. “The propellant farm, oxygen, liquid hydrogen and LNG [cryogenic methane] tanks are all in good shape. This is good luck because these are very long lead items.
“The water tower is also good. The big support tower is damaged, but it can be repaired in place rather than torn down and replaced.”
The New Glenn rocket, mounted atop its transporter-erector, is moved to launch pad 36 for final launch preparations ahead of the NG-3 flight. The transporter-erector and the rocket, without its nose cone and satellite payload, were destroyed last week in a launch pad explosion. Image: Blue Origin
The New Glenn rocket that blew up on pad 36 last Thursday was destroyed along with its transporter-erector, used to move the rocket to the pad surface and then rotate it to vertical. But Limp said another New Glen first stage booster and three upper stages housed in a large hangar-like “integration facility” at the base of the pad “look good.”
‘We had already been working for some time on eliminating our transporter-erector in favor of an alternative vertical (rocket assembly capability), and we’ll now go directly to that; so we don’t need a new transporter-erector.”
No word yet on what might have caused the explosion, but Limp closed his post by declaring: “We will fly again before the end of this year. Gradatim Ferociter.” The Latin expression, Blue Origin’s motto, means “step by step, ferociously.”
Blue Origin was preparing to launch it’s third New Glenn later this month to put a batch of Amazon Leo internet satellites into orbit. Last Thursday, engineers loaded both stages with supercold liquid methane and oxygen for a first stage engine test firing to verify its readiness for flight. The Leo satellites were not aboard.
Such “hot-fire” tests are fairly routine in the rocket industry, giving engineers a chance to test launch-day fueling procedures, a booster’s propulsion system and critical ground and flight software while the rocket remains securely bolted to its launch pad.
But it was far from routine last Thursday.
As the New Glenn’s seven BE-4 engines began igniting and throttling up, a fire broke out at the base of the booster and moments later, now engulfed in flames, the rocket exploded in a tremendous fireball, shaking the ground for miles around in a conflagration visible all the way across the Florida peninsula.
Footage captured by photo journalists from a helicopter the next day showed the rocket and its transporter-erector had been destroyed, at least some support beams at the base of the main gantry were either bent or blown away and a separate lightning tower had collapsed in a tangle of debris.
Unlike rival SpaceX, which has two operation pads in Florida and one in California, Blue Origin only has pad 36. The company already had plans to build a second pad at the Cape and another at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. But in the near term, New Glenns cannot fly until pad 36 is repaired.
That’s a problem for NASA’s Artemis moon program and the agency’s drive to beat the Chinese to the lunar surface. Chinese officials have said they plan to land their own “taikonauts” on the moon by the end of the decade.
To win this self-declared “space race,” NASA is relying on both SpaceX and Blue Origin to launch new moon landers into Earth orbit next yet for rendezvous and docking tests with Artemis astronauts in an Orion capsule.
If those tests go well, NASA hopes to launch one, and possibly two, astronaut moon landing missions in 2028, soon followed by two flights per year thereafter before beginning assembly of a moon base near the lunar south pole where astronauts can live and work for months at a time.
An artist’s impression of Blue Origin’s lunar lander on the moon’s surface. Graphic: Blue Origin/NASA
Blue Origin’s lander would give NASA an alternative to SpaceX’s, a variant of the company’s Starship rocket. SpaceX has had its own problems perfecting the Super Heavy-Starship rocket needed to launch its lander, and it’s not yet clear if they will be ready for the Artemis III Earth-orbit test flight next year as currently planned.
Blue Origin’s New Glenn also is needed to launch prototype rovers and other science experiments to the moon aboard an unpiloted cargo lander under contracts announced two days before last week’s explosion.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman remains optimistic about landing Artemis astronauts on the moon in 2028 using whatever landing craft is available.
“Blue Origin leadership has responded incredibly quickly, and NASA will do all we can to help with root cause analysis and accelerate pad recovery timeframes while staying extremely focused on progressing the lander,” he said on X.
Kennedy Space Center Director Brian Hughes, appointed to the post just last month, told the Space Florida board of directors Tuesday that NASA is “doubling down on the lunar lander.”
“We’ll be working with Blue and X lunar lander technology, and all of that is designed to keep us on path, meet the President’s goal, which is to have American boots back on the moon before the end of 2028,” he said. “Again, that’s not just something to tout, it’s an important demonstration of our nation’s abilities.”
A view of the New Glenn rocket in the ready for launch configuration. The lightning tower at left was destroyed when the rocket blew up last week during an engine test firing, along with the transporter-erector holding the New Glenn in place. The large gantry at right was damaged in the blast but officials say it can be repaired in place. Image: Blue Origin
Limp’s vow to resume flights by the end of the year might imply the “root cause” of the explosion might not have been an engine problem that would take months to correct and then test. Or at least, not a major design flaw.
That would be good news for United Launch Alliance, a partnership between Boeing and Lockheed Martin. ULA uses Blue Origin’s BE-4 engines in the first stage of its new Vulcan rocket. A drawn-out engine failure investigation would be a setback for ULA, but the BE-4s have not yet been blamed for the New Glenn mishap.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on the Starlink 10-43 mission on June 4, 2026. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now
Update June 4, 6:54 a.m. EDT (1054 UTC): SpaceX landed its booster on the drone ship.
Update June 3, 7:24 a.m. EDT (1124 UTC): SpaceX scrubbed the launch.
The second time proved to be the charm as SpaceX launched its Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Thursday morning. It came about 24 hours after a scrub on Wednesday due to poor weather that proved insurmountable.
The Starlink 10-43 mission will add 29 broadband internet satellites to the company’s low Earth orbit constellation. It consists of more than 10,000 spacecraft.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 40 happened at Thursday, June 4, 6:26:30 a.m. EDT (1026:30 UTC). The Falcon 9 rocket flew on a north-easterly trajectory upon leaving the pad.
The 45th Weather Squadron forecast a 95 percent chance for favorable weather during the launch window on Thursday. Meteorologists were tracking a small chance for interference from cumulus clouds.
“Mid to upper-level clouds will persist but will most likely be too high to pose an LLCC concern. Latest model guidance has become drier behind the front with the latest runs, leading to a drop in POV for the initial launch window Thursday morning,” launch weather officers wrote.
SpaceX launched the mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number B1090. This was its 12th flight after launching missions, like NASA’s Crew-10, CRS-33 and Bandwagon-3.
Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1090 landed on the drone ship, ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas,’ positioned in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South Carolina. This was the 153rd landing on this vessel and the 619th booster landing to date.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on the Starlink 10-43 mission on June 4, 2026. Image: John Pisani/Spaceflight Now
Up and by water to White Hall and so to St. James’s, to Mr. Coventry; where I had an hour’s private talk with him. Most of it was discourse concerning his own condition, at present being under the censure of the House, being concerned with others in the Bill for selling of offices. He tells me, that though he thinks himself to suffer much in his fame hereby, yet he values nothing more of evil to hang over him for that it is against no statute, as is pretended, nor more than what his predecessors time out of mind have taken;1 and that so soon as he found himself to be in an errour, he did desire to have his fees set, which was done; and since that he hath not taken a token more. He undertakes to prove, that he did never take a token of any captain to get him employed in his life beforehand, or demanded any thing: and for the other accusation, that the Cavaliers are not employed, he looked over the list of them now in the service, and of the twenty-seven that are employed, thirteen have been heretofore always under the King; two neutralls, and the other twelve men of great courage, and such as had either the King’s particular commands, or great recommendation to put them in, and none by himself. Besides that, he says it is not the King’s nor Duke’s opinion that the whole party of the late officers should be rendered desperate. And lastly, he confesses that the more of the Cavaliers are put in, the less of discipline hath followed in the fleet; and that, whenever there comes occasion, it must be the old ones that must do any good, there being only, he says, but Captain Allen good for anything of them all.
He tells me, that he cannot guess whom all this should come from; but he suspects Sir G. Carteret, as I also do, at least that he is pleased with it. But he tells me that he will bring Sir G. Carteret to be the first adviser and instructor of him what to make his place of benefit to him; telling him that Smith did make his place worth 5000l. and he believed 7000l. to him the first year; besides something else greater than all this, which he forbore to tell me.
It seems one Sir Thomas Tomkins of the House, that makes many mad motions, did bring it into the House, saying that a letter was left at his lodgings, subscribed by one Benson (which is a feigned name, for there is no such man in the Navy), telling him how many places in the Navy have been sold. And by another letter, left in the same manner since, nobody appearing, he writes him that there is one Hughes and another Butler (both rogues, that have for their roguery been turned out of their places), that will swear that Mr. Coventry did sell their places and other things.
I offered him my service, and will with all my heart serve him; but he tells me he do not think it convenient to meddle, or to any purpose, but is sensible of my love therein.
So I bade him good morrow, he being out of order to speak anything of our office business, and so away to Westminster Hall, where I hear more of the plot from Ireland; which it seems hath been hatching, and known to the Lord Lieutenant a great while, and kept close till within three days that it should have taken effect. The term ended yesterday, and it seems the Courts rose sooner, for want of causes, than it is remembered to have done in the memory of man.
Thence up and down about business in several places, as to speak with Mr. Phillips, but missed him, and so to Mr. Beacham, the goldsmith, he being one of the jury to-morrow in Sir W. Batten’s case against Field. I have been telling him our case, and I believe he will do us good service there.
So home, and seeing my wife had dined I went, being invited, and dined with Sir W. Batten, Sir J. Minnes, and others, at Sir W. Batten’s, Captain Allen giving them a Foy dinner, he being to go down to lie Admiral in the Downs this summer. I cannot but think it a little strange that having been so civil to him as I have been he should not invite me to dinner, but I believe it was but a sudden motion, and so I heard not of it.
After dinner to the office, where all the afternoon till late, and so to see Sir W. Pen, and so home to supper and to bed.
To-night I took occasion with the vintner’s man, who came by my direction to taste again my tierce of claret, to go down to the cellar with him to consult about the drawing of it; and there, to my great vexation, I find that the cellar door hath long been kept unlocked, and above half the wine drunk. I was deadly mad at it, and examined my people round, but nobody would confess it; but I did examine the boy, and afterwards Will, and told him of his sitting up after we were in bed with the maids, but as to that business he denies it, which I can [not] remedy, but I shall endeavour to know how it went.
My wife did also this evening tell me a story of Ashwell stealing some new ribbon from her, a yard or two, which I am sorry to hear, and I fear my wife do take a displeasure against her, that they will hardly stay together, which I should be sorry for, because I know not where to pick such another out anywhere.
When Tropical Storm Helene tore through western North Carolina in September 2024, it left behind a landscape transformed by destruction — roads washed out, homes lost, forests flattened. The fallen trees were everywhere, a constant reminder of the storm’s violence.
But in the middle of that wreckage, one woman saw something else. She saw material. She saw possibility. She saw music.
This short documentary follows her journey from loss to creation — and the way art can grow from the most unlikely places.
Jayne Henderson in her workshop in Asheville, NC. Photo: Sydney Woogerd
This mini documentary is part of Caught in the Current: Helene Recovery in Asheville and Beyond a project that we have partnered on with the School of Journalism at Northeastern University. Their enterprising students took on the story of Asheville, North Carolina, a community still dealing with the devastation of Hurricane Helene, 18 months later. As part of our mentoring program, we’re amplifying their efforts by sharing the amazing work produced by their students. Visit the official interactive magazine for the project HERE.
“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.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. If you haven’t heard, adjudicated rapist Donald Trump is trying to get his face on a $250 bill–which is in clear violation of a federal law, known as the Thayer Amendment, passed in 1866, which prohibits the likeness of living people on U.S. currency.
So why was the Thayer Amendment passed? It’s not entirely clear how this happened, but a treasury official by the name Spencer M. Clark might have used* a loophole in legislation passed to commemorate William Clark, of the explorer duo Lewis and Clark, to get his picture on the ¢5 bill (no, that’s not a typo; a five cent bill) because the legislation did not specific which Clark should be on the ¢5 bill.
But one thing worth noting about this story is that, when Congress found out about this, they passed a law to prevent this from happening ever again relatively quickly. I don’t think that could happen today. Which brings me to this piece by Brian Beutler arguing that Democrats, when they regain power, need to end the filibuster and enact court reform (boldface mine):
If the system was somewhat functional, these problems would be diminished. Democratic administration action wouldn’t be DOA. Democrats might still only be able to legislate with trifectas, but when they came to power with trifectas they could govern much more dynamically. They could pass a bill, then another bill, then another bill, knowing the administration could begin implementing new laws right away, free from bad-faith judicial interference. Advocates could try to get their priorities included in the first bill, but if that didn’t work, they could try again. And again. Then, as implementation challenges mounted, Democrats could refine their agenda with corrective legislation. And voters would see results within single election cycles, because most self-imposed impediments to governing would be removed, allowing benefits to flow and bridges to be built in timely ways.
If a candidate is not talking about ending the filibuster and court reform, then everything they’re saying is just chatter. Regardless of whether you think Bernie Is The Way or you envision an America Filled With Means Tested Programs, neither will happen as long as Republicans (fascist or not) are granted de facto vetoes, even when Democrats supposedly control the government.
*Alternatively, Clark might have fooled his supervisors by using the same excuse without referring to the legislation. While Clark narrowly avoided resignation from this scandal, he ultimately resigned due to a record keeping scandal.
So, Anthropic is going to IPO! The company is valued at almost $1 trillion, so this is going to be one of the biggest IPOs in history — the only other competitor being SpaceX, which is also set to go public soon. It’ll be one of the largest wealth creation events in history — the company’s seven founders are each going to be worth almost $20 billion, and regular employees will be worth in the millions to tens of millions. So much for my chances of buying a house in San Francisco!
Whether Anthropic is worth this valuation is not the topic of this post, but I guess it’s interesting to touch on. Anthropic is showing more impressive revenue growth than any company in history, having recently blown past OpenAI to an annualized rate of about $45 billion per year. Worries that the company would be unprofitable have been blown away by this hypergrowth — Anthropic is about to turn its first operating profit.
In fact, I think the price being offered for Anthropic is pretty conservative. A multiple of 20x annualized revenue really isn’t that expensive for a company growing at 130% a quarter. Obviously that’s going to level out at some point soon, but it would take only a little over one more year of that sort of growth for Anthropic to be priced like a value stock. The cautious pricing probably reflects the danger of competition, both from OpenAI and from the cheap Chinese open-source models perpetually nipping at the leaders’ heels.
The reason for Anthropic’s meteoric rise, of course, is the success of coding agents. For years, OpenAI had struggled to find a market for its state-of-the-art chatbots; everyone was wowed by the technology, and everyone used it, but people couldn’t figure out how to get it to produce lots of economic value. Anthropic basically solved that problem by being the first to invent usable coding agents — AIs that write software on their own. Claude Code, Anthropic’s agentic software, gained a huge amount of brand value, even though OpenAI’s Codex product is competitive in terms of quality.
This was true product-market fit. AI had already proved that it worked in terms of the underlying technology — probably around 2024, when reasoning models cut down on the hallucination problem. Now it had found its killer app — the equivalent of e-commerce and search for the internet, or spreadsheets and word processing for computers. Suddenly, everyone in the world was “tokenmaxxing” — trying to use coding agents as much as humanly possible.1
I first encountered this trend at a dinner event on the economics of AI (I go to a lot of those dinners these days). An entrepreneur at the dinner breathlessly told me and a couple of other attendees that he ordered his employees to “spend their salary in tokens” — that is, to create so much code with Claude Code and Codex that it cost as much as their entire paycheck. I remember asking him: “What are they using all those tokens to create?” I don’t think I got a straight answer; I’m not sure he knew.
He wasn’t alone, though. Plenty of companies encouraged their employees to use AI coding agents as much as possible. Meta even briefly had a leaderboard for who could use the most tokens. One company reportedly spenthalf a billion dollars on Claude Code — equal to one percent of Claude’s annualized revenue!
Reading these reports, I just kept wondering: What are all these tokens actually producing? Just like with that guy at dinner, there never seemed to be a clear answer. Were Amazon and Meta and other software companies rolling out new features? Not that I’ve seen. A lot more apps are being submitted to the App Store, but I’ve only heard of one good one (Refine.ink). I’m sure there are more out there, but so far it’s nothing like the early days of the smartphone, where I was hearing about cool new apps every couple of weeks.
Maybe it was all on the back end? I’m not a software guy, so I don’t have a proper grasp of how hard it is to make a website like Instagram run, or optimize the cloud servers at AWS. Sites and apps aren’t loading faster or obviously more reliable. Was advertising getting better? Are click-through rates improving? Were companies fixing their long-standing problems, taking care of “tech debt” so they can avoid paying large costs in the future? Maybe!
I kept quiet about these questions, since it’s not really my area of expertise. But I saw a lot of other people — people who know a lot more than I do about software engineering — asking similar things. John Loeber wrote:
The stuff I’m hearing is just insane. People are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on tokens? Guys, what are you shipping?…I am seeing people fully enraptured by illusions of productivity. They have swarms of agents coordinated by Byzantine Octopus harnesses. They’re munging thousands of tokens a second. They’re doing all this stuff, churning unfinished marginalia faster than ever before. Spinning their wheels and shipping absolutely jack shit for their customers…[W]e’re getting a lot of utility from AI for engineering at our company. I think we would really struggle to burn more than $5K per engineer per month.
Uber COO Andrew Macdonald said it wasn’t yet possible to draw a link between raw AI usage and useful products actually being shipped:
“That link is not there yet, right?” [Macdonald] said. “I think maybe implicitly there is more that is getting shipped, but it’s very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and, ‘Okay, now we’re actually producing 25% more useful consumer features.’”...He said that the trade-off costs from AI are harder to justify because he can’t draw a direct link.
Microsoft, meanwhile, began canceling Claude Code licenses. Salesforce started redesigning their employee targets to measure real output instead of AI input. And people who looked into the matter basically confirmed the suspicion that a lot of this AI coding wasn’t going into actual products being shipped:
For companies using advanced AI coding tools, only 18% of spending on tokens is translating into shipped coding products that reach real users, according to EntelligenceAI, a startup that aggregated data on more than 2,000 companies using advanced AI tools for coding.
You should absolutely NOT take this to mean that AI is a bubble, or that the tech doesn’t actually work, or that Anthropic’s IPO is overpriced, etc. A lot of this is perfectly normal. When a very capable new general-purpose technology bursts onto the scene — steam power, electricity, computing, the internet, etc. — a ton of people play around with it to see how it works and experiment with how they might be able to use it. That experimentation is healthy, and we shouldn’t expect it to last forever.
It’s also reasonable for companies to push their software engineers to try something radically new. Most professionals who have written code by hand all their lives will naturally be reluctant to switch over to letting a machine take the first crack at it. Rewarding AI usage for its own sake is silly in the long run — it’s just as subject to Goodhart’s Law as anything else, and it predictably resulted in people checking the weather with AI just to hit their targets. But in the short run, it could be good to shove stodgy old engineers out of their comfort zone.
But I also think there are two more interesting things that are potentially going on here:
Companies are finding out, once again, that turning task-level productivity into economic productivity is a lot harder than it looks. This has implications for the big “AI and jobs” debate, upon which the shape of our future society could hinge.
It’s very possible that the software industry as we know it is a mature industry, like steelmaking or internal combustion. If AI creates major improvements in software, it’s possible — even likely — that it’ll be in new types of software industries instead of just “better Facebook and Amazon”.
Several important questions — such as the possibility of debt-rollover without primary surpluses — turn on whether the present value of the aggregate endowment is finite, i.e., whether the economic growth rate under the “risk-neutral” measure, lies below the risk-free rate. It is tempting to argue that the endowment must be finitely valued, since there exist finitely-valued, non-depreciating assets whose cash flows are cointegrated with aggregate output. This paper shows why this argument is incorrect. A remarkable historical episode in which French government bonds were indexed to aggregate growth allows direct measurement of the risk-adjusted growth rate, which is found to exceed the risk-free rate.
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Nick Heer, at Pixel Envy, last week published a remarkable essay surveying — with copious receipts — the rise and fall of “metaverse” hype:
The obsession with the metaverse seems to have solidified in
Silicon Valley after Matthew Ball published an essay in
January 2020 in which he forecasted that, at the very least…
…it is likely to produce trillions in value as a new computing
platform or content medium. But in its full vision, the Metaverse
becomes the gateway to most digital experiences, a key component
of all physical ones, and the next great labor platform. [...]
Ball published this essay with darkly fortuitous timing. A week
earlier, Chinese health authorities had isolated a new strain of
coronavirus aggressively spreading in Wuhan; a day before, they
published its genetic sequence. Within a couple of
months, the world had turned upside down and many of us were
suddenly spending our days in a space that felt more virtual than
physical. We may have only been working from home — or, at least,
those of us who had the option and were not laid off — and
socializing over Zoom, all while remembering the last concert we
went to or the last time we ate a meal in a restaurant.
Just a tremendous piece of writing and reporting from Heer. What a pile of horseshit “the metaverse” as promulgated by Zuckerberg was. To call what Heer has assembled here, in a compelling narrative to boot, “comprehensive” is a vast understatement. These hucksters were selling a bill of goods and now they’re trying to whistle past their own hype:
As for the futurists like Hackl, who confidently proclaimed the
metaverse was “for certain”, they have found an out thanks to its
flexible definition. Jeff Barrett, of the Shorty Awards’ “It’s No
Fluke” podcast, published a glowing profile of “the Godmother of
the Metaverse” earlier this year under the headline “Why
Cathy Hackl Keeps Getting the Future Right”. “When enthusiasm
cooled and narratives collapsed, many distanced themselves from
the space”, writes Barrett, noting with seeming approval that
“Hackl did the opposite. She reframed it”. Many people — perhaps
everyone, come to think of it — could predict the future if they
got to retcon their predictions to fit reality.
There are only a few reasons why you might be hired for a
prestigious job that you are obviously not qualified for. One is
“they have recognized you for the genius that you are.” The urge
to conclude that this is, in fact, the reason must be
overwhelming, if you are the person in question. But this is
rarely the explanation.
Another possibility is “the person who hired you is a fucking
idiot.” This happens. A number of current United States cabinet
secretaries got their jobs this way.
The most likely reason, though — one that often overshadows the
other ones — is, “you are willing to carry out the dirty and
distasteful things to come.” This is why weird hirings at the top
always provoke dread among all the other employees. Maybe you are
a hidden gem, sure, but Occam’s Razor says that you are probably
just a hatchet man.
Nick Bilton, a former tech writer for the New York Times and
Vanity Fair and maker of a few documentaries, was just hired as
the new head of 60 Minutes.
Bilton tried to introduce himself to the (remaining) staff at 60 Minutes this morning and it did not go well.
My father, who died in 1981, was an inexhaustible font of
wisdom and wit. I don’t know when he told me this particular
three-part rule, but I’ve never forgotten it. I tweeted it
three years ago, but people keep asking for it in one place, so
here it is.
There are three ways to make a living:
Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.
Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a
living.
Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go
broke.
The rest is commentary.
Pairs well with Om Malik’s remarkable line about the success of “the grifters and the hucksters and the influencers selling impossible things” in his “We Are Living in Pinocchio’s World” essay that I linked to yesterday.
Of all the dickovers, the dickover that blueballs you with some
first-time buyer incentive. “Sign up and get 10% discount, new
accounts only”, the dickover boasts.
Never understood why you’d ever penalize returning customers with
a dickover, blue-balling them with 10% off teaser that they’re
ineligible for. wtf?
And for first time buyers, they’d always feel left out if they
don’t shove their email address in the dickover. The choice is
an illusion with a penalty of 10%. But wait… there’s more! You
only get a discount code if you, after clicking the confirmation
email link, also sign up for their SMS marketing. You just got
double dicked.
I fell for this racket once, albeit with my eyes open. Last year I bought a cap from New Era’s website. They offered me some sort of discount for giving them my email address. I knew they were going to get my email anyway because I was going to buy the hat, so I figured why not. Only then — exactly as Panchal describes — did they say I also needed to give them my phone number and grant permission to text me marketing messages. Now I was pissed. I did it anyway, just to see what happened (and get the discount). As soon as I bought the hat, discount applied, I rescinded their permission to send me text messages and marketing emails. (They had already texted me like two marketing messages, in addition to the ones confirming my phone number.) Overall I’d have rather paid a few more dollars than go through the hassle, which is why my standard operating procedure is to decline all such entreaties. A real discount is just offering a lower price. Anything else is a scam of some sort.
But the real problem is that it completely soured my impression of New Era. I am far less likely to purchase from them again. I will eventually buy a New Era cap again — their actual products are excellent, and they are the exclusive maker of official MLB on-field caps — but if I can buy it elsewhere, I will. I’ll go out of my way to avoid buying direct from New Era for the rest of my life.
The marketing shitbirds who press for these schemes — and insist on adding dickovers and dickbars to websites — do so by pointing to data that shows that they do convert some number of users. “It works” they claim, pointing to data. What doesn’t show up in their data are interactions like mine. They don’t have analytics that measure that I now consider their website an antagonist to avoid at all costs.
As we enter the summer months, we’re hitting the ground running. There is so much news today, I’m going to have to let some of it splash over into tomorrow to do it justice. For today, Iran and its role in the president’s deteriorating mental condition are going to take center stage.
Over the weekend, there were what I’m going to have to call the usual reports of an imminent agreement between the U.S. and Iran to end hostilities, with the usual outcome.
Last week the U.S. and Iran appeared to be making headway on a 60-day memorandum of understanding to continue the ceasefire and to establish a framework for further talks about Iran’s nuclear program. But President Donald J. Trump is caught between a rock and a hard place in these negotiations.
His base demands that he look strong and accomplish what, after the initial strikes failed, he claimed to have started the war for: to make sure Iran doesn’t have the capacity to produce a nuclear weapon. He also needs to reopen the Strait of Hormuz—which was open before he began the strikes—and get oil flowing again from that region of the Middle East. Prices in the U.S. are rising, and the looming threat of oil reserves running out adds even more pressure to consumer prices.
And Congress returns to work tomorrow, raising the possibility that lawmakers will pass a war powers resolution requiring Trump to withdraw American forces from the region. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) sent House members home a day early before the Memorial Day holiday out of concern such a measure would pass.
But Iran is in no hurry to throw Trump a lifeline. Their negotiators now maintain they have a right to control the Strait of Hormuz. They are demanding reparations for the damage inflicted in the country during the war, and they say they won’t negotiate over the nuclear program until there is a ceasefire.
But these conditions are all problematic for Trump’s negotiators. Permitting Iran to control the strait is not just about oil; it’s about the principle of freedom of the seas set out after World War II. Global trade depends on that concept. The exchange of money is also a problem for Trump. He has spent much of his political life attacking the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that China, France, Germany, Russia, the U.K., the U.S., and the European Union negotiated with Iran during the Obama administration, claiming that former president Obama “gave” Iran $1.7 billion. In fact, the JCPOA simply permitted the release of Iranian assets frozen overseas by sanctions, but much of Trump’s base believes that Obama showed weakness by buying an agreement.
And then there is the nuclear issue.
So what has tended to happen in negotiations is that the teams come up with a framework, details leak to the media, and Trump’s base hears that Trump has weakened on some of his maximalist demands. They complain, Trump then posts something false about the talks or incendiary about Iran, and the negotiations fall apart.
And the cost of the war, in both lives and treasure, and the pressure on U.S. consumers and the economy continue to mount.
Last Friday, Trump and his advisors spent two hours discussing the latest round of negotiations in the Situation Room. According to Erika Solomon and Farnaz Fassihi of the New York Times, that agreement included the release of about $24 billion in frozen Iranian assets and a postwar “investment fund” to rebuild Iran, with one diplomat telling the journalists the number on the table was $300 billion. Talks about Iran’s nuclear program would be deferred.
On Friday morning, Trump posted, once again, that the strait would be opened and that Iran must never have a nuclear weapon. But then he emerged from the Situation Room without the “final determination” on the agreement he had promised. On Saturday, Mohsen Rezaie, one of the advisors to Iran’s supreme leader, posted: “As predicted, the President of the United States is betraying diplomacy for the third time.”
Over the weekend, Trump’s social media account posted repeated attacks on Democrats and on the judges who have been deciding against him in legal cases. He posted long defenses of his alterations to monuments in Washington, D.C., and AI images of capital landmarks covered in trash and graffiti juxtaposed with ones gleaming and fresh, with captions that blame Democrats for the former and praise Trump for the latter.
His posts seemed designed primarily to reassure himself. By Saturday, so many of the musical acts his team had lined up to play at his Freedom 250 “Great American State Fair” from late June through the beginning of July had bailed that Trump posted that he was “thinking about bringing the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World, the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar, the man who loves our Country more than anyone else, and the man who some say is the Greatest President in History (THE GOAT!), DONALD J. TRUMP, to take the place of these highly paid, Third Rate “Artists,” and give a major speech, rallying the Country forward like I have done ever since being President!” He continued: “Two years ago, the United States was DEAD. Now we have the “HOTTEST” Country anywhere in the World. I don’t want so-called “Artists” that get paid far too much money, who aren’t happy. I only want to be surrounded by Happy People, Smart People, Successful People, and People that know how to WIN. So, by copy of this TRUTH, I am ordering my Representatives to look at the feasibility of doing an AMERICA IS BACK Rally on Wednesday, Washington, D.C., same time, same location. Only Great Patriots invited—It will be a Wild and Beautiful Celebration of America! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
It was an odd echo of his December 19, 2020, tweet calling his base to Washington, D.C., in which he wrote: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”
Odder still was what followed: image after image of Trump as a great leader. There were images of Trump alongside first president George Washington, one of them showing the two presidents riding horses together in colonial garb beside a racecar with TRUMP across the hood, the White House in the background, and the Space Shuttle overhead. In an AI image, Trump is dunking a basketball over an exhausted New York governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat; in another image, he and Patriots football player Tom Brady stand talking, backlit, under a caption that reads “GOAT.”
There were pictures of Trump kissing the American flag; Mount Rushmore with Trump’s sculpture in line with those of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln (who looks somewhat alarmed); Trump apparently as a superhero admiral with armor on his chest that bears an American eagle; Trump standing near King Charles; Trump with China’s president Xi Jinping.
A series of AI images in the style of the 1950s Dick and Jane readers show a town parade festooned with flags and patriotic bunting, little girls laughing together at an old-fashioned town fair, and little boys in a suburb playing ball. All of the images read: “AMERICA IS BACK!” And in them, all of the people are white.
He posted an image of a white family from that era standing beside a Cadillac Coupe DeVille parked on a suburban street, with the caption: “BILLIONS WERE SPENT TO CONVINCE YOU THIS IS EVIL.”
Then Trump’s account posted a series of images contrasting his vision of Biden’s America versus his own. In his images, Biden’s world was one of theft, illegal squatting, violence, and illegal immigration. The images of Trump’s “solutions” to these problems showed people imprisoned, arrested, and deported.
At 1:02 this morning, Trump posted: “Iran really wants to make a deal, and it will be a good one for the U.S.A. and those that are with us. But don’t the Dumocrats, and various seemingly unpatriotic Republicans, understand that it is MUCH tougher for me to properly do my job and negotiate, when political hacks keep negatively ‘chirping,’ at levels never seen before, over and over again, that I should move faster, or move slower, or go to war, or not go to war, or whatever. Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end—It always does! President DJT”
A minute later, his account posted: “Has anyone ever seen a happy Dumocrat???”
Then, later this morning, Iranian officials said they were suspending negotiations with the U.S. until Israel, which entered the war alongside the U.S., stops its strikes on Lebanon, strikes they say violate the ceasefire agreement. They warned they would close the Strait of Hormuz entirely—a few ships have been making the transit—and move against the Bab al-Mandab strait at the outlet of the Red Sea, as well. On CNBC, Trump told Eamon Javers that he doesn’t care if peace negotiations with Iran end. “I couldn’t care less,” he said. Negotiations were starting “to get very boring.”
But oil prices jumped sharply with the announcement of the suspension and the threat to the Bab al-Mandab, and at 1:43 in the afternoon, Trump posted: “Talks are continuing, at a rapid pace, with the Islamic Republic of Iran.” At 5:47, he posted on social media that he had spoken with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and indirectly with Hezbollah, and that they both agreed to stop striking each other.
The Pentagon has been trying to control information coming out about its actions for months now, but that effort is now ramping up. This afternoon, Scott Nover of the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon has designated its press office as a classified space—a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF—and even those journalists who have not had their press badges rescinded will require an appointment to talk to the press secretary.
Trump Escalates Push Against Mail Voting Ahead of November Election
Donald Trump is wasting no time on legal niceties in pushing for quashing of mail ballots for the November election.
Last Friday, one day after a federal judge declined temporarily to block the provision in Trump’s election-related executive order, the U.S. Postal Service essentially announced that it would only deliver mail ballot applications to voters that the federal government recognizes, stopping the delivery of applications to tens of millions or more.
What the Postal Service rules made public last Friday was that it would strictly follow new mail-in ballot rules that require states to submit voter names, addresses and unique ballot barcodes for federal elections. The order also sets forth mandatory “best practices” for federal elections including Election Mail logos, tracking barcodes and design reviews.
No Democratic-run state as well as some Republican run states has agreed to provide these names and private information to the government, arguing instead that this order is unconstitutional.
Whatever the wording, two things are true: Trump is seeking to stomp out mail-in voting with a federal order telling the states how to run their elections, and despite that single judge’s decision not to put a stop to the order right now, the legal issues here are still very much in question.
Nevertheless, we should view this as a shot at blocking mail ballots that Trump has decided will run against his leanings about how the election should turn out. Along with redistricted Congressional lines now being upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, attacks on voting machinery and vote-counting methods, the reduction of polling places particularly in rural, minority districts, Trump and Republicans are going full bore at derailing our November elections. The Supreme Court is expected to rule on two elections-related cases, one on a Republican effort to strike state laws that allow late-arriving ballots postmarked by Election Day, and the other about erasing more legal limits on campaign spending.
A Broad Campaign for Control
However broad the Trump campaign to control elections is, the challenges must be specific about each aspect. What we are seeing already in the redistricting cases is that confusion is building about which contradictory court orders in different states are changing or upholding procedures for early voting in primaries going on even now.
The official explanation from the Postal Service is that the rule would help determine how many ballots applications were mailed and allow officials to compare that figure with the number of returned to detect potential issues for further investigation. The rule would apply to general, special and runoff federal elections, but not primaries or ballots sent to military and overseas voters.
The postal service apparently would create state-specific “Mail-In and Absentee Participation Lists” through a new Federal Ballot Mail Portal. The proposal would also let the USPS return outbound federal ballot mailings that do not meet the new standards or are not tied to state-submitted voter lists.
Where Trump sees “rigged” elections through encouraging voting from home, democracy defenders see aggressive steps to block the vote.
In its statements, Democracy Docket headed by election lawyer Mark Elias calls these Postal Service rules “a radical crackdown on mail voting” and “an alarming step” towards trying to control who can vote this November. It also represents a massive expansion of federal control over voting, without congressional authorization.
Trump’s March 31 executive order on elections directed the Postal Service to begin rule-making on mail-in and absentee ballot services. It triggered immediate lawsuits that have yet to be heard. The judicial ruling against blocking the new procedures said the challenge was premature because agencies had not yet carried it out. Publishing the new rule – expected today — could be the start of implementation as well as a period of public comment.
Democrats and voting rights groups argue that Trump’s order intrudes on states’ authority over elections and have defended mail-in ballots. The use of mail-in balloting expanded during Covid for health reasons, and ballot by mail strategies are used by both major parties, but Trump has decided the practice favors Democrats.
Under the Constitution, states run elections and only Congress can set national standards.
The lawsuits challenging limits says the new rules will lead to eligible voters being unable to cast ballots. In part, that’s because the lists would rely on Department of Homeland Security databases that have been shown to have serious flaws.
The resolutions of all these cases would be easier with a huge turnout of voters.
“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 and future mentoring projects like Caught In the Current.
The picture above shows bodies of U.S. troops lying on the beach after the terrible first day of the Battle of Tarawa in 1943. This and other horrifying photos were released to the American public soon after the fighting. As the New York Times explained in 2023, these images
were barely censored before being shown to American audiences, and prompted outrage at home. Instead of scenes of victory, the American public was confronted by haunting images in which, as [one of the war photographers] described it, “riddled corpses formed a ghastly fringe along the narrow white beaches, where men of the Second Marine Division died for every foot of sand.”
Just a few months after the landings, a full-length documentary containing gruesome footage, “With the Marines at Tarawa,” was released in theaters.
In other words, in the middle of a desperate, existential war, the U.S. government believed that citizens had a right to know what was happening — up to and including seeing graphic images of ugly setbacks.
But that was another America.
Today Donald Trump, who now says that talks with Iran are “very boring,” insists that anyone questioning how his war is going is unpatriotic:
We used to be a serious country. Not anymore.
I’m bored with my job busy with personal errands today, so no full post.
I really like how you can paste a large volume of text into claude.ai (or the Claude desktop/mobile apps) and it will detect it as a large paste and turn it into a file attachment instead.
Most Americans work in the service sector so it’s not surprising that most export-related jobs are in the service sector (The U.S. exports about $2.2 trillion of goods and $1.2 trillion of services, but services are more labor intensive than manufacturing so they support more export jobs per dollar.)
In 2022, US service exports supported 8.9 million American jobs.
US manufacturing exports supported 2.2 million.
That’s four-to-one in favour of services. Yet in the national narrative, ‘export jobs’ almost always means things done in steel mills and factories.
…When a household in Germany pays for Netflix, that is an American export. When a Brazilian retailer buys Microsoft cloud capacity, that is an American export. When JPMorgan structures a financial deal in London, or an American consulting firm advises a company in Singapore, those are American exports too.
None of these is shipped in a container. No customs official records them as they clear the customshouse. Yet they are exports since they earn foreign income for America just as surely as the ‘Boeings, Beans and Beef’ that President Trump sold on his recent China trip.
Need I remind you that when OpenAI sells intelligence to people abroad, that is a US export? N.B. this is the future.
World trade in goods expanded roughly five-fold between 1990 and 2020. Trade in digitally enabled services expanded more than eleven-fold over the same period. These are the modern services.
The trade debate is fixated on manufacturing—where America is doing fine—while largely ignoring services, where America is crushing. Increasingly, our most valuable exports travel not on container ships but at the speed of light over fiber.
"Current UK military policy, published in 2022, said there would be “context-appropriate human involvement” in the selection and engagement of targets. Following rapid advances in drone warfare, some officials are pushing for human involvement to be optional.
"Al Carns, the armed forces minister, indicated that there might be exceptional circumstances in which machines made targeting decisions for themselves.
“I always say there must be a human in the loop. But you must have the ability to take the human out of the loop when required, because our adversaries won’t care about having a human in the loop,” Carns told the FT.
As part of their 20th Anniversary celebration, Dark Reading asked five cybersecurity industry leaders who wrote blogs or columns for them over the years to select their favorite piece and share their reflections on the topic today. This is my section.
Renowned technologist and author Bruce Schneier contributed a column on June 20, 2010, warning about cryptography’s inability to secure modern networks, a point he says he has been trying to argue since 2000.
“For a while now, I’ve pointed out that cryptography is singularly ill-suited to solve the major network security problems of today: denial-of-service attacks, website defacement, theft of credit card numbers, identity theft, viruses and worms, DNS attacks, network penetration, and so on.
“Recently, I talked to a former NSA employee at a conference. He told me that back in the 1990s, he had a copy of my book Applied Cryptography by his desk, as did many other cryptographers working at Ft. Meade. People were allowed to refer to it, but they were not allowed to cite it.
“The 1990s were an important decade for cryptography. This was before the internet went mass market, when cryptography was just emerging from a niche academic discipline to a mainstream engineering one. There wasn’t much that programmers could read. The NSA used my book for the same reason it became a bestseller: because it collected all the academic cryptography of the time in one place and made it understandable to people who weren’t mathematicians. They feared it for exactly the same reason.
“I’ve been thinking about that conversation as I revisit a 2010 essay I wrote for Dark Reading, ‘The Failure of Cryptography to Secure Modern Networks.’ Cryptography has inherent mathematical properties that greatly favor the defender. Adding a single bit to the length of a key adds only a slight amount of work for the defender but doubles the amount of work the attacker has to do. Doubling the key length doubles the amount of work the defender has to do (if that—I’m being approximate here) but increases the attacker’s workload exponentially. For many years, we have exploited that mathematical imbalance.
“Computer security is much more balanced. There’ll be a new attack, and a new defense, and a new attack, and a new defense. It’s an arms race between attacker and defender. And it’s a very fast arms race. New vulnerabilities are discovered all the time. The balance can tip from defender to attacker overnight, and back again the night after. Computer security defenses are inherently very fragile.
“That isn’t a new idea. I said much the same thing in the preface to my 2000 book, Secrets and Lies:
“‘Cryptography is a branch of mathematics. And like all mathematics, it involves numbers, equations, and logic. Security, real security that you or I might find useful in our lives, involves people: things people know, relationships between people, people and how they relate to machines. Digital security involves computers: complex, unstable, buggy computers.’
“I especially like how I phrased it in 2016: ‘Cryptography is harder than it looks, primarily because it looks like math. Both algorithms and protocols can be precisely defined and analyzed. This isn’t easy, and there’s a lot of insecure crypto out there, but we cryptographers have gotten pretty good at getting this part right. However, math has no agency; it can’t actually secure anything. For cryptography to work, it needs to be written in software, embedded in a larger software system, managed by an operating system, run on hardware, connected to a network, and configured and operated by users. Each of these steps brings with it difficulties and vulnerabilities.’
“It’s a lesson we have all learned over the decades. Cryptography is still necessary for cybersecurity—although I wouldn’t have used that word back then—but is not sufficient. There are particular attack and forms of mass surveillance that cryptography prevents. But as computers have infused throughout our lives, and networks have connected all those computers, those aspects of cybersecurity have become increasingly important, and vulnerable.
“Today, the cybersecurity world is changing yet again, this time due to the capabilities of artificial intelligence. AI isn’t advancing cryptography, but it’s changing cybersecurity. AI has demonstrated a superhuman ability to find vulnerabilities in software and to write exploits. A similar ability to write patches is probably coming. This has profound implications for both attackers and defenders, and it is unclear who will win the particular arms race in a world of what I call instant software.”
An anonymous security researcher called “Nightmare Eclipse” has been publishing a series of significant security exploits against Microsoft Windows—including one that breaks BitLocker. Microsoft has threatened legal action against the researcher. Lots of recriminations are being traded back and forth.
NASA is withdrawing a proposal to revamp its strategy for transitioning from the International Space Station to commercial stations, one that had been criticized by the companies developing such stations.
Commercial space station developer Vast has reached an agreement with the French government to fly two French astronauts on its missions, including the first flight to its Haven-1 space station.
The author is Martha C. Nussbaum, and the subtitle is Opera & Political Freedom. Martha decided she did not wish to do a podcast after all, so since I put some real prep time in I thought I would offer some thoughts on the book directly, in part because it is not receiving substantive reviews elsewhere. I suspect the number of people qualified to review the book, on the musical and philosophical and historical fronts, is pretty small.
Overall the book is very good, and if you think you might be interested you should buy and read it. It shows a significant knowledge of opera, in part from Nussbaum’s own efforts as performer and singer. Some of the operas considered at length include the major Mozart pieces, Verdi’s Don Carlo, Beethoven’s Fidelio, Benjamin Britten (Albert Herring, for one), and John Adams’s Nixon in China. For Nussbaum, “political freedom” is not exactly that of the classical liberal kind, but for at least eighty percent of the book those differences do not matter.
I do have some objections to her points. While each seems to be a smaller matter, I fear they reflect a larger reality where Nussbaum subordinates her understanding of the operas to her broader political and social agenda.
She is highly suspicious of Don Giovanni, considering it a “problem opera,” which for her I suppose it is. She cannot bring herself to admit that fair numbers of women might actually be attracted to the Don, instead suggesting it is their baleful economic plight that leads them into such liasions. That seems to me a grossly rigid misunderstanding of the work, at variance with centuries of high-level commentary on the piece. Kierkegaard’s understanding remains ahead of hers, as does that of the ordinary theatergoer.
More generally, she is highly suspicious of romanticism, and she works hard to resist the notion that romanticism was a natural and perhaps even inevitable outgrowth of the classical spirit in music. Not surprisingly, Tristan is anathema to her — “I think Tristan is a tedious opera and that the view of love in it — all unsatisfied longing and no reciprocity — is adolescent and boring.” I would agree that virtually all Wagner operas, except perhaps Das Rheingold, are too long and thus have an element of tedium. Yet that is hardly an accurate understanding of the libretto or the love connection (no reciprocity??).
One would do well to supplement Nussbaum with Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Queen’s Throat. GPT Pro had a good summary of some of Koestenbaum’s quite contrasting perspectives:
“The operatic voice exceeds ordinary speech: it is too loud, too stylized, too bodily, too artificial, too emotional. That excess makes it politically charged because it disrupts norms of restraint, masculine self-control, realism, and “proper” social identity. Opera gives form to things that respectable culture often requires people—especially queer people—to hide: longing, hysteria, theatricality, shame, glamour, grief, fantasy, and desire……it is a place where identity is unstable, theatrical, mediated, and excessive. Opera is full of secrecy, codes, hidden meanings, displaced passions, and voices that say indirectly what cannot be said directly.”
By no means are those entirely illiberal tendencies, but they complicate any identifications of opera with liberalism or indeed any other foundational political set of views. In some fundamental fashion, opera is usually going a bit askew from strictly classical principles.
I take Beethoven to be modestly less liberal than she does, as I am concerned with the repeated sense of “culmination” in his work, and the implied notion of total communal integration as the final good. It is not Beethoven’s fault that even the Nazis staged Fidelio, but it does point to the poliitically Romantic strand in his music, a strand that Nussbaum pushes off center stage.
Why so little Rossini in this book? (He gets a brief mention on pp.303-304). He is arguably the essence of opera, and the carrier of the Mozartean tradition, yet he also was a supporter of the French monarchy and its restoration. Even Verdi was a conservative and monarchist, which puts his Don Carlo in a slightly different light. I am reminded of Carl Schmitt’s critique of Romanticism, namely that it could transfer loyalties so readily from revolutionary republicanism to reactionary monarchism. 19th century opera is not altogether innocent of this charge, and a deeper look at the material would have confronted this issue. Mazzini wrote a whole book on opera and saw it as supportive of nationalism above all else. A look at the history of Auber’s La Muette de Portici, the performance of which spurred Belgian nationalism and a revolt in 1830, is consistent with this view.
Nussbaum is too concerned with her own classificatory impulses, and insufficiently aware of how much opera itself — most of all the music — keeps on diverting our attention in other directions.
Overall, this is a very thought-provoking book, full of deep knowledge of both opera and philosophy. If it is afraid to follow down the path of where the music itself — and most of its major purveyors — were leading us, that makes it thought-provoking all the more.
A false-color image of Santa Rosa Island from May 16, 2026, shows a dark-brown burned area toward the bottom-right. A thin, bright orange line runs along the burned area, indicating the active fire front.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
A false-color image of Santa Rosa Island from May 24, 2026, shows a reddish-brown burned area spanning the eastern third of the island.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
A false-color image of Santa Rosa Island from May 16, 2026, shows a dark-brown burned area toward the bottom-right. A thin, bright orange line runs along the burned area, indicating the active fire front.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
A false-color image of Santa Rosa Island from May 24, 2026, shows a reddish-brown burned area spanning the eastern third of the island.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
May 16, 2026
May 24, 2026
The burned area from a wildland fire on Santa Rosa Island in California’s Channel Islands National Park grows between May 16 (left) and May 24, 2026 (right), in these false-color images captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9 and Landsat 8, respectively.
On May 15, 2026, a fire was spotted from aircraft on the southeastern side of Santa Rosa Island, part of California’s Channel Islands National Park. The blaze spread over the next several days, ultimately burning 18,379 acres (7,438 hectares)—about one-third of the island.
These images show the expansion of the fire’s burned area between May 16 (left), the day after it was discovered, and May 24 (right), after the fire’s growth had stabilized. The Landsat satellite images are false-color to help distinguish burned areas (brown) from healthy vegetation (green). Officials reported the fire was 97 percent contained by the evening of May 26.
NASA tools utilizing satellite observations, namely FIRMS (Fire Information for Resource Management System) and the Fire Event Explorer, show how the fire spread to the north and east over several days. As it advanced, it consumed areas of grassland, coastal sage scrub, and island chaparral.
Santa Rosa Island, like the other Channel Islands, is known for its diversity of plant and animal species, some of them rare. Observers were concerned that the fire threatened the island’s Torrey pines, a rare type of tree that in the United States grows naturally only on the northeastern coast of Santa Rosa Island and near San Diego.
Initial post-fire surveys by firefighters and unmanned aircraft indicated the Torrey pine stand remained largely intact. The fire mostly burned at lower intensity through the pine areas and spared the canopy. However, some pockets of forest sustained damage where intensity was higher. Along the northwest edge of the fire, suppression crews worked to protect another vulnerable area—the cloud forests—by cooling fuels ahead of the fire’s front.
Local reports suggest the Santa Rosa Island fire is the largest on record on any of California’s Channel Islands. Some of the islands’ chaparral and tree species are adapted to fire but less dependent on it than their mainland counterparts, according to the National Park Service, because naturally occurring fire is less frequent on the Channel Islands.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Lindsey Doermann.
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