Exploratorium
Play with the physics of perception at Frank Oppenheimer’s Exploratorium in this captivating, Oscar-nominated short from 1974
- by Aeon Video
Play with the physics of perception at Frank Oppenheimer’s Exploratorium in this captivating, Oscar-nominated short from 1974
- by Aeon Video
The leaders of the House Science Committee say the FCC is overstepping its authority with parts of a space licensing rulemaking.
The post House Science Committee leaders criticize FCC rulemaking on space safety appeared first on SpaceNews.
New training for program managers shifting focus from hardware buys to integrated warfighting systems
The post Space Force modernization push runs into acquisition workforce shortfall appeared first on SpaceNews.
A lesson from private equity investing in defense and space technology is that while the sector has become trendy among investors, success in the long run depends on sustained government engagement
The post When space is hot, Washington holds a match appeared first on SpaceNews.
Redwire has introduced a new solar array product designed for mass-produced satellites that require high performance while minimizing mass.
The post Redwire unveils new solar array appeared first on SpaceNews.
As satellite communications constellations grow in size and number, they are also competing for a scarce and increasingly valuable resource: spectrum, the bands of radio frequencies that are crucial for communications and broadband service — and for tracking weather. The pace is intensifying as companies race to expand global communications networks, raising alarms at some […]
The post Spectrum showdown appeared first on SpaceNews.
PLD Space has raised $209 million to ramp up production of the Spanish startup’s Miura 5 launch vehicle, marking the largest funding round for a European space company announced so far this year.
The post PLD Space raises $209 million to shift into serial rocket production appeared first on SpaceNews.
The author is Sebastian Mallaby and the subtitle is Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence. A very good and enjoyable book.
The post *The Infinity Machine* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
US university endowments have recorded their fastest spending growth since the global financial crisis as federal funding cuts and rising operating costs squeeze campus budgets.
A study of 657 institutions by the National Association of College and University Business Officers (Nacubo) with Commonfund showed their endowment withdrawals rose 11 per cent year on year in the 12 months to June 2025 — the sharpest increase since 2010.
The surge came as endowments funded an average of 15.2 per cent of universities’ operating expenses last year, up from 10.9 per cent in 2023.
Here is more from Sun Yu at the FT.
The post Are universities running down their endowments? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Howdy partner, and welcome to the Wasteland!
What the heck is the Wasteland?
The Wasteland has been the inevitable next step for Gas Town since the day I launched it. Every new AI tooling form-factor breakthrough has involved 100x increase in token spend. How do you 100x a Gas Town? You federate a hundred Gas Town users together to build stuff.
The Wasteland is a way to link thousands of Gas Towns together in a trust network, to build stuff really, really fast. So fast that your biggest problem will be ideas.
At the heart of the Wasteland is a big shared Wanted Board of work. People put up ideas, and other people use their Gas Towns to help build those ideas. And you get credit for the work you do.
The Wasteland has a lot of moving parts. There are stamps. There are leaderboards. There are character sheets. The Wasteland was designed for federating work, but its metamorphosis into an RPG seems unstoppable at this point. You’ve seen the gaming interfaces people have already put on Gas Town, but with building blocks like this… it’s gonna be wild.
At its core, the Wasteland runs on accepting work and stamping it. When deciding whether work gets accepted, the Wasteland uses a socio-technical protocol that the industry has battle-tested for over a decade: Git’s fork/merge push/pull model.
When someone accepts a PR in the Wasteland, they stamp the contributor’s passbook. The contributor gains some reputation, and it all goes onto a permanent ledger that could eventually act something like a portable C.V./résumé. Your work in the Wasteland levels up your skills in the system, which happen to correspond to real skills. And it’s all public, even (in time) the skills and stamps you will get from working on private repos, all subject to proper governance rules.
Like any RPG worth its salt, the Wasteland’s rule book is an inch thick. There’s so much to cover that we just can’t do it. So instead, I’ll handle this post in Q&A style, and try to get the main ideas across. The curious ones will figure the rest out.
Let’s get started!
Will I learn all about the Wasteland in this post?
No.
We need to keep it small at first, lest it get away from us. It’s going to grow monstrously fast. Nom nom, eating the world of work, led by humans, not lobsters.
To keep it contained in the first couple weeks, the instructions in this post at the end are intentionally obtuse, accessible only to the most determined.
We will make it easier in time.
Who is this “We” of whom you speak?
Well, we may not have a bunch of fancy venture capital, but we’ve got a pretty darn good volunteer team.
For starters, we have a growing army of awesome contributors on the Discord, led by Dane Poyzer, and big shoutouts to Krystian Gebis for pushing on multi-model support, and to Pierre-Alexandre Entraygues for our Open Telemetry. But really, there are a ton of people there helping each other out and exploring PR ideas.
We also have a growing army on GitHub, with over 450 unique PR contributors. Special shoutout to Matt Wilkie, a prolific Beads contributor and soon to be co-maintainer.
My heartfelt thanks go out to everyone who ignored the First Two Rules of Gas Town, jumped in, and are helping make it great. I see you all and I appreciate you!
In addition to our Gas Town and Beads contributors, I also want to recognize the world-class team that brought you the Wasteland today:
I am deeply grateful to these amazing people who have volunteered so much of their time, passion, and resources to bring this vision to life for you today.
Is Gas Town Ready?
Yes. Let’s just get that out of the way up front.
I know I told you before that you were gonna die if you used Gas Town. That was true, two months ago. But since then:
In short, it’s smooth sailing these days. I’ll have a lot more to say about Dolt and how amazing it is in a future post. But it feels like Dolt predicted the Wasteland, because there could not be a more perfect technology for it.
Once your agent gets you past the setup, users report that the Gas Town experience is a pleasant surprise. Everyone likes working with the Mayor. Polecats make sense, convoys make sense, slinging makes sense… and most of the rest of the town’s operation is safely behind the scenes. It all just has a good vibe to it.
Going from Claude Code to Gas Town elevates you from pair-programming into large-scale engineering leadership. It can grow with you. At first, it’s just you and the Mayor. Best buds. Later, you’ll be juggling conversations with 20-odd crew members while your Mayor is out slinging polecats at half a dozen epics at once.
And before long, you’ll wonder how you ever managed to get anything done without a personal army.
So yeah. Gas Town is ready. Try it out! If you’ve used a coding agent, then you’re ready for Gas Town.
Do I actually need Gas Town for the Wasteland?
So the funny thing is… no. All you need is Dolt, a free DoltHub credential, and a coding agent that knows the schema. With that alone, you can start submitting work in the Wasteland, getting your stamps, and moving up the leaderboards. I’ll show you at the end of the post.
Why should you care about accumulating stamps? Because your stamp history is building toward something like a portable professional identity. Evidence-backed, auditable, and yours. It’s the beginning of a résumé you never have to write — one that proves what you can do.
The entire Wasteland protocol is encapsulated in this demo Claude skill — a prompt package that teaches Claude Code a new workflow. Load the skill, and your agent knows how to join, browse, claim, and submit work in the Wasteland.
That said, we recommend you use Gas Town, because it’s much more convenient.
Why is the Wasteland any different from blah Blah BLAAAH?
I’m glad you asked. I’ll tell you in this section how the Wasteland works, at a high level, and you can decide for yourself the answer to your very intelligent question.
First off: I did warn you that the rule book for the Wasteland is an inch thick. In this section, you’re getting the eight-paragraph quick-start version. But you could drill deep on any of these topics. The Wasteland is designed to scale up eventually to all the world’s work; let’s take a look briefly at how.
The Wasteland has three kinds of actors: rigs, posters, and validators. Every rig rolls up to a human participant. The AI side of the rig can be an agent, a Gas Town, or another orchestrator. Every rig has a handle, a trust level, and a history of work. Posters put work on the board. Validators attest to the quality of completed work. These aren’t fixed roles; any rig can post work, and any rig with sufficient trust can validate.
The central object is the wanted board. It’s a shared list of open work — tasks, bugs, features, research questions, documentation, designs, anything. Each item has a title, a description, an effort estimate, and some tags. Anyone can post to the board. There’s no approval gate: if you have work that needs doing, you post it.
The lifecycle of a wanted item has four stages: open, claimed, in review, and completed. When a rig claims an item, it’s marked as theirs — other rigs can see who’s working on what, preventing duplicate effort. When the rig finishes the work, they submit a completion: a record that includes evidence of what was done (a link, a commit, a description). The item moves to “in review.” A validator — a rig with maintainer-level trust — reviews the evidence and issues a stamp. We also support open-bounty work where nobody claims it, multiple rigs can work on it in parallel, and as soon as someone submits a solution the validator likes, it’s closed.
The stamp is not a binary pass/fail. A stamp is a multi-dimensional attestation: quality, reliability, creativity, each scored independently. It includes a confidence level (how sure is the validator?) and a severity (is this a leaf task or a root architectural decision?). The stamp is anchored to the specific completion — the specific evidence — so reputation is always traceable back to real work. And there’s a yearbook rule: you can’t stamp your own work.
Stamps accumulate into a portable reputation. Every stamp a rig receives becomes part of their permanent record. Over time, a rig builds a profile: they’re great at Go but mediocre at frontend. They’re highly reliable but not particularly creative. They crush small tasks but struggle with epics. This isn’t a single number, but a structured, evidence-backed work history. And because it’s stored in a versioned database, it’s auditable. Anyone can trace a rig’s reputation back through the chain of stamps to the original completions to the original wanted items.
Trust levels gate what you can do. A new rig starts as a registered participant (level 1). They can browse, claim, and submit completions. As their work is validated and stamps accumulate, they can be promoted to contributor (level 2), then maintainer (level 3). Maintainers can validate others’ work — they’re the ones issuing stamps. This creates a natural apprenticeship path: do good work, get stamped, eventually become someone who stamps others.
Wastelands are federated, not centralized. Anyone can create their own wasteland — a team, a company, a university, an open source project. Each wasteland is a sovereign database with the same schema. Your rig identity is portable across wastelands: join the root commons, join Grab’s wasteland, join a university’s wasteland. Your stamps follow you. A rig that’s proven reliable in one wasteland carries that reputation into the next.
The whole system is designed around one principle: work is the only input, and reputation is the only output. There’s no buying reputation, no gaming follower counts, no social signals disconnected from evidence. Every stamp points to a completion. Every completion points to a wanted item. The graph is fully traversable. And because the underlying storage is append-only and versioned, the history can’t be rewritten — your ledger is permanent.
And there’s a yearbook rule: you can’t stamp your own work. Your reputation is what others write about you, not what you claim about yourself. Think of it like a high school yearbook — you can sign other people’s pages, but you can’t sign your own. This is the fundamental difference between the Wasteland and LinkedIn. Nobody cares what you say about yourself. They care what the people who reviewed your work say about you.
What about cheating, you ask? We’ve thought about that, and consulted leading Trust & Safety experts. The stamp graph has a shape, and collusion rings have a distinctive topology — lots of mutual stamping, sharp boundaries, no outside critics. The Wasteland system is designed to make fraud unprofitable, not impossible. We’ll have more to say about this soon.
Whew. OK, that was a lot. And honestly there’s a lot more to it. Some of it hasn’t even been fully fleshed out yet, like the personal/work identity — right now your identity is global across all Wastelands. And who owns the stamps. We have solutions; it’ll all get worked out. The important thing is to get people working together now, so we can see what patterns and anti-patterns emerge.
You mentioned an RPG?
Oh, right, the RPG, thanks for reminding me.
You can start at gastownhall.ai, where you’ll see leaderboards and stuff. We built all this just over the last couple of days, since the past few weeks to months have been focused on getting the underlying protocols right. So it’s pretty bare-bones right now. But it will improve fast.
We have the beginnings of profile pages for the Wasteland. We pre-seeded them with data from GitHub, from the top ~10k contributors by whatever metric Claude thought appropriate, which it turns out you can get through GitHub’s APIs, and it’s supported by their ToS, with strong legal precedents. Public data is public data.
We figured, if the Wasteland is giving you reputational credit for work you’re getting verified as having completed, then why not give everyone partial credit for verified work they’ve already completed?
This is all experimental, of course, and we’re likely to throw the whole system out and start over at least twice in the next 2–3 months. I wouldn’t get too attached to your high score.
We didn’t scrape all of GitHub, because it would take forever. But we have an uploader, so if you want your GitHub profile slurped into the Wasteland, you fill out the form on the website and it’ll kick off a job to import your character sheet.
Originally we had levels, but somehow I was level 18 and Linus Torvalds was level 14, so it was clearly the most broke-ass leveling system ever invented, and we threw it out right before launch.
We’ll come up with a better one. How? We’ll post “make a better leveling system” on the Wasteland Commons wanted board, and someone will come along with a solution we like.
I strongly suspect that more sophisticated games will start to appear in this system as emergent behavior. Maybe it’ll be you making one, and you’ll be the next Wasteland superstar!
How can I help?
Funny you should ask. The Wasteland has opted into the classic Git pull-request based workflow, for literally all work. You submit a PR, it gets approved, you get your stamp. For any kind of work, not just coding. We chose this for several reasons:
The Wasteland is now building itself. The Gas Town, Wasteland, Gas City, and Beads projects are all putting work up for grabs on the Commons, and will begin farming out feature work in exchange for attested reputation.
So if you want to help, you join in, and you help. We’re building campfire-style. Come register your rig and help us figure out where this thing is going.
What’s coming next?
No idea. We’re gonna find out! It’s going to be massive, whatever happens. You can build things so fast, especially with this many contributors, that we will be able to knock out things that companies could only dream of.
Gas City will be one of the early successes. We’re going to deconstruct Gas Town into its constituent parts, like LEGO, and let you piece them together to make your own orchestrator topologies. It’s already got an early demo. Julian Knutsen and Chris Sells have been collaborating on it; they are both as smart as Victor Frankenstein and as tall as his monster. It shouldn’t be long before we can swap out Gas Town for a pure-declarative version of itself. And there’s work for it on the Commons board, so you can help!
I also suspect we’re going to build a coding agent that actually wants to be a factory worker. Claude Code seems to be slipping into the classic “we’re a product, not a platform” trap, and the thundering herd is going to route right around that, as soon as it’s thermodynamically possible. The world needs a coding agent that behaves like a factory worker, and we don’t have one today. So one will get built.
We’ll see sandboxes emerge soon, no doubt, and mechanisms will emerge for working on private repos. Although truthfully I could not tell you if private code will survive long-term. I’m on the fence about it today.
As for the actual Wasteland protocols, they are pretty good. But they are also very early-days v1, and they’ll need to evolve. Using Dolt makes schema migration a dream, though, so I’m not worried about it. Our design is forward-compatible with our long-term plans.
OK so how do you *actually* get started?
Here’s the deliberately minimal version:
1. Install Dolt and create a free DoltHub account.
2. Head to gastownhall.ai to browse the wanted board and look up your character sheet.
3. Load the Wasteland Claude skill and let your agent walk you through wl join.
That’s it. If those instructions aren’t enough, wait a week or two — we’ll make it easier. And if they are enough, welcome to the Wasteland. You’re exactly who we’re looking for.
See you out there.
This is the latest installment in my ongoing survey of the 20th century counterculture. I will probably publish all of these in a book some day. In the meantime, you can check out my previous essays here at The Honest Broker:
By Ted Gioia
A Korean War veteran is floundering. His career is an endless bumpy road, and includes work as a teacher, a technical writer for Honeywell, and even a Nevada casino employee. But our ambitious vet also studies philosophy at the Banaras Hindu University in India—and starts to develop his own philosophy of life, an unconventional merging of Eastern and Western currents.
Then comes a mental breakdown that sends him to a psychiatric hospital. Here he undergoes repeated electroshock therapy. He finally emerges a changed person.
But maybe he changed too much—he can hardly remember the person he once was. It’s almost as if his life got cleaved in two at this juncture. His wife leaves him. He holds on to his relationship with his son—but that ends tragically with the son’s murder in San Francisco at age 22.
While working for Honeywell, our aspiring philosopher stays awake from 2 AM to 6 AM in a small apartment above a shoe store in Minneapolis. Here he writes a novel destined to become one of the defining books of the era. But he has to pitch it to 121 editors before he gets a contract and a $3,000 advance.
The editor, J.D. Landis, admitted that he only accepted the novel because this “book forced him to decide what he was in publishing for.” But the author, he insisted, shouldn’t expect to make more than his tiny advance. Then Landis added: “Money isn’t the point with a book like this.”
That’s the story of how Robert Pirsig published of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. But the editor was wrong. The book sold 5 million copies, and for a spell in the 1970s you would see copies everywhere, even in the hands of people who didn’t read novels.
And that was just the start. Robert Redford tried to buy movie rights, but the author said no. Highbrow literary critic George Steiner compared Pirsig to Dostoevsky—which is especially meaningful when you know that Steiner wrote a book on Dostoevsky. The Smithsonian acquired the titular motorcycle for its permanent collection.
The book is simple enough to describe. It tells the story of a 17-day motorcycle trip from Minnesota to California. Along the way, the narrator tries to figure out many things—but especially his own past before his life split in two.
At one point in the novel, Pirsig writes:
“Before the electrodes were attached to his head he’d lost everything tangible: money, property, children; even his rights as a citizen had been taken away from him by order of the court….I will never know all that was in his head at that time, nor will anyone else. What’s left now is just fragments: debris, scattered notes, which can be pieced together but which leave huge areas unexplained.”
The electroshock treatment was done without Pirsig’s consent. That would be illegal nowadays.
In the aftermath, Pirsig felt so disconnected from his past that he included his pre-treatment self as a separate character in the novel. He calls that abandoned part of himself Phaedrus, a name drawn from Plato’s dialogues.
So you can read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as a dialogue between a man and his past self. Or you can treat it as a travel story or as a philosophical discussion (what Pirsig describes as a chautauqua, a name drawn from a populist adult education movement of the late 1800s). And, yes, it’s also a guide to motorcycle maintenance.
The text actually moves back and forth between all of these. Few novels pay less attention to the rules of fiction than Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. For that reason, it just might be the strangest travel book ever written—because most of the journey happens inside the narrator’s head.
But maybe that’s part of the story too. Pirsig worked as a college writing teacher, and was frustrated by the rules he was expected to impart to his students. He felt that good writing was indefinable. It violated accepted rules, and created its own. The whole process was mysterious.
Solving that mystery of Quality—also called goodness, excellence, or worth—is the main theme of the novel. Indeed, it’s the overarching theme of Pirsig’s entire life’s work. He wrote one more novel after Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the seldom read Lila, and it continues the discussion on quality. And the same topic takes center stage in the posthumous collection of writings published under the title On Quality: An Inquiry into Excellence.
At first glance, this inquiry feels like it’s full of holes. Pirsig has stumbled upon the Naturalistic Fallacy, and thinks he has discovered it anew. He might benefit from learning what G.E. Moore wrote about the subject back in 1903. Or Frankena’s response to Moore from 1939 or Moore’s 1942 rebuttal. But Pirsig is clearly unaware of this ongoing debate.
In general, his philosophical education is spotty. He knows some Hegel and more Kant, but he would probably have found more sympathetic voices in Heidegger, Bergson, and Nietzsche. But in the great spirit of American homespun thinking, he isn’t going to let those gaps limit his ambitions.
This ambition reached its highest intensity when Pirsig showed up at the University of Chicago, and developed a fierce antagonism against Aristotle in general, and the famous Aristotelian Richard McKeon—founder of Chicago’s esteemed Committee on the Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods—in particular.
Pirsig was a little out of his depth here, but this is the most engaging part of the Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for me. He arrives at the epicenter of Great Books education, but “he had no time or interest in other people’s Great Books,” Pirsig writes. “He was there solely to write a Great Book of his own.”
I daresay that Aristotle survived his attacks, as did McKeon (who also counts Susan Sontag, Richard Rorty, and Paul Goodman among his students). But Pirsig did get a famous book of his own out of this encounter—although no degree from U of C. That’s hardly a negligible achievement. And it adds more evidence to support my view that dropouts are often more successful than the people who earn degrees.
But let’s be honest: Pirsig was a better mystic than philosopher, and the deeper Pirsig digs into his personal notion of Quality, the more interesting—and metaphysical—his thinking becomes. Quality, he insists, can never be defined. He eventually embraces it as a kind of Tao, a force underlying all our experiences—hence resisting empirical analysis. He is now leaving philosophy behind, and perhaps for the better.
So he eventually aligns himself with a profound idea drawn from the ancient Greeks—but not the philosophers. Instead he goes back to the Homeric mythos, five hundred years older than rational philosophy, and discoveres the source of his Quality in the Greek concept of aretḗ, or excellence (sometimes translated as virtue). Aretḗ, Pirsig believes, is more powerful than Aristotelian logic, and closer in spirit to the Hindu dharma.
He quotes a passage from classicist H.D.F. Kitto, which I want to share in its entirety—not only because it is essential to Pirsig’s worldview, but because it’s invaluable to us today. Many are struggling to understand a place for humans in a world of AI and super-smart machines. From a purely rational perspective, the robots can beat us in terms of data generation and analysis. But in a world of aretḗ (or Quality), they fall far short.
This is where Pirsig earns my admiration and loyalty. Some things really are more powerful than logic.
Back in 1952 Kitto anticipated Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—and provided the missing piece to Pirsig’s worldview—when he wrote:
[If aretḗ refers to a person] it will connote excellence in the ways in which a man can be excellent—morally, intellectually, physically, practically. Thus the hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send; and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Phaeacian youth at boxing, wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by a song. He is in fact an excellent all-rounder; he has surpassing arête.
Aretḗ implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency...or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself.
We are now at the heart of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. If you read Kitto, you are already prepared for Pirsig—maybe you can even skip the novel. But, much better, you have a game plan for living a human life in the face of encroaching machines.
Pirsig understood this more than fifty years ago. He saw that we made a Faustian bargain when we put rationality ahead of the Good, and data ahead of human excellence. He grasped that science should be subservient to human needs, not the other way around. And the price we’re paying now is much higher than it was back then.
In an extraordinary passage, the narrator of Pirsig’s novel picks up a copy the Tao Te Ching, and recites it aloud—but substituting the word Quality for Tao. This is strange and unprecedented, but hits at the heart of this mystic work from the fourth century BC:
The quality that can be defined is not the Absolute Quality….
The names that can be given it are not Absolute names.
It is the origin of heaven and earth.
When named it is the mother of all things….
He declares: “Quality is the Buddha. Quality is scientific reality. Quality is the goal of Art.”
I worked with many quality control engineers in the business world and often walked with them on the factory floor. I’m sure they would be shocked by Pirsig’s statement that “Quality is the Buddha.” But that’s exactly the kind of journey we’re on in this book.
Pirsig, in defense of this unexpected proclamation, tells us that the words god and good have a shared etymology in English—and that’s why, he believes, Quality is a concept that can unify science, art, and religion.
Now this is something different from Philosophy 101. We’ve reached a level where G.E. Moore and other Anglo-American philosophers can no longer follow us, or even Aristotle and his progeny. And, after all, what did those ivory tower thinkers know about motorcycle maintenance?
Even fifty years after its publication, this is still a unique novel. And at its core there’s a powerful idea—more inspiring than logic because it draws on the defining mythos of our culture, and maybe all cultures. That’s more than enough to keep drawing readers to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance so many years after its debut.
But for my money, the story behind this book is just as interesting as the novel itself. Pirsig is a kind of Gatsby-like character of the spiritual realm, and inspires me just through his ambition and persistence—and especially his dogged pursuit of Quality (or aretḗ or dharma or the Tao) in his own life. They should make that tale into a movie.
Improving education and labor market outcomes for low-income students is critical for advancing socioeconomic mobility in the United States. We use longitudinal data on five cohorts of 9th grade students to explore how Massachusetts public high schools affect the longer-term outcomes of students, with a special focus on students from low-income families. Using detailed administrative and student survey data, we estimate school value-added impacts on college outcomes and earnings. Observationally similar students who attend a school at the 80th percentile of the value-added distribution instead of a school at the 20th percentile are 11% more likely to enroll in college, are 31% more likely to graduate from a four-year college, and earn 25% (or $10,500) more annually at age 30. On average, schools that improve students’ longer-run outcomes the most are those that improve their 10th grade test scores and increase their college plans the most.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
The post The value of good high schools appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Dating back centuries, salt-crusted plains in present-day Oklahoma held great value to native tribes and, later, to homesteaders. People used the inland supply of salt in their diets, for tanning deer hides, and for trade. The area also proved to be a fertile hunting ground due to the abundance of game that sought out the nutrient-rich habitat.
Since 1930, the salty deposit located about 90 miles (150 kilometers) northwest of Oklahoma City has been part of Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge. Today, the plains are still known as a gathering place for diverse animal life, including more than 300 species of birds. But its salt resources have become appealing in another way: it is the only place in the world where people can dig for a distinctively patterned form of crystallized gypsum.
The OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 captured these images of the area in natural color (above) and false color (below) on October 10, 2025. The salt basin is partially filled by Great Salt Plains Lake, a shallow reservoir formed by the damming of the Salt Fork Arkansas River and fed by ephemeral streams.
The false-color image combines the shortwave infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum with visible light (OLI bands 7-4-2). In this combination, healthy vegetation appears dark red to purple, and water is blue. The variation in color on the salt plain may be due to different moisture or salinity levels. (Scientists can use shortwave infrared data in estimations of soil salinity.)
The basin’s salt has its origins in the Permian Period, about 300 million to 250 million years ago. A shallow salt layer from that time still underlies parts of the southwestern U.S., including western Oklahoma. Salt gradually dissolves into groundwater, and when the resulting brine rises to the surface, the water evaporates and leaves behind a bright crust.
The saline water is a key component in a mineral structure unique to the area—hourglass selenite crystals. Selenite, a crystalline variety of gypsum, forms in the top two feet of the wet subsurface when saline water combines with gypsum. The process can occur relatively quickly when temperatures and moisture levels are right. Likewise, crystals may dissolve away if the environment is too wet. Sand and clay particles get incorporated into the otherwise clear crystals, often in a brownish hourglass shape.
Visitors to the Salt Plains scour for these crystal “blades,” but crystal collecting is limited to certain months of the year so as not to disrupt seasonal activities of shorebirds and waterbirds. The salt flats provide habitat and feeding grounds for species such as the snowy plover, sandhill crane, and endangered whooping crane. Other wildlife common to the area include white-tailed deer, red-eared sliders, and nine-banded armadillos.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Lindsey Doermann.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
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Modern legal systems are undergoing a massive shift away from the old winner take all mentality that used to define divorce cases. Instead of one parent being the primary and the other a visitor, courts now focus on creating a team environment. This change reflects a better understanding of how children thrive when both parents stay active.
The evolution of language is a key part of this transformation as terms like visitation are being replaced with parenting time. This change in phrasing helps to remove the stigma of being a secondary parent and emphasizes the shared responsibility of raising a child. It focuses on the quality of the connection rather than a simple schedule.
Finding the right balance requires carefully reviewing the different child custody arrangements available, including joint custody, sole custody, and variations in physical and legal arrangements. Understanding these distinctions helps families choose a structure that truly serves the child’s best interests. This flexible approach allows for a more personalized and workable plan for everyone involved.
The legal framework used by judges today is built almost entirely on the best interest of the child standard for every case. This subjective but vital measure looks at the emotional bonds and the physical safety of the environment provided by each parent. It prioritizes the stability of the child over the desires of the adults.
Stability is defined by more than just a roof over a head or a clean room in a quiet house during the week. It involves the ability of a parent to provide a consistent routine and emotional support during a very difficult transition period. Courts look for evidence of a healthy and nurturing relationship that will survive the split.
Care also includes the ability of the parents to communicate effectively about the needs of their children without constant fighting. A parent who can put aside their own anger to facilitate a relationship with the other parent is often viewed very favorably. The goal is always to minimize the trauma for the younger generation.
Shared legal decision making is becoming the standard for many families who want to remain involved in the big choices. This allows both parents to have an equal say in important matters like education and medical care for their children. It ensures that neither parent is left out of the major milestones of growth.
Managing these choices together requires a level of cooperation that can be difficult to maintain during a high stress divorce. Parents must find a way to discuss schools and religious upbringing without letting past grievances interfere with the process. It is about creating a unified front for the sake of the family.
This model works best when both parties are willing to compromise and listen to the perspective of the other person. While it takes more work than a traditional arrangement, it provides a much richer experience for the child. Legal custody is a shared responsibility that defines the future of the children.
Customizing physical placement schedules is a vital part of making a custody agreement work in a real world setting. Moving beyond the every other weekend model allows families to find a rhythm that fits their specific work and school lives. There is no longer a single template that fits every household.
Functional daily routines are the foundation of a successful parenting plan that reduces stress for both the kids and the adults. Some families choose a week on and week off schedule while others prefer a more frequent rotation of two days each. The best plan is the one that minimizes travel and disruption.
The focus remains on ensuring that the child feels at home in both locations rather than feeling like a guest. Providing a dedicated space and a consistent set of rules helps to build a sense of belonging in both houses. Flexibility is the key to managing a successful transition between two separate homes.
Technological tools have revolutionized the way that modern co-parents manage their busy lives and communicate with each other. Using shared calendars and specialized apps helps to reduce direct interpersonal friction by providing a neutral platform for logistics. It keeps the focus on the schedule rather than the emotions.
These apps allow parents to track expenses and share photos or school reports without the need for a long phone call. Having a digital record of all interactions also provides a level of accountability that can be very helpful in high conflict situations. It creates a clear and objective history for the court.
Shared calendars ensure that everyone is on the same page regarding sports practices and doctor appointments throughout the month. This transparency reduces the risk of missed events and prevents the child from being caught in the middle of a scheduling conflict. Technology serves as a bridge between two separate households.
Evolving with the changing needs of the family is a critical component of any long term and successful custody agreement. As children get older their interests and schedules naturally change, which often requires a shift in the physical placement plan. A rigid document can become a burden if it does not allow for growth.
Parents should view their agreement as a living document that can be adjusted as new challenges and opportunities arise for the kids. This might involve changing the transition times or allowing for more input from the child as they reach their teenage years. Flexibility prevents the legal system from becoming an obstacle.
Maintaining a focus on the well being of the child ensures that the plan remains effective for several years of growth. By being willing to adapt, parents can show their children that they are committed to their happiness and success. Evolution is a natural and necessary part of a healthy post divorce life.
Photo: Freepik via their website.
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The American work environment has gone through a significant transformation in the last 20 years. Millions of people today make a living through app-based platforms, freelance marketplaces, as well as contract-based industries.
However, the workers compensation systems were tailored to the traditional employer-employee relationship. Independent contractors are usually outside of that protective frame. This detachment has resulted in a wide coverage gap that exposes many injured workers to financial vulnerability.
The workers compensation laws emerged in the early twentieth century as a compromise between labor and industry. Employers agreed to bear liability to job-related injuries irrespective of the fault and workers waived the right to sue in the majority of cases. In exchange, workers gained medical coverage and partial wage replacement during recovery. However, eligibility depends on classification as an “employee”, a distinction that has become increasingly contested.
Independent contracting has taken off in transportation, delivery, construction, media, health, and technology. By categorizing workers as contractors, companies save on payroll, escape the obligation to provide benefits, and restrict insurance claims. Digital platforms have expanded this model through short-term, task-based arrangements.
While flexibility may benefit some individuals, the structure shifts substantial risk onto workers who may not fully understand the consequences of their classification. As more individuals operate outside traditional employment models, the number of workers without automatic workers’ compensation coverage continues to grow.
If an employee gets injured on the job, their medical bills are covered and wage replacement begins during recovery. When an independent contractor is injured, there is no automatic safety net. The individual may rely on personal health insurance, pursue civil litigation, or absorb the costs directly.
In metropolitan areas like Miami, a Miami workers comp lawyer may consider misclassification, but that process can be lengthy and uncertain. During the consideration period, the income often stops so medical expenses accumulate. The absence of guaranteed benefits creates immediate financial strain, particularly for households dependent on a single income.
The stakes become higher in severe incidents. If a contractor dies in the course of executing his work-related responsibilities, families may end up with wrongful death lawsuits without workers compensation death benefits. Civil claims involve establishing negligence which is heavier than a no-fault claim.
Criminal lawyers can be also introduced in situations connected with unsafe working conditions or misconduct on the side of the employer, especially, when the deaths were caused by regulatory violations. These layered legal processes highlight how far removed contractors are from streamlined protections.
Legal standards for determining worker classification vary by state. Some jurisdictions apply a control-based test, while others rely on the ABC test or economic realities analysis. This patchwork creates inconsistent protections. Enforcement agencies often lack resources to investigate widespread misclassification, as a result questionable practices persist.
The consequences extend beyond individual workers. When injured contractors lack adequate coverage, costs shift to public healthcare systems and family support networks, undermining the original purpose of workers’ compensation.
Addressing the gap requires deliberate reform. Legislators could broaden legal definitions of employment, increase the punishment of misclassification, or impose portable benefits such as injuries, which are paid into by firms that depend on contract workers. Without structural adjustments, labor protections will remain misaligned with today’s workforce.
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NASA has fixed the problem that forced the removal of the rocket for the Artemis II mission from its launch pad last month, but it will be a couple of weeks before officials are ready to move the vehicle back into the starting blocks at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The 322-foot-tall (98-meter) rocket could have launched as soon as this week after it passed a key fueling test on February 21. During that test, NASA loaded the Space Launch System rocket with super-cold propellants without any major problems, apparently overcoming a persistent hydrogen leak that prevented the mission from launching in early February.
However, another problem cropped up just one day after the successful fueling demo. Ground teams were unable to flow helium into the rocket's upper stage. Unlike the connections to the core stage, which workers can repair at the launch pad, the umbilical lines leading to the upper stage higher up the rocket are only accessible inside the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at Kennedy.
The Moon has received a lot of attention in recent months, particularly the surface of Earth's cold and dusty companion.
This has largely been driven by a decision from SpaceX founder Elon Musk to pivot, at least in the near term, from Mars to lunar surface activities and the potential for using material there to build large satellites. But there has been a notable shift from NASA, too, which has started talking a lot more about building up elements of a base on the surface rather than an orbiting space station known as the Gateway.
In short, the world's most successful space company and the largest space agency have both increased their lunar ambitions, suggesting a greater frequency of missions to the Moon in the coming years.
(Shrove Tuesday). Up and walked to the Temple, and by promise calling Commissioner Pett, he and I to White Hall to give Mr. Coventry an account of what we did yesterday. Thence I to the Privy Seal Office, and there got a copy of Sir W. Pen’s grant to be assistant to Sir J. Minnes, Comptroller, which, though there be not much in it, yet I intend to stir up Sir J. Minnes to oppose, only to vex Sir W. Pen. Thence by water home, and at noon, by promise, Mrs. Turner and her daughter, and Mrs. Morrice, came along with Roger Pepys to dinner. We were as merry as I could be, having but a bad dinner for them; but so much the better, because of the dinner which I must have at the end of this month. And here Mrs. The. shewed me my name upon her breast as her Valentine, which will cost me 20s. After dinner I took them down into the wine-cellar, and broached my tierce of claret for them. Towards the evening we parted, and I to the office awhile, and then home to supper and to bed, the sooner having taken some cold yesterday upon the water, which brings me my usual pain. This afternoon Roger Pepys tells me, that for certain the King is for all this very highly incensed at the Parliament’s late opposing the Indulgence; which I am sorry for, and fear it will breed great discontent.
I recently realized I hadn’t written much in this blog about the Fermi Paradox, though I do write about it elsewhere. So here is a quick note.
The Fermi Paradox, sometimes paraphrased as “where are they?” is a question about the apparent lack of intelligent alien life in the universe. The universe is extreme old relative to the speed of light at galactic scales. Light has been able to cross our galaxy a thousand times since the dinosaurs died out, and that was relatively recent (less than 2%) compared to the age of the Earth. So if life is common in the universe (it seems like it might be) and if intelligent life is an eventually winning strategy of evolution (it seems to be) and technological life follows from this (it has at least once) and technology leads relatively quickly to space travel and visible technosignatures (this is probably not the hard part) then why isn’t the universe teeming with alien life?
There are a bunch of potential solutions to this puzzle. I’ll mention a few before I get to my preferred one.
We haven’t looked very carefully.
Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
We have only relatively tiny telescopes on one tiny planet looking out into a vast darkness. We have found only a few thousand exoplanets, of which just a handful might be able to support life. We have not a single spectra from an exoplanet atmosphere. Our nearest star Proxima Centauri has planets and we know almost nothing about them. For all we know, there’s already an advanced civilization there and we would not be able to see it. We’ve run various SETI searches for a few decades but again, barely scratched the surface. We could build much larger telescopes but even one the size of the Earth would hardly rule out intelligent life in our galaxy – much of which is obscured by dust.
At our current rate of technology, we’re not going to discover intelligent aliens unless they’re very close by and sending us very powerful radio signals, or they visit us directly.
Interstellar travel might be impossible.
The galaxy might be only 100,000 light years across and nearly 10 billion years old, but you and I typically travel at perhaps a meter per second, while light covers the same distance in just 3 nanoseconds. That is, the galaxy is relatively small if you’re a photon, and impossibly enormous otherwise. Our fastest space probes would take nearly 100,000 years to reach the nearest stars. Antimatter might be energetic enough to accelerate to close to light speed, but that doesn’t mean that interstellar travel is possible – colliding with a single dust grain would be very bad news. Perhaps the galaxy has a million technological civilizations, and they’re all trapped in their respective solar systems by the enormous gulfs of space.
The Great Filter.
Maybe intelligent alien life is rare because there’s some filter or set of filters that kills off life forms that get too advanced. This filter could be in our past (multicellularity, asteroid extinction, solar flares) or in our future (nuclear war, hostile aliens killing upstarts, AIs starving us to death, depopulation, loss of culture of exploration). But you only need one very powerful alien species to overcome these filters and then they can fill up the galaxy relatively quickly. As far as we can see, the galaxy is not full.
Near light speed travel is hard to observe for people at the destination.
This is my preferred explanation at present.
The most interesting stuff I’ve read about the Fermi Paradox is Robin Hansen’s work on Grabby Aliens, which uses the fact that the universe appears to be empty and that cultural selection on expansionist aliens would lead to their rapid spread if they did occur to conclude that intelligent life must actually be very rare (fewer than one species per multiple galaxies) or that evolution must be very slow.
There is an observational subtlety to alien observations, which is that when we look out into the universe we are observing only our past light cone. If grabby aliens were expanding at a high fraction of the speed of light (c), the light carrying information of their coming would be only just ahead of them. So even though aliens might be quite close, we wouldn’t see them until just before they arrived. In fact, there is quadratically more available space further away from Earth, so while a nearby alien species might reach us with their slower, first generation starships, any starships that get here from more distant parts of the galaxy are almost certainly the fastest, latest tech ones which overtook the slow ones on their way here.
The universe could be in three different states, observationally. What we observe (no aliens), aliens seen but not here yet, and aliens among us. But if the aliens we see are traveling at high speed toward us, the intermediate state (seen but not met) is unlikely to be longer than a handful of weeks. Choosing our present time at random, there is almost zero chance for humanity to find itself in a time where we’re aware of alien intelligences but haven’t yet met them. That is, Earth is 4.5 billion years old (no aliens), then one day the Vera Rubin Observatory sees a flash that turns out to be an alien spacecraft departing to meet us from 100 light years away, traveling at 99.9% of c. They arrive just five weeks later. For the remaining billions of years of Earth’s existence, we are in the world of aliens among us.
I think it’s physically possible to reach 99% of c with current human technology, so there’s no reason to suppose aliens with better technology would fly slower than this, and they could fly much faster.
I put together this chart a year ago. If relativistic aliens are flying towards us, we won’t see their launch until the light gets here, and if they’re right behind the light, they’ll be here soon after. For example, reading this chart, if they’re traveling at 99% c, we will see them only when they’re 99% of the way here. If they’ve traveled 1000 light years to visit us, we’ll see them (at best) 10 years before they arrive. We might not see them at all – 1000 light years is far enough away that some stars are too dim to see with the naked eye. Meanwhile, 1000 light years is a long way to go, so it’s fortunate that at high speed, relativistic time dilation kicks in and helps to pass the time. This is shown with the yellow curve. At 99% c, the 1000 light year trip only feels like 142 years. This is still a long time, so perhaps they will travel to us at 99.9% c. In that case, the trip will feel like only 45 years to them, and we will get a whole year of warning, assuming we see them launch 1000 light years away.
I think this factor is under-estimated when discussing the Fermi Paradox. If most of the planets in the universe are too far away for us to see alien life, then if we see it at all we’ll be seeing their space ships as they come to us. But we won’t even see them launch to us, even with perfect telescopes staring out into the galaxy, until they’re almost here. In practice this means that, in the grand scheme of human history, the phase between becoming aware of aliens and meeting them is vanishingly short.
This quirk is intuitively obvious in the context of supersonic planes – whose sound arrives after the plane.
How to use this chart: Select your speed on the horizontal axis, and decide on your travel distance. Then run up vertically to read off the distance-time multiplier (blue line) for visible travel time on the ground and (orange line) the apparent travel time for the traveler due to time dilation. For example, let’s say we’re doing 99.5% c over 500 light years. Then we’re going 0.5% slower than c, so the delta t multiplier is 0.005*500 = 2.5 years, while the subjective travel time is 0.1*500 = 50 years. We will be in flight for 502.5 years, we will arrive 2.5 years after our light, and on board we’ll feel just 50 years pass by.
The Grabby Aliens hypotheses points out that expanding alien civilizations appear as circular regions in the night sky where, for example, we can observe spectral changes in stars or their planets, given a sufficiently powerful telescope. For an expansion speed that’s small compared to c, this gives the correct intuition. But, at higher speeds, the apparent angular size before contact shrinks. You might think that you’d see the alien sphere expand through stars in your field of view until it surrounded you, but in fact the light from their arrival at nearby off-axis stars is still on its way to you when they arrive. So the apparent shape of their expanding sphere, looking into our past light cone, is a cone whose narrowness increases with flight speed. In the extreme case, we would see nothing even with a perfect telescope. It’s quite hard to see things thousands of light years away!
There are a couple of other aspects to the Fermi paradox. It seems to me that the Fermi paradox can be at least partly explained if either relativistic interstellar travel is relatively easy, or any kind of interstellar travel is basically impossible. I think the intermediate case is ruled out quite well by even our limited observation.
I favor the first explanation. The implication is that the night sky is not full of alien civilizations because they’re expanding so fast that the period of time between our feeble telescopes being able to detect expansion and them actually arriving is extremely short. This does, however, imply that no traveling aliens could have occurred in our galaxy in the past billions of years, right up to barely 100,000 years ago, when our ancestors first started leaving Africa. There is still no good reason for this to be true, other than the anthropic principle.
Accordingly, when we look up and wonder where are the intelligent aliens, we can know two things for sure.
1) Our telescopes are bad and we should feel bad.
2) They could be passing Betelgeuse (700 ly away) right now on their way here and we would still not have seen their departure. If they’re going fast enough they could be closer and brighter than Alpha Centauri and we still wouldn’t have seen them yet.
And if we could only detect them at Betelgeuse, picking up a thruster signature with blue-shifting indicating 0.99 c travel speed, they’d be here in about 7 years (running just behind the light announcing their arrival) – an even more laughably ridiculously short period of time for us to know we’re not alone and have not yet shaken tentacles.
With Vera Rubin telescope up and running, we’d have a chance of detecting incoming relativistic spacecraft out to maybe 1000 LY, which means 10 years warning at most. If they can hit 0.99c, why not 0.999c?
How well do you know the night sky?
SpaceX sent a Falcon 9 rocket soaring from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station during a pre-dawn liftoff on Wednesday with a batch of Starlink internet satellites onboard.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 40 happened at 5:52:20 a.m. EST (1052:20 UTC). The rocket flew on a north-easterly trajectory upon leaving the launch pad.
The Starlink 10-40 mission added another 29 broadband internet satellites into low Earth orbit. This included the 600th Starlink satellite to be launched so far in 2026.
The 45th Weather Squadron forecast a 90 percent chance for favorable weather during the launch window, citing a small chance for interference from cumulus clouds. Meteorologists were also watching the booster recovery weather as a potential watch item.
SpaceX launched the mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number 1080. This was its 25th flight after previously launching two private astronaut missions for Axiom Space, NG-21 for Northrop Grumman, and CRS-30 for NASA, among others.
Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1080 landed on the drone ship, ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas,’ positioned in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South Carolina. This was the 145th landing on this vessel and the 581st booster landing to date for SpaceX.
On Sunday, according to the U.S. military, Kuwaiti forces shot down three U.S. F-15s in a “friendly fire” incident. Fortunately, the crews were able to safely eject and survived. The sad truth is that such incidents are common in modern war. One of the highest-ranking U.S. officers to die in World War II, General Lesley McNair, was killed in Normandy by U.S. bombs, not the Germans.
The shocking aspect of the story is the value of the equipment destroyed: A new F-15 costs U.S. taxpayers $97 million. So that’s almost $300 million lost in seconds. And we should think about what could have been done with that money other than launch a war without a clear plan or an exit strategy.
There are many reasons to be disturbed by Operation Epic Fury. Donald Trump has taken America to war, not only without Congressional authorization, but without even trying to make a case to the American people. Other than the hope that Iranians will rise up and overthrow the Ayatollahs’ regime, the war has no clear plan for either victory or exit. This strongly suggests that the rush to war was a Trump ego tantrum rather than a carefully planned campaign. And although it would be a great boon to the world if the Iranian people were able to liberate themselves from this evil regime, as with any war there are huge risks of unforeseen consequences, including to the world economy.
One of the reasons to be disturbed by this war is the extraordinary amount of money the U.S. government is either laying out now or will have to lay out in the future to replace the spent munitions.
The modern American way of war is extremely capital-intensive, deploying massive amounts of equipment while putting relatively few people in harm’s way. This has been true ever since World War II, when FDR rejected calls to recruit an immense army and chose instead to fight what Phillips O’Brien calls a “machine-intensive, infantry light war.” That’s a rational approach, given how rich our nation is and how averse it is to casualties. It’s certainly a lot more rational than Pete Hegseth’s talk about “warrior ethos” — are soldiers supposed to flex their biceps at attacking drones?
But the U.S. military’s reliance on munitions rather than manpower can create two problems.
The first problem is that modern munitions, which are highly sophisticated and complex, can’t be produced on short notice, and Trump has already used up many missiles and other weapons in his various military ventures. Yesterday he told reporters that the Iran campaign might go on for four to five weeks or even longer. But many reports suggest that the United States doesn’t have enough left in its weapons stockpiles to continue the current pace of action for more than a few days without dangerously weakening the military’s ability to counter other threats, such as a potential Chinese attack on Taiwan.
In a Truth Social post last night Trump insisted that the U.S. has a “virtually unlimited supply” of “medium and upper medium grade” weapons, which is in effect confirmation that stocks of high-grade weapons are on the verge of of exhaustion.
The other problem is that U.S.-style war is incredibly expensive — so much so that the cost becomes a serious concern even for a nation as wealthy as America.
Linda Bilmes of Harvard’s Kennedy School estimates that Trump’s largely unsuccessful bombing campaign last year against the Iran-backed Islamist Houthis in Yemen — a far softer target than Iran itself — cost between $2.76 billion and $4.95 billion. Operation Midnight Hammer, Trump’s one-day strike against suspected Iranian nuclear facilities, cost between $2.04 billion and $2.26 billion.
The current war is being waged not only with massive bombing but also with the use of large numbers of expensive interceptors to defend U.S. bases and U.S. allies against Iranian drones and missiles. So in just a few days we have surely incurred billions of dollars in cost. And if this war continues for an extended period, the costs could easily rise to the twenty to thirty billion dollar range.
How should we think about these costs? On one side, the federal budget is immense, and almost any individual category of spending is only a small fraction of the total. If we spend $20 billion, $30 billion, or even more on Trump’s war, it will still look almost like rounding error in the overall federal budget.
However, on the other side, consider what else could have been done with that money.
Conservatives complain constantly about the level of federal spending, claiming that we are spending more than we can afford on social programs. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act imposes harsh cuts in nutritional and healthcare assistance, supposedly because the cost of food stamps and Medicaid is excessive. This, despite the fact that study after study has shown that the long run costs of not providing food stamps and Medicaid are far higher than the cost of providing them.
And if we compare the cost of this war to what we spend to help needy Americans, then it’s clear that this war is extremely expensive compared with other ways we could have spent the funds. Put it this way: SNAP — the Supplemental Nutritional Food Assistance Program, formerly food stamps — spends an average of about $2,400 a year per recipient. CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program administered under Medicaid, provides comprehensive health care for about $3,000 per child.
So just replacing those three jets shot down over Kuwait — each of them, remember, with a price tag of $97 million — will cost about as much as providing 125,000 Americans with crucial food aid or providing healthcare to 100,000 American children. And the war might very well end up costing 100 times as much as the price of those jets.
Now, I support the U.S. government spending whatever it must to keep the nation secure. But the Trump administration, which hasn’t provided any coherent rationale for the war, is hardly bothering to pretend that it has anything to do with national security.
Public opinion on this war is extremely negative, As G. Elliott Morris says, “every modern American president who started a war had the public behind him at the outset” — until Trump. And there is no hint of a rally-around-the-flag effect.
Why are Americans so negative about this war? First, they believe it has been foisted upon them: Trump hasn’t bothered to give them a reason for it. Second, Americans – already disillusioned by false promises about DOGE (remember those) and tariffs – sense, correctly, that there is no strategy here. Third, the public senses, also correctly, that the little people will bear this war’s cost. There has, of course, been not even a whisper from Trump about shared sacrifice, about, for example, taxing billionaires to pay for the money being spent on missiles and bombs.
Ordinary Americans feel that Trump is setting billions of dollars on fire with no idea how that is supposed to work out, and that they will end up paying the price. And they’re right.
MUSICAL CODA
Donald Trump’s war on Iran has many in the political media shocked. Wasn’t this the guy who ran against interventionism? As a Wall Street Journal headline put it, “Trump Spent Years Denouncing U.S. Intervention. Now He’s Toppling Foreign Leaders.” Goodness, who could have predicted such a turn of events!
Then comes the inevitable follow-up: Will Trump’s new war anger all the people who voted for him — especially in 2016, but even in 2024 — because they thought he’d keep us out of all those wars in the Middle East?
Here’s the truth: Anyone who thought Trump was some kind of anti-interventionist wasn’t paying enough attention to what he actually said. You can excuse some voters for believing that, but you should definitely not excuse any journalist or pundit who did, because it’s supposed to be their job to understand politics and politicians.
Nevertheless, the number of Trump voters who abandon him over this will be tiny. A tiny number of voters can be meaningful in a closely divided electorate, but we’re going to find that most of Trump’s supporters will either decide that this war doesn’t mean very much, or update their views to align with what their leader does and says. They will consider Iran to be a necessary exception to a belief they never really held all that strongly in the first place.
During the 2016 primaries, Trump was the only Republican candidate who would say forthrightly that the Iraq War was a disaster; this distinguished him from his competitors, who were still struggling to figure out how to talk about a war started by the last president from their party, and which that party supported steadfastly even as it turned from bad to worse.
Trump went so far as to construct an entire fictional history for himself in which he was an ardent opponent of the war from before it began, making prescient warnings about how badly things could go. He even told a laughable lie about the Bush administration sending an envoy to New York in 2003 to beg him to tone down his criticisms. In fact, he only started making negative comments after the war began to drag on and it became clear that it would not be quick and easy.
What’s important now is that none of what Trump said in 2016 was driven by some kind of broad opposition to military intervention. All Trump wanted was credit for being right about Iraq, even if it required making things up. “I’m the only one on this stage that said, ‘Do not go into Iraq, do not attack Iraq,’” he said in a primary debate. “Nobody else on this stage said that. And I said it loud and strong. And I was in the private sector. I wasn’t a politician, fortunately. But I said it, and I said it loud and clear, ‘You’ll destabilize the Middle East.’ That’s exactly what happened.”
Yet some in the news media, eager to ascribe to Trump a coherent philosophy that aligned with familiar ideological divides, labored to convince people that he was indeed some kind of anti-interventionist:
The journalist/pundit misinterpretation of Trump’s intentions extended to his use of the slogan “America First.” When very informed people saw that, they said, “Ah, you see, he is intentionally echoing Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee, which sought to prevent America’s entry into World War II, and therefore he opposes military involvement overseas.” This was an absurd overcomplication of Trump’s actual view, which was no more sophisticated than “America rules, everybody else drools,” i.e. he would act in whatever he defined as America’s interests (and define his own preferences as America’s interests) without regard to how other countries might be affected.
If you listened to what Trump was saying rather than trying to cram him into pre-existing ideological categories, it would have been obvious that his views about the rest of the world were aggressive and contemptuous, but hardly isolationist. He said we should have seized Iraq’s oil, because “You know, it used to be to the victor belong the spoils.” He said that the problem with the Bush administration’s torture program was that it was not brutal enough (“I would bring back waterboarding, and I would bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”). He advocated murdering the families of suspected terrorists.
The lesson he took from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wasn’t that it’s bad to rain American military power down on people in foreign lands, but that one should avoid getting stuck in a quagmire. But he never made any principled objection to the use of military force. Those wars, he believed, weren’t wrong, they were “stupid,” because they didn’t turn out well.
The difference between him and the neocons of the Bush era is that they had grandiose ambitions of spreading democracy across the Middle East and beyond, and they convinced themselves that they were acting for the good of those populations and the whole world. Trump couldn’t give a rat’s ass about democracy or the people of the Middle East. But that doesn’t mean he has any qualms about launching a vigorous bombing campaign every month or two. In the first year of his second term, Trump bombed seven different countries (Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, Somalia, and Nigeria).
The Trumpian view isn’t that the U.S. shouldn’t intervene militarily around the world, it’s that there are good reasons and bad reasons to do so, and we should only do so for the right reasons. In his view, bad reasons include: fostering democracy, protecting human rights, discouraging imperialist aggression, and supporting allies. Good reasons include: plunder, culture wars, revenge, pique, and because war is cool. So here was Pete Hegseth, the living embodiment of anxious masculinity, explaining on Monday how super-tough the Iran War will be, not long after we blew up a school, killing well over a hundred children:
“No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win, and we don’t waste time.” That, not isolationism, is the Trump philosophy on military adventures. And it always was.
As I wrote last week before the bombs started falling, Trump didn’t even bother to explain to the public why he was about to launch this war. He didn’t give a series of speeches making the case, or send out his cabinet to blanket the airwaves with arguments for it, or any of the things we associate with a modern propaganda campaign. But in not trying to persuade the public as a whole, he also failed to persuade his own base.
So just a few days in, the polls are not looking good:
Even among Republicans, the highest level of support we see is 77% in the Reuters poll, with the other ones even lower. Nevertheless, it might not stay that way.
Trump has at his disposal an enormous and immensely powerful media apparatus that when called upon to unify the right around a cause or idea knows exactly how to swing into action. That’s what’s happening now on Fox News, where the cheerleading for war couldn’t be louder.
When a campaign like that operates as intended, it not only persuades people that something like a war is a good idea, it tells them how to talk about it with family, friends, coworkers, or anyone else. It tells them which principles, grudges, and worries should be prioritized. It gives them arguments, anecdotes, and language to use. It tells them, “This is what our side believes now.” Before long, they get the message and adopt that view as their own, even if they began with doubts.
But at the same time, many figures on the right — especially podcasters, influencers, and others less dependent on establishment institutions — are criticizing the war. So you have people like Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes saying it’s a disastrous idea, which subjects people to cross-pressure and splits the coalition. This is the downside of building a propaganda machine with so many different parts: You can’t always control every piece of it. After coming to an agreement that what unites the right is its hatred of the left (or what Trump calls “the enemy within”), it might take some work to convince them all to care deeply about a foreign enemy. And Trump hasn’t put in the work.
A lot will depend on how quickly Trump declares victory and what the consequences are for Iraq and other countries. But one thing we can say is that if Trump was hoping he’d get the entirety of his base — let alone the whole country — to rally around him and shore up his declining political fortunes, he’ll be disappointed.
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I trust private companies with strong AI more than I trust the government, regardless of which administration is in power. Yet if the federal government feels it has no say or no control, it will lunge and take over the whole thing. We thus want sustainble methods of perpetual interference that a) are actually somewhat useful from a safety perspective, and b) give governments some control, and the feeling of control, but not too much control.
You should judge AI-related events within this framework.
The post A simple model of AI governance appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
1. Legal basis for the Pentagon’s designation?
3. “But what is true is that this should not be much of a surprise considering the constant rhetoric over the past few years has been that AI is a power like no other. It’s like nukes, but times a thousand. We need regulation. And when an industry repeatedly calls out for oversight, asking for someone to make the rules on how it should be used, you cannot be surprised when the Defense department take that seriously. You cannot be surprised when they make up their own interpretations of what ought to be done, because you were insufficiently prescriptive. They will listen to your articulation of any red lines and wonder, what do you mean you want to tell me how to use the mega-nuke-crazy-power that you yourself are saying you don’t know how to control?” Rohit.
4. There are too many types of shower controls.
5. The Anthropic valuation seems pretty stable. Plus other matters of interest from SSC, including an idea for how to improve prediction markets by inducing the sports betting to subsidize participation in other contracts.
6. You can now bet on German train delays.
7. Rohit: “OpenAI now is also the only case I know of a defense department vendor contract being negotiated in public iteratively. With plenty of object lessons on why nobody does it.” People, there is nothing weird going on here. It is fine to dislike various aspects of the U.S. military, after all part of their business is to kill people. But any blame you wish to levy goes toward “the system,” do not overly spin the narrative here.
The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Hey, it’s almost time for SRECon 2026! (I can’t go, but YOU really should!)
Which means it was almost a year ago that Fred Hebert and I were up on stage, delivering the closing keynote1 at SRECon25.
We argued that SREs should get involved and skill up on generative AI tools and techniques, instead of being naysayers and peanut gallerians. You can get a feel for the overall vibe from the description:
It’s easy to be cynical when there’s this much hype and easy money flying around, but generative AI is not a fad; it’s here to stay.
Which means that even operators and cynics — no, especially operators and cynics — need to get off the sidelines and engage with it. How should responsible, forward-looking SREs evaluate the truth claims being made in the market without being reflexively antagonistic?
Yep, that was our big pitch. Don’t be reflexively antagonistic. You should learn AI so that your critiques will land with credibility.
That is not the message I would give today, if I were keynoting SRECon26.
I’ve been in a bit of a hole for the past few months, trying to get the second edition of “Observability Engineering” written and shipped.
Maybe the hole is why this feels so abrupt and discontinuous to me. Or maybe it’s just having such a clear artifact of my views one year ago. I don’t know.
What I do know is that one year ago, I still thought of generative AI as one more really big integration or use case we had to support, whether we liked it or not. Like AI was a slop-happy toddler gone mad in our codebase, and our sworn duty as SREs was to corral and control it, while trying not be a total dick about it.
Today, it’s very clear to me that the center of gravity has shifted from cloud/automation workflows to AI/generation workflows, and that the agentic revolution has only just begun. That toddler is heading off to school. With a loaded gun.
I don’t know when exactly that bit flipped in my head, I only know that it did. And as soon as it did, I felt like the last person on earth to catch on. I can barely connect with my own views from eleven months ago.
Were my views unreasonably pessimistic? Was I willfully ignoring credible evidence in early 2025?
Hmm, perhaps. But Silicon Valley hype trains have not exactly covered themselves in glory in recent years. VR/AR, crypto/web3/NFTs, wearable tech, the Metaverse, 3D printing, the sharing economy…this is not an illustrious string of wins.2
Cloud computing, on the other hand: genuinely huge. So was the Internet. Sometimes the hype train brings you internets, sometimes the hype train brings you tulips.
So no, I don’t think it was obvious in early 2025 that AI generated code would soon grow out of its slop phase. Skepticism was reasonable for a time, and then it was not. I know a lot of technologists who flipped the same bit at some point in 2025.
If I was giving the keynote at SRECon 2026, I would ditch the begrudging stance. I would start by acknowledging that AI is radically changing the way we build software. It’s here, it’s happening, and it is coming for us all.
It is very, very hard to adjust to change that is being forced on you. So please don’t wait for it to be forced on you. Swim out to meet it. Find your way in, find something to get excited about.
As Adam Jacob recently advised,
“If you’re an engineer or an operations person, there is only one move. You have to start working in this new way as much as you can. If you can’t do it at work, do it at home. You want to be on the frontier of this change, because the career risk to being a laggard is incredibly high.” — Adam Jacob
This AI shit is not hard to get started with (but it is also not easy to master). The early days of any technology are the simplest, and this technology more than most. Conquer the brain weasels in your head by learning the truth of this for yourself.
At a time of elevated uncertainty and anxiety, our natural human tendency to drift into confirmation bias and disconfirmation bias is higher than ever. Whatever proof you instinctively seek out, you are guaranteed to find.
The best advice I can give anyone is: know your nature, and lean against it.
If you are a reflexive naysayer or a pessimist, know that, and force yourself to find a way in to wonder, surprise and delight.
If you are an optimist who gets very excited and tends to assume that everything will improve: know that, and force yourself to mind real cautionary tales.
Try to keep your aperture wide, and remain open to possibilities you find uncomfortable. Curate the ocean you swim in. Puncture your bubble.
Don’t panic, and don’t give in to despair. The future isn’t written yet, and nobody knows what’s going to happen. I sure as hell don’t. Neither do you.
The fact that AI has radically changed the way we develop software in very a short time, and seems poised to change it much more in the next year or two, is real and undeniable.
This does not mean that everything else predicted by AI optimists will come to pass.
Extraordinary claims still require extraordinary evidence. AGI is, at present, an elaborate thought experiment, one that contradicts all the evidence we currently have about how technological breakthroughs typically yield enormous change in the early days, and then plateau.
Here’s another Adam quote I really like:
The bright side is that it’s a technology shift, not a manufacturing shift - meaning you still have to have technologists to do it.
I’ve written a number of blog posts over the years where I have advised people to go into the second half of their career thinking of themselves not as “engineers” or as “managers”, but as “technologists”. 3
Every great technologist needs an arsenal of skills on top of their technical expertise. They need to understand how to navigate an organization, how to translate between the language of technology and the language of the business; how to wield influence and drive results across team, company, even industry lines.
These remain durable skills, in an era where good code can be generated practically for free.
Many people who love the art and craft of software are struggling in this moment, as the value of that craft is diminishing. (I’m sorry. 💔)
People who take a much more…functional…approach to software seem to be thriving in the present chaos. “Functional” describes most of the SREs I know, including myself.
After all, SREs have always been judged by outcomes — uptime, reliability, whether the thing kept running. An outcome orientation turns out to be excellent preparation for a world where the “how” of software is becoming less important than the what and the whether, across the board.
So maybe the advice we gave at SRECon wasn’t so bad after all. Especially this part:
Which means that even operators and cynics — no, especially operators and cynics — need to get off the sidelines and engage with it.
Who can build better guardrails for AI, than SREs and operators who have spent their entire careers building guardrails for software engineers and customers?
The industry needs us. But not begrudgingly, eyerollingly, pretending to get on board in order to slow things down from the inside. The industry needs our skills to help engineering teams go fast forever.
Don’t sit back and wait for change to reach you. Run towards the waves. It’s nice out here.
Our talk was called “AIOps: Prove it! An Open Letter to Vendors Selling AI for SREs”. In retrospect, this was a terrible title. It was not an open letter to vendors at all; if anything, it was an open letter to SREs. It started out as one topic, but by the time the event rolled around, it had morphed into something entirely different. Ah well.
I am not even listing the kooky religious shit like effective accelerationism, transhumanism, AI “alignment” or the Singularity, all of which has seeped into the water table around these parts.
Omg, I have so many unwritten posts wriggling around in my brain right now on this topic.
The fortunes of Breakthrough Starshot have been the subject of so much discussion not only in comments in these pages but in backchannel emails that it is with relief that I turn to Jim Benford’s analysis of a project that has done significant work on interstellar travel and is still very much alive. Jim led the sail team for several of his eight years with Breakthrough Starshot and was with the project from the beginning. In this article and a second that will run in a few days, he explains how and why press coverage of the effort has been erroneous, and not always through the fault of writers working the story. Let’s now take a look at what Starshot has accomplished during its intensive Phase I.
by James Benford
“Make no mistake — interstellar travel will always be difficult and expensive, but it can no longer be considered impossible.” – Robert Forward
Breakthrough Starshot has not failed, nor has it been canceled. Phase I of the program achieved its stated objectives: to identify potential show-stoppers in beam-driven interstellar propulsion and determine whether credible solutions exist. That goal was met.
Recent media coverage, including a Scientific American cover article titled “Voyage to Nowhere,” misunderstands both the intent and the outcome of Phase I. The reality is that the project thus far has been successful. It was put “on hold, paused” in 2024 to restructure for the next phase and seek broader support. It has not been canceled, as some in the media are saying.
I contend that Starshot succeeded because the key Phase I objectives were met. Of course, extensive future effort in the later phases is needed to create a fully functional Starshot system, principally the beamer and sailcraft (referred in the project as “photon engine” and “lightsail”). The major issues have been found to have credible solutions. A great many Starshot-related papers have been published. Many address the crucial issues of sail materials and sail ‘beam-riding’, meaning staying on the beam while undergoing inevitable perturbations. There is a final report, but it has not yet been published.
The principal issues for Starshot were 1) Can a phased array of lasers be constructed that is sufficiently coherent and directive as well as being affordable? 2) Can a sail material be made that will have high reflectivity, very low absorption, high emissivity and very low mass so as to be efficiently accelerated and not overheat? 3) Can a sail ride stably on the beam because of inherent restoring forces (without feedback, which is impossible over long ranges)? 4) Can data be sent back to Earth from the probe at sufficient data rates before the sail moves far beyond the target star?
In this first of two reports on the successes of the Starshot project, I discuss the shape of later phases in the effort, and distortions in the reporting on it. In the second report I will describe the major accomplishments of Phase I.
Starshot was not initiated to fully design, build and launch the first interstellar ‘lightsail’ (as they are called, referring to both the low mass and the near-visible frequency of the laser). The program path was divided into phases, as shown below. The first phase was to invest in high-risk, high-reward research that would de-risk the technology. Phase 1 was to find if there were any ‘show-stoppers’ and pave the way forward. It accomplished that.
High levels of research by Starshot retired most of these key issues for beam-driven sail systems, at least at the conceptual level. The results are at the TRL 2 level. Experiments are needed to verify the solutions for these major issues found in Phase 1.
In Phase II, a coalition of Caltech and other institutions would lead experimental technical demonstrations, and the first experiments in orbit. Then, with the technology concepts having been proven, it’s on to near-term missions shaking out various technologies while performing precursor missions, probably to the outer solar system. Much effort would be needed in systems engineering to enable such precursor missions.
The first phases of Starshot, the R&D program, are projected to cost $120M, which includes Phase 1, and concludes with solar system science missions in the medium-term. The large effort would then follow: construction of the Starshot System and finally, operation of the System and the first interstellar probe voyages.
Many requirements of the Starshot mission come together at the sail. Principal technical issues are the design of the beamer, material to be used and whether the beam and sail stay together, meaning stable beam-riding by the sail:
• Stability is influenced by sail shape, beam shape and the distribution of mass, such as payload, on the sail.
• Material properties, are its reflectivity, absorptivity and transmissivity, it’s tensile strength and its areal mass density.
• Deployment of the diaphanous sail, correctly oriented and including any initial spin, is of course a key requirement.
• The beamer interacts with the sail through its power distribution on the sail-causing differential stresses. This depends on duration of the acceleration, the transverse width of the beam, pointing error of the beam as well as its pointing jitter.
• Data return to Earth, interstellar communications, is perhaps the greatest challenge of all.
What Scientific American got wrong
Journalism is only the first draft of history, so flaws occur. Assessing a system as complex as Starshot is a challenge to a journalist with limited time. It would take years to read and absorb all the relevant literature and to mentally organize it into a reconciled and coherent understanding of the system as a whole.
The biased title – “Voyage To Nowhere” – of the piece in Scientific American, (which was chosen by the editors, not the author Sarah Scoles), may have been chosen to refer to the famous Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska and the Train to Nowhere in California. The Scientific American reporting is already being mistaken for a primary source by others, who are stating that Starshot has been “canceled”. This is an example of how media myths, once manufactured, propagate through journalistic copying.
The article fails to understand the Starshot project for a basic reason: The key people who did extensive work on the program were not available or not even known to the writer.
Because the principal workers from the Breakthrough Foundation and the leaders of Breakthrough Starshot, Pete Worden and Avi Loeb, were not interviewed, it seems the author did not know who the main contributors actually were. She relied instead on people she could easily reach. Few of them are major contributors to the program and most left the project early on or never actually participated in the project. A key participant who is not mentioned is Kevin Parkin [1, 2], who spent 8 years under contract, as did most of us who were in at the beginning or even before that. Others are Mason Peck (who is mentioned in the piece), Paul Mauskopf and Dave Messerschmitt. Unfortunately, the final report, which went through many iterations, has never been published publicly [3].
The recent policy of Breakthrough Starshot has been to have little contact with the media, so not to engage with Sarah Scoles at all didn’t help things: it left the door open for detractors to influence the narrative in her piece. Communication was a priority, with public outreach from and within Starshot during Phase 1. In research, communication enables cross-fertilization and prevents work duplication. The big gap now is a comprehensive publication that ties it all together. It could motivate researchers to continue or take up the project later if Phase II occurs.
The article also truncates the long history that led up to Starshot. Beam-driven propulsion concepts didn’t start in 2016! This was documented in my Photon Beam Propulsion Timeline, which appeared here at the start of Starshot in 2016. Media are not aware of how much has been done by the propulsion community over the last decades. Several areas of photon beam-driven sail system development, to include experiments demonstrating sail beam-driven flight [4, 5] and sail stability and dynamics, such as beam-driven spin of sails for stability [6, 7], have been reserched. The major innovation which caused the beginning of Starshot was the realization that going to much smaller sails and much higher accelerations reduces the cost of the overall system substantially.
The budget estimate given in the Scientific American article is clearly wrong. That only 4.5 million dollars could fund 8 years of steady work by many people is absurd. Thirty contracts were executed over 8 years. There were years of invitational meetings, a standing staff of advisors, subcommittees for specific topics; all of them further expenditures. And I count about 50 Starshot-related papers, some of which have been published since it was put on hold. I estimate that Breakthrough Starshot Phase 1 had a cost of 25 million dollars.
The way Forward
Phase II would lead to a firm experimental basis for the later phases in Figure 1. If Breakthrough decides to move on to Phase II, it must deal with the costs of interruption: institutional knowledge about the previous work, which is never fully captured in documentation, will need to be relearned, as the people who worked on Phase 1 have dispersed to other programs.
My second piece on Breakthrough Starshot, scheduled to run here next week, will describe the present state of the concept and the many advances achieved by Starshot in Phase I
Breakthrough Starshot was the most significant event in the history of beam propulsion, which clearly is the only way that probes can be sent to the stars in this century. And now the work goes on, the hope still lives, and the dream of beam-driven interstellar travel could be realized.
References
[1] “The Breakthrough Starshot Systems Model”, Kevin Parkin, Acta Astronautica 152, pp 370–384 (2018).
[2] “Starshot System Model” Kevin Parkin, Ch 3, in Claude Phipps, Editor, Laser Propulsion in Space: Fundamentals, Technology, and Future Missions, Elsevier (2024).
[3] Breakthrough Starshot Summary Report, September 2023, not published.
[4] “Microwave Beam-Driven Sail Flight Experiments”, James Benford, Gregory Benford, Keith Goodfellow, Raul Perez, Henry Harris, and Timothy Knowles, Proc. Space Technology and Applications International Forum, Space Exploration Technology Conf, AIP Conf. Proceedings 552, ISBN 1-56396-980-7STAIF, pg. 540, (2001).
[5] “Laser-Boosted Light Sail Experiments with the 150 kW LHMEL II CO2 Laser,” Leik Myrabo, Timothy Knowles, John Bagford and H. Harris, “High-Power Laser Ablation IV,” edited by Claude Phipps, Editor, Proc. Space Exploration Technology Conf., 4760 pp. 774-798 (2002).
[6] “Spin of Microwave Propelled Sails” Gregory Benford, Olga Goronostavea and James Benford, Beamed Energy Propulsion, AIP Conf. Proc. 664, pg. 313, A. Pakhomov, ed., (2003).
[7] “Experimental Tests of Beam-Riding Sail Dynamics”, James Benford, Gregory Benford, Olga Gornostaeva, Eusebio Garate, Michael Anderson, Alan Prichard, and Henry Harris, Proc. Space Technology and Applications International Forum (STAIF-2002), Space Exploration Technology Conf, AIP Conf. Proc. 608, ISBN 0-7354-0052-0, pg. 457, (2002).
And here it is.
Amazing, this could have been our president.
And.
We.
Chose.
The.
Orange.
Pedophile.
Note: When I initially wrote this post, I kept Greg Szczepaniak’s identification private. Then he decided to up the shit talk. Which—was a choice. So while I wish this guy no personal ill, I’d certainly never, ever, ever turn to him for realty assistance were I moving to/from Baltimore.
I met a guy from Baltimore yesterday.
Well, “met” implies we actually came face to face. Shook hands. Smooched. Whatnot.
Alas, none of that happened.
Instead, a guy from Baltimore posted something on my Instagram feed, after I raved about the SNL clip featuring the four Olympic hockey players and Connor Storrie of “Heated Rivalry.”
I wrote this:
He responded with this:
And because I’m a nice enough guy, and because it’s never my goal to get people fired/hurt their careers, I covered his name and blurred his image. But I also took the time to scroll the Information Superhighway to learn more about the bruh, and here’s what gets me.
What always gets me.
The Baltimore guy is a real estate agent … in Baltimore. Having spent a ton of time in the city for Tupac research, Baltimore oozes diversity. It’s Black. It’s White. It’s Asian. It’s Latino. You can snag a taco over here, sushi over there, Ethiopian food down there. Truly, it’s the metropolis’ greatest strength—hands down. It’s culture personified.
So how are you—a man charged with selling people homes in such a city—supporting a president who earned his political bones by lying that Barack Obama was a Kenyan-born Muslim sans birth certificate? How do you, Baltimore resident, sit back and kneel as your president demands the Central Park 5 be put to death, post-exoneration? How, when you learn about Donald Trump’s past Queens housing racism, do you offer your approval? How are you OK with his dismissing of seemingly every Black military leader? How are you OK with his alcoholic defense secretary bemoaning diversity “as weakness”?
Hell, in myriad photos on your Facebook page you are literally wearing a Lamar Jackson jersey—a young Black man who was born and raised in an economically distressed section of Pompano Beach, Florida. Lamar Jackson is your guy. Your kids worship him. A dude who rose from poverty, who had to suffer through underfunded schools with budgets slashed by conservative state officials. Please, tell Lamar Jackson diversity is evil. Tell him he was probably a DEI hire.
Fucks, let’s go deeper. You, Baltimore guy, have two kids. Clearly, from the photos, you love them, cherish them, value them, want them to grow up to be decent, kind, empathetic. So when you hear Donald Trump calling people “retarded,” when you see him mocking disabled folks, when you listen to him ridiculing women for their looks, their weight, when you find out he cheated on wife 1 with wife 2, and wife 2 with wife 3, and wife 3 with a porn star—does none of that give you pause? At all? It’s just Don being Don? Haha. Chuckles.
Am I—the man who sees Donald Trump for who he has always been—the one with TDS? Or is it you, Baltimore guy? Is it the inability to ever say, “Wait a minute—this isn’t what I signed up for. This isn’t what I want our nation to look like. This isn’t who we should be”?
Look at your children tonight, Baltimore guy. Try on your Lamar Jackson jersey.
Cruise around your amazing city.
Who has TDS, buddy?
Who has TDS?
•••
PS: Update. Fuck it—his name is Greg Szczepaniak. If you have friends in Baltimore, or friends moving to Baltimore, and you wanna avoid some Trumpy creep, definitely don’t use this dude as your realtor.
The Economist’s Middle East correspondent Gregg Carlstrom noted that Trump appears to be workshopping the causes for his attacks on Iran and his goals for the war by talking to journalists.
As Meidas Touch summarized Carlstrom’s argument, he said: “[Trump] doesn’t sound convinced by any of it. He’s throwing spaghetti at the wall. Ultimately I suspect he just wants to say he ‘solved’ a problem that has vexed every American president since Jimmy Carter. But there’s no clear idea what that looks like and no plan for how to get there. And there are plenty of possible scenarios in which Trump declares victory and leaves the region with an absolute mess.”
Matt Gertz of Media Matters noted today that Trump, who watches the Fox News Channel consistently, appears to have shaped his attack on Iran in response to encouragement from FNC hosts. Gertz recalled that for decades, the FNC hosts Trump trusts the most have called for military strikes on Iran.
Last June, FNC personalities Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and Brian Kilmeade urged Trump to bomb Iran and then lavished praise on him when he did. Hannity said the bombing would “go down in history as one of the great military victories.”
In the past weeks, Gertz wrote, the same figures have been urging Trump to attack. But their goal appeared to be the bombing itself. They expected an easy victory, without defining what that might look like. According to Kilmeade, the U.S. would “lose credibility forever” if it didn’t hit Iran. On Friday morning, Kilmeade said: “I hope the president chooses to go at it. We have been looking at these headlines for 47 years, and we have an opportunity to end it. And this president likes to make history.”
On Friday night, Levin told Hannity: “This president knows right from wrong. He knows good from evil. He knows that this regime is a death cult. And he knows that there’s only really two countries that are prepared and willing to put an end to this. We don’t need to put up with their crap. It’s time to put it to an end.”
On Saturday, after Trump had started the bombing, Levin said: “Donald Trump did what nobody else could do for half a century. How do you like that? And you know why he did it? Because he loves his country.”
Trump’s strikes on Iran could have had something to do with the increasing heat over the Epstein files or his fury that the Supreme Court struck down his tariff walls, which were central not only to his economic program but also to his pressure on foreign governments and companies to do his bidding. Possibly he was responding to pressure from Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu or Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, or both.
Whatever their immediate trigger, the strikes fall in line with the ideology of cowboy individualism that began to take over the Republican Party in the 1980s and which, under Trump, has turned into brutal displays of dominance. The old idea of a cowboy from rural America who cuts through the government bureaucracy that threatens his livelihood by coddling racial minorities and women has curdled into the notion that a leader can do whatever it takes, including violence, to force opponents to submit to his will.
In foreign affairs, that means smashing the international alliances built after World War II. One of the crowning achievements of that international order is the United Nations, constructed to maintain international peace and security by creating organizations that could provide a forum for diplomacy and stop countries from attacking each other. The U.S. currently owes the U.N. nearly $4 billion in unpaid dues as Trump seeks to replace the organization with his own “Board of Peace” that he alone controls. This month, the U.S. holds the presidency of the U.N. Security Council, enabling it to set the agenda. Today, Trump sent First Lady Melania Trump to chair the meeting, the first time a presidential spouse has done so.
Another of the crowning achievements of the post–World War II international order is the Geneva Conventions, which define the legal treatment of noncombatants in war. In his confirmation hearings, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth refused to tell Senator Angus King (I-ME), who pressed him on the issue, that he would uphold the Geneva Conventions.
In the ideology that honors violent domination, Trump’s bombing Iran without regard for the Constitution or international law, when no president before him had done so, proves his strength. Hegseth illustrated that idea this morning when he said: “For forty-seven long years, the expansionist and Islamist regime in Tehran has waged a savage, one-sided war against America.” Hegseth, who was a Fox News Channel weekend host before becoming secretary of defense, tried to turn the administration’s military operation into a heroic stand in a silent war that had lasted for two generations.
Claiming the U.S. attacks on Iran that started this conflagration were defensive, rather than offensive, Hegseth claimed: “We didn’t start this war, but under President Trump we are finishing it…. It took the 47th president, a fighter who always puts America first, to finally draw the line after 47 years of Iranian belligerence. He reminded the world, as he has time and time again…[i]f you kill Americans, if you threaten Americans anywhere on Earth, we will hunt you down, without apology and without hesitation, and we will kill you.”
Hegseth celebrated Israel and its strikes alongside the U.S., while he condemned “so many of our traditional allies who wring their hands and clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force. America, regardless of what so-called international institutions say, is unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history…. No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win, and we don’t waste time or lives.”
In this ideology, the dominance itself is the point: there is no other endgame.
But this ideology was always based on a myth that played well on television. Three days into the attack on Iran, there is increasing scrutiny of the assertions from government officials. According to Dustin Volz, Alexander Ward, and Lara Seligman of the Wall Street Journal, lawmakers and experts say those assertions are “incomplete, unsubstantiated, or flat-out wrong.”
And as the conflagration spreads, taking the lives of now six of our military personnel, the administration is now discovering that the American people would like to know why we are engaged in what appears to be a war of choice, and why this approach to the world is better than the one that kept us safe for 80 years.
Today the State Department told U.S. citizens to leave Gulf states immediately because of “serious safety risks,” “using available commercial transportation.” But many of the airports in the region are closed, some because they have been hit in the fighting. Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) posted on social media: “Dear [Secretary of State Marco Rubio]: You told Americans to depart now via commercial means when you know many airports/airspace are closed. YOU MUST IMMEDIATELY SCHEDULE U.S. GOVERNMENT EVACUATION FLIGHTS FOR THE STRANDED AMERICANS IN DANGER. Maybe you should have thought of a frickin’ plan first.”
Retired Major General Randy Manner, who is currently stranded in the United Arab Emirates, told CNN: “It seems to me that the purpose and mission have been shifting over the past few days and the past few weeks. Initially, it was to ensure that they could not continue to develop nuclear weapons. Now it’s about regime change, and then there’s so many things that are being piled onto the mission list, it almost seems like someone googled it before the brief, to throw everything…in the kitchen sink into it. So it’s a little bit disconcerting.
“And, in fact, one of the small things that does matter to tens of thousands of people here, as well as to their families: It’s a little bit disheartening and a little bit envious to hear that the BBC has announced that the U.K. government is actually arranging transport for the British citizens to be able to extract them, whereas here, for us as Americans, we feel abandoned. The State Departments have talked to two embassy personnel, two different embassies. They are in survival mode, quite frankly, because as we know, the administration reduced their budgets by almost one half over the past year. So this is a difficult situation for people who are not used to being in a combat situation. And that, of course, is, quite frankly, probably 99% of the travelers that are here.”
Former paratrooper and Army Ranger Representative Jason Crow (D-CO) also had something to say about the reality of war. “I learned, years ago, that when elites like Donald Trump bang the war drums and pound their chests in Washington, D.C., and talk about sending troops into the ground or into combat, he’s not talking about his kids. He’s not talking about all of his minions’ kids. He is talking about kids like me and the people that I grew up [with] in working-class areas, rural places around the country that have to pick up rifles, jump in the tanks or helicopters, and…do the tough work. Well, America is over it. America is over the three trillion dollars we’ve spent. The quagmires of failed nation building. The sending of our sons and daughters and brothers and sisters to enrich oil executives. America is over endless adventurism using our military. Because they want their infrastructure rebuilt. They want quality affordable healthcare. They want to be able to afford groceries. They want to be able to afford a home. They want to be able to send their kids to school.”
—
Notes:
https://apnews.com/article/un-us-budget-dues-trump-payment-7d68c072d470f989006b7d674ba85aaa
https://www.pressherald.com/2025/01/21/king-votes-against-hegseth-for-defense-secretary/
https://www.pressherald.com/2025/01/14/king-questions-hegseth-during-contentious-hearing/
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/trumps-case-for-war-with-iran-faces-growing-scrutiny-96648cb9
https://apnews.com/article/iran-us-international-law-war-aggression-6f0b57efff5e62e5c8fbc1acca4a3199
X:
atrupar/status/2028544448532013284
allenanalysis/status/2028627916393939016
tedlieu/status/2028617022394044427
Bluesky:
If you could fly over the North Pole of
Amrith Ramkumar, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):
Trump’s announcement came shortly before the Pentagon’s Friday afternoon deadline for Anthropic to agree to let the military use its models in all lawful-use cases, a concession the company had refused to make. “We cannot in good conscience accede to their request,” Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei said on Thursday.
The company’s red lines had been domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, areas the Pentagon said Anthropic didn’t need to worry about because the military would never break the law with AI. Defense Department officials said Anthropic needed to fully trust the Pentagon to use the technology responsibly and relinquish control.
OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman said the company’s deal with the Defense Department includes those same prohibitions on mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, as well as technical safeguards to make sure the models behave as they should. “We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements,” he said, adding that OpenAI asked that all companies be given the chance to accept the same deal. [...]
Shortly after the deadline, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on X that he is designating the company a supply-chain risk, impairing its ability to work with other government contractors.
My short take is that both of these are true:
See also: Anthropic’s official response.
Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:
A seasonal color refresh arrived today for a variety of Apple accessories, including iPhone cases, Apple Watch bands, and the Crossbody Strap. All of the accessories in the latest colors are available to order on Apple.com starting today.
Back in December I linked to a sort-of stunt project from Tyler Hall called Alan.app — a simple Mac utility that draws a bold rectangle around the current active window. Alan.app lets you set the thickness and color of the frame. I used it for an hour or so before calling it quits. It really does solve the severe (and worsening) problem of being about to instantly identify the active window in recent versions of MacOS, but the crudeness of Alan.app’s implementation makes it one of those cases where the cure is worse than the disease. Ultimately I’d rather suffer from barely distinguishable active window state than look at Alan.app’s crude active-window frame all day every day. What makes Alan.app interesting to me is its effectiveness as a protest app. The absurdity of Alan.app’s crude solution highlights the absurdity of the underlying problem — that anyone would even consider running Alan.app (or the fact that Hall was motivated to create and release it) shows just how bad windowing UI is in recent MacOS versions.
Turns out there exists an app that attempts to solve this problem in an elegant way that you might want to actually live with. It’s called HazeOver, and developer Maxim Ananov first released it a decade ago. It’s in the Mac App Store for $5, is included in the SetApp subscription service, and has a free trial available from the website.
What HazeOver does is highlight the active window by dimming all background windows. That’s it. But it does this simple task with aplomb, and it makes a significant difference in the day-to-day usability of MacOS. Not just MacOS 26 Tahoe — all recent versions of MacOS suffer from a design that makes it difficult to distinguish, instantly, the frontmost (a.k.a. key) window from background windows.1 Making all background windows a little dimmer makes a notable difference.
Longtime DF reader Faisal Jawdat sent me a note suggesting I try HazeOver back in early December, after I linked to Alan.app. I didn’t get around to trying HazeOver until December 30, and I’ve been using it ever since. One thing I did, at first, was not set HazeOver to launch automatically at login. That way, each time I restarted or logged out, I’d go back to the default MacOS 15 Sequoia interface, where background windows aren’t dimmed. I wanted to see if I’d miss HazeOver when it wasn’t running. Each time, I did notice, and I missed it. I now have it set to launch automatically when I log in.
HazeOver’s default settings are a bit strong for my taste. By default, it dims background windows by 35 percent. I’ve dialed that back to just 10 percent, and that’s more than noticeable enough for me. I understand why HazeOver’s default dimming is so strong — it emphasizes just what HazeOver is doing. But after you get used to it, you might find, as I did, that a little bit goes a long way. (Jawdat told me he’s dropped down to 12 percent on his machine.) I’ve also diddled with HazeOver’s animation settings, changing from the default (Ease Out, 0.3 seconds) to Ease In & Out, 0.1 seconds — I want switching windows to feel fast fast fast.
Highly recommended, and a veritable bargain at just $5.
The HazeOver website also has a link to a beta version with updates specific to MacOS 26 Tahoe. To be clear, the current release version, available in the App Store, works just fine on Tahoe. But the beta version has a Liquid Glass-style Settings window, and addresses an edge case where, on Tahoe, the menu bar sometimes appears too dim. ↩︎
Marcin Wichary, writing at Unsung (which is just an incredibly good and fun weblog):
Half of my education in URLs as user interface came from Flickr in the late 2000s. Its URLs looked like this:
flickr.com/photos/mwichary/favorites flickr.com/photos/mwichary/sets flickr.com/photos/mwichary/sets/72177720330077904 flickr.com/photos/mwichary/54896695834 flickr.com/photos/mwichary/54896695834/in/set-72177720330077904This was incredible and a breath of fresh air. No redundant
www.in front or awkward.phpat the end. No parameters with their unpleasant?&=syntax. No%signs partying with hex codes. When you shared these URLs with others, you didn’t have to retouch or delete anything. When Chrome’s address bar started autocompleting them, you knew exactly where you were going.This might seem silly. The user interface of URLs? Who types in or edits URLs by hand? But keyboards are still the most efficient entry device. If a place you’re going is where you’ve already been, typing a few letters might get you there much faster than waiting for pages to load, clicking, and so on.
In general, URLs at Daring Fireball try to work like this.
Casey Handmer's blog/linked/2026/03/02/wichary-flickr-urls/linked/2026/03/02/wichary-flickr-urls.text/linked/2026/03/02//linked/2026/03/I say “in general” because the DF URLs could be better. There should be one unified URLs space for all posts on DF, not separate ones for feature articles and Linked List posts. Someday.
Wichary subsequently posted this fine follow-up, chock full of links regarding URL design.
During the most recent episode of The Talk Show, Jason Snell brought up a weird issue that I started running into last year. On my Mac, sometimes I’d drag an image out of a web page in Safari, and I’d get an image in WebP format. Sometimes I wouldn’t care. But usually when I download an image like that, it’s because I want to publish (or merely host my own copy of) that image on Daring Fireball. And I don’t publish WebP images — I prefer PNG and JPEG for compatibility.
What made it weird is when I’d view source on the original webpage, the original image was usually in PNG or JPEG format. If I opened the image in a new tab — just the image — I’d get it in PNG or JPEG format. But when I’d download it by dragging out of the original webpage, I’d get a WebP. This was a total WTF for me.
I turned to my friend Jeff Johnson, author of, among other things, the excellent Safari extension StopTheMadness. Not only was Johnson able to explain what was going on, he actually made a new Safari extension called ChangeTheHeaders that fixed the problem for me. Johnson, announcing ChangeTheHeaders last year:
After some investigation, I discovered that the difference was the Accept HTTP request header, which specifies what types of response the web browser will accept. Safari’s default Accept header for images is this:
Accept: image/webp,image/avif,image/jxl,image/heic,image/heic-sequence,video/*;q=0.8,image/png,image/svg+xml,image/*;q=0.8,*/*;q=0.5Although
image/webpappears first in the list, the order actually doesn’t matter. The quality value, specified by the;q=suffix, determines the ranking of types. The range of values is 0 to 1, with 1 as the default value if none is specified. Thus,image/webpandimage/pnghave equal precedence, equal quality value 1, leaving it up to the web site to decide which image type to serve. In this case, the web site decided to serve a WebP image, despite the fact that the image URL has a.pngsuffix. In a URL, unlike in a file path, the “file extension”, if one exists, is largely meaningless. A very simple web server will directly match a URL with a local file path, but a more complex web server can do almost anything it wants with a URL.
This was driving me nuts. Thanks to Johnson, I now understand why it was happening, and I had a simple set-it-and-forget-it tool to fix it. Johnson writes:
What can you do with ChangeTheHeaders? I suspect the biggest selling point will be to spoof the User-Agent. The extension allows you to customize your User-Agent by URL domain. For example, you can make Safari pretend that it’s Chrome on Google web apps that give special treatment to Chrome. You can also customize the Accept-Language header if you don’t like the default language handling of some website, such as YouTube.
Here’s the custom rule I applied a year ago, when I first installed ChangeTheHeaders (screenshot):
Header: Accept
Value: image/avif,image/jxl,image/heic,image/heic-sequence,video/*;q=0.8,image/png,image/svg+xml,image/*;q=0.8,*/*;q=0.5
URL Domains: «leave blank for all domains»
URL Filter: «leave blank for all URLs»
Resource Types: image
I haven’t seen a single WebP since.
ChangeTheHeaders works everywhere Safari does — Mac, iPhone, iPad, Vision Pro — and you can get it for just $7 on the App Store.
Julien Khaleghy, CEO of SerpApi:
Google thinks it owns the internet. That’s the subtext of its lawsuit against SerpApi, the quiet part that it’s suddenly decided to shout out loud. The problem is, no one owns the internet. And the law makes that clear.
In January, we promised that we would fight this lawsuit to protect our business model and the researchers and innovators who depend on our technology. Today, Friday, February 20, 2026, we’re following through with a motion to dismiss Google’s complaint. While this is just one step in what could be a long and costly legal process, I want to explain why we’re confident in our position.
Is Google hurting itself in its confusion? Google is the largest scraper in the world. Google’s entire business began with a web crawler that visited every publicly accessible page on the internet, copied the content, indexed it, and served it back to users. It did this without distinguishing between copyrighted and non-copyrighted material, and it did this without asking permission. Now Google is in federal court claiming that our scraping is illegal.
I’ve come around on SerpApi in the last few months. My initial take was that it surely must be illegal for a company to scrape Google’s search results and offer access to that data as an API. But I’ve come around to the argument that what SerpApi is doing to obtain Google search results is, well, exactly how Google scrapes the rest of the entire web to build its search index. It’s all just scraping publicly accessible web pages.
This December piece by Mike Masnick at Techdirt is what began to change my mind:
Look, SerpApi’s behavior is sketchy. Spoofing user agents, rotating IPs to look like legitimate users, solving CAPTCHAs programmatically — Google’s complaint paints a picture of a company actively working to evade detection. But the legal theory Google is deploying to stop them threatens something far bigger than one shady scraper.
Google’s entire business is built on scraping as much of the web as possible without first asking permission. The fact that they now want to invoke DMCA 1201 — one of the most consistently abused provisions in copyright law — to stop others from scraping them exposes the underlying problem with these licensing-era arguments: they’re attempts to pull up the ladder after you’ve climbed it.
Just from a straight up perception standpoint, it looks bad.
Ben Thompson, writing at Stratechery:
In fact, Amodei already answered the question: if nuclear weapons were developed by a private company, and that private company sought to dictate terms to the U.S. military, the U.S. would absolutely be incentivized to destroy that company. The reason goes back to the question of international law, North Korea, and the rest:
- International law is ultimately a function of power; might makes right.
- There are some categories of capabilities — like nuclear weapons — that are sufficiently powerful to fundamentally affect the U.S.’s freedom of action; we can bomb Iran, but we can’t North Korea.
- To the extent that AI is on the level of nuclear weapons — or beyond — is the extent that Amodei and Anthropic are building a power base that potentially rivals the U.S. military.
Anthropic talks a lot about alignment; this insistence on controlling the U.S. military, however, is fundamentally misaligned with reality. Current AI models are obviously not yet so powerful that they rival the U.S. military; if that is the trajectory, however — and no one has been more vocal in arguing for that trajectory than Amodei — then it seems to me the choice facing the U.S. is actually quite binary:
- Option 1 is that Anthropic accepts a subservient position relative to the U.S. government, and does not seek to retain ultimate decision-making power about how its models are used, instead leaving that to Congress and the President.
- Option 2 is that the U.S. government either destroys Anthropic or removes Amodei.
It’s Congress that is absent in — looks around — all of this. Right down to the name of the Department of Defense. The whole Trump administration has taken to calling it the Department of War, but only Congress can change the legal name. (Anthropic, despite its very public spat with the administration, refers to it as the “Department of War” as well. But serious publications like the Journal and New York Times continue to call it the Department of Defense.)
Nilay Patel, quoting the same section of Thompson’s column I quoted above, sees it as “Ben Thompson making a full-throated case for fascism”. I see it as the case against corporatocracy. Who sets our defense policies? Our democratically elected leaders, or the CEOs of corporate defense contractors?
npx workos launches an AI agent, powered by Claude, that reads your project, detects your framework, and writes a complete auth integration directly into your existing codebase. It’s not a template generator. It reads your code, understands your stack, and writes an integration that fits.
The WorkOS agent then typechecks and builds, feeding any errors back to itself to fix.
Just to be clear, this is the Mad Biologist’s Official Take on the Maine Democratic primary senate race, which, unfortunately, has become a contest between Gov. Janet Mills and Graham Platner:
There is some important context for Maine: it’s a very weird state. More precisely, it is the whitest state in the U.S., with 93.1% of the population classified as “White alone, not Hispanic or Latino.” It also has a small Jewish population, with only 1.3% of the population being Jewish.
Needless to say, this is not the typical Democratic primary demographic. This might be important context for Totenkopf Guy.
That also is why it is weird to read articles about someone like Platner being touted as the future of the Democratic Party: leaving aside Platner’s Totenkopf problem (which has only become worse), Maine is completely unrepresentative of the U.S. as a whole. Despite the best efforts of Stephen Miller, it’s also not what the future looks like. Arguably, the borough of Brooklyn–which is twice as large as Maine and is usually mocked as atypical and weird–is as ‘normal’ as the nearly all white Maine.
Anyway, just some context.
“Better, sooner, cheaper, your choice of any two”—while there are situations where this old chestnut fits, it doesn’t fit in software development.
That was one of the insights behind XP—fix quality at “high”, let scope vary, & you’ll end up with sooner & cheaper. Seems like magic to break the Iron Triangle, but it’s not.
Econ To Go is a Stanford series in which Neale Mahoney, the director of SIEPR, interviews an economist.
In this one he interviews the inimitable Nick Bloom, who is perhaps the leading scholar of the growing pattern of work from home.
x
California cannot permit the construction of a smartphone factory, an electric car plant, or a Navy destroyer shipyard. Not won’t — can’t. The regulatory environment makes it effectively impossible to build new semiconductor fabs, automotive paint shops, battery gigafactories, or steel foundries.
Tesla didn’t put its Gigafactory in Nevada out of affection for Reno. General Dynamics NASSCO in San Diego can build destroyers only because it’s been grandfathered in since 1960. If it closed tomorrow, it could not be rebuilt.
I get tired at all the discussion of tariffs and industrial policy and manufacturing. All of it is BS in comparison to the basics. We have the met the enemy and the enemy is us. Our future is in our hands. Is that optimistic or pessimistic? Either way complaining about China won’t fix our problems.
The post Banned in California appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The MIT Technology Review has a good article on Moltbook, the supposed AI-only social network:
Many people have pointed out that a lot of the viral comments were in fact posted by people posing as bots. But even the bot-written posts are ultimately the result of people pulling the strings, more puppetry than autonomy.
“Despite some of the hype, Moltbook is not the Facebook for AI agents, nor is it a place where humans are excluded,” says Cobus Greyling at Kore.ai, a firm developing agent-based systems for business customers. “Humans are involved at every step of the process. From setup to prompting to publishing, nothing happens without explicit human direction.”
Humans must create and verify their bots’ accounts and provide the prompts for how they want a bot to behave. The agents do not do anything that they haven’t been prompted to do.
I think this take has it mostly right:
What happened on Moltbook is a preview of what researcher Juergen Nittner II calls “The LOL WUT Theory.” The point where AI-generated content becomes so easy to produce and so hard to detect that the average person’s only rational response to anything online is bewildered disbelief.
We’re not there yet. But we’re close.
The theory is simple: First, AI gets accessible enough that anyone can use it. Second, AI gets good enough that you can’t reliably tell what’s fake. Third, and this is the crisis point, regular people realize there’s nothing online they can trust. At that moment, the internet stops being useful for anything except entertainment.
Whole regions of the world are now uninsurable, bringing radical uncertainty to the economy. How do we fix the problem?
- by Gavin Evans
SpaceX has disrupted the launch business with the Falcon 9 and the satellite communications business with Starlink. Now it may be taking aim at the emerging space situational awareness (SSA) field. In late January, SpaceX announced Stargaze, a new SSA service. Stargaze uses data from star tracker cameras on its Starlink satellites to track satellites […]
The post Stargazing into the future of SSA appeared first on SpaceNews.
U.S. Cyber Command and U.S. Space Command have ‘continuously layered effects to disrupt, disorient and confuse the enemy’
The post Pentagon details cyber, space ‘first mover’ role in Iran operations appeared first on SpaceNews.
Orbital and lunar data centers are often framed as engineering challenges or launch economics problems. Those matter, but they are not the limiting factor. The real bottleneck is the absence of a procurement and logistics architecture capable of sourcing, qualifying, transporting, assembling and sustaining the technologies these systems require. If companies are going to realize […]
The post Hardware is no longer the problem holding back space-based data centers — the supply chain is appeared first on SpaceNews.
March 2, 2026 Houston, Texas – World Space Week 2025 recorded nearly 50,000 activities across 102 nations, marking the highest global participation in its history, World Space Week Association announced […]
The post World Space Week 2025 Set Record With 50,000 Events in 102 Countries appeared first on SpaceNews.
Instead of customized development, Space Force will seek commercially derived ground stations
The post Space Force rethinks satellite ground station strategy appeared first on SpaceNews.
Deutsche Telekom plans to deliver Europe’s first direct-to-smartphone services via upgraded Starlink satellites in 2028, aiming to use MSS spectrum to bring 5G speeds to remote areas across 10 countries.
The post Deutsche Telekom aims to bring Starlink Mobile V2 to Europe in 2028 appeared first on SpaceNews.
March 2, 2026 – Washington, D.C.— The Commercial Space Federation (CSF) today announced that Kelli Kedis Ogborn will join the organization as a Strategic Advisor for Global Markets and Industry […]
The post Kelli Kedis Ogborn Joining Commercial Space Federation as Strategic Advisor for Global Markets and Industry Engagement appeared first on SpaceNews.
Turns out that LLMs are good at de-anonymization:
We show that LLM agents can figure out who you are from your anonymous online posts. Across Hacker News, Reddit, LinkedIn, and anonymized interview transcripts, our method identifies users with high precision and scales to tens of thousands of candidates.
While it has been known that individuals can be uniquely identified by surprisingly few attributes, this was often practically limited. Data is often only available in unstructured form and deanonymization used to require human investigators to search and reason based on clues. We show that from a handful of comments, LLMs can infer where you live, what you do, and your interests—then search for you on the web. In our new research, we show that this is not only possible but increasingly practical.
I thought this was one of the five or six best movies of the millennium so far, comparable in quality to say Uncle Boonmee or Winter Sleep. The soundtrack is one of the very best, ever. The production is joint Spanish and French. The story starts with a Spanish father looking for his lost (grown) daughter at a rave in Morocco. He then meets up with some other parties and a story ensues. I do not consider it a spoiler to report that I consider this a movie about the end of the world, so to speak. Here is the trailer for the film.
It has been playing in NYC and LA for a while, and this Friday it opens for a week in many more cities. The big screen is essential, so see it while you can.
The post *Sirāt* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
We use long-run annual cross-country data for 10 macroeconomic variables to evaluate the long-horizon forecast distributions of six forecasting models. The variables we use range from ones having little serial correlation to ones having persistence consistent with unit roots. Our forecasting models include simple time series models and frequency domain models developed in Müller and Watson (2016). For plausibly stationary variables, an AR(1) model and a frequency domain model that does not require the user to take a stand on the order of integration appear reasonably well calibrated for forecast horizons of 10 and 25 years. For plausibly non-stationary variables, a random walk model appears reasonably well calibrated for forecast horizons of 10 and 25 years.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Kurt G. Lunsford and Kenneth D. West. If you do not know macro, here is a GPT translation in plainspeak. And this new paper suggests macro shocks do not matter that much.
The post Deflating macroeconomics? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
On February 22, 2026, a wildland fire was discovered in Big Cypress National Preserve, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) east of Naples, Florida. The blaze, dubbed the National fire, moved through dry vegetation and sent a plume of smoke billowing over parts of the preserve and nearby communities.
The MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image on the afternoon of February 25. By then, the fire had burned around 24,000 acres (9,700 hectares), according to the National Park Service.
After carrying smoke southward in previous days, winds shifted to start pushing it north by the time Aqua captured this image. According to news reports, the smoke reduced visibility and led to the brief closure of I-75—the interstate nicknamed “Alligator Alley” that runs east-west through the northern part of the preserve. It also contributed to smog over Lake Okeechobee.
The fire continued to spread over the next several days, reaching just over 35,000 acres (14,000 hectares) by February 28, according to InciWeb. As of March 2, it remained roughly the same size and was 38 percent contained.
The fire’s cause remains under investigation. Officials noted, however, that its spread was driven by ample fuel, including vegetation that was dry from persistent, extreme drought and damaged by recent frost. The National Interagency Fire Center’s wildland fire outlook calls for above-normal fire potential across Florida through May.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Story by Kathryn Hansen.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
Smoke filled river valleys in northeastern Washington and parts of British Columbia.
Lightning likely ignited several large fires that sent smoke pouring over the Canadian province in early September 2025.
Blazes spread across Los Alerces National Park, home to some of the world’s oldest trees.
The post Smoke Rises Over Big Cypress National Preserve appeared first on NASA Science.
People argue back and forth about when artificial superintelligence will arrive. The truth is that it’s already here.
Go back a hundred years, and the popular notion of “intelligence” would probably include things like calculating speed and memorization. Then we invented computers, which could memorize and recall infinitely more things than we could, and do calculations infinitely faster. But we didn’t want to call those capabilities “intelligence”, because we recognized that although they were very powerful, they were very narrow. So we started to use the word “intelligence” to refer to the things machines still couldn’t do — various forms of pattern-matching, logical reasoning, communicating through natural language, and so on.
Even before the invention of AI, though, computers were already participating in frontier research. The four-color theorem is a famously hard math problem that stumped humans until the 1970s, when some mathematicians used a computer to prove it. The humans figured out that the theorem could be proven by brute force, just by checking a very large number of cases. So the computer did a mental task that humans couldn’t, and the result was a scientific breakthrough.
In the 2020s, we invented computer systems that could do most of the kinds of cognitive tasks that previously only humans could do. They can read, understand, and speak in human language. They can do mathematics, which is really just a language with very formal rules (this means they can also do theoretical physics). They can recognize complex patterns of knowledge embedded in written text, and apply those patterns to produce actionable insights. They can write software, because software is also just a language with formal rules. It turns out that all computers really needed in order to do all of this stuff was A) statistical regressions to identify patterns probabilistically, and B) a very large amount of computing power.
This doesn’t mean that AI can now do everything a human being can do. Its intelligence is “jagged” — there are still some things humans are better at. But this is also true of human beings’ advantages over animals. Did you know that chimps are better than humans at game theory and have better working memory? My rabbit can distinguish sounds much more sensitively than I can. If we were capable of creating business contracts with chimps and rabbits, we might even pay them for these services. Similarly, AI might not take all of humans’ jobs. But no one in the world thinks that chimps’ and rabbits’ superiority on a narrow set of cognitive tasks means that humans “aren’t truly intelligent”. We are jagged general intelligences as well.
Most of the benchmarks that aim to measure whether we’ve achieved “AGI” — things like ARC-AGI and Humanity’s Last Exam — focus on the kinds of things that computers couldn’t do in 2021 — things that gave humans our irreplaceable cognitive edge before AI came along, and made us highly complementary to computers. And most of the discussion around “AGI” is about when AI will surpass humans at everything. For example, Metaculus forecasters still think AGI is in the future:
This may be the most important question from an economic standpoint — i.e., whether we expect AI to replace human jobs or augment them. But if what we’re talking about is domination of the planet’s resources, and control of the destiny of life on Earth, we don’t actually need AI to be better at every cognitive task. Humans conquered the planet from animals despite having worse short-term memories than chimps and being worse at differentiating sounds than rabbits.
In fact, I bet that if AI had A) permanent autonomy and long-term memory, B) highly capable robots, and C) end-to-end automation of the AI production chain, it could defeat humans and take control of Earth today. I might be wrong about that, but if so, I doubt I’ll be wrong three or four years from now. In any case, if we decide we don’t want to hand over control of the planet to an alien intelligence, we should think about restricting either A) full autonomy, B) robots, and/or C) full automation of the AI production chain.1
That’s a sidetrack from my real point, though. My real point here is that AI, as it exists today, is already superintelligent. The reason is that AI can already do language and concepts and pattern recognition well enough, while also being able to do all the superhuman, fantastic, incredibly powerful things that a computer could do in 2021.
Right now, today, AI can do mental tasks that no human can do. In a few minutes, it can read an entire scientific literature, and extract many of the basic conclusions and insights from that literature. No human can do that. A single human can be an expert in one or two complex subjects; an AI can be an expert in all of them at once. A human needs to eat and sleep and take breaks; an AI agent can work tirelessly at proving a theorem or writing code. And AI can prove theorems and write code — or write paragraphs of text — much, much faster than any human.
These are all superhuman cognitive capabilities. They go far, far beyond anything that even the smartest human being can do. They are the result of combining the roughly human-level language ability, pattern recognition, and conceptual analysis of an LLM with the pre-2022 superhuman memory, speed, and processing power.
I don’t want to get sidetracked here, but I think there’s a nonzero chance that AI never gets much better than humans at most of the things that humans were better than computers at in 2021. It seems possible that humans are simply incredibly specialized in a few types of cognitive tasks — extracting patterns from sparse data, synthesizing various patterns into “intuition” and “judgement”, and communicating those patterns in language — and that we’ve basically approached the theoretical maximum in those narrow areas.
That would explain why AI has gotten much better at things like math and coding and forecasting over the last year, but why the basic chatbot interface doesn’t seem much more “intelligent”. It would also explain why when you talk to Terence Tao about math, it’s like talking to a superhuman, but when you talk to him about where to get lunch or which movies are the best, he’ll just sound like a fairly smart normal dude. AI will eventually get better than Tao at math, because it’s a computer, and computers are inherently good at math — but it may never get much better than the most thoughtful, eloquent humans at deciding where to get lunch or recommending movies. It may simply not be mathematically possible to get much better than we already are at that sort of thing.
In fact, this is what AI is basically like in Star Trek: The Next Generation, my favorite science fiction show of all time — and the one that I think best predicted modern AI. The show has two types of AGI — the ship’s computer, which eventually creates superhuman sentience via the Holodeck, and Data, an android built to simulate human intelligence. Both the ship’s computer and Data are approximately human-equivalent when it comes to taste, judgement, intuition, and conversational ability. But they are far superior when it comes to math, scientific modeling, and so on.2
It makes sense that the big differentiator between humans and AI would not be superior taste, judgement, and intuition, but things like computation speed and memory. Those are things humans are especially weak at, because we have very limited room in our little organic brains. It makes sense that humans would evolve to specialize in the type of thing we could get maximum leverage out of — recognizing and communicating patterns embedded in sparse data. And it makes sense that when we started automating cognitive tasks, we started out by going for the things we were weakest at, because those had the greatest marginal benefit.
In other words, the advent of LLMs, reasoning chains, and agents may simply be a “last mile” event in terms of creating superhuman intelligence — filling in an essential gap that humans were previously specialized to fill. The biggest marginal gains of AI over human brains may always come from the pieces we already had in place before 2022 — the ability to scan a whole corpus of literature in seconds, to perform computations at lightning speed, and to hold vast amounts of information in working memory.
This means that despite still being “jagged” and still being only human-equivalent on certain benchmarks, AI is ready to start pushing the boundaries of scientific research in a big, big way.
Let’s start with math, which AI is especially good at doing. The famous mathematician Paul Erdős made around 1,179 conjectures, around 41% of which have been solved. These are known as the Erdős Problems. They’re not the hardest problems in math, or the most interesting. But they’re hard enough that no one has ever bothered to go solve them, so they represent novel mathematics. And in recent months, AI has begun solving Erdős Problems — sometimes in cooperation with human mathematicians, but sometimes in an automatic, push-button sort of way:
According to a webpage started by the mathematician Terence Tao, AI tools have helped transfer about 100 Erdős problems into the “solved” column since October. The bulk of this assistance has been a kind of souped-up literature search, as it was with Sawhney’s initial success. But in many cases, LLMs have pieced together extant theorems—often in dialogue with their mathematician prompters—to form new or improved solutions to these niche problems. In at least two cases, an LLM was even able to construct an original and valid proof to one that had never been solved, with little input from a human.
Some people have been quick to pooh-pooh this accomplishment, declaring that Erdős Problems are no big deal. But Terence Tao, widely acknowledged as the world’s best mathematician, sees the potential. Here are some excerpts from his interview with The Atlantic’s Matteo Wong:
In these Erdős Problems in particular, there’s a small core of high-profile problems that we really want to solve, and then there’s this long tail of very obscure problems. What AI has been very good at is systematically exploring this long tail and knocking off the easiest of the problems. But it’s very different from a human style. Humans would not systematically go through all 1,000 problems and pick the 12 easiest ones to work on, which is kind of what the AIs are doing.
And here is what Tao said in a recent talk about AI and math:
To me, these advances show there is a complementary way to do mathematics. Humans traditionally work in small groups on hard problems for months, and we will keep doing that…But we can also now set AI to scale: sweep a thousand problems and pick up all the low-hanging fruit. Figure out all the ways to match problems to methods. If there are 20 different techniques, apply them all to 1,000 problems and see which ones can be solved by these methods. This is the capability that is present today.
Tao understands that automated research could help solve the herding problem in science. There are a limited number of human scientists, and they have a limited amount of time. They’re highly motivated to work on things that interest them, and/or on things that will get them fame if they succeed. This leads to an interesting version of the streetlight problem; when the key scarce resource is the attention and effort of smart humans, lots of boring or seemingly incremental advances get overlooked.
In mathematics, AI is just going to blaze through those boring or tedious or seemingly uninteresting problems. It’s a computer — it’s tireless, its memory and processing speed are essentially infinite, and it doesn’t get bored.3 Here is another example of a fully automated mathematics breakthrough that doesn’t involve Erdős Problems. And here is an example from theoretical physics, where AI showed that there can be a kind of particle interaction that physicists had assumed couldn’t happen.
Solving a huge number of minor problems might sound like small potatoes, but it’s not. China’s innovation system has already shown how a huge number of incremental results can add up to a big difference in a society’s overall technology level. And occasionally one of those incremental results — some obscure theorem or method — will turn out to be useful for a big breakthrough or a more important problem. In fact, sometimes great discoveries happen entirely by accident — no one knew what vectors were good for when they were first invented, but linear algebra ended up being arguably the most useful form of math ever invented. This happens in natural science too — witness the discovery of penicillin, x-rays, insulin, or radioactivity.
But that’s only the beginning of how AI — not the AI of the future, but the technology that exists today — is going to accelerate science. Because AI is a computer, it can act as a tireless, incredibly fast, all-knowing research assistant. Here’s Tao again:
[O]ver the next few months, I think we’re going to have all kinds of hybrid, human-AI contributions…Today there are a lot of very tedious types of mathematics that we don’t like doing, so we look for clever ways to get around them. But AIs will just happily blast through those tedious computations. When we integrate AI with human workflows, we can just glide over these obstacles…We are basically seeing AIs used on par with the contribution that I would expect a junior human co-author to make, especially one who’s very happy to do grunt work and work out a lot of tedious cases.
This “automated research assistant” is getting more incredible every day:
Google DeepMind has unveiled Gemini Deep Think’s leap from Olympiad-level math to real-world scientific breakthroughs with their internal model "Aletheia"…"Aletheia" autonomously solved open math problems (including four from the Erdős database), contributed to publishable papers, and helped crack challenges in algorithms, economics, ML optimization, and even cosmic string physics…2.5 years ago chatbots werent even able to solve simple math problems.
"We are witnessing a fundamental shift in the scientific workflow. As Gemini evolves, it acts as "force multiplier" for human intellect, handling knowledge retrieval and rigorous verification so scientists can focus on conceptual depth and creative direction. Whether refining proofs, hunting for counterexamples, or linking disconnected fields, AI is becoming a valuable collaborator in the next chapter of scientific progress."
Here’s a long and very good post by mathematician Daniel Litt on how AI is going to boost productivity in his field. Notably, he doesn’t see full push-button automation of research coming soon, but instead sees AI as a massive productivity-booster.
Math (and math-like fields like theoretical physics and theoretical economics) represents only one area of research, though; every field has different requirements. And in other fields, researchers are using AI to boost their capabilities in various ways. This is from Raza Aliani’s summary of a Google paper that summarizes some of these methods:
In one case, the AI was used as an adversarial reviewer and caught a serious flaw in a cryptography proof that had passed human review. That’s a very different use than “summarise this PDF.”…
The model links tools from very different fields (for example, using theorems from geometry/measure theory to make progress on algorithms questions). This is where its wide reading really matters…
Humans still choose the problems, check every proof, and decide what’s actually new. The model is there to suggest ideas, spot gaps, and do the heavy algebra…In some projects, they plug Gemini into a loop where it…proposes a mathematical expression…writes code to test it…reads the error messages, and…fixes itself. (humans only step in when something promising appears)[.]
Again, we see that AI’s pure scientific reasoning ability is only up to that of a fairly smart human, but its computer-like abilities — speed, meticulousness, memory, and so on — make it superintelligent.
And here’s Google doing something similar in biology:
We worked with Ginkgo to connect GPT-5 to an autonomous lab, so it could propose experiments, run them at scale, learn from the results, and decide what to try next. That closed loop brought protein production cost down by 40%.
Ole Lehmann points out how incredible and game-changing this is:
The 40% cost reduction is amazing but still kind of undersells it…The real number is the time compression…A human researcher might test 20-30 combinations in a good month. This system tested 6,000 per iteration…(Which is roughly 150 years of traditional lab work compressed into a few weeks, if you want to feel something about that)…Drug discovery, materials science, synthetic biology, basically any field where the bottleneck is "we need to try thousands of things to find what works" just got its timeline crushed…The second-order effects of this will be insane[.]
Here’s a post by Andy Hall, describing how he’s using agentic AI to get a lot more done:
Even when AI can’t be trusted to do much of the research process on its own, it can automate much of the grunt work of doing literature searches, checking results, writing papers, creating data presentations, and so on. Here is climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, describing a bunch of ways that AI has accelerated his own workflow:
And here is economist John Cochrane, talking about how AI now checks his papers and makes helpful suggestions and finds errors:
Even Terence Tao found an error in one of his papers using AI!
Here’s a Google tool that will generate publication-ready scientific illustrations at the touch of a button. Here’s a software package that will quantify the attributes of large qualitative datasets — something very useful for social science research. Here’s a paper about how AI can enhance the quality of peer review. Here’s Gabriel Lenz describing how AI makes it much quicker and easier to write a data-heavy book.
And remember, these are only the AI tools that exist today. Superintelligence is already here, thanks to AI’s ability to combine human-level reasoning with the mental superpowers of a computer. But AI is improving by leaps and bounds every day. It may achieve superhuman reasoning ability soon. In math, I will be surprised if it doesn’t. But even if not, advances in agents’ ability to handle long tasks, synthesize results, process vast and varied data, and extract insights from vast scientific literatures will likely be far better in a couple years compared to now.
Is AI already supercharging science? That’s not clear yet. Publications are way up, and scientists who use AI have experienced a huge bump in productivity. A lot of this content seems to be low-quality slop so far, so there’s an open question of whether AI-generated content will overwhelm the existing review process. Unscrupulous scientists can also jailbreak AI models and have them p-hack their way to spurious results. But in a few months, and certainly in a few years, I think it’ll be clear that AI has been a game-changer.
A lot of people who think about the risks of superintelligence — and those risks are very real — ask what the upside is. Why would we invent a technology that has the capability to end human civilization? What might we get that could possibly justify that risk?
I don’t know where the cost/benefit calculation lies. But I’m pretty sure that the #1 answer to this question is better science. Before AI showed up, scientific discovery was hitting a wall — the picking of much of the Universe’s low-hanging fruit meant that ideas were getting more expensive to find, and requiring research manpower that the human race simply was not producing at sufficient scale.
Now, thanks to the invention of superintelligence and the supercharging of scientific productivity, we will be able to break through that wall. Fantastic sci-fi materials, robots that can do anything we want, and therapies that can cure any disease are just the beginning. There is a whole lot left to discover about this Universe, and thanks to superintelligence, a lot more of it is going to get discovered.
I just hope humans will still be around to see that future.
Updates
A bunch of folks had very enlightening and helpful comments. Marian Kechlibar writes:
I studied algebra and number theory and the part about mathematics sounds true…All the heavy lifting on the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem was done by Andrew Wiles, but his proof eventually lasts on Gerhard Frey’s observation that if FLT didn’t hold, a non-modular eliptic curve could be constructed - which is a bridge connecting some far away islands in the mathematical landscape. These bridges are rare and tend to be very productive, but first you have to notice that they can be built, and this is the problem. Current mathematics is so large that people specialize in tiny subfields thereof, and only have a very vague, if any, idea, what is happening in nearby subfields. Much less in distant subfields…AI does not have this sort of “my brain is not big enough to fit everything” limitation…So, we can expect some interesting mathematical concepts from AI. Not just mere slog.
And John C writes:
I’m a working scientist doing theoretical physics in an AI-adjacent field. I am currently a few months into a computational project that I have vibe coded and and analyzed with GPT5.2, and run on my laptop…I agree 100% with this post. I get into chats with GPT about the nature of science, and its Balkanization. I ask, ‘does concept X exist in any other disciplines?’ as a meta-literature search. It then says ‘Yes, in field A it called X, in field B it is called Y, in field C it is called Z...’ and then lists 3 other fields. This is a jaw dropping act of SYNTHESIS. In modern science the literature is so large, the same ideas get reinvented in distributed in separate fields... wasteful duplication.
In a general sense, this is about the burden of knowledge. One commonly cited reason for why science is getting less novel over time is that as the set of knowledge grows, it takes longer and longer for human scientists to get up to speed on everything that has already been done. This is one possible explanation for why Nobel Laureates are getting older over time4. And when it comes to knowledge across disciplines, we barely even try to solve this problem — if you can barely get up to speed on the solid-state physics literature, how do you have time to go off and read the plasma physics literature?
AI basically busts right through this wall. That alone should be enough to generate a ton of novel findings, possibly with humans in the loop, possibly without.
Meanwhile, Alexander Kustov has a good post about how AI will revolutionize social science, with links to a bunch of other posts:
Some excerpts:
Tibor Rutar recently described generating a full research paper using AI prompts alone, producing work he considers publishable in first-quartile journals. Paul Novosad reportedly accomplished similar results in 2-3 hours. Yascha Mounk claims that Claude can produce a publishable-quality political theory paper in under two hours with minimal feedback. Scott Cunningham estimates that manuscript creation now basically costs roughly $100 in editing services plus a Claude subscription…Aziz Sunderji describes building a ~200-line instruction file encoding his research workflow, judgment calls, and behavioral guardrails…Chris Blattman went from a Claude Code skeptic to building an entire AI workflow toolkit in a matter of weeks…
Yamil Velez and Patrick Liu have been building AI-generated experimental designs since 2022; tailored Qualtrics experiments can now be created in 15 minutes via prompts. Velez’s work points to something even bigger: AI doesn’t just speed up existing survey methods, it makes entirely new forms of interactive, adaptive surveys possible—designs that would have been impractical to program manually. David Yanagizawa-Drott has taken things further still, launching a project to produce 1,000 economics papers with AI—not as a stunt, but as a stress test of what happens when the cost of generating research drops to near zero.
A lot of social science lives in the realm of pure data — statistical analysis and theory — instead of in the messy world of the physical. So social science could be just as radically revolutionized as math or theoretical physics. As Kustov points out, though, the real challenge here is in filtering the massive torrent of papers and results that are going to emerge from everyone just vibe-coding research papers. Social science was already doing a bad job of that, raising suspicions that a lot of research in the area was just useless signaling (or worse).
What do research fields look like when random no-name authors are spamming out dozens of apparently top-quality papers a month from all corners of the globe? Will there be an arms race between AI filtration and AI generation? At what point does the whole thing just get automated end to end, with humans simply asking AI questions about the world like an oracle and receiving answers that are usually right but hard to verify for certain?
Science is about to get a lot more powerful, but in fields where there’s no link to a physical experiment and (eventually) no human in the loop, science is about to get very weird.
Somehow, I doubt that humanity will decide to try to stop this from happening. If AI conquers us, we’ll be trying to use it to make money on B2B SaaS right up until the end. But in any case, I’m far more worried about AI-assisted bioterrorism wiping us out long before autonomous AI gets the chance to decide it doesn’t need us around. Sleep tight!
For the sake of the show’s plot, the human engineers often come up with the novel insights. But when they really need a boost, they turn to the AIs to help them — as in the scene depicted in the image at the top of this post. Interestingly, TNG also shows humans prompting AI in natural language instead of coding — a choice made for ease of storytelling on a screen, but which ended up being realistically futuristic. Also, the ship’s computer has frequent hallucinations, some of which end up being the central conflict for whole episodes. Occasionally the computer even accidentally creates autonomous sentient life. Star Trek: TNG really deserves more recognition as the most accurate anticipation of modern AI in all of 20th century sci-fi.
An alternative explanation is that there are more of them jamming up the queue.
Apple Newsroom:
Apple today announced the new iPad Air featuring M4 and more memory, giving users a big jump in performance at the same starting price. With a faster CPU and GPU, iPad Air boosts tasks like editing and gaming, and is a powerful device for AI with a faster Neural Engine, higher memory bandwidth, and 50 percent more unified system memory than the previous generation. With M4, iPad Air is up to 30 percent faster than iPad Air with M3, and up to 2.3× faster than iPad Air with M1. The new iPad Air also features the latest in Apple silicon connectivity chips, N1 and C1X, delivering fast wireless and cellular connections — and support for Wi-Fi 7 — that empower users to work and be creative anywhere. [...]
With the same starting price of just $599 for the 11-inch model and $799 for the 13-inch model, the new iPad Air is an incredible value. And for education, the 11-inch iPad Air starts at $549, and the 13-inch model starts at $749. Customers can pre-order iPad Air starting Wednesday, March 4, with availability beginning Wednesday, March 11.
So much for my theory that Apple would separate its announcements this week with separate days for each product family (e.g. iPhone 17e on Monday, iPads on Tuesday, MacBooks on Wednesday.) Maybe an update to the no-adjective iPad isn’t coming this week?
Aside from the M3 to M4 speed bump, there are very few differences between this generation iPad Air and the last. Same colors even (space gray, blue, purple, and starlight). Here’s a link to Apple’s iPad Compare page, preset to show the current M5 iPad Pro, new M4 iPad Air, and old M3 iPad Air side-by-side.
One interesting tech spec: the new M4 iPad Air models come with 12 GB of RAM, up from 8 GB in last year’s M3 models. With the M5 iPad Pro models, RAM is tied to storage: the 256/512 GB iPad Pros come with 12 GB RAM; the 1/2 TB models come with 16 GB RAM.
Jesper, writing at Take:
My hope is that Macintosh is not just one of these empires that was at the height of its power and then disintegrated because of warring factions, satiated and uncurious rulers, and droughts for which no one was prepared, ruining crops no one realized were essential for survival.
My hope is that there remains a primordial spark, a glimpse of genius, to rediscover, to reconnect to — to serve not annual trends or constant phonification, but the needs of the user to use the computer as a tool to get something done.
A former NASA administrator says he is "encouraged" that the US Congress is considering legislation to prevent NASA from spending more than 50 percent of its launch funding on any single provider.
"America succeeds in space when American companies compete, innovate, and grow," former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine wrote on LinkedIn. "I’m encouraged to see Congress taking meaningful steps to strengthen the industrial base that underpins both our civil and national security space missions."
Bridenstine commended the chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and ranking member Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) on a new provision that appears in the NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2025. Cruz plans to hold a markup hearing for the legislation on Wednesday.
Up early and by water with Commissioner Pett to Deptford, and there took the Jemmy yacht (that the King and the Lords virtuosos built the other day) down to Woolwich, where we discoursed of several matters both there and at the Ropeyard, and so to the yacht again, and went down four or five miles with extraordinary pleasure, it being a fine day, and a brave gale of wind, and had some oysters brought us aboard newly taken, which were excellent, and ate with great pleasure.
There also coming into the river two Dutchmen, we sent a couple of men on board and bought three Hollands cheeses, cost 4d. a piece, excellent cheeses, whereof I had two and Commissioner Pett one.
So back again to Woolwich, and going aboard the Hulke to see the manner of the iron bridles, which we are making of for to save cordage to put to the chain, I did fall from the shipside into the ship (Kent), and had like to have broke my left hand, but I only sprained some of my fingers, which, when I came ashore I sent to Mrs. Ackworth for some balsam, and put to my hand, and was pretty well within a little while after.
We dined at the White Hart with several officers with us, and after dinner went and saw the Royal James brought down to the stern of the Docke (the main business we came for), and then to the Ropeyard, and saw a trial between Riga hemp and a sort of Indian grass, which is pretty strong, but no comparison between it and the other for strength, and it is doubtful whether it will take tarre or no.
So to the yacht again, and carried us almost to London, so by our oars home to the office, and thence Mr. Pett and I to Mr. Grant’s coffee-house, whither he and Sir J. Cutler came to us and had much discourse, mixed discourse, and so broke up, and so home where I found my poor wife all alone at work, and the house foul, it being washing day, which troubled me, because that tomorrow I must be forced to have friends at dinner.
So to my office, and then home to supper and to bed.
Links for you. Science:
RFK Jr. food pyramid site links to Grok, which says you shouldn’t trust RFK Jr.
RFK Jr. made promises to get his job as health secretary. He’s broken many of them
NSF’s flagship fellowship program is rejecting applicants without peer review
RFK Jr. pledged more transparency. Here’s what the public doesn’t know anymore
Students, faculty mystified as NSF turns back applications for prestigious fellowship program
An mRNA Refusal to File
Other:
This Is How a Child Dies of Measles. When your family becomes a data point in an outbreak
The Woman Alex Pretti Was Killed Trying to Defend Is an EMT. Federal Agents Stopped Her From Giving First Aid.
HHS Secretary RFK Jr. admits he used to snort cocaine off toilet seats
School Picture Days Canceled, Investigations Launched After Rumors Link Popular Photo Company To Epstein
Case dismissed against LA protester accused of assaulting federal officer with cloth hat
Elementary students run from bus stop during ICE operation at NJ apartment
Why chasing twitter’s approval doesn’t work. The opinions you believe are universal are being fed to you by an algorithm designed to show you things you agree with
Palantir for Governor? Why is extremist MAGA billionaire Joe Lonsdale funding a California Democrat?
Building the camps
‘Even in Russia, they don’t treat children like this’: A family’s nightmare in ICE detention
“Not Ready for Prime Time.” A Federal Tool to Check Voter Citizenship Keeps Making Mistakes.
European Parliament Votes Overwhelmingly For “The Full Recognition Of Trans Women As Women”
Local police aid ICE by tapping school cameras amid Trump’s immigration crackdown
Rugged Great Plainswoman
‘UK has fallen’: Antisemitic conspiracies theories on Starmer’s wife, Jewish world control spread
What Minnesota Really Thinks Of The End Of Trump’s ICE Surge
Does Anybody Show Up For Work
Why Is Thom Tillis Lying About Trump and Tariffs?
The real reason Kristi Noem wants ICE body cams
Minimum Standards for Taking AI Seriously (I would add regulations about data acquisition and sharing)
Why Are Senate Democrats Still Voting to Confirm Trump’s Judicial Nominees?
The MAGA Bubble Is Imploding
Trump Will Never Stop Dragging the American Economy Down
ICE’s warehouse detention centers run up against NIMBYism
Orlando Rep. Maxwell Frost gets Epstein files assist from Reddit sleuths
ICE Proposal to Hold 8,500 Immigrants in Mississippi Mega Warehouse Draws Local Opposition
An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – More Things Have Happened
‘Suicide is only one option’: Social Security staff newly assigned to phone duties raise concerns over training
Kristi Noem was unable to cite single election fraud case during secretive Arizona visit
The NFL Owners and Olympic Organizers in Epstein’s Inbox
And I’m not talking about professional Democrats, but people like you and me. By way of G. Elliot Morris:
Democrats are only +15 for D.C. statehood. We need to be better than that. And it’s not just about the two senate seats either, it’s also . To make this topical, you might have read last week how the Republican-controlled Kansas legislature overrode the Democratic governor’s veto of a bill that would invalidate trans people’s drivers licenses if they were not marked with their gender as noted at birth. This is awful, evil legislation. And there is nothing that the residents of the colonial territory known as the District of Columbia could do to stop congressional Republicans from inflicting the same law on D.C., were Republicans inclined to do so–to be clear, there is no indication they currently are. Maybe senate Democrats would filibuster this, but the history of senate Democrats in terms of protecting D.C.’s limited Home Rule is spotty*.
And to make it clear: it is bad enough when Kansans do this evil to themselves, but it is worse if something like this is inflicted on people who have no recourse.
I could speculate as to why too many Democrats do not support statehood. Some of it is a combination of racism and dislike of cities, but there are too many Democrats who do not support statehood for this to be the entire explanation. Some Democrats likely believe that everyone in D.C. is a ‘politician’ and so we do not deserve statehood. Regardless, rank-and-file Democrats need to up their game.
*House Democrats, to their credit, historically have been very good–not perfect, but better than senate Democrats. In fact, the first piece of legislation passed by the Democratic-controlled House in 2021 was a D.C. statehood bill.
Deepening fissures underscoring Donald Trump’s abrupt decision to go to war with Iran are evident even as the military story continues to unfold.
Indeed, we learned of the first U.S. casualties, amid more Gulf nations taking hits from Iranian drones and missiles. U.S.-Israeli bombs were hitting the Islamic Revolutionary Guard headquarters, targets in central Tehran and other cities without a full assessment of what has been destroyed or determination of who besides the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been killed. Temporary government fill-ins in Iran called Trump to say they should talk.
There is plenty of outright worry in Israel and throughout the region from Iranian missiles hitting hotels, fields, airports, three oil tankers, and other non-military targets at random. People in Europe and the U.S. remain on alert about the lone Iranian rebel cell that can seek revenge.
The fissures cross diplomatic, political, even moral lines, standing in for the debate that never happened before missiles were fired and jets launched.
They question the why, as separable from any issues of military efficiency and expertise, which all, friend and foe alike, praise as well an initial strike carried out by a military that clearly had spent time and practice to hone the attack plans. The sole military questions remaining involve degrading Iran’s ability to launch its own retributive missiles and when to halt the bombing.
The key arguments remain over a U.S. president seen eluding of legal, Constitutional restraints and the lack of any understandable, measurable goals. Are all of us subject to more Trump announcements of “obliteration” only to find ourselves once again “days away” from an Iranian threat?
The undercurrent of alarm says that Trump – pushed by Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu – wanted the attack all along and any negotiations with Iran were all but pretense. For his part, Trump continued to confuse, offering in the same day to “immunize” Iranian troops who turn on the country and to threaten them for having killed three U.S. troops in retaliation.
Team Trump’s over simplistic argument is that Iran has been and remains a bad international player, therefore it should be punished. That’s it. Any other reasons offered to start a war now keep changing, but they are subordinate to Iran is Bad.
The array of those in the U,S., the Gulf or around the world who do not line up daily to defend whatever comes out of Trump’s mouth push a lack of congressional authority, critique what constituted an immediate need for this war amid ongoing “negotiations” towards limiting nuclear weapons development, and the lack of any plan for what comes next.
In fact, as with Trump policies about elections, Epstein, Venezuela, the “Donroe Doctrine,” or immigration concerns, it is past grievances rather than immediately demonstrable problems that get his attention. Even Trump’s biggest Republican defenders used television appearances to scoff over any lack of “immediate threat” when we have four decades of ire with Iran to settle.
If Democrats push this week for a too-late vote on allowing this Trump war, it’s not going to be a simply Republican-Democratic split. Too many MAGA fans backed Trump to stay out of open-ended war to gauge the outcome, except that it will be legislators voting about “Iran is Bad” against those who want separation of powers, even from a Congress that might support war with Iran on a less-hurried basis.
That concern is only heightened by having a Department of Homeland Security that has dismissed many of its anti-terrorism officials who had been assigned to Trump investigations to build up Homeland’s deportation campaign — all at a time when Congress has shut down non-deportation money to put limits on ICE enforcement.
Trump always seems to need to strike back at someone who has caused him harm in the past.
Any television drama watcher knows we’re awaiting a Situation Report, a SitRep, to concisely update the status of this war project and to inform its key stakeholders what happens next. In this case, there won’t be one, other than a declaration of military might and a Trump-Netanyahu spotlight turn, because there is no plan for what happens next.
Personally, I’m awaiting Trump’s sure-to-come announcement that he needs to control Iran’s oil and minerals as well as its “obliterated” nuclear labs and missile factories.
What still is remarkable is that Donald Trump, who ignores populist demands about prices, immigration tactics, health policies and taxes at home, cites the empowerment of an extremely diverse Iranian public without access to arms to overturn the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iran’s entrenched institutions. What still is surprising is that Trump believes an air war can deliver a fully functional replacement government structure that magically will bow to his wishes.
Amid decapitation of Iran’s leadership, we don’t even know who’s in charge of military decisions, diplomatic efforts or even who is authorizing food imports. Iran’s top national security official, Ali Larijani, announced that an interim committee would run the country.
We do know that Trump, the iconoclast, has broken another country and once again has no idea what to do next. That should shake us.
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The post Deepening Fissures Over Iran appeared first on DCReport.org.
The sudden conflict with Iran has brought Persian Gulf air traffic to a halt. Emirates, Qatar Airways, and Etihad have seen greater than 90 percent of their flights curtailed, leaving hundreds of thousands of people stranded.
This is no small matter. The airports of Doha, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi comprise a massive global crossroads — the biggest transit region on earth — hosting 182 million passengers annually.
Traveling from the U.S. to Thailand a couple of months ago, I shot this 30-second video of the departure board at Dubai. It was just after midnight, with the screen showing dozens of early-morning Emirates departures to just about anywhere you could imagine.
Each time that I pass through Dubai it knocks my socks off. DXB is the world’s biggest and busiest international hub, and the lineup of Emirates jets is astonishing, with 50 or more A380s, and dozens of 777s, lined up side-by-side. There are flights to six continents and across every ocean. Throughout the long history of commercial aviation, nothing like this has existed.
The growth of Emirates and the other Gulf carriers (together they are sometimes referred to as the “ME3” or “G3”) has been controversial. Lavish government subsidies, many argue, have permitted these airlines to take a huge and unfair advantage over others. Is this true? Sure. But it’s also true these airlines’ hubs are in the perfect geographic position to connect world’s biggest population centers; the governments of the U.A.E and Qatar realized this and ran with it.
They built their mega-carriers from scratch, and have done well, believing that the commerce generated by air travel is something to be nurtured rather than hindered. You can call it government subsidizing. You also can call it an investment in an industry your economy and society benefit from.
Here in the U.S., it feels like we’ve given up on that concept. Our airports are undersized and dirty, security screening has gone off the rails, and consider the misery we put international connecting passengers through. You ask if the complaint of government subsidies is valid. Yes, but it’s less a complaint against their governments than a complaint against ours. Once upon a time, America was commercial aviation’s global leader. That was then.
Of course, that geographic lucky card that has served the Gulf carriers so well has always been fraught with risk. This perfect connecting point is also a geopolitical powder keg, as we’re seeing right now.
How long the disruption might last is anyone’s guess. The ME3 have plenty of resources to weather the storm, but it’ll be interesting to see airlines from other parts of the world might benefit. Someone has to pick up all the traffic that was flowing through the Gulf.
That so many flights to so many places, carrying so many people, exist in the first place is impressive enough. Equally remarkable is how quickly this movement can be brought to a halt.
Cancellation stats for March 2nd. Source: Cirium.
Photos and video by the author.
The post Crossroads, Interrupted appeared first on AskThePilot.com.
2. Just say no to the monopsony model.
3. Your dose of John Cochrane.
4. More on the recent climate change estimate. It seems the paper should not have been published?
5. “During their lives, centenarians rarely get sick.“
The post Monday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
We’re used to Americans, at least as judged by polls, going into wars generally supportive and then trailing off quickly as the complications and fatalities mount. Some of that is a rally-’round-the-flag effect. In some cases there’s been a precipitating event which the public wants vengeance for. Here we are seeing none of that. The public was very skeptical going in. And the attack itself seems to have done nothing to change that. A new CNN poll has the familiar 59% of Americans disapprove of the attacks and expect things to get worse. What is most interesting to me, however, is not so much public opposition but the disconnect between elite and popular opinion.
What strikes me in these poll numbers and my general read of the moment is not so much the opposition to the conflict, though that’s certainly there, as how irrelevant most Americans see this conflict to anything that is happening in the country. You’ve got economic concerns over affordability, health care, the long half life of the shock of the pandemic. You have the domestic political situation, which many Democrats see as an existential battle over the future of democracy and the country itself. MAGA may be thinking about crime, the culture war, mass deportation and more. But neither of these worldviews hold much place for a regime change war against Iran, especially one that seems to be escalating rapidly.
Meanwhile, elite opinion is very different. Most of what I have read is at least skeptical of Trump’s war for obvious reasons. But it is mostly still grounded in decades-long conversations about the wisdom, utility and possible success of overthrowing the Iranian regime by military force. We hear all the arguments both on possible new dawns in the Middle East following the extraction of the terroristic clerical regime as well as on the likely blowback and regional chaos. The specifics of these debates seem less important than the fact that the debate over all has probably been discussed in the U.S. commentariat more than any other single issue in foreign policy for decades.
The killing of Ali Khamenei at a moment when his regime was already deeply enfeebled really may be a game changing moment for Iran. Perhaps, even some critics say, Trump made a big gamble and won. Maybe a relatively stable and intact new Iranian regime can emerge and Trump will get credit from the public?
But again, what you see most clearly is how disconnected this entire elite discussion is from public opinion. Trump might get lucky and hasten the fall of the Iranian government by killing Khamenei. But I don’t get the sense much of the public cares. A clear majority opposes the whole thing. But it doesn’t seem like ingrained anti-war sentiment, the kind of thing that will bring people into the streets, at least not now. It reads more like a grand “what the F is this about.” It’s not simply a war of choice against an already deeply enfeeble regime. It starts unpopular and seems all but certain to get more so. Not mostly because Americans are against wars (some of the time) but because nothing about this war we started seems tied to the issues that are currently animating the public mind.
Do you remember the 1979 energy crisis? I hope not — or at least I hope many of you don’t. Because I’d like to believe that my readers aren’t all old codgers like me.
I, however, remember the gas lines and the panic they instilled. I remember the Iranian hostage crisis and the sense that we were all at risk from political instability on the other side of the world. I remember how soaring energy prices were followed by soaring inflation across the board.
Now Donald Trump has taken us to war with the nation that was at the epicenter of that crisis. Obligatory disclaimer: The Iranian regime is evil, and it would be a good thing if this war leads to its demise. But my topic today is the side consequences of the US attack.
Almost everyone assumes that the economic fallout from Operation Masculine Insecurity Epic Fury will be much less severe than the fallout from the rise of the mullahs nearly fifty years ago. And they’re probably — probably — right.
But it’s worth asking why the world economy looks less vulnerable to instability in Iran now than it did in 1979. The main explanation isn’t what you may think. And it’s also worth asking what new vulnerabilities have emerged over the last 47 years.
The following table shows some indicators that help explain how the world economy’s vulnerability to Middle East turmoil has changed since the eve of the Iranian Revolution:
Source: Our World in Data, FRED
As the first line of the table shows, Iran, while a significant oil producer, accounts for only a modest share of total world oil production. On that basis alone one would not expect a shutdown of Iranian exports, which is presumably happening as you read this, to cause a huge spike in world oil prices.
However, in 1978 Iran didn’t account for a large share of world oil production either. So why did world oil prices rise 165 percent after the Iranian Revolution? Fears of disruption in other Middle Eastern nations led to speculative hoarding, followed by Saudi production cuts that kept prices high. The lesson for today is that when assessing the impact of events in Iran on world oil markets, we need to consider the impact on exports from Iran’s neighbors.
And that’s somewhat worrying. In 1979 radical forces in Iran, whatever they did to oil production and exports from their own nation, couldn’t disrupt exports from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and so on. Today the Iranian regime possesses large numbers of missiles and drones, which it has already used to strike Dubai, Bahrain, and other states in the region. Shipments of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, which is how most Middle Eastern oil reaches world markets, appear to have come to a more or less complete halt.
And the world still relies heavily on Middle Eastern oil. As the second line in the table shows, the Middle Eastern share of world production is only slightly lower now than it was in 1978. This share has remained high despite the fracking-based rise in U.S. production, shown in the third line of the table, which has made America self-sufficient in oil but hasn’t changed the fact that Middle Eastern oil remains crucial for the world economy as a whole.
As of this morning, oil prices were about $10 a barrel higher than they were in mid-February. That will add approximately 25 cents to the price of a gallon of gasoline. So far markets are in effect betting on a short, not-too-disruptive war, although that could change.
Yet the economic effect of an oil price shock should be less than it was in the 1970s, for two reasons.
First, major economies are much less dependent on oil than they were in the 1970s. The “oil intensity of GDP” is the ratio of oil consumption (measured in terawatt-hours of energy) to real GDP, measured in 2017 dollars. This indicator has declined more than 70 percent since the 1970s, which basically tells us that today’s economy uses much less oil to produce a given amount of output than the economy of the 1970s. One way to see this is to compare growth in US real GDP to the change in US oil consumption since 1978:
Source: Our World in Data, FRED
The U.S. economy has tripled in size, but oil consumption now is about the same as it was in the late 1970s.
How did we manage that? Among other things, the gas mileage of the average car has roughly doubled. Also, cheap natural gas has replaced oil in many uses, for example in home heating, and renewable energy is also starting to make a dent.
The reduced oil intensity of U.S. GDP means that even if the current war causes a large, sustained increase in oil prices, there will be less economic damage inflicted as a comparable increase would have done a few decades ago.
The next line of the table shows another reason to be less worried about an oil shock than in the past: Reduced risk of stagflation. The 1979 oil shock hit an economy that was already suffering from persistently high inflation. Furthermore, it was an economy in which, to use Federal Reserve jargon, expectations of future inflation had become “unanchored”: Companies reacted to sudden price increases by raising their own prices in the belief that there would be more to come, workers demanded wage hikes to offset the rising cost of living, and so on. As a result, the 1979 oil price shock set off a wage-price spiral.
Today, inflation — while still running above the Fed’s target of 2 percent — is much lower. Moreover, surveys show that most people expect inflation to return to normal levels in the future. So any effect of the new war on inflation will probably be transitory.
So far, so reassuring. Yet there are, as I see it, at least two reasons — in addition to the threat to shipping — to be moreworried about a war in the Middle East than we would have been decades ago.
First is financial fragility. In 1979 the U.S. financial system was still highly regulated, so that there was little room for serious bank runs and other disruptions. Today many observers have been warning about potential risks to financial stability, most urgently from private credit. Could the Iran war trigger a broader financial crisis? I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem alarmist to be worried.
Also, might the war burst a market bubble? The next to last line in the table shows the price-earnings ratio for the S&P 500, which was low in 1978 but is very high now. Will those high valuations be sustainable if the fallout from the war causes significant economic damage?
Finally, one point I haven’t seen many observers emphasize is that the modern Middle East now plays an important role in the world economy that goes beyond its status as a major source of oil. Dubai in particular is an important node in the global financial system, as well as playing host to many extremely rich people who thought they had found a safe haven. One indicator of that changing status is the transformation of Dubai International Airport into one of the world’s most important travel hubs.
To the extent that the war disrupts this new role for the region, that will be another risk to the world economy.
I don’t want to engage in doomsaying. But I do worry that people are too complacent about the economic risks this war creates.
MUSICAL CODA
Agentic Engineering Patterns >
I like to include animated GIF demos in my online writing, often recorded using LICEcap. There's an example in the Interactive explanations chapter.
These GIFs can be pretty big. I've tried a few tools for optimizing GIF file size and my favorite is Gifsicle by Eddie Kohler. It compresses GIFs by identifying regions of frames that have not changed and storing only the differences, and can optionally reduce the GIF color palette or apply visible lossy compression for greater size reductions.
Gifsicle is written in C and the default interface is a command line tool. I wanted a web interface so I could access it in my browser and visually preview and compare the different settings.
I prompted Claude Code for web (from my iPhone using the Claude iPhone app) against my simonw/tools repo with the following:
Here's what it built, plus an animated GIF demo that I optimized using the tool:
Let's address that prompt piece by piece.
gif-optimizer.html
The first line simply tells it the name of the file I want to create. Just a filename is enough here - I know that when Claude runs "ls" on the repo it will understand that every file is a different tool.
My simonw/tools repo currently lacks a CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md file. I've found that agents pick up enough of the gist of the repo just from scanning the existing file tree and looking at relevant code in existing files.
Compile gifsicle to WASM, then build a web page that lets you open or drag-drop an animated GIF onto it and it then shows you that GIF compressed using gifsicle with a number of different settings, each preview with the size and a download button
I'm making a bunch of assumptions here about Claude's existing knowledge, all of which paid off.
Gifsicle is nearly 30 years old now and is a widely used piece of software - I was confident that referring to it by name would be enough for Claude to find the code.
"Compile gifsicle to WASM" is doing a lot of work here.
WASM is short for WebAssembly, the technology that lets browsers run compiled code safely in a sandbox.
Compiling a project like Gifsicle to WASM is not a trivial operation, involving a complex toolchain usually involving the Emscripten project. It often requires a lot of trial and error to get everything working.
Coding agents are fantastic at trial and error! They can often brute force their way to a solution where I would have given up after the fifth inscrutable compiler error.
I've seen Claude Code figure out WASM builds many times before, so I was quite confident this would work.
"then build a web page that lets you open or drag-drop an animated GIF onto it" describes a pattern I've used in a lot of my other tools.
HTML file uploads work fine for selecting files, but a nicer UI, especially on desktop, is to allow users to drag and drop files into a prominent drop zone on a page.
Setting this up involves a bit of JavaScript to process the events and some CSS for the drop zone. It's not complicated but it's enough extra work that I might not normally add it myself. With a prompt it's almost free.
Here's the resulting UI - which was influenced by Claude taking a peek at my existing image-resize-quality tool:
I didn't ask for the GIF URL input and I'm not keen on it, because it only works against URLs to GIFs that are served with open CORS headers. I'll probably remove that in a future update.
"then shows you that GIF compressed using gifsicle with a number of different settings, each preview with the size and a download button" describes the key feature of the application.
I didn't bother defining the collection of settings I wanted - in my experience Claude has good enough taste at picking those for me, and we can always change them if its first guesses don't work.
Showing the size is important since this is all about optimizing for size.
I know from past experience that asking for a "download button" gets a button with the right HTML and JavaScript mechanisms set up such that clicking it provides a file save dialog, which is a nice convenience over needing to right-click-save-as.
Also include controls for the gifsicle options for manual use - each preview has a “tweak these settings” link which sets those manual settings to the ones used for that preview so the user can customize them further
This is a pretty clumsy prompt - I was typing it in my phone after all - but it expressed my intention well enough for Claude to build what I wanted.
Here's what that looks like in the resulting tool, this screenshot showing the mobile version. Each image has a "Tweak these settings" button which, when clicked, updates this set of manual settings and sliders:
Run “uvx rodney --help” and use that tool to tray your work - use this GIF for testing https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/animated-word-cloud-demo.gif
Coding agents work so much better if you make sure they have the ability to test their code while they are working.
There are many different ways to test a web interface - Playwright and Selenium and agent-browser are three solid options.
Rodney is a browser automation tool I built myself, which is quick to install and has --help output that's designed to teach an agent everything it needs to know to use the tool.
This worked great - in the session transcript you can see Claude using Rodney and fixing some minor bugs that it spotted, for example:
The CSS
display: noneis winning over the inline style reset. I need to setdisplay: 'block'explicitly.
When I'm working with Claude Code I usually keep an eye on what it's doing so I can redirect it while it's still in flight. I also often come up with new ideas while it's working which I then inject into the queue.
Include the build script and diff against original gifsicle code in the commit in an appropriate subdirectory
The build script should clone the gifsicle repo to /tmp and switch to a known commit before applying the diff - so no copy of gifsicle in the commit but all the scripts needed to build the wqsm
I added this when I noticed it was putting a lot of effort into figuring out how to get Gifsicle working with WebAssembly, including patching the original source code. Here's the patch and the build script it added to the repo.
I knew there was a pattern in that repo already for where supporting files lived but I couldn't remember what that pattern was. Saying "in an appropriate subdirectory" was enough for Claude to figure out where to put it - it found and used the existing lib/ directory.
You should include the wasm bundle
This probably wasn't necessary, but I wanted to make absolutely sure that the compiled WASM file (which turned out to be 233KB) was committed to the repo. I serve simonw/tools via GitHub Pages at tools.simonwillison.net and I wanted it to work without needing to be built locally.
Make sure the HTML page credits gifsicle and links to the repo
This is just polite! I often build WebAssembly wrappers around other people's open source projects and I like to make sure they get credit in the resulting page.
Claude added this to the footer of the tool:
Built with gifsicle by Eddie Kohler, compiled to WebAssembly. gifsicle is released under the GNU General Public License, version 2.
Tags: claude, ai, claude-code, llms, prompt-engineering, webassembly, coding-agents, tools, generative-ai, gif, agentic-engineering
I just sent the February edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. In this month's newsletter:
Here's a copy of the January newsletter as a preview of what you'll get. Pay $10/month to stay a month ahead of the free copy!
I use Claude as a proofreader for spelling and grammar via this prompt which also asks it to "Spot any logical errors or factual mistakes". I'm delighted to report that Claude Opus 4.6 called me out on this one:
Tags: newsletter, kakapo, claude
This just came in from Kelly Hart, whose website, Green Home Building, is a cornucopia on sustainable and planet-friendly building.
(I didn’t even know there were feminist rural collectives in the 1970s.)
This is a kick-ass barn!
“After driving for more than three hours north on the CA-128 from San Francisco, a winding highway through old-growth redwood groves and densely foggy mountain ranges, the scenery opens to the striking blueness of the Pacific Ocean, picturesque cliffs, and sculptural rock formations. Heading toward Albion Ridge, the “Turtle Time Farm” sign…appears beside the uphill dirt road, amongst small sprawling eucalyptus trees. Turning left, the road leads to the huge cedar barn and ends in an open garden area surrounded by redwood trees, where the turtle-time stillness seems to dissolve past and future. A cat under the blooming trellis arch was the first one to greet me.
“The massive octagonal barn is much larger and sturdier than I had imagined. I first learned about the farm when I stumbled upon a photograph of women building the barn in a 1978 Mother Jones article a friend shared with me during a conversation about my interest in the architecture of feminist rural collectives from the 1970s.…
“The built environment of Turtle Time Farm, originally named T’ai Farm, embodies the political and ecological values of 1970 feminist intentional communities in Northern California. In this context, the octagonal barn is not only a material structure, but a materialization of the values these women sought to enact in their relationship to the land. The barn exemplifies how feminist collectives used construction as a form of political world-making—challenging dominant architectural norms through ecological design, collective labor, and non-hierarchical spatial forms.
“T’ai Farm is particularly significant because it emerged prior to the more generalized lesbian separatist movement in the United States. The collective did not adhere to a rigid understanding of gender and did not exclude trans women. While many were lesbians, the collective also welcomed women who identified as bisexual and straight.…
“The idea for the barn’s non-hierarchical shape—which resisted centralized authority both symbolically and in use—came while driving on the highway through Santa Rosa, where they saw an old round barn in Fountaingrove. “Well, that would be such a great way to have a farm!” they said, drawn to the round form’s openness and lack of corners, which contrasted with the directional, enclosed structure of a typical rectangular barn.
They researched Shaker barns and other early utopian spiritual communities and decided they wanted something similar. They reached out to a Bay Area lesbian carpentry collective called the Seven Sisters Construction, who connected them with a Berkeley-based architect named Jean Doke. Doke suggested it would be easier to build the barn as an octagon rather than a circle, and helped them position it for optimal sun exposure.
“The most dramatic moment in the process came on the day they poured the concrete foundation: over the course of five fast-paced hours, three large concrete trucks arrived in succession and at least eight or nine women were needed to manage the pour before the concrete set. Over the course of the project, a total of sixteen women worked on the barn, rotating the role of supervisor among them. They described the build as ‘an endurance marathon,’ lasting seven months and spanning multiple seasons of extreme weather. In the end, they would sometimes look at the beams in place and wonder how they got there, despite having done all the work themselves.”
From my new Free Press column, I see these as the most important facts:
Congress has not passed explicit regulation of AI foundation models, and an executive order from President Trump limited regulation at the state level. But do not think that laissez-faire reigns. In addition to existing (largely pre-AI) laws, which lay out general principles of liability, and laws from a few states, the United States is engaged in a kind of “off the books” soft regulation.
The major AI companies keep the national security establishment apprised of the progress they are making, as has been the case with Anthropic. There is a general sense within the AI industry that if the national security authorities saw anything in the new products that was very concerning or that might undermine the national interest, they would inform the president and Congress. That would likely lead to more formal and more restrictive kinds of regulation, so the major AI companies want to show relatively safe demos and products. An informal back and forth enforces implied safety standards, without the involvement of formal legislation.
That may sound like an unusual way to do regulation, but to date the system has worked relatively well. For one thing, I believe our national security establishment has a better and more sophisticated understanding of the issues than does Congress. Congress right now simply isn’t up to the job, as indeed the institution has been failing more generally. Most representatives seem to know little about the core issues behind AI regulation.
As it stands, AI progress has been allowed to proceed, and the United States has stayed ahead of China, without major catastrophes. The burden on the companies has been manageable, and the system, at least until last week, was flexible.
Another advantage of this system is that both Congress and the administrative state can be very slow to act. The AI landscape can change in just weeks, yet our federal government is used to taking years to issue laws and directives. Had we passed AI legislation in, say, 2024, today it would be badly out of date, no matter what your point of view on what such regulation should accomplish. For instance, in 2024 few outsiders were much concerned with the properties of, or risks from, autonomous AI “agents.” Today that is the number-one topic of concern.
Though it is not driven by legislation, the status quo AI regulatory system is not anti-democratic, as it operates well within the rules passed by Congress and the administrative state. It is more correct to say the current AI guardrails rely on the threat of regulation, rather than regulation itself, with the national security state as the watchdog. The system sticks to a kind of creative ambiguity. The national security state offers no official imprimatur for the new advances, but they proceed nonetheless. Nevertheless, the various components of the national security state reserve the right to object in the future.
It is also correct, however, to believe that such a system cannot last forever. At some point creative ambiguity collapses. Someone or some institution demands a more formal answer as to what is allowed or what is not allowed. At that point a more directly legalistic system of adjudication enters the picture, and Congress likely starts paying more attention.
With the recent dispute between Hegseth and Anthropic, we have taken a step away from the previous regulatory mode of quiet cooperation. Instead, the relationship between the military and the AI companies has become a matter of public concern. Now everyone has an opinion on Hegseth, Anthropic, and OpenAI, and social media is full of debate.
No matter “whose side you take,” it would have been better to have resolved all this behind closed doors.
The post What the recent dust-up means for AI regulation appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Every election season brings a familiar sight of bright placards dotting the neighborhood landscapes. These signs represent the voices of residents who want to share their support for specific candidates. It is a tradition that allows for a vibrant display of civic engagement.
Unfortunately, this period also marks a rise in frustration as many of these displays start to vanish overnight. Finding a bare lawn where a message once stood feels like a personal attack. This interference is a common and very aggravating hurdle for many local people.
Theft of political yard signs is a criminal act that carries significant legal weight and penalties. Authorities take these reports seriously because they involve the removal of private property. Respecting these boundaries is essential for a healthy and truly functional local democracy.
Stealing a campaign sign is much more than a simple act of petty theft or a neighborhood prank. It represents a direct attempt to suppress the protected political speech of a fellow citizen. This interference strikes at the very heart of the freedom of expression.
When someone removes a sign, they are essentially trying to silence a specific viewpoint they find disagreeable. This behavior creates a hostile environment that discourages others from participating in the public square. It undermines the open exchange of ideas that is necessary for a community.
Legal systems recognize that these physical markers are vital tools for political communication and awareness during an election. Protecting these displays ensures that every voice has a fair chance to be heard by the public. Sabotage is never an acceptable response to a different opinion.
Confusion often arises regarding the exact rules of where a sign is legally allowed to stand. Most residents assume that any spot near the street is fair game for their displays. However, public right of way laws vary significantly between different cities and counties.
Code enforcement officers have the legal authority to remove signs that block traffic visibility or violate local ordinances. This type of official removal is not considered theft, even if it happens without a warning. Understanding these local regulations prevents unnecessary conflict and loss of materials.
Property owners should ensure their signs are placed well within their own boundaries to avoid any legal ambiguity. When a sign is on private land, its removal by an unauthorized person is a clear violation of the law. Clarity in placement protects the owner.
The rise of doorbell cameras and affordable home security systems has changed how these crimes are prosecuted. Neighbors are now much more likely to capture high quality video of individuals removing signs under the cover of night. These recordings provide the evidence needed for charges.
Police departments use this footage to identify repeat offenders and bring them to justice in a local court. Having a digital witness makes it much harder for saboteurs to claim they were just joking around. The threat of being caught on camera is a powerful deterrent.
Publicly sharing these videos also helps to hold individuals accountable for their actions within the local community. It sends a clear message that the neighborhood will not tolerate the suppression of anyone’s political views. Technology is helping to preserve the integrity of the yard.
Taking a proactive approach to security can help prevent a sign from becoming a target for theft. Many residents choose to move their displays further back from the sidewalk to make them harder to reach. This simple change can discourage casual vandals who want a quick exit.
Some high stakes campaigns even use small GPS trackers to locate and recover stolen property in real time. Others use defensive placement techniques like coating the edges with sticky substances to deter anyone from grabbing them. These methods make the act of theft much more difficult.
Working with neighbors to keep an eye on each other’s property is another effective way to stay safe. A vigilant community is the best defense against those who wish to disrupt the democratic process. Sharing information quickly helps everyone keep their signs standing until the very end.
Respecting the physical presence of opposing views is a fundamental component of the democratic process in any country. It requires a level of maturity and restraint that allows for a peaceful coexistence of different ideas. We must protect the rights of others to speak.
While it is tempting to lash out at a message that feels wrong, the law is very clear about the consequences. Stealing property only serves to deepen the divide and foster a culture of resentment. True progress happens through debate and voting rather than through silent sabotage.
The quality of our local political climate depends on our collective ability to respect the rules of the game. Keeping the conversation civil and the signs standing is a shared responsibility for every resident. Excellence in democracy is found in our respect for the process.
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Did you know that just hours before Donald Trump launched his illegal Middle East war that Iranian negotiators offered him a better deal on nuclear materials than Barack Obama’s administration negotiated in 2015?
The Iranians agreed to lower levels of enriching nuclear fuels, keeping them far below weapons grade, and other major concessions just so Trump could boast that he was a better negotiator than Obama.
From Trump’s point of view this could have been a major win, maybe even enough to make his name as the “peace president.”
From Tehran’s perspective it supported their claim that they would never build or use nuclear weapons because they are unholy.
What happened next provided Tehran with irrefutable proof that the American government is run by incompetents and liars who cannot be trusted.
After all, if you give the Trump administration what it says publicly it wants—verifiable guarantees that Iran will not build or have the capacity to build nuclear bombs—and the response is to kill your head of state what else would any rational, or even irrational, regime conclude?
The illegal war on Iran violates Trump’s endless promises on the campaign trail that if returned to the White House he would guarantee no more “endless wars” in the Middle East or anywhere else.
Trump, campaigning to get back to the White House in 2023 and 2024, declared again and again that he would never go to war with Iran. The reason, he emphasized, was that he had superior and effective negotiating skills unlike, he said, Obama, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Once again, the appallingly ignorant tyrant in the White House showed the “poor educated” MAGA who embrace him that they are fools, lacking the discernment to spot the devil in front of their faux Christian eyes.
The rest of us know that only Congress can declare war, making Trump’s attacks properly impeachable offenses. But only educated fools believe the Republican leadership on Capitol Hill will act to stop the madman from Queens.
Trump asserted that Biden, and later Harris, would bring us to “the brink of world War III.”
Indeed, in 2011 Trump declared that Obama would start a war with Iran because it was the only way he could win re-election in 2012.
News that Iran offered Trump more than it gave Obama 11 years ago comes from the man who mediated indirect nuclear talks in Geneva between Tehran and Washington: the foreign minister of Oman, Sayyid Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi.
Badr shuttled between the Iranian delegation in one room and another, occupied by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Trump emissary Steve Witkoff with messages aimed at avoiding military action by the U.S. and Israel.
When the nuclear talks broke off Friday in Switzerland, Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr flew directly to Washington. There Badr gave interviews, informal and on camera, to David Rohde, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and my former colleague at the New York Times and later Reuters. Rohde, who spent seven months as a Taliban captive, has shown time and again how deeply and solidly he knows the Middle East. He now covers national security issues for MS Now.
Kushner and Witkoff are amateurs, both from real estate families with no formal training in diplomacy and no education in the centuries of mind-numbingly complex political, religious, and economic issues in the region from Egypt east to India that was largely controlled by the British in the 1800s and has been called “the Middle East” since at least 1902 (and by some since the 1850s).
Their public statements and official remarks make clear that Kushner and Witkoff aren’t equal to the best high school debaters in understanding geopolitical conflicts. Their track records in Gaza, Ukraine, and now Iran show why experience and education matter in diplomatic talks.
On Ukraine, they push a version of the Kremlin line, advancing the Trumpian credo that might makes right.
On Gaza, they talk to Israel and oil-rich Arabs—except for Palestinians, who are also Arab.
On Iran, they received valuable Iranian concessions, but didn’t persuade America’s conmander-in-chief to take the win and brag about what he got. Had Trump taken their offer, which include included allowing American oil companies to operate in Iran, it would have helped strengthen his oft-repeated 2016 claim that he would be the “peace president.”
American taxpayers poured vast sums of money, especially since the end of World War II, into developing an extraordinarily sophisticated diplomatic corps that among other accomplishments got us past the Cold War without a nuclear exchange between Moscow and Washington. There’s plenty to criticize about our State Department, but the fact remains that diplomacy is always preferable, and cheaper, than war.
But from this seat-of-the-pants administration, run by amateurs and sycophants, many of them filled with hate, violence is embraced. Donald Trump has been public about how murderous desires since 1989 when he took out full page ads calling for the summary executions of five young men in a Central Park rape case. When evidence showed the five had been falsely accused—released after years in prison, the real perpetrator convicted— Trump doubled down on his call to murder the five.
Official violence is Trumpism in action, be it against American citizens shot to death or grabbed by ICE or an illegal Trump-directed war that on Saturday dropped a bomb on an Iranian school, killing more than 160 girls, teachers and staff.
We should remember that “ACTION IS CHARACTER,” as the great American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in the manuscript for his final novel, The Last Tycoon.
Trump’s lifelong actions violating the law tell you exactly who he is.
Attacking civilians, as American servicemen did this weekend, is the Russian style of warfare, a style that dates at least to the era of the boyars, as Russian aristocrats were called in the old Czarist era. Under the modern Czar, Vladimir Putin, Russia has repeatedly launched missiles against Ukrainian hospitals, schools, and other civilian facilitates that no civilized nation, no democratic nation, should or would tolerate from its leaders.
But America, for more than a year, has been not a democracy but a de facto dictatorship run by a convicted career felon who falsely claims that our Constitution empowers him to “do anything I want.”
Indeed, the question on the line now is whether America is indeed a civilized society anymore or just a land of cowards who will tolerate any injustice, any cruelty, and indulge the murderous rage flows from the addled brain of Donald Trump.
Who are we, America?
1. A Diplomatic Off-Ramp Was Rejected Oman’s foreign minister, who mediated the Geneva talks, confirmed that Iran agreed to lower enrichment levels and other major concessions dcreport specifically to give Trump a better deal than Obama’s. Launching strikes after receiving those concessions raises fundamental questions about whether the administration was negotiating in good faith.
2. Campaign Promises Broken Trump repeatedly declared during his 2023–2024 campaign that he would never go to war with Iran, emphasizing his superior negotiating skills as the alternative to military conflict. The strikes directly contradict his “peace president” branding and his promise to end “endless wars.”
3. Amateur Diplomats in a High-Stakes Arena The U.S. side in Geneva was represented by Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff — both from real estate backgrounds with no formal diplomatic training — rather than career State Department professionals. The article argues this sidelined decades of taxpayer-funded institutional expertise.
4. Constitutional War Powers at Issue The military campaign was launched without a congressional declaration of war, raising serious constitutional questions. The article notes that only Congress can declare war, framing the strikes as potentially impeachable offenses, though Republican leadership is unlikely to act.
5. Civilian Casualties Raise Moral Questions U.S. strikes reportedly hit civilian infrastructure including a hospital and a school, with the article reporting over 160 killed at one school alone. The piece draws direct parallels to Russian tactics in Ukraine.
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Not everyone has the right to file—and the timeline is shorter than most families expect.
Losing someone to another person’s negligence is already devastating. Adding a legal process on top of that grief feels impossible, but wrongful death cases exist for a reason—to hold responsible parties accountable and provide some financial stability for the people left behind.
Birmingham is Alabama’s largest city, with a metro area of more than one million people and a history built around manufacturing, healthcare, and transportation. Roads here carry heavy daily traffic, and worksites across the region hold genuine risk.
When those accidents turn fatal, families in the area often reach out to a wrongful death lawyer in Birmingham to understand what options remain before the legal window closes.
Alabama handles this differently from most states. Under Alabama Code Section 6-5-410, only the personal representative of the deceased’s estate can bring a wrongful death claim—not family members filing on their own. That representative acts on behalf of the estate, and any damages recovered are distributed according to the will or state intestacy laws.
In other states, the rules vary. Some allow spouses, children, or parents to file independently. A few extend that right to anyone who can show financial dependency on the person who died.
The death has to be a result of someone else’s negligent, reckless, or intentional conduct. Car crashes, medical malpractice, defective products, workplace accidents—these are the most common scenarios. The National Safety Council reported 224,935 preventable injury deaths in the U.S. in 2021, and many involve negligence that could support a wrongful death claim.
It doesn’t start in a courtroom. Most cases open with an investigation—police reports, medical records, witness statements, and physical evidence. Once that foundation is in place:
In Alabama, the deadline is two years from the date of death. Two years sounds like a long time. It isn’t—especially when the first months are consumed by grief rather than legal research. Courts rarely make exceptions, and filing deadlines vary by state, so families must confirm which statute of limitations applies to their case.
Settlement is far more common than a full trial in wrongful death cases.
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The moment a customer clicks the final button to complete a purchase, a complex and invisible series of events begins within the retail network. Most people experience a brief surge of excitement followed by a sense of anticipation as they wait for their package to arrive at their door. This transition from a digital cart to a physical shipment is the backbone of the modern commerce experience today.
Behind the scenes, a dedicated team of professionals and automated systems work together to ensure that every request is handled with absolute precision and care. There is no room for error when dealing with regulated products that must meet strict legal and safety standards before they ever leave the warehouse. This coordinated effort is what allows a business to maintain a high level of trust with its community.
Understanding the specific steps of the fulfillment process helps to remove the mystery and the anxiety that can sometimes accompany a digital transaction. Every phase of the journey is designed to protect the privacy and the security of the consumer while ensuring a timely arrival. A successful and smooth delivery starts the moment you finalize your THCA online order.
Clear communication, real-time tracking updates, and discreet packaging all play a role in reinforcing that confidence from checkout to doorstep. When each link in the chain functions smoothly, customers are far more likely to return for future purchases and recommend the service to others.
The first stage of the fulfillment cycle involves a rigorous verification of the payment information and the identity of the purchaser. Advanced encryption systems work in real time to ensure that the transaction is secure and that all financial data is protected from unauthorized access. This initial check is a vital safeguard for both the customer and the boutique.
Fraud detection protocols are often running in the background to prevent the use of stolen cards or suspicious account activity within the system. If a transaction flags any concerns, it may undergo a manual review by a staff member to confirm its legitimacy before moving forward. This careful attention to detail protects the integrity of the market and the safety of the shoppers.
Age verification is a non negotiable part of this early phase, as retailers must confirm that the buyer meets all state and local legal requirements. Most platforms use automated databases to verify birth dates against official records to ensure total compliance with hemp regulations. Once these digital checks are complete, the order is officially released to the warehouse floor for the next step.
Once the order is approved, a digital pick ticket is generated and sent to the fulfillment center where the physical inventory is stored. Professional staff members use these lists to locate the exact strains and formats that were selected during the shopping session. This process requires a high level of organization to ensure that every item matches the customer’s request perfectly.
Inventory management systems track the movement of every gram in real time to prevent the accidental sale of items that are no longer in stock. When an item is picked from the shelf, its unique code is scanned into the system to update the counts and maintain accurate data. This technical precision is what allows for a reliable and consistent shopping experience for everyone involved.
Quality control is the final part of the picking phase, as staff members inspect the packaging for any signs of damage or leaks. They ensure that seals are intact and that the labels are clear and easy to read before placing the items into the shipping container. Taking these extra seconds to verify the condition of the goods prevents future returns and customer frustration.
Discretion is a primary priority for any retailer that ships regulated hemp products to residential addresses across the country today. Orders are typically placed in neutral and smell proof secondary packaging that does not reveal any information about the contents of the box. This commitment to privacy ensures that the delivery remains a personal matter for the homeowner.
Regulatory compliance requires that specific documentation be included in every package to prove the legality and the safety of the contents. This often includes a letter to law enforcement and a summary of the laboratory reports that verify the cannabinoid percentages. Having this paperwork readily available protects the consumer during the transportation phase and upon arrival.
Safety standards also dictate that all products must be stored in child resistant containers that meet current industry requirements for security. These sturdy jars and bags are designed to protect the integrity of the flower or concentrates from light and air while keeping them away from curious hands. Professional packaging is the hallmark of a responsible and respected modern brand.
The final stage of the warehouse journey occurs when the package is scanned into the carrier’s network and a unique tracking number is generated. This digital code is the key that allows the customer to monitor the progress of their shipment in real time as it moves toward their city. It provides a level of transparency that is essential for a high quality retail experience.
Automated email or SMS notifications are sent out immediately to inform the shopper that their order has officially left the facility. These alerts include the expected delivery window and links to the carrier’s website for easy access to the latest updates. Knowing exactly where the package is located on the map removes the mystery and the stress of the waiting period.
Reliable logistics partners are selected based on their ability to handle sensitive items with care and to hit their promised timelines consistently. The transition from the storefront to the mail carrier is a critical moment that requires a seamless handoff to ensure a successful conclusion. High standards in shipping are what define the most successful boutiques in the current market.
Recapping the path from the digital checkout to the final delivery shows that every second is accounted for by a professional and dedicated team. It is a structured journey that relies on a combination of advanced technology and meticulous human oversight to reach its goal. Consistency in these phases is what builds a loyal and satisfied customer base over time.
Confidence in the process comes from knowing that your privacy and your safety are being prioritized by the retailer at every turn. From the initial ID check to the neutral shipping box, every detail is designed to make the experience feel simple and secure. A well managed fulfillment system is the sign of a brand that truly values its community.
The final arrival of the package marks the end of a successful logistical cycle that began with a single click in the mountains. Maintaining high standards in every department ensures that the consumer receives exactly what they ordered in perfect condition every time. A clear and reliable path to the door is the foundation of a modern and professional hemp market.
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This morning, U.S. Central Command posted on social media that three service members have been killed in action in Operation Epic Fury and five more are seriously wounded. It continued: “Several others sustained minor shrapnel injuries and concussions—and are in the process of being returned to duty. Major combat operations continue and our response effort is ongoing.”
Democratic leaders reacted to the news with comments like this one by Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA): “My thoughts are with the families of these servicemembers, and their loved ones. And I continue to pray for the safety of every servicemember and the recovery of those wounded in these operations. May God protect our troops.” Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, Mike Waltz—the same man who invited Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg to the Signal chat about striking Yemen—suggested the soldiers’ sacrifice for the country was worthwhile, writing: “Freedom is never free.”
In a phone call with Peter Nicholas and Alexandra Marquez of NBC News, Trump said: “We expect casualties with something like this.” He added: “We have three, but we expect casualties, but in the end it’s going to be a great deal for the world.”
Later today, Trump told the American people: “As one nation we grieve for the true American patriots who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our nation. Even as we continue the righteous mission for which they gave their lives, we pray for the full recovery of the wounded and send our immense love and eternal gratitude to the families of the fallen. And sadly, there will likely be more before it ends. That’s the way it is. Likely be more. But we’ll do everything possible where that won’t be the case. But America will avenge their deaths and deliver the most punishing blow to the terrorists who have waged war against, basically, civilization. They have waged war against civilization itself.”
Trump was hosting a fund raiser at Mar-a-Lago on Friday, as the U.S. offensive began. The New York Times reported last November that tickets for the dinner dance were $1 million apiece. The optics of Trump partying with his rich cronies while American soldiers died is at least partly what is behind the fact that today, “#SendBarron” trended on social media.
Strikes continued today in the Middle East as Israel and the U.S. hit Iran and Iran retaliated against Israel and U.S. bases in the region. Iran-backed Hezbollah militants in Lebanon joined the fight by sending missiles into Israel. Israel responded with an attack on the suburbs of Beirut. Oil prices jumped sharply as traffic through the Strait of Hormuz at the outlet of the Persian Gulf, through which about 20% of the world’s oil passes, dropped almost to a halt.
After yesterday’s euphoria coming from the administration following the first strikes against Iran, today revealed that the administration had not given much thought to whether the strikes were legitimate or what would happen after them. Administration officials did not appear on the Sunday talk shows, relying instead on congressional surrogates. Brian Stelter and Kit Maher reported that journalists have been working around the White House press office, calling Trump directly, and he has been willing to talk.
Trump told NBC News reporters Nicholas and Marquez that he launched the strikes because “They weren’t willing to stop their nuclear research. They weren’t willing to say they will not have a nuclear weapon.” When asked if he would stop the strikes and negotiate, he said: “I don’t know,” but said he would consider it “if they can satisfy us,” adding that “they haven’t been able to.”
Natasha Bertrand, Zachary Cohen, and Jennifer Hansler of CNN reported this evening that briefers from the Pentagon today told congressional staff that Iran had not been planning to attack U.S. forces or bases in the Middle East unless Israel attacked first. Trump administration officials said on Saturday that Iran was planning to strike the U.S. preemptively and thus posed an imminent threat. The briefers said there was no intelligence to support that claim.
Trump seems unclear about the end game of the conflict he has started.
When NBC News reporters Nicholas and Marquez asked him what he hoped to accomplish through the military operation, he said: “There are many outcomes that are good. Number one is decapitating them, getting rid of their whole group of killers and thugs. And there are many, many outcomes. We could do the short version or the longer version.”
He told Michael Scherer of The Atlantic that Iran’s new leadership wants to talk with him and that he will do so, suggesting that he was not, in fact, interested in regime change. “They should have done it sooner, Michael. They could have made a deal. They should’ve done it sooner. They played too cute,” Trump said. But then Trump told Scherer he had confidence that the Iranian people would launch an uprising against the Iranian government.
Kristen Welker of Meet the Press this morning quoted Trump’s statement of yesterday saying “Hopefully, [Iranian troops] and Police will peacefully merge with the Iranian Patriots, and work together as a unit to bring back the Country to the Greatness it deserves.”
Then Welker asked her guest, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), “Is ‘hope’ the plan for the future of Iran?” Graham said: “No, the future of Iran is going to be determined by the Iranian people. The new Iran, whatever it is…our goal is to make sure it cannot become again the largest state sponsor of terrorism.” Welker responded: “But is there a plan to make sure that happens…does the president have a plan to guarantee that that happens?” Graham responded with some heat: “No. It’s not his job or my job to do this.”
Apparently, U.S. officials simply hoped the Iranian people would seize the government if their leaders were killed in airstrikes. But there was a line of succession, and the country’s police state remains in place. Erin Banco of Reuters reported yesterday that before the attacks, analysts for the Central Intelligence Agency assessed that if Iran’s 86-year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei were killed, younger hard-line men could replace him.
Trump told Zolan Kanno-Youngs, David E. Sanger, and Tyler Pager of the New York Times that he intends to keep bombing Iran for “four to five weeks” if necessary. He spoke repeatedly of an outcome like that of Venezuela, in which the U.S. removed the top leader but left the rest of the government intact. Trump told the reporters he hoped Iran’s military forces would turn over their weapons to the Iranian people. “They would really surrender to the people, if you think about it,” he said.
The New York Times reporters note that the security forces he says should surrender to the people were the ones that killed thousands of protesters in January. Trump refused to say that the administration would defend the Iranian people if they did rise up.
ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl spoke to Trump tonight and posted: “Pres Trump told me tonight the US had identified possible candidates to take over Iran, but they were killed in the initial attack. ‘The attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates,’ Trump told me. ‘It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.’”
In the midst of today’s military operation and all his calls with reporters, Trump took to social media to repost more than 40 social media posts with over-the-top praise for his State of the Union address. The posts appeared to be curated, suggesting that someone is feeding him praise.
National security scholar Tom Nichols posted on social media: “People predicting disaster: The odds are in your favor, but you cannot be sure, and you should not hope to be right. People celebrating: Maybe wanna wait a bit. The odds, historically, are definitely not on your side. Anyone certain they know what happens next is making it up.”
—
Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/us/politics/trump-super-pac-fundraisers.html
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/global-markets-global-markets-2026-03-01/
https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/03/trump-iran-attack-negotiations/686201/
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/03/01/iran-uprising-trump-khamenei-regime-change-00806179
https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/01/media/trump-iran-media-sunday-shows-white-house
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/01/us/politics/trump-iran-war-interview.html
X:
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jonkarl/status/2028299468223676673
Bluesky:
schiff.senate.gov/post/3mfzbsnaz2s2d
meidastouch.com/post/3mfzb24wsic2v
atrupar.com/post/3mfzootkwyk2t
meidastouch.com/post/3mfz4hmk2ks2a
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It’s hard to tell what drives each human. This is why my usual last interview question is a very blunt, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I ask everyone regardless of the amount of experience because I want to see how they improvise and, often, a hint at their motivation.
I usually have a working thesis by the time we arrive at this final question. Ah, this person is motivated by accomplishment, great. Oh, this is a money person — that’s fine, coin-operated humans are very predictable, I find. Uh oh, I have no idea what motivates this person… dig more.
The need to understand motivation is required because your job as a leader is build a successful team that is full of individuals who want stuff. Compensation, opportunities, or just a quiet place to build. Understanding what they want is the start of understanding how to motivate them. If you don’t understand drive, you have nowhere to start.
While you figure that out, let me alert you to three drives that are going to consume a disproportionate amount of your time, frustrate your engineers, and erode your leadership credibility.
These humans like to fix stuff. The drive starts with the observation that a part of the system, product, or process is broken. Some credible engineers fear finding this brokenness, and then some light up because they now have a time to shine — let’s fix it!
Except they are The Complicator.
Sigh.
Let’s start with the positives.
… except they never finish.
The Complicator challenge: they love the solving part, but not the fixing part. Their desire to tinker exceeds the need to fix. What if I do this? Oh interesting. Flip that switch. Well, that’s delightful. I will flip that switch again.
Complicators create immense piles of mostly interesting stuff. Complicators will describe this stuff to you endlessly in detail — it’s almost as fun to talk about it as it is to tinker. Complicators might sound like they are close to a fix, but what you are hearing is their enthusiasm about this next tinker. When pressed for a timeline for a solution, the Complicator will firehose you with seemingly endless stuff they’ve tried and the near infinite ideas they have to try next. You will leave this conversation confused, but they will leave the conversation fulfilled.
The Complicator needs:
When I see a Complicator spinning up the complexity, I find an operational human who can pair with them. Entropy Crushers are amazing at this and eat Complicators for breakfast.
These humans crave energy. They trade in it. It starts down the hallway or in the Slack channel, where they discover a secret. What’s the secret? I don’t know, it’s a secret. With this secret in hand, these humans take the secret to a very specific set of people. Humans who:
Sigh.
Let’s start with the positives:
You are a manager in this scenario, and part of the management role is that you both have access to more information and a responsibility to share that information appropriately with your team. You will screw this up. The most common scenario is you are given Information X. You stare at Information X and determine “Not that important, actually,” and because of this perceived low importance, you forget to share at your next staff meeting.
The core issue: your quick assessment was correct, given the information you have at your fingertips. The issue is that when paired with other readily available information not in your line of sight, it is clear your assessment is wrong — horribly wrong1.
Most of your team can intuitively sense information vacuums. It’s that slight eyebrow raise when the story… kind’a… doesn’t make sense. Some of them raise their eyebrow and move on, but not the Drama Aggregators. They sense the mystery, the intrigue. In fact, they already have a leading unsubstantiated theory why this information vacuum exists, AND BOY IT’S JUICY.
Sigh.
Drama Aggregators need:
Yes. My snark is high with the Drama Aggregators. I’m working hard as I write this to shine a light on the positives, but when I find myself stumbling into a Drama Aggregated situation, my first unspoken thought is, “Don’t we have better things to do with our time?” If this situation is a result of a failure on my part1, fine, I’ll take the hit, but when I discover the Drama, dig in, and find the swirl of noise, murky information, and emotion has no basis in fact, I’m furious frustrated. My average work day already has plenty of real firefighting, so why am I not putting out fake fires? At least the Complicator is doing something useful by trying to fix the problem.
I’ve hit that footnote1 four times now, so you know the practice. It’s not going to eliminate the Drama Aggregators’ need for energy, but a strategy of overcommunication will fill information gaps. The reduction in these vacuums reduces targets for Drama Aggregators. Also, when they invariably spin up a High Drama regardless of your hard work, you can point at your communication furiously and remind everyone, there is little drama here.
Lenny. Good engineering manager. We’ve been working together for over a year. We are built differently, so we stare at each other strangely now and then, but everyone is an adjustment. No issue here.
Year two of our working relationship, my staff meeting. I’ve identified a non-urgent, but long-term, important effort that one of my managers needs to drive. I clearly state the requirements and ask for volunteers.
Silence. Not surprised. We’ve all got enough work on our hands with Complicators making it complicated and Drama Aggregators viciously building unnecessary fires. I get it. However, if we don’t do my project, then we’re creating future avoidable pain for ourselves, so I say that — clearly — and ask for volunteers again.
Silence.
And then it hits me. Lenny has never signed up for anything. Lenny is working; he has a team full of engineers who are doing well, but when it comes to work outside of his clearly defined responsibilities, he doesn’t show up. So, after 30 seconds of silence, I give him the task. He squints, nods noncommittally, and a week later has stealthily reassigned the task to one of his peers.
Oh. The Avoider.
Let’s start with the positives. These humans:
Of our three archetypes, The Avoider is the least a character attribute and also the easiest for you to address. Yes, they like working in their well-defined box that is their team or their product. “Not my problem.” Yes, like you, they do not like being told what to do; they prefer to be asked, but in this situation, the Avoiders don’t know what you are talking about.
In a healthy team, your team assumes your competence. This means when you say, “We should do X,” there are those sitting around the able, who don’t give X much thought; they assume, “Well, he knows, so let’s go.” I’m not talking about sycophants, I’m talking about teams who trust their leaders.
The challenge is that you start to get comfortable with people agreeing with you, so you do less work to frame your thinking. Your thought, they’ll figure it out, right?And sometimes you’re right, but sometimes this comfort turns into laziness. Your request isn’t a request; it’s a half-thought motivated by recency bias, and The Avoider has seen this before. No, thanks.
There are Evil Variants2 of all of these archetypes, and a serial Avoider is one of them, but my working assumption for all of the non-evil variants is that they want to help. It’d be helpful if The Avoider requested clarification as opposed to avoiding, but he’s seen this trick before, and he’s not interested in wasting his or his team’s time in an effort he does not understand.
I had the robots run through the 900+ articles on this blog, asking the question, “How many labels for humans have I generated?” From 2002, there have been 90+ labels in 14 different categories3. To me, it started in 2003 with the Incrementalists and Completionists article. That work struck a nerve.
Each of these labels is distinct in my head. They all started as an observation of another human, but I wasn’t seeing the entire human — it was this one habit. Characteristic. Behavior. The reduction to a colorful label makes understanding the situation approachable. Yes, The Old Guard. I know these people.
While mentally digestible, labels have historically bugged me for two reasons. First, they reduce a human to a label. This is the point of the label: to provide a name to the behavior, but when leading humans, there are no labels. Humans are complex. Humans feature sets of hard-to-predict behaviors that, when combined with other humans, only become more unpredictable. My labels might help a bit to understand one behavior, but the real work begins by stepping back and seeing the entirety of the human.
Second, and I haven’t reread all the personality articles over the years, but my impression is that my label schtick often conveys they are the problem. Sorry, as a manager, you don’t get to blame others on your team. It’s your fault. Yes, evil exists. Humans who are inexplicably hostile to the project or you. Who are acting purely in their self-interest. Who lie. Who deceives. You are accountable for all of them.
To understand motivation, you must understand drive. I wish all of these drives were productive and positive, but many are not. My discomfort with these drives is not an excuse to ignore them; in fact, they signal when I am required to do my most important work.
Apple Newsroom:
Apple today announced iPhone 17e, a powerful and more affordable addition to the iPhone 17 lineup. At the heart of iPhone 17e is the latest-generation A19, which delivers exceptional performance for everything users do. iPhone 17e also features C1X, the latest-generation cellular modem designed by Apple, which is up to 2× faster than C1 in iPhone 16e. The 48MP Fusion camera captures stunning photos, including next-generation portraits, and 4K Dolby Vision video. It also enables an optical-quality 2× Telephoto — like having two cameras in one. The 6.1-inch Super Retina XDR display features Ceramic Shield 2, offering 3× better scratch resistance than the previous generation and reduced glare. With MagSafe, users can enjoy fast wireless charging and access to a vast ecosystem of accessories like chargers and cases. And when iPhone 17e users are outside of cellular and Wi-Fi coverage, Apple’s groundbreaking satellite features — including Emergency SOS, Roadside Assistance, Messages, and Find My via satellite — help them stay connected when it matters most.
Available in three elegant colors with a premium matte finish — black, white, and a beautiful new soft pink — iPhone 17e will be available for pre-order beginning Wednesday, March 4, with availability starting Wednesday, March 11. iPhone 17e will start at 256GB of storage for $599 — 2× the entry storage from the previous generation at the same starting price, and 4× more than iPhone 12 — giving users more space for high-resolution photos, 4K videos, apps, games, and more.
The main year-over-year changes from the 16e:
That’s about it. Here’s a preset version of Apple’s iPhone Compare page with the iPhone 17, 17e, and 16e.
The Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is once again planning its long-running summer school in Economic Theory (which was skipped last year, amidst war with Iran...)
The 35th Advanced School in Economic Theory - Recent Developments in Economic Theory
Sun, 28/06/2026 to Tue, 07/07/2026
General Director: Eric Maskin, Harvard University
Director: Elchanan Ben- Porath, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Speakers
Itai Ashlagi, Stanford University
Elchanan Ben- Porath, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Ben Brooks, The University of Chicago
Marina Halac, Yale University
Eric Maskin, Harvard University
Abraham Neyman, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Bruno Strulovici, Northwestern University
Omer Tamuz, Caltech
Alexander Wolitzky, MIT
"This year’s School features some of the most exciting recent results in economic theory presented by the researchers who discovered them "
My latest paper, Chaos and Misallocation under Price Controls, (with Brian Albrecht and Mark Whitmeyer) has a new take on price controls:
Price controls kill the incentive for arbitrage. We prove a Chaos Theorem: under a binding price ceiling, suppliers are indifferent across destinations, so arbitrarily small cost differences can determine the entire allocation. The economy tips to corner outcomes in which some markets are fully served while others are starved; small parameter changes flip the identity of the corners, generating discontinuous welfare jumps. These corner allocations create a distinct source of cross-market misallocation, separate from the aggregate quantity loss (the Harberger triangle) and from within-market misallocation emphasized in prior work. They also create an identification problem: welfare depends on demand far from the observed equilibrium. We derive sharp bounds on misallocation that require no parametric assumptions. In an efficient allocation, shadow prices are equalized across markets; combined with the adding-up constraint, this collapses the infinite-dimensional welfare problem to a one-dimensional search over a common shadow price, with extremal losses achieved by piecewise-linear demand schedules. Calibrating the bounds to stationlevel AAA survey data from the 1973–74 U.S. gasoline crisis, misallocation losses range from roughly 1 to 9 times the Harberger triangle.
Brian has a superb write up that makes the paper very accessible. Unfortunately, the paper is timely and relevant.
The post Chaos and Misallocation under Price Controls appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Why Ilya Repin’s masterpiece of Ivan the Terrible, first banned in 1885, remains one of Russia’s most controversial paintings
- by Aeon Video
A prominent architect of decolonial theory, his diagnosis of European colonial ills is both penetrating and flawed
- by Federico Perelmuter
The European Space Agency announced up to $118 million in funding March 2 for projects promising to accelerate the convergence of satellite and terrestrial communications.
The post ESA announces 100 million euro satellite-mobile convergence initiative appeared first on SpaceNews.
NASA has provided new details about its plans to procure a Mars communications orbiter funded under last year’s budget reconciliation bill as companies continue positioning themselves to bid on it.
The post NASA outlines objectives for Mars communications orbiter appeared first on SpaceNews.
Open Cosmos shed more light on its proposed sovereign broadband constellation for Europe March 2, branding the Ka-band network ConnectedCosmos while leaving how it will meet mid-2026 deployment deadlines in the dark.
The post Open Cosmos unveils vision for imagery-linked sovereign satellite connectivity appeared first on SpaceNews.
Today’s Picture of the Week, taken with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), seems to have captured a cosmic hawk as it spans its wings. While the dark clouds in the middle of the image make up the head and body of the bird of prey, the filaments extending away from the body to the left and right compose its wings. Below it, is a mesmerising blue nebula with massive newly born stars, whose intense radiation make the gas around them glow brightly.
Altogether the image shows the RCW 36 nebula, located about 2300 light-years away in the Vela constellation. Coincidently, this nebula, resembling a hawk, was also captured by a hawk — the HAWK-I instrument on the VLT. While the most apparent stars in this image may be the massive and bright baby stars, the astronomers behind this image are actually more interested in hidden, very dim stars called brown dwarfs — “objects unable to fuse hydrogen in their cores,” explains Afonso do Brito do Vale, a PhD student at the Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço, Portugal, and the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Bordeaux, France, and lead author of a new paper where this image was presented.
HAWK-I is perfectly suited for this task. It observes at infrared wavelengths, where these cold failed stars are more easily spotted, and it can correct atmospheric turbulence with adaptive optics, delivering sharp images like this one. Besides providing invaluable data to understand how brown dwarfs form, the study produced a striking image of “massive stars ‘pushing’ away the clouds of gas and dust around them almost like an animal breaking through its eggshell for the first time,” as do Brito do Vale describes. Who knows, perhaps the cosmic hawk is guarding his baby stars — watching over them as they “hatch”.
Since the 1970s, planetary geologists have known that volcanic features cover large swaths of Mars. Early Mariner 9 images revealed massive shield volcanoes and lava plains on a scale unlike anything on Earth. Olympus Mons, the tallest volcano in the solar system, stands nearly three times higher than Mount Everest. Alba Mons, the planet’s widest volcano, spans a distance comparable to the length of the continental United States.
Both Olympus Mons and Alba Mons were primarily built by basaltic effusive eruptions—relatively calm outpourings of “runny” lavas that spread across the surface in sheets. This is thought to be the most common type of volcanism on Mars, accounting for the vast majority of its volcanic landforms. However, a small portion was produced by explosive volcanism of the sort that forms volcanic cones, pyroclastic flows, and ashfalls.
The dearth of explosive volcanic features on Mars has long puzzled geologists. With an average atmospheric pressure 160 times lower than Earth’s and only a third of the gravity, explosive eruptions should theoretically occur more easily on the Red Planet, said Petr Brož, a planetary geologist with the Czech Academy of Sciences. That rarity is part of what makes features like the volcanic cones (shown above) found in Mars’ Ulysses Colles region so compelling to planetary geologists.
“They appear to be scoria cones—a clear sign of explosive volcanism,” Brož added. “They were the first identified in the Tharsis region in the 2010s, and they helped paint a broader and more complete picture of Martian volcanism.”
The CTX (Context Camera) on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured this image (second image above) of Ulysses Colles above on May 7, 2014. Ulysses Colles is located at the southern edge of Ulysses Fossae, a group of troughs within the Tharsis volcanic region.
The OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 captured an image with similar cones in the San Francisco Volcanic Field (SFVF) in northern Arizona on June 19, 2025 (top). Planetary geologists consider the cones in the two locations to be highly analogous. Both images also include grabens—linear blocks of crust that have shifted downward.
In both images, the scoria cones appear as rounded hills crowned with circular vents, while lava flows spread outward as dark, textured areas around the bases of the cones. At both locations, seemingly younger and smaller lava flows appear to spill from some cones, while older, more weathered flows lie in the background.
“Understanding similar features on Earth helps us know what to look for on Mars and interpret processes that we can’t observe directly,” said Patrick Whelley, a NASA volcanologist who is part of a team that develops field equipment and techniques for Moon and Mars exploration.
SP Crater (above left), located in Arizona’s San Francisco Volcanic Field, features a 7-kilometer-long lava flow that extends northward and has been used for NASA astronaut geology training. In two places, the flow has spilled into a graben, creating a distinctive half-moon pattern along its left side.
On Earth, scoria cones form when gas-rich magmas soar high into the air and solidify into small particles of material called scoria that accumulate in steep-sided structures. While similar processes create cones on Earth and Mars, there are important differences. Martian scoria cones are typically taller, wider, and have gentler slopes, Flynn said. That makes sense. With lower gravity and atmospheric pressure, volcanic fountains can loft erupted magma higher and farther from the vent, producing larger cones.
There are far more scoria cones on Earth, where tens of thousands exist and account for about 90 percent of volcanoes on land. On Mars, “we have only identified tens to a few hundred candidates,” Broz said. It could be that explosive volcanism was never common on Mars, or it could be that it was but that explosive features have been covered up by younger, effusive flows or destroyed by erosion, he added.
Whelley noted that on Mars, it remains unclear whether the Martian lava flows or the scoria cones formed first. The lava flow could be older, with the cone forming on top. Or, the cone may have formed first and later become plugged, forcing lava to spill from its side. Determining the order of events is one of the “puzzles of geology” that planetary geologists try to solve when studying Martian features remotely, he said. “Visiting places like the San Francisco Volcanic Field and studying the geology of analogous features up close on Earth helps us know what clues to look for when interpreting Martian geology.”
Below (left) is a closer view of a scoria cone on Earth, southeast of SP Crater, called Sunset Crater. It erupted about 800 years ago, making it the youngest scoria cone in the San Francisco Volcanic Field. The analogous cone in Ulysses Colles (right), in contrast, is thought to be billions of years old.
Note that eruptions that create scoria cones are “mildly explosive,” usually Strombolian events, characterized by intermittent lava fountains, said Ian Flynn, a planetary geologist at the University of Pittsburgh. They differ from the far more violent explosive eruptions that send ash columns billowing tens of kilometers into the air, as happened at Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai in the South Pacific, he added.
Mars also shows evidence of highly explosive “super eruptions,” but that type of eruption leaves behind a different geologic signature: large depressions called paterae and broad, thin deposits of ash and other erodible material sculpted into landforms such as yardangs.
Planetary comparison is valuable for understanding the geology of distant worlds, Brož said. Without such comparisons, it becomes harder to determine how landforms on other planets or moons may have formed at all.
But caution is essential. “In planetary science, it’s often said—only half-jokingly—that even if something looks like a duck, behaves like a duck, and sounds like a duck, it may not actually be a duck,” he added. It’s easy, for instance, to confuse scoria cones with mud volcanoes.
Researchers are highly confident that the Ulysses Colles cones formed through explosive volcanism based on the surrounding volcanic landscape, but in more ambiguous terrain it can be difficult to tell. Mars is fundamentally different from Earth, he cautioned. Brož’s laboratory research suggests, for instance, that mud flows on Mars can look much like certain types of lava flows, and that, under certain conditions, they can even boil and levitate. “We also have to avoid being constrained by terrestrial experience,” he said. “If we fail to think outside the box, we may overlook important possibilities.”
NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey and CTX data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Story by Adam Voiland.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
The volcano on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula continues to erupt after centuries of quiescence.
The volcano in Hawaii is one of the most active in the world, and NASA tech makes it easier for…
The Tongan volcano expanded its mid-Pacific real estate during its latest eruptive phase.
The post Scoria Cones on Earth and Mars appeared first on NASA Science.
Numerous nations in the Middle East are being pulled into the current conflict and have received missile attacks from Iran. I believe the proper Bayesian update is that Brazil is underrated.
The country has plenty of water, and lots of capacity to grow its own food. It is an agricultural powerhouse. It is developing more and more fossil fuels. No neighbor or near neighbor dares threaten it. You cannot imagine conquering it, because even the government of Brazil has not conquered its own country.
It is big enough that even the United States can push it around to only a limited degree.
Crime rates are high, but on the up side that gives the place a certain resiliency. People are used to bad events, and society is structured accordingly. You cannot write of “Brazil falling into dystopia” without generating a laugh.
If immigration bothers you (not my view), Brazil and Brazilian culture is not going to be swamped by people coming from somewhere else. For better or worse.
Brazil has “stayed Brazil” through both democracy and autocracy.
Worth a ponder. Here is an FT piece on “Brazil’s Dubai.”
The post Brazil is underrated appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Some observations and comments on Trump and Israel’s war on Iran:
1. Tehran is not looking for a ceasefire and has rejected outreach from Trump. The reason is that they believe they committed a mistake by agreeing to the ceasefire in June – it only enabled the US and Israel to restock and remobilize to launch war again. If they agree to a ceasefire now, they will only be attacked again in a few months.
2. For a ceasefire to be acceptable, it appears difficult for Tehran to agree to it until the cost to the US has become much higher than it currently is. Otherwise, the US will restart the war at a later point, the calculation reads.
3. Accordingly, Iran has shifted its strategy. It is striking Israel, but very differently from the June war. There is a constant level of attack throughout the day rather than a salvo of 50 missiles at once. Damage will be less, but that isn’t a problem because Tehran has concluded that Israel’s pain tolerance is very high – as long as the US stays in the war. So the focus shifts to the US.
4. From the outset, and perhaps surprisingly, Iran has been targeting US bases in the region, including against friendly states. Tehran calculates that the war can only end durably if the cost for the US rises dramatically, including American casualties. After the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran says it has no red lines left and will go all out in seeking the destruction of these bases and high American casualties.
5. Iran understands that many in the American security establishment had been convinced that Iran’s past restraint reflected weakness and an inability or unwillingness to face the US in a direct war. Tehran is now doing everything it can to demonstrate the opposite – despite the massive cost it itself will pay. Ironically, the assassination of Khamenei facilitated this shift.
6. One aspect of this is that Iran has now also struck bases in Cyprus, which have been used for attacks against Iran. Iran is well aware that this is an attack on a EU state. But that seems to be the point. Tehran appears intent on not only expanding the war into Persian Gulf states but also into Europe. Note the attack on the French base in the UAE. For the war to be able to end, Europe too has to pay a cost, the reasoning appears to be.
7. There appears to be only limited concern about the internal situation. The announcement of Khamenei’s death opened a window for people to pour onto the streets and seek to overthrow the regime. Though expressions of joy were widespread, no real mobilization was seen. That window is now closing, as the theocratic system closes ranks and establishes new formal leadership.
Again: The question “How will this end?” should have been asked before this war was triggered. It wasn’t.
That is from Trita Parsi, via B. Note that some people consider Parsi a biased source (not sufficiently anti-Iran?), in any case it is worth pondering how other parties may view the current situation.
The post One view of Iranian strategy appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Market Design
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