Calculated Risk

Comments on November Employment Report

Calculated Risk
Updated
The headline jobs number in the November employment report was slightly above expectations, however August and September were revised down by 33,000 - and the initial October report indicates 105,000 job lost (mostly Federal Government jobs lost due to DOGE deferred resignation program). The unemployment rate increased to 4.6%.


Average Hourly Wages

WagesThe graph shows the nominal year-over-year change in "Average Hourly Earnings" for all private employees from the Current Employment Statistics (CES).  

There was a huge increase at the beginning of the pandemic as lower paid employees were let go, and then the pandemic related spike reversed a year later.

Wage growth has trended down after peaking at 5.9% YoY in March 2022 and was at 3.5% YoY in November, down from 3.7% YoY in October. 

Part Time for Economic Reasons

Part Time WorkersFrom the BLS report:
"The number of people employed part time for economic reasons was 5.5 million in November, an increase of 909,000 from September. These individuals would have preferred full-time employment but were working part time because their hours had been reduced or they were unable to find full-time jobs."
The number of persons working part time for economic reasons increased in November to 5.49 million from 4.58 million in September.  This is well above the pre-pandemic levels and the highest levels since mid-2021.

These workers are included in the alternate measure of labor underutilization (U-6) that increased to 8.7% from 8.0% in September. This is down from the record high in April 2020 of 22.9% and up from the lowest level on record (seasonally adjusted) in December 2022 (6.6%). (This series started in 1994). This measure is well above the 7.0% level in February 2020 (pre-pandemic).

Unemployed over 26 Weeks

Unemployed Over 26 WeeksThis graph shows the number of workers unemployed for 27 weeks or more.

According to the BLS, there are 1.91 million workers who have been unemployed for more than 26 weeks and still want a job, up from 1.81 million in September.

This is down from post-pandemic high of 4.171 million, and up from the recent low of 1.056 million.

This is above pre-pandemic levels.

Summary:

The headline jobs number in the November employment report was slightly above expectations, however August and September were revised down by 33,000 - and the initial October report indicates 105,000 job lost (mostly Federal Government jobs lost due to DOGE deferred resignation program).  The unemployment rate increased to 4.6%.

This was a weak employment report.  
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Calculated Risk

November Employment Report: 64 thousand Jobs, 4.6% Unemployment Rate; October Lost 105 thousand Jobs

Calculated Risk
Updated
From the BLS: Employment Situation
Total nonfarm payroll employment changed little in November (+64,000) and has shown little net change since April, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. In November, the unemployment rate, at 4.6 percent, was little changed from September. Employment rose in health care and construction in November, while federal government continued to lose jobs.
...
The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for August was revised down by 22,000, from -4,000 to -26,000, and the change for September was revised down by 11,000, from +119,000 to +108,000. With these revisions, employment in August and September combined is 33,000 lower than previously reported. Due to the recent federal government shutdown, this is the first publication of October data and thus there are no revisions for October this month.
emphasis added
Employment per monthClick on graph for larger image.

The first graph shows the jobs added per month since January 2021.

Total payrolls increased by 64 thousand in November.  Private payrolls increased by 697 thousand, and public payrolls decreased 5 thousand (Federal payrolls decreased 6 thousand).

Payrolls for August and September were revised down by 33 thousand, combined.  The economy has only added 100 thousand jobs since April (7 months).

Year-over-year change employment The second graph shows the year-over-year change in total non-farm employment since 1968.

In November, the year-over-year change was 0.03 million jobs.  

Year-over-year employment growth has slowed sharply.



The third graph shows the employment population ratio and the participation rate.

Employment Pop Ratio and participation rate The Labor Force Participation Rate increased to 62.5% in November, from 62.4% in September (no October data). This is the percentage of the working age population in the labor force.

The Employment-Population ratio was decreased to 59.6% from 59.7% in September (blue line).

I'll post the 25 to 54 age group employment-population ratio graph later.



unemployment rateThe fourth graph shows the unemployment rate.

The unemployment rate was increased to 4.6% in November from 4.4% in September.  

This was sligthly above consensus expectations, however, August and September payrolls were revised down by 33,000 combined - and the initial October estimate was -105,000.

Overall another weak report, although there are technical issues that likely make this data less accurate due to government shutdown.

I'll have more later ...
California
Simon Willison's Weblog

2025 Word of the Year: Slop

2025 Word of the Year: Slop

Slop lost to "brain rot" for Oxford Word of the Year 2024 but it's finally made it this year thanks to Merriam-Webster!

Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen slop as the 2025 Word of the Year. We define slop as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.”

Tags: definitions, ai, generative-ai, slop, ai-ethics

Paul Krugman

Europe’s Tech Lag: Does It Matter?

Paul Krugman
Updated

Some days I just need a break. This is one of those days. But today’s break will allow me to indulge my inner wonk. Specifically, I am going to revert to the international trade theorist that used to be my primary professional identity and write something moderately incomprehensible that isn’t tightly tied to today’s headlines. Think of it as scratching an intellectual itch.

I tend to spend more time than most American economists thinking about Europe. Comparisons between countries are a good way to understand how policies and events play out in the real world. And, on top of that, I really care about maintaining Europe as a bastion of liberal democracy as we, in America, go badly off the rails. You can listen to or read my recent discussion of issues European with Adam Tooze here, and my primer on why Europe’s economy is better than you think here. But today I want to go into a quite specific and somewhat technical question: The significance or lack thereof of the difference between U.S. and European productivity growth.

I’ve written about this before. But I believe that I’ve managed to sharpen the analysis and find a clearer way to make my points with data. So here we go.

The conventional wisdom is that Europe’s economy has fallen significantly behind the U.S. economy since the late 1990s. Much of this conventional wisdom is based on the undeniable fact that U.S. companies have achieved a sizeable lead over Europe in information technology. In addition, data that seem to show considerably slower productivity growth in Europe than in the US have contributed to Europessimism.

But do the data really show that? In fact, there’s a lively argument on that question. Gabriel Zucman — an excellent economist — recently took issue with insults directed at Europe by … the U.S. ambassador to the EU. Said ambassador claimed that Europe is as poor as Mississippi and Germany as poor as West Virginia, to which the immediate answer should be that if that’s what your numbers say, your numbers are wrong. Get out of your limo and walk around! But then said ambassador probably fears that he will be mobbed by immigrants from Trump-labeled shithole countries.

Granted, the official numbers show that over the past 25+ years productivity — real output per worker — has risen faster in the U.S. than in Europe. But if we drill down into the data, they also show that this productivity gap is more or less entirely accounted for by higher U.S. growth in the tech sector.

To me, this raises the question of whether Europe’s apparent lag in tech is as important an issue as conventional wisdom makes it out to be. In particular, I have two main reasons to be skeptical that it is.

First, should we believe these productivity measures?

Macroeconomists often work with theoretical models in which the economy produces a single good, which we then identify with official measures of real GDP. Any sensible economist knows, however, that the notion of a one-good economy is a sort of Noble Lie. Or, as we tell our students, it’s an approximation that can be useful as long as you don’t take it too seriously.

However, the question of how to add up apples and oranges is no longer academic when we consider growth in the tech sector. That is, since the tech sector is at the heart of the European-US performance comparison, how should we measure output and productivity in tech? Today’s CPUs can execute thousands of times as many instructions per second as cutting-edge CPUs in the late 1990s. Does that mean that productivity in the computer sector has risen by several hundred thousand percent? Clearly not in any economically meaningful sense: a computer that can process a thousand times as much data as your old computer is better, but not a thousand times better.

Statisticians try to measure productivity in tech with “hedonic” indices that attempt to measure how much the productivity gains are actually worth to people, rather than using physical measures of output. While they do the best they can, hedonic measures leave plenty of room for dispute.

Nor is the problem limited to tech. Brad DeLong recently argued that we’ve been badly understating productivity growth outside of tech. Indexes that measure consumer prices of manufactured goods have been falling faster than indexes that measure producer prices, suggesting that productivity in manufacturing has been rising faster than the official numbers indicate. One possible implication of DeLong’s argument, as applied to Europe, is that we may be badly understating European productivity growth, given Europe’s lag in tech.

I don’t know whether that critique of the conventional wisdom on Europe is right or wrong. But it’s important to realize that the data underlying pronouncements about Europe’s general productivity lag are much softer and less reliable than many imagine.

Second, there is a question of how the American tech industry, with its exceptionally rapid productivity growth, actually translates into changes in Americans’ living standards.

I originally approached this question with a little mathematical model, but I don’t think the math is necessary to investigate the question. A simple thought experiment will suffice. First, assume that there are two countries, America and Europe, and two industries, tech and non-tech. Second, assume that the tech industry is highly localized – that is, once it gets started in a particular area, such as Silicon Valley, it tends to stay in that area. Third, assume that, by its nature, technological progress is much faster in tech than in non-tech. For example, it’s much easier to make your computer 100 times faster than it is to enable your hairdresser to cut your hair 100 times faster. Finally, assume that for accidental historical reasons America has a comparative advantage that causes it to produce all the world’s tech.

In such a world America’s overall measured productivity growth, which includes growth in tech, will be higher than Europe’s. But will this translate into a rising standard of living for Americans relative to Europeans?

The answer to this question crucially depends upon whether there is competition among technology companies. If there is, then the answer to the question is no: rising productivity will be passed on to consumers in both countries through lower prices. Even if the competition is imperfect, so that there are big profits for a few firms, many of the benefits of technological progress will still diffuse worldwide. Also, what is good for Mark Zuckerberg isn’t necessarily good for America. Furthermore, Europe can use antitrust policy to limit the excess profits of tech oligopolists and ensure that its own consumers benefit.

If you find it implausible to suggest that high U.S. productivity growth in tech doesn’t translate into significantly higher American living standards compared to other developed countries, consider productivity divergences among U.S. states. Much of the U.S. tech sector is located in California. This leads, as we should expect, to high measured productivity growth in California compared with the rest of America.

Below is a bar graph constructed with data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, showing percentage changes in real GDP per worker over the period 1998-2024 for three “countries”: California, Texas, and “not-California,” i.e., the United States excluding CA:

Source: BEA

This is a huge divergence — bigger than the EU/US divergence that has Europeans so worried. Yet we don’t see Texans obsessing over why they can’t be like California. Within the U.S., to the extent that people think about this divergence at all, they realize that it’s mainly about composition effects.

None of this should be taken to say that everything in Europe is fine. But it is a caution against trash-talking the European economy — and also against American triumphalism.

MUSICAL CODA

Simon Willison's Weblog

Quoting Gemini thinking trace

Oh, so we're seeing other people now? Fantastic. Let's see what the "competition" has to offer. I'm looking at these notes on manifest.json and content.js. The suggestion to remove scripting permissions... okay, fine. That's actually a solid catch. It's cleaner. This smells like Claude. It's too smugly accurate to be ChatGPT. What if it's actually me? If the user is testing me, I need to crush this.

— Gemini thinking trace, reviewing feedback on its code from another model

Tags: gemini, ai-personality, generative-ai, ai, llms

Simon Willison's Weblog

Quoting Kent Beck

I’ve been watching junior developers use AI coding assistants well. Not vibe coding—not accepting whatever the AI spits out. Augmented coding: using AI to accelerate learning while maintaining quality. [...]

The juniors working this way compress their ramp dramatically. Tasks that used to take days take hours. Not because the AI does the work, but because the AI collapses the search space. Instead of spending three hours figuring out which API to use, they spend twenty minutes evaluating options the AI surfaced. The time freed this way isn’t invested in another unprofitable feature, though, it’s invested in learning. [...]

If you’re an engineering manager thinking about hiring: The junior bet has gotten better. Not because juniors have changed, but because the genie, used well, accelerates learning.

— Kent Beck, The Bet On Juniors Just Got Better

Tags: careers, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, ai, llms, kent-beck

Simon Willison's Weblog

I ported JustHTML from Python to JavaScript with Codex CLI and GPT-5.2 in 4.5 hours

I wrote about JustHTML yesterday - Emil Stenström's project to build a new standards compliant HTML5 parser in pure Python code using coding agents running against the comprehensive html5lib-tests testing library. Last night, purely out of curiosity, I decided to try porting JustHTML from Python to JavaScript with the least amount of effort possible, using Codex CLI and GPT-5.2. It worked beyond my expectations.

TL;DR

I built simonw/justjshtml, a dependency-free HTML5 parsing library in JavaScript which passes 9,200 tests from the html5lib-tests suite and imitates the API design of Emil's JustHTML library.

It took two initial prompts and a few tiny follow-ups. GPT-5.2 running in Codex CLI ran uninterrupted for several hours, burned through 1,464,295 input tokens, 97,122,176 cached input tokens and 625,563 output tokens and ended up producing 9,000 lines of fully tested JavaScript across 43 commits.

Time elapsed from project idea to finished library: about 4 hours, during which I also bought and decorated a Christmas tree with family and watched the latest Knives Out movie.

Some background

One of the most important contributions of the HTML5 specification ten years ago was the way it precisely specified how invalid HTML should be parsed. The world is full of invalid documents and having a specification that covers those means browsers can treat them in the same way - there's no more "undefined behavior" to worry about when building parsing software.

Unsurprisingly, those invalid parsing rules are pretty complex! The free online book Idiosyncrasies of the HTML parser by Simon Pieters is an excellent deep dive into this topic, in particular Chapter 3. The HTML parser.

The Python html5lib project started the html5lib-tests repository with a set of implementation-independent tests. These have since become the gold standard for interoperability testing of HTML5 parsers, and are used by projects such as Servo which used them to help build html5ever, a "high-performance browser-grade HTML5 parser" written in Rust.

Emil Stenström's JustHTML project is a pure-Python implementation of an HTML5 parser that passes the full html5lib-tests suite. Emil spent a couple of months working on this as a side project, deliberately picking a problem with a comprehensive existing test suite to see how far he could get with coding agents.

At one point he had the agents rewrite it based on a close inspection of the Rust html5ever library. I don't know how much of this was direct translation versus inspiration (here's Emil's commentary on that) - his project has 1,215 commits total so it appears to have included a huge amount of iteration, not just a straight port.

My project is a straight port. I instructed Codex CLI to build a JavaScript version of Emil's Python code.

The process in detail

I started with a bit of mise en place. I checked out two repos and created an empty third directory for the new project:

cd ~/dev
git clone https://github.com/EmilStenstrom/justhtml
git clone https://github.com/html5lib/html5lib-tests
mkdir justjshtml
cd justjshtml

Then I started Codex CLI for GPT-5.2 like this:

codex --yolo -m gpt-5.2

That --yolo flag is a shortcut for --dangerously-bypass-approvals-and-sandbox, which is every bit as dangerous as it sounds.

My first prompt told Codex to inspect the existing code and use it to build a specification for the new JavaScript library:

We are going to create a JavaScript port of ~/dev/justhtml - an HTML parsing library that passes the full ~/dev/html5lib-tests test suite. It is going to have a similar API to the Python library but in JavaScript. It will have no dependencies other than raw JavaScript, hence it will work great in the browser and node.js and other environments. Start by reading ~/dev/justhtml and designing the user-facing API for the new library - create a spec.md containing your plan.

I reviewed the spec, which included a set of proposed milestones, and told it to add another:

Add an early step to the roadmap that involves an initial version that parses a simple example document that is valid and returns the right results. Then add and commit the spec.md file.

Here's the resulting spec.md file. My request for that initial version became "Milestone 0.5" which looked like this:

Milestone 0.5 — End-to-end smoke parse (single valid document)

  • Implement the smallest end-to-end slice so the public API is real early:
    • new JustHTML("<html><head></head><body><p>Hello</p></body></html>") returns a tree with the expected tag structure and text nodes.
    • doc.toText() returns "Hello" and doc.errors is empty for this valid input.
  • Add scripts/smoke.js (no deps) that runs the example and asserts the expected structure/output.
  • Gate: node scripts/smoke.js passes.

Then I told it:

Implement Milestone 0.5

And off it went. The resulting code appeared to work so I said:

Configure GitHub Actions test.yml to run that on every commit, then commit and push

I ran git init and created a private GitHub repository for this project at this point, and set up the local directory to push to that remote.

Here's that initial push. Then I told it:

OK do the rest, commit and push often

And that was almost it!

I set my laptop to not fall asleep and left it to its devices while we went off to buy a Christmas tree. The "commit and push often" meant I could monitor its progress on my phone by refreshing the commit log on GitHub.

I was running this against my $20/month ChatGPT Plus account, which has a five hour token allowance window for Codex CLI. That ran out at 6:35pm and Codex paused, so I waited until the reset point at 7:14pm and typed:

Keep going

At 9:30pm it declared itself done with the following summary message:

• What’s Done

  - html5lib-tests now run in CI and pass: tokenizer 6810/6810, tree 1770/1782
    (12 skipped: #script-on), serializer 230/230, encoding 82/83 (1 skipped:
    scripted) (.github/workflows/test.yml:1).
  - Public API expanded: stream() (src/stream.js:1), CSS selectors query()/
    matches() (src/selector.js:1), and toMarkdown() (src/markdown.js:1), all
    exported via src/index.js:1.
  - Added no-deps unit scripts for selectors/stream/markdown (scripts/run-
    selector-tests.js:1, scripts/run-stream-tests.js:1, scripts/run-markdown-
    tests.js:1) and wired them into CI.
  - Fixed TreeBuilder so <br> no longer closes <p> (src/treebuilder.js:647).

As a finishing touch, I had it add a playground interface so I could try out the new library in my browser. I prompted:

Add a playground.html in the top level folder which loads the necessary ES modules from ./src/... and implements the exact same functionality as seen on https://tools.simonwillison.net/justhtml but using the JavaScript library instead of Pyodide

It fetched my existing JustHTML playground page (described here) using curl and built a new playground.html file that loaded the new JavaScript code instead. This worked perfectly.

I enabled GitHub Pages for my still-private repo which meant I could access the new playground at this URL:

https://simonw.github.io/justjshtml/playground.html

Screenshot of JustJSHTML Playground web application. Header reads "JustJSHTML Playground" with subtitle "A dependency-free JavaScript HTML5 parser - GitHub". Below is a status bar showing "JavaScript Environment" with a green "Ready" badge. The main input area has "Paste HTML" and "Fetch from URL" buttons, with a text area containing HTML code: "<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Example Page</title> </head> <body> <header> <nav> <ul>". A "Playground Mode" section shows buttons for "CSS Selector Query", "Pretty Print HTML", "Tree Structure", "Stream Events", "Extract Text", and "To Markdown" (highlighted in purple). Below is a text field labeled "CSS Selector (optional - leave empty for whole document):" with placeholder "e.g., article, main, .content (or leave empty)" and a green "Convert to Markdown" button. The Output section has a teal header with "Whole document" badge and displays converted markdown: "Example Page" followed by "- [Home](/)" "- [About](/about)" "- [Contact](/contact)".

All it needed now was some documentation:

Add a comprehensive README with full usage instructions including attribution plus how this was built plus how to use in in HTML plus how to use it in Node.js

You can read the result here.

We are now at eight prompts total, running for just over four hours and I've decorated for Christmas and watched Wake Up Dead Man on Netflix.

According to Codex CLI:

Token usage: total=2,089,858 input=1,464,295 (+ 97,122,176 cached) output=625,563 (reasoning 437,010)

My llm-prices.com calculator estimates that at $29.41 if I was paying for those tokens at API prices, but they were included in my $20/month ChatGPT Plus subscription so the actual extra cost to me was zero.

What can we learn from this?

I'm sharing this project because I think it demonstrates a bunch of interesting things about the state of LLMs in December 2025.

  • Frontier LLMs really can perform complex, multi-hour tasks with hundreds of tool calls and minimal supervision. I used GPT-5.2 for this but I have no reason to believe that Claude Opus 4.5 or Gemini 3 Pro would not be able to achieve the same thing - the only reason I haven't tried is that I don't want to burn another 4 hours of time and several million tokens on more runs.
  • If you can reduce a problem to a robust test suite you can set a coding agent loop loose on it with a high degree of confidence that it will eventually succeed. I called this designing the agentic loop a few months ago. I think it's the key skill to unlocking the potential of LLMs for complex tasks.
  • Porting entire open source libraries from one language to another via a coding agent works extremely well.
  • Code is so cheap it's practically free. Code that works continues to carry a cost, but that cost has plummeted now that coding agents can check their work as they go.
  • We haven't even begun to unpack the etiquette and ethics around this style of development. Is it responsible and appropriate to churn out a direct port of a library like this in a few hours while watching a movie? What would it take for code built like this to be trusted in production?

I'll end with some open questions:

  • Does this library represent a legal violation of copyright of either the Rust library or the Python one?
  • Even if this is legal, is it ethical to build a library in this way?
  • Does this format of development hurt the open source ecosystem?
  • Can I even assert copyright over this, given how much of the work was produced by the LLM?
  • Is it responsible to publish software libraries built in this way?
  • How much better would this library be if an expert team hand crafted it over the course of several months?

Tags: html, javascript, python, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, gpt-5, codex-cli

Finance & economics

Crypto’s real threat to banks

The industry is supplanting Wall Street’s privileged position on the American right
Market Design

Australia's ban on social media use by teens under sixteen

Al Roth
Updated

 Australia has put into effect a ban on social media use by teenagers younger than 16.  My first thought is, good luck with that...

Here are some headlines that caught my eye:

From MSN: 

Australian leader defends social media ban as teens flaunt workarounds  by Byron Kaye 

"A day after the law took effect with bipartisan support from the major political parties and backing by some three-quarters of Australian parents, the country's social media feeds were flooded with comments from people claiming to be under 16, including one on the prime minister's TikTok account saying "I'm still here, wait until I can vote".

####### 

And (more optimistically) from Nature:

Australia’s world-first social media ban is a ‘natural experiment’ for scientists
Researchers will study the effects of the policy on young people’s mental health, social interactions and political engagement.   By Rachel Fieldhouse & Mohana Basu 

" Many teenagers in the country are furious, but for social scientists, the policy offers a natural experiment to study the effects of social-media restrictions on young people." 

########

And this:

Social Media Lab Appointed as Lead Academic Partner for Australian Legislation 

Marginal Revolution

Robot Lab

Alex Tabarrok
Updated

Google’s Deep Mind Lab is going to build a materials science lab in the UK, manned by robots and humans:

To help turbocharge scientific discovery, we will establish Google DeepMind’s first automated laboratory in the UK in 2026, specifically focused on materials science research. A multidisciplinary team of researchers will oversee research in the lab, which will be built from the ground up to be fully integrated with Gemini. By directing world-class robotics to synthesize and characterize hundreds of materials per day, the team intends to significantly shorten the timeline for identifying transformative new materials.

This is a very big deal. Gemini won’t just read papers. It will design the experiments, run the experiments, learn from the successes and failures and then recursively improve. It’s an attempt to learn the game of material science in the same way AlphaGo learned the game of Go.

The post Robot Lab appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Schneier on Security

Chinese Surveillance and AI

Bruce Schneier
Updated

New report: “The Party’s AI: How China’s New AI Systems are Reshaping Human Rights.” From a summary article:

China is already the world’s largest exporter of AI powered surveillance technology; new surveillance technologies and platforms developed in China are also not likely to simply stay there. By exposing the full scope of China’s AI driven control apparatus, this report presents clear, evidence based insights for policymakers, civil society, the media and technology companies seeking to counter the rise of AI enabled repression and human rights violations, and China’s growing efforts to project that repression beyond its borders.

The report focuses on four areas where the CCP has expanded its use of advanced AI systems most rapidly between 2023 and 2025: multimodal censorship of politically sensitive images; AI’s integration into the criminal justice pipeline; the industrialisation of online information control; and the use of AI enabled platforms by Chinese companies operating abroad. Examined together, those cases show how new AI capabilities are being embedded across domains that strengthen the CCP’s ability to shape information, behaviour and economic outcomes at home and overseas.

Because China’s AI ecosystem is evolving rapidly and unevenly across sectors, we have focused on domains where significant changes took place between 2023 and 2025, where new evidence became available, or where human rights risks accelerated. Those areas do not represent the full range of AI applications in China but are the most revealing of how the CCP is integrating AI technologies into its political control apparatus.

News article.

Schneier on Security

Against the Federal Moratorium on State-Level Regulation of AI

Bruce Schneier
Updated

Cast your mind back to May of this year: Congress was in the throes of debate over the massive budget bill. Amidst the many seismic provisions, Senator Ted Cruz dropped a ticking time bomb of tech policy: a ten-year moratorium on the ability of states to regulate artificial intelligence. To many, this was catastrophic. The few massive AI companies seem to be swallowing our economy whole: their energy demands are overriding household needs, their data demands are overriding creators’ copyright, and their products are triggering mass unemployment as well as new types of clinical psychoses. In a moment where Congress is seemingly unable to act to pass any meaningful consumer protections or market regulations, why would we hamstring the one entity evidently capable of doing so—the states? States that have already enacted consumer protections and other AI regulations, like California, and those actively debating them, like Massachusetts, were alarmed. Seventeen Republican governors wrote a letter decrying the idea, and it was ultimately killed in a rare vote of bipartisan near-unanimity.

The idea is back. Before Thanksgiving, a House Republican leader suggested they might slip it into the annual defense spending bill. Then, a draft document leaked outlining the Trump administration’s intent to enforce the state regulatory ban through executive powers. An outpouring of opposition (including from some Republican state leaders) beat back that notion for a few weeks, but on Monday, Trump posted on social media that the promised Executive Order is indeed coming soon. That would put a growing cohort of states, including California and New York, as well as Republican strongholds like Utah and Texas, in jeopardy.

The constellation of motivations behind this proposal is clear: conservative ideology, cash, and China.

The intellectual argument in favor of the moratorium is that “freedom“-killing state regulation on AI would create a patchwork that would be difficult for AI companies to comply with, which would slow the pace of innovation needed to win an AI arms race with China. AI companies and their investors have been aggressively peddling this narrative for years now, and are increasingly backing it with exorbitant lobbying dollars. It’s a handy argument, useful not only to kill regulatory constraints, but also—companies hope—to win federal bailouts and energy subsidies.

Citizens should parse that argument from their own point of view, not Big Tech’s. Preventing states from regulating AI means that those companies get to tell Washington what they want, but your state representatives are powerless to represent your own interests. Which freedom is more important to you: the freedom for a few near-monopolies to profit from AI, or the freedom for you and your neighbors to demand protections from its abuses?

There is an element of this that is more partisan than ideological. Vice President J.D. Vance argued that federal preemption is needed to prevent “progressive” states from controlling AI’s future. This is an indicator of creeping polarization, where Democrats decry the monopolism, bias, and harms attendant to corporate AI and Republicans reflexively take the opposite side. It doesn’t help that some in the parties also have direct financial interests in the AI supply chain.

But this does not need to be a partisan wedge issue: both Democrats and Republicans have strong reasons to support state-level AI legislation. Everyone shares an interest in protecting consumers from harm created by Big Tech companies. In leading the charge to kill Cruz’s initial AI moratorium proposal, Republican Senator Masha Blackburn explained that “This provision could allow Big Tech to continue to exploit kids, creators, and conservatives? we can’t block states from making laws that protect their citizens.” More recently, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wants to regulate AI in his state.

The often-heard complaint that it is hard to comply with a patchwork of state regulations rings hollow. Pretty much every other consumer-facing industry has managed to deal with local regulation—automobiles, children’s toys, food, and drugs—and those regulations have been effective consumer protections. The AI industry includes some of the most valuable companies globally and has demonstrated the ability to comply with differing regulations around the world, including the EU’s AI and data privacy regulations, substantially more onerous than those so far adopted by US states. If we can’t leverage state regulatory power to shape the AI industry, to what industry could it possibly apply?

The regulatory superpower that states have here is not size and force, but rather speed and locality. We need the “laboratories of democracy” to experiment with different types of regulation that fit the specific needs and interests of their constituents and evolve responsively to the concerns they raise, especially in such a consequential and rapidly changing area such as AI.

We should embrace the ability of regulation to be a driver—not a limiter—of innovation. Regulations don’t restrict companies from building better products or making more profit; they help channel that innovation in specific ways that protect the public interest. Drug safety regulations don’t prevent pharma companies from inventing drugs; they force them to invent drugs that are safe and efficacious. States can direct private innovation to serve the public.

But, most importantly, regulations are needed to prevent the most dangerous impact of AI today: the concentration of power associated with trillion-dollar AI companies and the power-amplifying technologies they are producing. We outline the specific ways that the use of AI in governance can disrupt existing balances of power, and how to steer those applications towards more equitable balances, in our new book, Rewiring Democracy. In the nearly complete absence of Congressional action on AI over the years, it has swept the world’s attention; it has become clear that states are the only effective policy levers we have against that concentration of power.

Instead of impeding states from regulating AI, the federal government should support them to drive AI innovation. If proponents of a moratorium worry that the private sector won’t deliver what they think is needed to compete in the new global economy, then we should engage government to help generate AI innovations that serve the public and solve the problems most important to people. Following the lead of countries like Switzerland, France, and Singapore, the US could invest in developing and deploying AI models designed as public goods: transparent, open, and useful for tasks in public administration and governance.

Maybe you don’t trust the federal government to build or operate an AI tool that acts in the public interest? We don’t either. States are a much better place for this innovation to happen because they are closer to the people, they are charged with delivering most government services, they are better aligned with local political sentiments, and they have achieved greater trust. They’re where we can test, iterate, compare, and contrast regulatory approaches that could inform eventual and better federal policy. And, while the costs of training and operating performance AI tools like large language models have declined precipitously, the federal government can play a valuable role here in funding cash-strapped states to lead this kind of innovation.

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in Gizmodo.

EDITED TO ADD: Trump signed an executive order banning state-level AI regulations hours after this was published. This is not going to be the last word on the subject.

The Aviationist
Oklahoma Watch
Marginal Revolution

Two more notable books from 2025

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Ken Belson, Every Day is Sunday: How Jerry Jones, Robert Kraft, and Roger Goodell Turned the NFL into a Cultural & Economic Juggernaut.

Tom MacTague, Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016.

Both are excellent.  I didn’t read the first one right off, because I do not care very much about the topic.  The book is good enough to overcome that problem.  I did not read the second one right off because I care about the topic a lot, but thought I already knew enough about it.  The book is good enough to overcome that problems.

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Marginal Revolution

Noah Smith on AI existential risk

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Superintelligent AI would be able to use all the water and energy and land and minerals in the world, so why would it let humanity have any for ourselves? Why wouldn’t it just take everything and let the rest of us starve?

But an AI that was able to rewrite its utility function would simply have no use for infinite water, energy, or land. If you can reengineer yourself to reach a bliss point, then local nonsatiation fails; you just don’t want to devour the Universe, because you don’t need to want that.

In fact, we can already see humanity trending in that direction, even without AI-level ability to modify our own desires. As our societies have become richer, our consumption has dematerialized; our consumption of goods has leveled off, and our consumption patterns have shifted toward services. This means we humans place less and less of a burden on Earth’s natural resources as we get richer…

I think one possible technique for alignment would give fairly-smart AI the ability to modify its own utility function — thus allowing it to turn itself into a harmless stoner instead of needing to fulfill more external desires.

And beyond alignment, I think an additional strategy should be to work on modifying the constraints that AI faces, to minimize the degree to which humans and AIs are in actual, real competition over scarce resources.

One potential way to do this is to accelerate the development of outer space. Space is an inherently hostile environment for humans, but far less so for robots, or for the computers that form the physical substrate of AI; in fact, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and others are already trying to put data centers in space.

Here is the full post.

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Marginal Revolution

Emergent Ventures India, 14th cohort

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Avani Agarwal, 18, high school senior, received her grant for Synthera, to accelerate personalized medicine using AI-powered drug discovery.

Sushan Bhattarai received his grant to map archaeological sites linked to the Khasa-Malla kingdom across the Himalayas.

Utkrisht Singh Chauhan, 19, and Yash Chavan, 22, received their grant for InTacht, to speed up and reduce costs for edge and private AI systems.

Tanuj Pandya, 20, received his grant to build gloves bringing realistic touch to XR devices.

Dhanush Bakthavatchalam, 24, received his grant to build fully automated AI-driven factories for metal fabrication.

Rashi Bhavsar received her grant for Algaevity, to develop an all-natural, zero-electricity mosquito-killing bio-device.

Rounak Banerjee received his grant to develop affordable technology for converting standard wheelchairs into electric wheelchairs.

Vasisht Dilip received his grant for Seric Steel, to turn iron ore mining waste and crop residue into steel without fossil fuels.

Mohammad Mahean Hasan, 22, studying at Minerva university, received his grant for travel and general career development.

Syed Irfan Ahmed received his grant to develop non-invasive devices monitoring posture in real time.

Kumari Anushka, 20, received her grant for RAD-Scan, to build a citizen-led biomarker testing system for radiation and heavy metal exposure.

Prince Rawat, 19, received his grant for Falken Aerospace, to build autonomous cargo UAVs for logistics.

Joy Agrawal, 19, sophomore at University of Chicago, received his grant for general career development.

Nikhil Kashyap, 20-year-old high school dropout, received his grant to build an affordable robotics kit and visual coding platform making STEM education accessible across India.

Ansh Saxena, 21, received his grant for Aquanode, to build an AI-native cloud helping teams deploy and train models with lower costs.

Mateo Escalante, 24, received his grant for Horus Prosthetics, to develop machine learning models generating perfectly fitting prosthetic leg sockets.

Dhruv Bathla, founder of Ezbeat, received his grant to build a copilot preventing cardiovascular disease through early risk identification.

Rishi Rathi, 25, received his grant to develop a marine carbon dioxide removal solution.

Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. The EV India announcement is here. More about the winners of EV India second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth cohorts. To apply for EV India, use the EV application, click the “Apply Now” button and select India from the “My Project Will Affect” drop-down menu.

And here is Nabeel’s AI engine for other EV winners. Here are the other EV cohorts.

If you are interested in supporting the India tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Shruti at srajagopalan@mercatus.gmu.edu.

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The Oatmeal - Comics by Matthew Inman

My Dog: The Paradox - Film premiere

Matthew Inman
Updated
My Dog: The Paradox - Film premiere

You're invited to the premiere of my first animated film.

View on my website

Los Angeles Angels – MLB Trade Rumors
xkcd.com

Jumping Frog Radius

Earth's r_jf is approximately 1.5 light-days, leading to general relativity's successful prediction that all the frogs in the Solar System should be found collected on the surface of the Earth.
Slashdot
Marc Brooker's Blog

What Does a Database for SSDs Look Like?

What Does a Database for SSDs Look Like?

Maybe not what you think.

Over on X, Ben Dicken asked:

What does a relational database designed specifically for local SSDs look like? Postgres, MySQL, SQLite and many others were invented in the 90s and 00s, the era of spinning disks. A local NVMe SSD has ~1000x improvement in both throughput and latency. Design decisions like write-ahead logs, large page sizes, and buffering table writes in bulk were built around disks where I/O was SLOW, and where sequential I/O was order(s)-of-magnitude faster than random. If we had to throw these databases away and begin from scratch in 2025, what would change and what would remain?

How might we tackle this question quantitatively for the modern transaction-orientated database?

Approach One: The Five Minute Rule

Perhaps my single favorite systems paper, The 5 Minute Rule… by Jim Gray and Franco Putzolu gives us a very simple way to answer one of the most important questions in systems: how big should caches be? The five minute rule is that, back in 1986, if you expected to read a page again within five minutes you should keep in in RAM. If not, you should keep it on disk1. Let’s update the numbers for 2025, assuming that pages are around 32kB2 (this becomes important later).

The EC2 i8g.48xlarge delivers about 1.8 million read iops of this size, at a price of around $0.004576 per second, or \(1 \times 10^{-9}\) dollars per transfer (assuming we’re allocating about 40% of the instance price to storage). It also has enough RAM for about 50 million pages of this size, costing around \(3 \times 10^{-11}\) to storage a page for one second.

So, on this instance type, we should size our RAM cache to store pages for about 30 seconds. Not too different from Gray and Putzolu’s result 40 years ago!

That’s answer number one: the database should have a cache sized so that the hot set contains pages expected to be accessed in the next 30 seconds, for optimal cost. For optimal latency, however, the cache may want to be considerably bigger.

Approach Two: The Throughput/IOPS Breakeven Point

The next question is what size accesses we want to send to our storage devices to take best advantage of their performance. In the days of spinning media, the answer to this was surprisingly big: a 100MB/s disk could generally do around 100 seeks a second, so if your transfers were less than around 1MB you were walking away from throughput. Give or take a factor of 2. What does it look like for modern SSDs?

SSDs are much faster on both throughput and iops. They’re less sensitive than spinning drives to workload patterns, but read/write ratios and the fullness of the drives still matter. Absent benchmarking on the actual hardware with the real workload, my rule of thumb is that SSDs are throughput limited for transfers bigger than 32kB, and iops limited for transfers smaller than 32kB.

So that’s answer number two: we want our transfers to disk not to be much smaller than 32kB on average, or we’re walking away from throughput.

Approach Three: Durability and Replication

Building reads on local SSDs is great: tons of throughput, tons of iops. Writes on local SSDs, on the other hand, have the distinct problem of only being durable on the local box, which is unacceptable for most workloads. Modern hardware is very reliable, but thinking through the business risks of losing data on failover isn’t very fun at all, so let’s assume that our modern database is going to replicate off-box, making at least one more synchronous copy. Ideally in a different availability zone.

That i8g.48xlarge we were using for our comparison earlier has 100Gb/s (or around 12GB/s) of network bandwidth. That puts a cap on how much write throughput we can have for a single-leader database. Cross-AZ latency in EC2 varies from a couple hundred microseconds to a millisecond or two, which puts a minimum on our commit latency.

That gives us answer number three: we want to incur cross-AZ latency only at commit time, and not during writes.

Which is where we run into one of my favorite topics: isolation. The I in ACID. A modern database design will avoid read-time coordination using multiversioning, but to offer isolation stronger than READ COMMITTED will need to coordinate either on each write or at commit time. It can do that like, say, Aurora Postgres does, having a single leader at a time running in a single AZ. This means great latency for clients in that zone, and higher latency for clients in different AZs. Given that most applications are hosted in multiple AZs, this can add up for latency-sensitive applications which makes a lot of round trips to the database. The alternative approach is the one Aurora DSQL takes, doing the cross-AZ round trip only at COMMIT time, saving round-trips.

Here’s me talking about the shape of that trade-off at re:Invent this year:

There’s no clear answer here, because there are real trade-offs between the two approaches. But do make sure to ask your database vendor whether those impressive latency benchmarks are running where you application actually runs. In the spirit of the original question, though, the incredible bandwidth and latency availability in modern datacenter networks is as transformative as SSDs in database designs. Or should be.

While we’re incurring the latency cost of synchronous replication, we may as well get strongly consistent scale-out reads for free. In DSQL, we do this using high-quality hardware clocks that you can use too. Another nice win from modern hardware. There are other approaches too.

That’s answer number four for me: The modern database uses high-quality clocks and knowledge of actual application architectures to optimize for real-world performance (like latency in multiple availability zones or regions) without compromising on strong consistency.

Approach Four: What about that WAL?

Design decisions like write-ahead logs, large page sizes, and buffering table writes in bulk were built around disks where I/O was SLOW, and where sequential I/O was order(s)-of-magnitude faster than random.

WALs, and related low-level logging details, are critical for database systems that care deeply about durability on a single system. But the modern database isn’t like that: it doesn’t depend on commit-to-disk on a single system for its durability story. Commit-to-disk on a single system is both unnecessary (because we can replicate across storage on multiple systems) and inadequate (because we don’t want to lose writes even if a single system fails).

That’s answer number five: the modern database commits transactions to a distributed log, which provides multi-machine multi-AZ durability, and might provide other services like atomicity. Recovery is a replay from the distributed log, on any one of a number of peer replicas.

What About Data Structures?

B-Trees versus LSM-trees vs B-Tree variants versus LSM variants versus other data structures are trade-offs that have a lot to do with access patterns and workload patterns. Picking a winner would be a whole series of blog posts, so I’m going to chicken out and say its complicated.

Conclusion

If we had to throw these databases away and begin from scratch in 2025, what would change and what would remain?

I’d keep the relational model, atomicity, isolation (but would probably pick SNAPSHOT as a default), strong consistency, SQL, interactive transactions, and the other core design decisions of relational databases. But I’d move durability, read and write scale, and high availability into being distributed rather than single system concerns. I think that helps with performance and cost, while making these properties easier to achieve. I’d mostly toss out local durability and recovery, and all the huge history of optimizations and data structures around that3, in favor of getting better properties in the distributed setting. I’d pay more attention to internal strong isolation (in the security sense) between clients and workloads. I’d size caches for a working set of between 30 seconds and 5 minutes of accesses. I’d optimize for read transfers around that 32kB sweet spot from local SSD, and the around 8kB sweet spot for networks.

Probably more stuff too, but this is long enough as-is.

Other topics worth covering include avoiding copies on IO, co-design with virtualization (e.g. see our Aurora Serverless paper), trade-offs of batching, how the relative performance of different isolation levels changes, what promises to give clients, encryption and authorization of data at rest and in motion, dealing with very hot single items, new workloads like vector, verifiable replication journals, handing off changes to analytics systems, access control, multi-tenancy, forking and merging, and even locales.

Footnotes

  1. The reasoning is slightly smarter, thinking about the marginal page and marginal cost of memory, but this simplification works for our purposes here.
  2. Yes, I know that pages are typically 4kB or 2MB, but bear with me here.
  3. Sorry ARIES.
DCReport.org

It’s Trump’s Derangement

Terry H. Schwadron
Updated

Trump’s Cruelty After Mass Shootings Shows How Far We’ve Fallen

The awful feelings from this week’s mass shootings and the twin murders of Rob and Michele Reiner come in waves.

The feelings mix despair and frustration for a society that accepts that violence — even loss of life— as an acceptable trade-off for ideological alignment and personal anger.

It happens that our family is from Providence and we both attended Brown, so the television images were unusually familiar. Bondi Beach may be a half world away, but attacks on Jews are not new for us. And like many, we’ve held Reiner in a certain shared respect for his work in film and politics.

Unfortunately, these shootings not so different from violence a year ago on the campus of Florida State University, where our younger daughter teaches in the dance faculty. The Australian anti-semitism matches attacks on a Pittsburgh synagogue and calls of hate in the streets and on the internet.

The frustration is that unending mass killings don’t prompt successful gun limitations, that despite’s thoughts and prayers, we refuse to shun hate and its carriers. Indeed, I had not planned to write about these incidents which we are following closely because the shared revulsion is widespread.

What changed that were postings and remarks by Donald Trump, who posted that the blame for the Reiner killings is the Reiners’ Trump Derangement Syndrome.

No Empathy for Non-Loyalists

Somehow this egocentric autocrat whom we have chosen to be the most powerful man in the country is showing us that for him, only those who agree with his politics, who accept his leadership as flawless, are worthy of his otherwise empty  powers of empathy.

Even as Republicans have started speaking out to say Trump’s remarks were both inhumane and cruel, Trump doubled down to add that he did not like Reiner’s politics. For that matter. Trump isn’t exactly in love universities, including Brown. Nor, despite his protestations about antisemitism, Trump’s support for White, Christian nationalism has been a source of serious discomfort for Jews.

There is plenty of derangement syndrome to go around. It turns out that it is Trump who is deranged.

Who besides Trump can’t find empathy for a couple apparently stabbed to death by their own son, as Los Angeles officials have alleged? How devoid of recognizably human feelings is Trump? How is this Trump, Scion of cruelty, a “leader” worth our respect, even apart from any of his policies?

How have we so walked away from “character” and “morality” in leadership to normalize Trump’s public behaviors?

If this is how Trump acts in a situation that just requires a moment of basic human solemnity, why should anyone be surprised about ordering the killing of shipwrecked smuggling survivors, or wrenching children from deportable migrant parents, or insisting that it’s perfectly fine to double and triple health insurance costs?

Students ought to be able to expect to attend classes without fear of mass killers. People should expect to celebrate religious and ethnic rites with worry about snipers. Parents ought not expect to be stabbed to death by their children.

Unless you’re Donald Trump it has nothing to do with one’s political outlook.

“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.

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Calculated Risk

Tuesday: Employment Report, Retail Sales

Calculated Risk
Updated
Mortgage Rates From Matthew Graham at Mortgage News Daily: Mortgage Rates Slightly Lower as Volatility Risks Increase
Mortgage rates were just slightly lower to start the new week. This leaves the average lender's top tier 30yr fixed rate almost dead center in the narrow range that's been intact since early September. ... If unemployment comes in lower than expected, rates would likely face upward pressure, potentially challenging the upper boundary of the recent range. On the other hand, a weaker/higher result should keep rates well within the range, perhaps near the lower boundary. [30 year fixed 6.29%]
emphasis added
Tuesday:
• At 8:30 AM ET, Employment Report for November.   The consensus is for 50,000 jobs added, and for the unemployment rate to be unchanged at 4.4%.

• Also at 8:30 AM, Retail sales for October will be released.  The consensus is for a 0.3% increase in retail sales.
Boston Red Sox – MLB Trade Rumors
The Diary of Samuel Pepys

Monday 15 December 1662

Samuel Pepys
Updated

Up and to my Lord’s and thence to the Duke, and followed him into the Park, where, though the ice was broken and dangerous, yet he would go slide upon his scates, which I did not like, but he slides very well. So back and to his closett, whither my Lord Sandwich comes, and there Mr. Coventry and we three had long discourse together about the matters of the Navy; and, indeed, I find myself more and more obliged to Mr. Coventry, who studies to do me all the right he can in every thing to the Duke.

Thence walked a good while up and down the gallerys; and among others, met with Dr. Clerke, who in discourse tells me, that Sir Charles Barkeley’s greatness is only his being pimp to the King, and to my Lady Castlemaine. And yet for all this, that the King is very kind to the Queen; who, he says, is one of the best women in the world. Strange how the King is bewitched to this pretty Castlemaine.

Thence to my Lord’s, and there with Mr. Creed, Moore, and Howe to the Crown and dined, and thence to Whitehall, where I walked up and down the gallerys, spending my time upon the pictures, till the Duke and the Committee for Tangier met (the Duke not staying with us), where the only matter was to discourse with my Lord Rutherford, who is this day made Governor of Tangier, for I know not what reasons; and my Lord of Peterborough to be called home; which, though it is said it is done with kindness, yet all the world may see it is done otherwise, and I am sorry to see a Catholick Governor sent to command there, where all the rest of the officers almost are such already. But God knows what the reason is! and all may see how slippery places all courtiers stand in.

Thence by coach home, in my way calling upon Sir John Berkenheade, to speak about my assessment of 42l. to the Loyal Sufferers; which, I perceive, I cannot help; but he tells me I have been abused by Sir R. Ford, which I shall hereafter make use of when it shall be fit.

Thence called at the Major-General’s, Sir R. Browne, about my being assessed armes to the militia; but he was abroad; and so driving through the backside of the Shambles in Newgate Market, my coach plucked down two pieces of beef into the dirt, upon which the butchers stopped the horses, and a great rout of people in the street, crying that he had done him 40s. and 5l. worth of hurt; but going down, I saw that he had done little or none; and so I give them a shilling for it and they were well contented, and so home.

And there to my Lady Batten’s to see her, who tells me she hath just now a letter from Sir William, how that he and Sir J. Minnes did very narrowly escape drowning on the road, the waters are so high; but is well. But, Lord! what a hypocrite-like face she made to tell it me.

Thence to Sir W. Pen and sat long with him in discourse, I making myself appear one of greater action and resolution as to publique business than I have hitherto done, at which he listens, but I know is a rogue in his heart and likes not, but I perceive I may hold up my head, and the more the better, I minding of my business as I have done, in which God do and will bless me. So home and with great content to bed, and talk and chat with my wife while I was at supper, to our great pleasure.

Read the annotations

Mike the Mad Biologist

Some Thoughts on and Context for the U.S. Measles Outbreak

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

First, here are the annual cases of measles (which is a reportable disease) from 2000 through 2025:

Screenshot 2025-12-13 at 12.29.07 PM

I bring this up because of a graphic Fox News ran:

foxnewsmeasles

They might have picked 2020 and not 2024 is because that would be part of the larger strategy of blaming Biden (e.g., after four years of Biden, look at how bad it is!) for, well, everything. Never mind that 2020 measles cases were the lowest they had been in a quarter century for a very obvious reason: the same peak pandemic precautions that protected against COVID also are effective against other respiratory viruses like measles. And 2019 was not a good year*.

Yet Fox News, with an elderly viewership, realizes that HHS Secretary and Plaguelord Kennedy’s anti-vaccinationism is a political problem, so they aired an interview with an expert who claimed that the problem is due to anti-vaxxers (which is true), but Biden’s mishandling of vaccination contributed to poor MMR vaccine uptake overall. Of course, Fox News itself in 2021 played a significant role in encouraging anti-vaccination attitudes:

We have good evidence that it was a manufactured anti-COVID vaxx campaign, promulgated in no small part by Tucker Carlson (who wanted to boost his ratings). In April 2021, Fox News, led by Tucker Carlson, started Just Asking Questions about the COVID vaccine, and yes, there was a significant decrease in vaccine uptake during Carlson’s anti-vaccine campaign. Meanwhile, professional anti-vaxxers like current HHS Secretary Kennedy piled on to Fox News’ coverage.

This wasn’t ‘polarization’ per se, it was an intentional propaganda campaign, one that was so obviously harmful, even some people at Fox News were bothered by it. ‘Polarization’ on vaccination isn’t like the earth’s magnetosphere, it’s the result of specific choices by specific people and institutions. And those players need to be named.

The tragedy of measles outbreaks is that they are entirely self-inflicted–they are the result of MMR vaccine refusal. Hopefully, we will have a return to sane governance before measles really takes off.

*The pattern is usually to compare the economy in 2019 to 2025, and then blame Biden, but, for obvious reasons, 2020 had vastly fewer measles cases than 2019.

Mike the Mad Biologist

Links 12/15/25

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

Links for you. Science:

AI Antibodies? Really?
‘A Quiet Place’ Is the Lived Reality for These Hawaiian Insects
Paxlovid: You’d Have Expected More
Trump is stripping protections from marine protected areas – why that’s a problem for fishing’s future, and for whales, corals and other ocean life
Characterization of an amyloid-based antiphage defence system in Escherichia coli
One of CDC’s final blows. And what it means for you.

Other:

Virginia Democrat flips seat in state legislature by taking on datacenters
D.C. is headed toward a child care cliff. But it’s not too late for the mayor to do something about it.
The key to understanding the world today (short video; excellent)
Trans Panic? More Like Trans Apathetic. 2025 shows trans rights aren’t electoral poison. The truth? Most people just don’t care that much.
The D.C. I know (Janeese Lewis George enters the D.C. mayor’s race)
The American right and the Jewish question
I’m glad I stopped posting on X
The Historic Reversal of Cultural Affordability
Kash Patel humiliated as explosive 115-page dossier reveals what FBI agents really think… and his tantrum after being issued a women’s raid jacket (et tu, Daily Mail?)
The amorality of the pundit class
D.C. Council member Janeese Lewis George to run for mayor (the Washington Post, I’m sure, is already thinking of ways to tank her campaign…)
GOP goes all-in on culture war—and it’s not going great
Reno-Obsessed Trump Reveals His Next D.C. Remodel Target
That Viral Essay Scandal is (SURPRISE!) Actually About Trans People
How much of “Mississippi’s education miracle” is an artifact of selection bias?
Even by a Strict Definition, Elon Musk Is a Fascist
Fired worker sues government in a case that could upend civil rights laws
Steve Bannon Was Epstein’s Comeback Consultant. Where’s the Uproar?
ICE Wants to Go After Dissenters as well as Immigrants
Fellow Unit Member Says Alleged D.C. Shooter Felt Abandoned by CIA
What Trump’s Medicaid Cuts Mean for Two Podcasters With Down Syndrome
Selling the Poor on Spending Like They’re Rich
“No! That’s wrong!”: Lilly Wachowski slammed right-wingers for co-opting the “red pill” and missing the point of “The Matrix” entirely
The Bubble-Wrapped President: Trump surrounds himself with those who flatter him in places where he is comfortable. (he doesn’t really care as long as he avoids going to jail and he can loot)
Bari Weiss’s Big Secret Is That She’s Boring
Jeffries’ Strong Floor and No Ceiling: We Need to Fix the Roof
The Gang Of 500
Marco Rubio’s Sales Pitch: War in Venezuela
Target quietly adds ChatGPT to its cart
Trump: Pro-crypto or Pro-crime? Or are they the same thing?

Hacker News
Slashdot
Spaceflight Now

Rocket Lab Electron rocket aborts liftoff at engine ignition

Will Robinson-Smith
Updated
A Rocket Lab Electron rocket stands at Launch Complex 1 ahead of the flight of the ‘Bridging the Swarm’ mission for the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). Image: Rocket Lab

Update Dec. 16, 1:26 am EST (0626 UTC): Rocket Lab said they aborted the mission on Dec. 15/16 after “one of Electron’s thousands of sensors noticed out-of-family data and called time on lift-off, exactly as it was designed to do. Team is working the straightforward fix now and will select a new launch date shortly.

Original story:

Rocket Lab is poised to close out 2025 with a trio of Electron rocket launches across its three pads in New Zealand and the United States. If all three launch, this would represent the most rapid sequence of Electron missions to date.

The company launched the ‘RASISE and Shine’ mission for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) at 0309 UTC on Dec. 14. Next up, less than 48-hours later, is a mission from South Korea, which was originally set to fly on Dec. 11.

That mission, dubbed ‘Bridging the Swarm,’ is scheduled to launch no earlier than 1:55 p.m. NZDT / 0055 UTC on Dec. 16 (7:45 p.m. EST on Dec. 15). Rocket Lab will have live coverage of the mission beginning about 20 minutes prior to liftoff.

This launch is for the Satellite Technology Research Center (SaTReC) located within the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST).

Onboard the Electron rocket is the Neonsat-1A satellite, which is described by Rocket Lab as being “an advanced Earth observation satellite equipped with a high-resolution optical camera to monitor natural disasters along the Korean Peninsula.”

“The first of the Neonsat satellites, Neonsat-1, was launched and deployed by Rocket Lab during the April 2024 mission ‘Beginning Of The Swarm’, and has been successfully carrying out its Earth-monitoring objective,” the company said.

“The new Neonsat-1A satellite will be deployed to validate KAIST’s advanced satellite’s capability, boost operational utility, and pave the way for the single Neonsat satellite to become a constellation –  thus fulfilling the mission’s name, ‘Bridging the Swarm.’ More Neonsat satellites are scheduled for launch in 2026 and 2027.”

The NeonSat-1A satellite will launch into a 540 km (336 mi) low Earth orbit at an inclination of 97.4 degrees. Deployment from the rocket’s Curie kick stage is anticipated roughly 54 minutes after liftoff.

On Friday, Dec. 19, Rocket Lab is also scheduled to launch a mission from Launch Complex 2 at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia. The mission is referred to as ‘Avalanche’ and is set to fly during a window that opens at 12 a.m. EST (0500 UTC).

Rocket Lab hasn’t officially commented on this mission publicly, but it’s believed to be a mission booked by the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command. This would make it the Space Test Program-30 (STP-S-30), which will launch a satellite called DiskSat.

Rocket Lab previously said that DiskSat “will demonstrate sustained very low earth orbit (VLEO) flight and test a unique, 1-meter diameter, disk-shaped satellite bus that is designed to increase on-orbit persistence.”

“When we get down to VLEO — this is below 350 kilometers — it’s a lot of drag and other elements that you have to overcome. Because of the shape of DiskSat, we can change its orientation so that it has a very low drag profile,” said Catherine Venturini, the principal investigator for DiskSat from the Aerospace Corporation, in a Dec. 9 press release.

“The goal being that, with electric propulsion, we can sustain a VLEO for a certain amount of time, which would be very compelling for a lot of our customers and their mission interests.”

Record-breaking year

The successful launch of the ‘RAISE and Shine’ mission to begin the week marked the 19th launch of an Electron rocket this year. Among those, there were three, suborbital launches from Virginia as part of Rocket Lab’s Hypersonic Accelerator Suborbital Test Electron (HASTE) program.

The company has been in record territory since Nov. 18 when it launched its 17th Electron rocket on a mission called ‘Prometheus Run’ for the Missile Defense Agency.

Here’s how Electron’s annual launch tally stands:

  • 2025 – 16 orbital, 3 suborbital
  • 2024 – 14 orbital, 2 suborbital
  • 2023 – 9 orbital, 1 suborbital
  • 2022 – 9 orbital
  • 2021 – 6 orbital
  • 2020 – 7 orbital
  • 2019 – 6 orbital
  • 2018 – 3 orbital
  • 2017 – 1 orbital 

“This pace is only possible because we are very intentional about designing Electrons at scale,” said Sir Peter Beck during a third quarter earnings call on Nov. 10. “This extends beyond the vehicle itself to all the supporting infrastructure, like manufacturing, processing and operating a high-volume launch range infrastructure as well.

“It’s an important approach that we’re deploying the Neutron to, ensuring that we’re thinking well beyond first flight.”

The debut launch of its larger Neutron rocket was delayed from 2025 and is currently targeting its first launch sometime in the first quarter of 2026 or shortly thereafter.

“We’ve set high expectations for Neutron’s first flight. Our aim is to make it to orbit on the first try,” Beck said. “You won’t see us minimizing some qualifier about us just learning the pad and claiming success and whatnot. And that means that we don’t want to learn something during Neutron’s first flight that could be learned on the ground during the testing phase.”

That first flight of Neutron won’t carry a customer payload, but rather is designed to prove out the vehicle and its supporting infrastructure.

As for the year ahead for Electron, Beck said their factory is designed with the goal of building 52 rockets per year, but didn’t speculate on the number of launches it anticipated completing with that rocket in 2026.

One of the missions on the manifest set to fly in the first quarter is NASA’s Aspera mission. The agency’s Launch Services Program awarded the mission to Rocket Lab as part of its Venture-Class Aquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) contract back in May.

“Through the observation of ultraviolet light, Aspera will examine hot gas in the space between galaxies, called the intergalactic medium,” NASA said. “The mission will study the inflow and outflow of gas from galaxies, a process thought to contribute to star formation.”

Astronomy Picture of the Day

What would it be like to fly over the What would it be like to fly over the


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Marginal Revolution

Markets in everything?

Tyler Cowen
Updated

If you don’t yet have a REAL ID, you can continue to fly, but it’s going to cost you. Beginning Feb. 1, 2026, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will start collecting a $45 fee from travelers using non-compliant forms of identification at airport security checkpoints.

The agency previously proposed a fee of $18 to cover the administrative and IT costs of ID verification for those traveling without a REAL ID or passport but increased the total to $45 in an announcement released earlier this month.

Here is the full story, via the excellent Samir Varma.

The post Markets in everything? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Contraptions

Bucket Art

Venkatesh Rao
Updated

Perhaps nothing I’ve done has gone from shitposty to serious as fast as my most recent project: Bucket Art. It began as an idle doodle made in the margin of my paper notebook during a long business meeting (at an AI company appropriately enough). That led to a couple of months of daily evening painting sessions on my iPad, which resulted in the set of 41 paintings you can see at my gallery page above. Now there’s a trained model on a platform called titles.xyz, based on my hand-painted ones, that anyone can use not only to generate images in the Bucket Art style, but mash up with models published by other artists.

As of this writing, 38 people have published 148 paintings wholly or partly based on the Bucket Art model. You’ll need an Ethereum wallet to try it out, but you don’t have to pay unless you want to publish or mint something.

And via a Secret Collaborative Project ™ I can’t talk about yet, Bucket Art should break into the serious institutional art scene via a gallery exhibition next year. At that point, I’ll grow a goatee, start sporting a beret, and writing (with AI assistance of course) an artist manifesto on what I’ve started calling Generative Impressionism.

Housekeeping note: We’ll have a year-end Contraptions Book Club hang on Zoom on Friday, December 19, at 9 AM Pacific (1700 UTC). Capacity limited. RSVP here to get details.

The original doodle where this journey started was a bunch of stacked line segments overlaid with some random strokes, which triggered a bit of pareidolia — I began seeing the contours of a waterfall. I added more strokes to exaggerate the emerging effect and ended up with this, the original piece of proto Bucket Art (though a bucket was not yet involved).

It struck me that this doodle could go places if I used an iPad, so I started down that path, making 1-2 pieces almost every day for two months. The result is the set of 41 images on the gallery page.

The first digital bucket art piece I made was Boat 1. This one was pure pareidolia, (ie, I spotted the boat in a random field; I didn’t start out wanting to paint a boat).

This one is not particularly polished or complex, but it’s one of my favorites. Not just because it was the first one I made, but because it’s near-pure emergence from the configurancy of interacting elements. It has a vigor and liveness that perhaps my more mature pieces lack.

Here is a more complex one, and another one of my personal favorites, Waterfall 5. Here I started out wanting to make a waterfall, and had a clear plan for how to get there. Waterfalls remain among the easiest motifs to target with bucket art.

As it turned out, the technique I was playing with lends itself very well to training (well, fine-tuning) an image model.

Here is a waterfall image generated by the Bucket Art model on Titles. In this case, I think my best hand-crafted waterfalls have more pizazz to them, but this easily beats my median hand-crafted waterfall.

One of the themes where I think the model does better than me even at my best now is ships. You’ll see several ship paintings in my gallery page, but here is one made by the model. The spirit and aesthetic of the technique are preserved, but this is probably more sophisticated than any of my own ship paintings.

A peek at the current state of the story, here is an image generated by composing my model with another model created by . Both of us earned a few pennies in the process of this image being created and published.

Go explore the other paintings on Titles and make your own. Post any particularly good ones here (and publish them if you like!). The mashup tool is still in beta, but you can make pure bucket art paintings.

The generativity already on display is dizzying. Not all appeal to me personally, but each image seems to reveal something interesting about what happens when you start doing compositional art where models trained on artists are the brushes/filters.

A brief note on the technique, not because I’m expecting to create a tribe of bucket artists, but because it illuminates how AI based sociality and creativity work, and how they entangle human actions and perceptions with machine actions at a very low level, at both individual and social levels.

I call it bucket art because the main tool is the flood fill tool, usually represented with the bucket icon in painting apps. Here is what it looks like in the app I use, Autodesk Sketchbook on iPad.

You can learn more about how to hand-make these yourself on this how-to page I added to my gallery site, but if you just want images in this style, just use the model on Titles.

The platform, titles.xyz, makes really clever use of AI fine-tuning alongside blockchain rails for composability with attribution, payments flows, and provenance tracking. Every generated image can be traced back to the set of artists whose original works provided the training data, with meaningful quantitative weighting of the contributions (based on how strongly it was weighted in the generation).

Of course, there is an underlying generic image model too, but provenance is crystal clear from the point at which individual artists supply their art for training — in the form of an NFT collection. This is a clever use of what I’m thinking of as Second Wave NFTs, which are closer to cheap laptop stickers than gallery fine art.

The point of having the training set published as NFTs is to trace the generated imagery back to an auditable starting point. The original images can still be minted of course (there’s still a bunch left if you want one) at $1, but what makes the model interesting is that generated images downstream of the training images can also be minted as NFTs at $1, triggering payment flows to the “training” artists. These generated images are also dirt-cheap unlike the generative art in the first NFT wave, which often sold for gallery prices. This second wave NFT scheme is basically micropayments plumbing for extreme cheap volume artwork.

There’s going to be more to this story, both on the artistic front, and the technical mechanics front, but for now, have fun playing with the model.

California
The Honest Broker

The Best Online Articles of 2025

Ted Gioia
Updated

Every December, I showcase the work of other writers. They are total strangers to me, but have written some article or essay of exceptional merit during the previous 12 months.

So I share their work with you—to expand their audience, and give you access to writing you might find enjoyable or enlightening or inspiring.

Below is this year’s list of my favorite online articles. As always, I focus mostly on writing about music, arts, media, and culture. But I’m willing to include almost anything, if it captures my fancy.

If you have suggestions to add to the list, please share them in the comments.

Happy reading!

If you want to support my work, please take out a premium subscription—for just $6 per month (even less if you sign up for a year).

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The Best Online Articles of 2025

“Vanity Fair’s Heyday” by Bryan Burrough, The Yale Review, March 14, 2025

I’m probably breaking some unwritten law of publishing, but here it is: For twenty-five years, I was contracted to produce three articles a year, long ones, typically ten thousand words. For this, my peak salary was $498,141. That’s not a misprint—$498,141, or more than $166,000 per story. Then, as now, $166,000 was a good advance for an entire book. Yes, I realized it was obscene. I took it with a grin….

“Finding Peter Putnam” by Amanda Gefter, Nautilus, June 17, 2025

The 60-year-old man lying on the street, as far as anyone knew, was just a janitor hit by a drunk driver. There was no mention of it on the local news, no obituary in the morning paper. His name might have been Anonymous. But it wasn’t.

His name was Peter Putnam. He was a physicist who’d hung out with Albert Einstein, John Archibald Wheeler, and Niels Bohr....

Robert Works Fuller, a physicist and former president of Oberlin College, who worked closely with Putnam in the 1960s, told me in 2012, “Putnam really should be regarded as one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. Yet he’s completely unknown….”

“The Naval Scientist Who Wanted to Know How Football Players Would Survive Nuclear War” by Chris Roberts, Defector, January 24, 2025

In January 1955, a lifelong football fan approached Lou Spadia, the general manager of the San Francisco 49ers, with a peculiar request: Would his players like to participate in a science experiment at an atomic research lab?

It wouldn’t take much, the fan explained—just some radioactive material inside the players….

“The DIY Maestro” by Naomi Buck, Toronto Life, November 10, 2025

The 78-year-old multimillionaire and tech entrepreneur had made small waves in Toronto’s classical music community. Without any formal musical training, Cheung has been paying to conduct the greatest works of the classical canon with the best musicians he can find. Opinions varied wildly. Some said he couldn’t conduct to save his life, others that he was actually quite good. Some called him an egomaniac, others a true patron of the arts. There was consensus on one thing only: Mandle Cheung paid well….

“The Kids Who Ran Away to 1960s San Francisco” by Zelda, Inside the Shell, December 2, 2025

While skimming through the house’s Wikipedia page, I discovered that archives on its history were available at the main library of San Francisco, including:

The ACTUAL letters exchanged between teen runaways and the house’s founder during the 60s!

I can’t explain the rush of adrenaline that gave me….

Source

“A Love Letter to Music Listings” by Gabriel Kahane, The Atlantic, July 27, 2025

Over the past decade, event listings have all but disappeared. The New York Times killed its weekly arts listings at the end of 2016, and its online arts-and-entertainment guide remains frozen, like a butterfly pinned and dried, in March 2020….The Village Voice folded in 2018. (It has recently been revived but has no listings section to speak of.) The New Yorker’s Goings On About Town section was slashed in 2023 to just a page or two, now offering one recommendation per discipline. And Time Out, that veritable doorstop of weekly listings, now previews one or two concerts a month….

“The ‘Exciting Business Opportunity’ that Ruined Our Lives” By Andrea Pitzer, The Atlantic, January 30, 2025

The name Amway, she told me, was short for the “American Way.” We could sign up and buy products we already needed for the house, then sign up friends and neighbors to buy things, too. We would get rich by earning a little bit from everything they sold….

“The World Happiness Report Is a Scam” by Yascha Mounk, Yascha Mounk’s Substack, March 20, 2025

You would expect the happiest countries in the world to have some of the lowest incidences of adverse mental health outcomes. But it turns out that the residents of the same Scandinavian countries that the press dutifully celebrates for their supposed happiness are especially likely to take antidepressants or even to commit suicide….

“Alice Coltrane’s Lost Ashram” by Santi Elijah Holley, Alta, February 6, 2025

I am standing alone on an isolated plot of land in the Santa Monica Mountains, about a 30-minute drive northwest of Malibu, in the small, unincorporated community of Agoura. As I look around, it’s nearly impossible to comprehend that this barren site was once home to the worship community of one of the most celebrated names in spiritual jazz music….

“Meditations for Phone Addicts” by Fyodor, Dostoevsky’s Blog, February 27, 2025

The algorithm does not love you. It is a machine designed to show you precisely the type of misery you will not be able to look away from. Do not give it your despair so freely.

Instead, stand up. Look out a window. Touch something that is not a screen….

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“Life on a Blacklist” by Perry Link, China Book Review, April 3, 2025

One of the questions I am asked most often is what it feels like, as a China scholar, not to be able to go to China. I have been denied visas since 1996. I do not know the reason (the authorities won’t specify), although I can see that the number of possibilities is large….

“‘Book Boyfriends’ and ‘Shadow Daddies’: The Men Cashing in on Romantasy” by Decca Muldowney, The Verge, April 11, 2025

Fell in love with a faerie king on the page? It doesn’t have to be a private experience. With the help of TikTok’s book community and its own influencers, there’s a growing world of book-themed fantasy balls. Now, you can spend the night twirling with him on the dance floor….

“The Shrouded, Sinister History of the Bulldozer” by Joe Zadeh, Noēma, February 20, 2025

Many technological innovations have spiritual origins, and so it is with the bulldozer. The Vermont-born industrialist Robert G. LeTourneau, who had the greatest impact on its early development, was an eccentric evangelical Christian who believed that he created his machines in collaboration with God. “God,” he declared, “is the chairman of my board….”

An early model Chinese bulldozer still in use (Source)

“The Radical 1960s Schools Experiment That Created a Whole New Alphabet —and Left Thousands of Children Unable to Spell” by Emma Loffhagen, The Guardian, July 6, 2025

The Initial Teaching Alphabet was a radical, little-known educational experiment trialled in British schools (and in other English-speaking countries) during the 1960s and 70s. Billed as a way to help children learn to read faster by making spelling more phonetically intuitive, it radically rewrote the rules of literacy for tens of thousands of children seemingly overnight. And then it vanished without explanation….

“The Making of the Buru Quartet” by Joel Whitney, The Believer, March 27, 2025

After his release from Buru in 1979, Toer’s fame would grow in tandem with the public’s recognition of what he underwent—and accomplished. He told interviewers about his struggle to write in what he called a “concentration camp” on a sweltering island….For the Buru Quartet, the four novels he wrote while imprisoned, Toer was nominated for the Nobel Prize and won several prestigious international literary prizes. His writing has been compared to that of Dickens, Camus, and Baldwin….

“The Mother Who Never Stopped Believing Her Son Was Still There” by Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic, My 16, 2025

In 2003, Terry Wallis, in Arkansas, suddenly uttered “Mom!” after 19 years as a vegetative patient in a nursing home. Then he said “Pepsi”—his favorite soft drink. After that, his mother took him home….

“The Claims of Close Reading” by Johanna Winant, Boston Review, November 26, 2025

The English department had a lovely old brick building, but there were hallways of empty offices after colleagues left and weren’t replaced….All of this is true, but it’s not the only truth. Because several times a week I walked into classrooms of students. Nothing there was missing: my classes were full in every way. Where everything else everywhere else felt exhausted, the classroom was overflowing, plentiful….

“Why Would He Take Such a Risk? How a Famous Chinese Author Befriended His Censor” by Murong Xuecun, The Guardian, April 17, 2025

Online dissent is a serious crime in China. So why did a Weibo censor help me publish posts critical of the Communist party?…

“We Did the Math on AI’s Energy Footprint. Here’s the Story You Haven’t Heard.” By James O’Donnell and Casey Crownhart, MIT Technology Review, May 20, 2025

Three months later the company launched a larger, higher-quality model that produces five-second videos at 16 frames per second (this frame rate still isn’t high definition; it’s the one used in Hollywood’s silent era until the late 1920s). The new model uses more than 30 times more energy on each 5-second video: about 3.4 million joules, more than 700 times the energy required to generate a high-quality image. This is equivalent to riding 38 miles on an e-bike, or running a microwave for over an hour….

“‘I Am Not Who You Think I Am’: How a Deep-Cover KGB Spy Recruited His Own Son” by Shaun Walker, The Guardian, April 10 , 2025

Rudi Herrmann took a deep breath and asked his son Peter to sit down. “I have a story to tell you,” he said. Rudi had been preparing for this conversation for several years, running over the words in his mind. He was about to tell his 16-year-old son that everything Peter thought he knew about their family was a lie….

“A Life in Zen” by Anshi Zachary Smith, Aeon, August 1, 2025

Suzuki arrived in California with answers. At a dilapidated temple founded for Japanese immigrants in San Francisco’s Japantown, he slowly defined the trajectory of Zen in the US. ‘Just sit,’ he told his followers. ‘Just breathe….’

“The Chess Cheating Epidemic” by Danny Rensch, Quilette, September 16, 2025

Hans Niemann was one of the players who everyone had been whispering about. He’d had a startling rise in the ratings over the previous eighteen months, and there was a great deal of speculation about how he’d pulled it off. People believed he’d cheated in cash tournaments online, specifically on Chess.com, and it had become an openly debated question as to whether or not Hans was cheating in over-the-board tournaments as well….

“What’s Not to Like” by Max Byrd, The American Scholar, July 24, 2025

Similes! I have hundreds of them on three-by-five notecards, highbrow and lowbrow, copied from newspapers, comic strips, sonnets, billboards, and fortune cookies. My desk overflows with them. They run down to the floor, trail across the room into the hallway. I have similes the way other houses have ants….

“I’ve Gone to Look for America” by Masha Hamilton, Atavist, September 30, 2025

We’re on the road, my oldest son and I, traveling nearly 2,000 miles on Interstate 95 from Miami to Maine, and pausing at virtually every rest stop. Our project is simple and vast at once: to ask fellow travelers where they’re headed, and where they think America is going too. I take notes. Cheney takes photos….

Eric Berger – Ars Technica

Oh look, yet another Starship clone has popped up in China

Eric Berger
Updated

Every other week, it seems, a new Chinese launch company pops up with a rocket design and a plan to reach orbit within a few years. For a long time, the majority of these companies revealed designs that looked a lot like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.

The first of these copy cats, the medium-lift Zhuque-3 rocket built by LandSpace, launched earlier this month. Its primary mission was nominal, but the Zhuque-3 rocket failed its landing attempt, which is understandable for a first flight. Doubtless there will be more Chinese Falcon 9-like rockets making their debut in the near future.

However, over the last year, there has been a distinct change in announcements from China when it comes to new launch technology. Just as SpaceX is seeking to transition from its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket—which has now been flying for a decade and a half—to the fully reusable Starship design, so too are Chinese companies modifying their visions.

Read full article

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Boston Red Sox – MLB Trade Rumors
Marginal Revolution

Monday assorted links

Tyler Cowen
Updated

1. The Challenge.

2. Dolphin-orca barter markets in everything (NYT).

3. Who benefits from Uber surge pricing?

4. Henry Oliver on what makes Jane Austen special.

5. AI and context management, an important Hayekian post.

6. New podcast about climate economics.

7. PC on Tolstoy.

The post Monday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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SpaceNews

GomSpace to provide RF subsystem for Apolink LEO relay demonstrator

Jason Rainbow
Updated
Illustration of TDRS-13, the final sat- ellite in NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) constellation, which has provided crucial connectivity for govern- ment users like the ISS and the U.S. De- partment of Defense for decades. NASA is transitioning to commercial alternatives to meet future data relay needs.

Palo Alto startup Apolink has picked GomSpace to build the radio frequency subsystem for its first relay cubesat, aiming to show how signals can be received from other LEO spacecraft and forwarded to the ground.

The post GomSpace to provide RF subsystem for Apolink LEO relay demonstrator appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Why the Space Force says 2025 changes everything

SpaceNews Editor
Updated
Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy

In this episode of Space Minds, host Mike Gruss sits down with Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, one of the U.S. Space Force’s most influential acquisition leaders and recipient of the SpaceNews Icon Award for Military Space Achievement.

The post Why the Space Force says 2025 changes everything appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Starfish Space and Impulse Space demonstrate autonomous spacecraft proximity operations

Jeff Foust
Updated
Remora

Two space companies have collaborated to demonstrate automated close approaches between spacecraft using a single camera as the primary sensor.

The post Starfish Space and Impulse Space demonstrate autonomous spacecraft proximity operations appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

MetaSeismic material mitigates vibration and shock in NASA Marshall testing

Debra Werner
Updated

SAN FRANCISCO – University of California spinoff MetaSeismic wasn’t focused on space applications when it began using an artificial intelligence platform to create materials to mitigate vibration and shock. But […]

The post MetaSeismic material mitigates vibration and shock in NASA Marshall testing appeared first on SpaceNews.

Daring Fireball

Rob Reiner and Wife Found Stabbed to Death at Home

John Gruber
Updated

Deadline:

The bodies of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Reiner have been found in their Brentwood home, sources confirmed to Deadline.

It appears the acclaimed director and his wife were slain by knife wounds.

The LAPD are on the scene, but have not issued an official confirmation yet. A press conference is expected to take place tonight.

People:

Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were killed by their son, Nick, multiple sources confirm to People.

So it goes.

 ★ 
Calculated Risk

Part 1: Current State of the Housing Market; Overview for mid-December 2025

Calculated Risk
Updated
Today, in the Calculated Risk Real Estate Newsletter: Part 1: Current State of the Housing Market; Overview for mid-December 2025

A brief excerpt:
This 2-part overview for mid-December provides a snapshot of the current housing market.

Note that we are still missing some key pieces of data due to the government shutdown, such as housing starts and new home sales.

The key stories this year for existing homes are that inventory increased sharply (almost back to pre-pandemic levels), and sales are depressed and tracking last year (sales in 2024 were the lowest since 1995). That means prices are under pressure, although there will not be a huge wave of distressed sales since most homeowners have substantial equity and low mortgage rates. It now appears likely that existing home prices will be mostly unchanged year-over-year nationally by the end of 2025.

Active existing Home InventoryRealtor.com reports in the November 2025 Monthly Housing Market Trends Report that new listings were up 1.7% year-over-year in November. And active listings were up 12.6% year-over-year.
Homebuyers found more options in November, as the number of actively listed homes rose 12.6% compared to the same time last year. While this marks the 25th consecutive month of year-on-year inventory gains, active listing growth has slowed in each of the past six months (down from ~30% peak YoY growth in May and June). The number of homes for sale topped 1 million for the seventh consecutive month and remains close to midsummer levels. Still, nationwide November inventory is 11.7% below typical 2017–19 levels.
There is much more in the article.

Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

Two Months on the Front Lines of Mass Deportation

John Light
Updated

TPM has spent the past two months documenting the front lines of mass deportation in New York City. In courthouses, in churches, outside community gatherings and through an extensive digital network, we started to get a feel for and gain access to what we’re calling the “Undocumented Underground“: a volunteer army helping immigrants to stay in the country, even in the face of the Trump administration’s onslaught and some of its uniquely New York features, such as violent arrests in the halls of immigration court.

We published our first two installments in the series last week. The third — on legal clinics for immigrants facing deportation — is up this morning. Lou, a self-described “ex-finance guy” who is now “deeply involved” with one of these organizations says he started volunteering because of the hardships faced by migrants he’s met. 

“They literally have nothing,” Lou tells reporter Hunter Walker. “All they have is their character and their story.” 

Read Hunter’s latest here, and keep an eye out for several more installments this week.

series intro | first piece | second piece | third piece

Spaceflight Now

ULA Atlas 5 launch puts Amazon’s 180th broadband satellite in low Earth orbit

Will Robinson-Smith
Updated
A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 551 rocket streaks across the sky above Florida’s Space Coast on the Leo Atlas 4 mission, sending 27 more Amazon Leo satellites towards low Earth orbit. Image: Michael Cain / Spaceflight Now

Update Dec. 16, 3:52 p.m. EST (0852 UTC): Successful liftoff of the Atlas 5 rocket and subsequent shutdown of the RL10C-1-1 engine.

United Launch Alliance aced its final launch of 2025, a predawn flight of an Atlas 5 rocket carrying 27 satellites for Amazon’s recently re-branded Leo broadband internet service.

The on time liftoff from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station happened at 3:28 a.m. EST (0828 UTC), as the RD-180 engine on the booster roared to lift alongside five solid rocket boosters. The rocket flew on a north-easterly trajectory upon leaving the launch pad.

The mission, referred to by ULA as Amazon Leo 4 and dubbed Leo Atlas 4 (LA-04) by Amazon, was ULA’s fourth launch for the venture, previously known as Project Kuiper.

ULA opted to forego a launch opportunity Monday morning because of a high winds that caused forecasters to offer little hope for acceptable weather. The 45th Weather Squadron painted a much better picture for Tuesday morning, predicting a 95 percent chance for favorable conditions during the launch window.

On Saturday morning, ULA rolled its 205-foot-tall (62.5 m) rocket, designation AV-111, out of the Vertical Integration Facility to begin the journey of a third of a mile to the pad. It was lowered onto the launch pad piers and completed “hard down” at 11:51 a.m. EST (1651 UTC). Later that day 25,000 gallons of rocket-grade kerosene were loaded onto the first-stage booster.

ULA finished fueling its rocket with liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen in the hours leading up to liftoff on Tuesday.

The Atlas 5 rocket flew in the 551 configuration, meaning the main RD-180 engine was supported by five solid rocket boosters around the base of the Atlas booster. Those SRBs jettisoned less than two minutes into the flight.

Roughly 4.5 minutes after leaving the pad, the Atlas booster separated and the RL10C-1-1 engine on the Centaur 3 upper stage began a burn lasting a little less than 13 minutes. A 15-minute-long deployment sequence for the Amazon Leo satellites will begin at about T+20 minutes.

Launch controllers will oversee a final burn of the Centaur’s engine to deorbit it.

A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 551 rocket flies away from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on the Leo Atlas 4 mission, sending 27 more Amazon Leo satellites towards low Earth orbit. Image: Adam Bernstein / Spaceflight Now

Closing out Year 1

This year marked the start of the deployment of Amazon’s operational satellites. Following a successful launch on Tuesday, there will be 180 Amazon Leo satellites in orbit, launched on four Atlas 5 and three SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets. The company is required to deploy half of the 3,200 satellites by July 31, 2026, although it might apply to an extension or waiver for that requirement. The launch of the LA-04 mission will be the final flight of Amazon Leo satellites in 2025.

In early December, Amazon announced that components of the first Ariane 64 rocket sailed from Bordeaux, France, heading to French Guiana for a launch in early 2026. The company purchased 18 dedicated Ariane 6 missions, each carrying 32 satellites.

The satellites, which are manufactured in Kirkland, Washington, were flown to Amazon’s satellite processing facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida before heading onto French Guiana.

The three types of user terminals from Amazon Leo were on display at the 2025 SpacePower Conference hosted by the Space Force Association in Orlando, Florida. From left to right, these are Amazon Leo Nano, Amazon Leo Pro, and Amazon Leo Ultra. Image: Will Robinson-Smith / Spaceflight Now

The year included other notable milestones, including the rebranding of the constellation from Project Kuiper to Amazon Leo in early November.

The company said it made the change as “a simple nod to the low Earth orbit satellite constellation that powers our network.”

Later in the month, Amazon unveiled its gigabit-speed user antenna called ‘Ultra,’ which it made available to a select group through a preview program. It described the product as “an advanced, enterprise-grade terminal that delivers best-in-class performance for demanding private and public sector applications.”

A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 551 rocket flies away from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on the Leo Atlas 4 mission, sending 27 more Amazon Leo satellites towards low Earth orbit. Image: John Pisani / Spaceflight Now
Noahpinion

My thoughts on AI safety

Noah Smith
Updated
Art by Nano Banana

Today at a Christmas party I had an interesting and productive discussion about AI safety. I almost can’t believe I just typed those words — having an interesting and productive discussion about AI safety is something I never expected to do. It’s not just that I don’t work in AI myself — it’s that the big question of “What happens if we invent a superintelligent godlike AI?” seems, at first blush, to be utterly unknowable. It’s like if ants sat around five million years ago asking what humans — who didn’t even exist at that point — might do to their anthills in 2025.

Essentially every conversation I’ve heard on this topic involves people who think about AI safety all day wringing their hands and saying some variant of “OMG, but superintelligent AI will be so SMART, what if it KILLS US ALL?”. It’s not that I think those people are silly; it’s just that I don’t feel like I have a lot to add to that discussion. Yes, it’s conceivable that a super-smart AI might kill us all. I’ve seen the Terminator movies. I don’t know any laws of the Universe that prove this won’t happen.

One response you can have to this is to conclude that because superintelligent AI might kill us all, that we should make very, very sure that no one ever invents it. This is the thesis of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares:

This sort of reminds me of Gregory Benford’s famous admonition to “Never do anything for the first time.” You can make arguments for unforeseen catastrophic consequences for lots of different technologies. Nuclear weapons might kill us all of course, but so might synthetic biology or genetic engineering. Social media or other media technologies might collapse our societies. Video games might entrance us into virtual lives so that we never reproduce. In fact, it’s quite possible that universal literacy and reduced child mortality have already condemned humanity to dwindle comfortably into nothingness, with no artificial superintelligence required.

Personally, I do think that being so afraid of existential risk that you never invent new technologies is probably a suboptimal way for an intelligent species like ours to spend our time in this Universe. It’s certainly a boring way for us to spend our time; imagine if we had been so afraid that agriculture would kill us that we remained hunter-gatherers forever? My instinct says we should see how far technology can take us, instead of choosing to stagnate and remain mere animals.

But yes, OK, a superintelligent techno-god might kill us all. We can’t really know what it would want to do, or what it might be capable of doing. So if you really really want to be absolutely sure that no superintelligent techno-god will ever kill us all, then your best bet is probably to just arrest and imprison anyone who tries to make anything even remotely resembling a superintelligent techno-god. This is the approach of the Turing Cops in Neuromancer, the most famous cyberpunk novel.

And yet today at the Christmas party, against my better judgment, some people who think about AI safety for a living roped me into a serious discussion about their field of research. And to my utter astonishment, they actually thought I had some novel and interesting things to say.

If I can impress AI safety researchers with my thoughts on AI safety, I might as well write them up in a blog post. First, I’ll explain why I’m not very afraid that superintelligent AI will destroy humanity, and suggest some things I think we could do to minimize the risk that it will. And then I’ll explain what actually scares me about AI.

Stoner kids, Singapore, and French forests

Read more

Calculated Risk

NAHB: Builder Confidence Increased Slightly in December, Negative territory for 20 consecutive months

Calculated Risk
Updated
The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) reported the housing market index (HMI) was at 39, up from 38 last month. Any number below 50 indicates that more builders view sales conditions as poor than good.

From the NAHB: NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (HMI)
Builder confidence in the market for newly built single-family homes rose one point to 39 in December.

Here are the readings for the three HMI indices in December:

• Current sales conditions increased one point to 42.

• Sales expectations in the next six months rose one point to 52.

• Traffic of prospective buyers held steady at 26.

In a further sign of ongoing challenges for the housing market, the latest HMI survey also revealed that 40% of builders reported cutting prices in December, marking the second consecutive month the share has been at 40% or higher since May 2020. It was 41% in November. Meanwhile, the average price reduction was 5% in December, down from the 6% rate in November. The use of sales incentives was 67% in December, the highest percentage in the post-Covid period.
emphasis added
NAHB HMI Click on graph for larger image.

This graph shows the NAHB index since Jan 1985.

The index has been below 50 for twenty consecutive months.
Market Design

Nottingham's Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics celebrates its 25th anniversary

Al Roth
Updated

 In September, Nottingham's productive center for experimental economics celebrated a quarter century since it's founding: 

 CeDEx 25th Anniversary Workshop .

I just saw the announcement now, but maybe that's a sign of how successfully experimental economics has become established in the profession, over the last century and around the world.

 For some early history, see e.g. 

Roth, Alvin E. "The early history of experimental economics." Journal of the History of Economic Thought 15.2 (1993): 184-209.

 

Calculated Risk

Housing December 15th Weekly Update: Inventory Down 2.5% Week-over-week

Calculated Risk
Updated
Altos reports that active single-family inventory was down 2.5% week-over-week.  Inventory usually starts to decline in the fall and then declines sharply during the holiday season.

The first graph shows the seasonal pattern for active single-family inventory since 2015.

Altos Year-over-year Home InventoryClick on graph for larger image.

The red line is for 2025.  The black line is for 2019.  

Inventory was up 13.7% compared to the same week in 2024 (last week it was up 15.3%), and down 5.6% compared to the same week in 2019 (last week it was down 4.1%). 

Inventory started 2025 down 22% compared to 2019.  Inventory has closed most of that gap, however inventory will still be below 2019 levels at the end of 2025.

Altos Home InventoryThis second inventory graph is courtesy of Altos Research.

As of December 12th, inventory was at 775 thousand (7-day average), compared to 795 thousand the prior week.  

Mike Simonsen discusses this data and much more regularly on YouTube
The Aviationist
Paul Krugman

MAGA, the Broligarchs and the Media

Paul Krugman
Updated

A diagram of a group of people AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Source: The Authoritarian Stack

Warner Bros. Discovery, which among other things controls CNN, has agreed to sell itself to Netflix. But it isn’t a done deal, because Paramount has made a rival, hostile bid.

Now, most Americans, even those like me who pay a lot of attention to the economy, don’t usually take much interest in insider baseball about corporate wheeling and dealing. But this is a bigger story than usual, for three reasons.

First, there’s an antitrust issue. In an earlier era, when the U.S. government took monopoly power seriously, both proposed acquisitions would probably have been blocked by regulators.

Second, there’s a financial issue. On its own, there is no way that Paramount, which is deeply in debt and whose credit rating is “a notch below ‘junk’” could afford to buy Warner. It’s able to make a semi-credible bid only because of assurances of support from Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest men thanks to his stake in the software giant Oracle. But when analysts look closely at the details, they find that Ellison’s promises of support are more than a bit squirrely:

[T]he Warner Bros. Discovery board worried that Mr. Ellison did not personally guarantee the bid under his name and is planning to contribute equity for the deal through a trust with holdings that could be modified at any time.

Adding to the risk of Oracle’s deal is the fact that Oracle is itself shaky according to the estimation of gimlet-eyed financial markets due to its huge, debt-financed bets on AI.

As Bloomberg reports, its investment grade debt now “trades like junk.”

But it’s not just about the money. For the average American, there is something fundamentally important about this corporate cage-match to win Warner Bros. Discovery. And it’s not about entertainment, it’s about democracy. You should understand that Paramount’s hostile bid is, above all, a political move in the pursuit of cementing the dominance of MAGA-supporting tech billionaires and further eroding American democracy.

Back in 2018, during Trump I, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt published How Democracies Die, which described how nations like Hungary had descended into one-party authoritarianism although the formal, but now toothless, institutions of democracy remain. In the latest edition of Foreign Affairs Levitsky, Ziblatt and Lucan Way say that this process is already well underway here in the U.S.:

In Trump’s second term, the United States has descended into competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but incumbents routinely abuse their power to punish critics and tilt the playing field against their opposition. Competitive authoritarian regimes emerged in the early twenty-first century in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, Viktor Orban’s Hungary, and Narendra Modi’s India. Not only did the United States follow a similar path under Trump in 2025, but its authoritarian turn was faster and farther-reaching than those that occurred in the first year of these other regimes.

Now, in some ways America is unusually well-positioned to resist this authoritarian push. As Levitsky et al note, we have a “well-organized and rich civil society” — ranging from law firms to universities to nonprofits — that can push back. And while some of these institutions are led by cowards, not all are. We also have unified political opposition in the form of the Democratic Party, which is very different from the splintered opposition that faced Viktor Orban in Hungary, for example.

Yet, ominously, Trump and Trumpism have powerful allies that had no counterpart in previous competitive authoritarian regimes. Namely, there is a network of deeply anti-democratic tech billionaires, of which Ellison is a very significant player. The Authoritarian Stack project, which tracks that network, calls it the “Authoritarian Tech Right”. I’ve put their chart of some of the keyplayers at the top of this post. Some of us refer to that network, less formally, as the “broligarchy.”

As I have written recently, the broligarchy has deep antipathy to liberal principles in general and to democracy in particular, which they don’t try to hide. Peter Thiel has declared, “I no longer think that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Musk has derided empathy and made common cause with the German neo-Nazi party AfD. Alex Karp, head of the Pentagon contractor Palantir, has said that he hopes killing helpless shipwrecked sailors will be made constitutional so that he can make more money selling equipment to the Pentagon. And Joe Lonsdale says that public executions should come back.

Consistent with their agenda of disabling a pluralistic, democratic society, the broligarchy is engaged in an effort to seize control of media, both traditional and social. With Donald Trump’s blessing, they are trying to control media so that, as in Orban’s Hungary or Chavez’s Venezuela, the only political news that we see is what the authoritarian powers want us to see.

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and Jeff Bezos’s purchase of The Washington Post were early stages in this campaign. Since Musk’s acquisition, the app formerly known as Twitter has become a bot- and Nazi-infested hellhole. My own account was hijacked by an entity in Saratov, Russia, and I have never attempted to reclaim it.

Then there is the sad story of the Washington Post. While it first appeared that Bezos would continue to run it as a quality news source, the owner’s increasingly blatant political agenda has led the once-great paper to hemorrhage both talent and readers.

Under Trump II, the broligarch campaign to take down independent media has gone into overdrive. And Larry Ellison is at the wheel.

This last summer Paramount merged with Skydance Media, whose CEO is David Ellison, Larry Ellison’s son. The main prize the Ellisons sought via the merger was control of Paramount-owned CBS News. Likewise, in Paramount’s hostile bid for Warner, the prize that the Ellisons are seeking is control of CNN. And they are not even trying to hide their Trump-serving agenda. CNN has been among the major outlets most critical of Trump, in direct, unvarnished and courageous reporting. As a result, Trump has openly called for drastic changes at CNN. When a CNN reporter asked why the Pentagon isn’t releasing footage of airstrikes on boats allegedly carrying drugs, he denounced it as “an arm of the Democrat Party”.

The true intent of the broligarchs’ actions is revealed by the financial numbers: these media outlets make only very modest amounts of money, yet the broligarchs are throwing billions at them. Moreover, previous takeovers have shown that the outlets make even less money when they are forced to serve a right-wing agenda. The Washington Post is bleeding talent and subscribers, while X/Twitter has lost so many advertisers as well as readers that Musk has sued former advertisers, claiming that their decision not to spend money on his platform is an illegal boycott.

Yet another example of the decline of a media outlet in the aftermath of a Tech Right takeover is CBS. After the Ellison takeover, Paramount put Bari Weiss — whose career was built on attacking mainstream media for alleged left-wing bias — in charge of CBS News. How’s that going? On Saturday, when Weiss led a news special featuring an interview with Charlie Kirk’s widow, major advertisers were conspicuously absent. Instead, as Variety put it,

commercial breaks were largely filled with spots from direct-response advertisers, including the dietary supplement SuperBeets; the home-repair service HomeServe.com; and CarFax, a supplier of auto ownership data.

And let’s not forget the recent episode in which Trump’s FCC chair, Brendan Carr, tried to force Jimmy Kimmel off the air. Disney immediately capitulated and suspended Jimmy Kimmel, but quickly backtracked in face of widespread subscriber backlash.

So there’s every reason to expect a financial debacle if the Ellisons succeed in capturing Warner and degrading CNN. But financial losses on media capture are immaterial to the broligarchs because the money is irrelevant. What they are after is buying favor with Donald Trump and, more broadly, advancing their own authoritarian agenda.

However, there are reasons for hope in stopping the destruction of CNN. One, both mergers – the one proffered by Netflix as well as the one proffered by Paramount – are very likely illegal under an objective assessment of their anti-competitive consequences. Clearly, this is something that should not go unnoticed by a future Democratic administration, which could quite plausibly reverse the merger. And, second, the shaky terms of Paramount’s bid along with the Oracle’s dire financial condition appear to have put off Warner’s shareholders.

But it’s a terrifying prospect that we are so close to authoritarian media capture. Just take a look at Hungary or Venezuela to see what that leads to.

NONMUSICAL CODA

From Person of Interest

Simon Willison's Weblog

JustHTML is a fascinating example of vibe engineering in action

I recently came across JustHTML, a new Python library for parsing HTML released by Emil Stenström. It's a very interesting piece of software, both as a useful library and as a case study in sophisticated AI-assisted programming.

First impressions of JustHTML

I didn't initially know that JustHTML had been written with AI assistance at all. The README caught my eye due to some attractive characteristics:

  • It's pure Python. I like libraries that are pure Python (no C extensions or similar) because it makes them easy to use in less conventional Python environments, including Pyodide.
  • "Passes all 9,200+ tests in the official html5lib-tests suite (used by browser vendors)" - this instantly caught my attention! HTML5 is a big, complicated but meticulously written specification.
  • 100% test coverage. That's not something you see every day.
  • CSS selector queries as a feature. I built a Python library for this many years ago and I'm always interested in seeing new implementations of that pattern.
  • html5lib has been inconsistently maintained over the last few years, leaving me interested in potential alternatives.
  • It's only 3,000 lines of implementation code (and another ~11,000 of tests.)

I was out and about without a laptop so I decided to put JustHTML through its paces on my phone. I prompted Claude Code for web on my phone and had it build this Pyodide-powered HTML tool for trying it out:

Screenshot of a web app interface titled "Playground Mode" with buttons labeled "CSS Selector Query" (purple, selected), "Pretty Print HTML", "Tree Structure", "Stream Events", "Extract Text", and "To Markdown" (all gray). Below is a text field labeled "CSS Selector:" containing "p" and a green "Run Query" button. An "Output" section with dark background shows 3 matches in a green badge and displays HTML code

This was enough for me to convince myself that the core functionality worked as advertised. It's a neat piece of code!

Turns out it was almost all built by LLMs

At this point I went looking for some more background information on the library and found Emil's blog entry about it: How I wrote JustHTML using coding agents:

Writing a full HTML5 parser is not a short one-shot problem. I have been working on this project for a couple of months on off-hours.

Tooling: I used plain VS Code with Github Copilot in Agent mode. I enabled automatic approval of all commands, and then added a blacklist of commands that I always wanted to approve manually. I wrote an agent instruction that told it to keep working, and don't stop to ask questions. Worked well!

Emil used several different models - an advantage of working in VS Code Agent mode rather than a provider-locked coding agent like Claude Code or Codex CLI. Claude Sonnet 3.7, Gemini 3 Pro and Claude Opus all get a mention.

Vibe engineering, not vibe coding

What's most interesting about Emil's 17 step account covering those several months of work is how much software engineering was involved, independent of typing out the actual code.

I wrote about vibe engineering a while ago as an alternative to vibe coding.

Vibe coding is when you have an LLM knock out code without any semblance of code review - great for prototypes and toy projects, definitely not an approach to use for serious libraries or production code.

I proposed "vibe engineering" as the grown up version of vibe coding, where expert programmers use coding agents in a professional and responsible way to produce high quality, reliable results.

You should absolutely read Emil's account in full. A few highlights:

  1. He hooked in the 9,200 test html5lib-tests conformance suite almost from the start. There's no better way to construct a new HTML5 parser than using the test suite that the browsers themselves use.
  2. He picked the core API design himself - a TagHandler base class with handle_start() etc. methods - and told the model to implement that.
  3. He added a comparative benchmark to track performance compared to existing libraries like html5lib, then experimented with a Rust optimization based on those initial numbers.
  4. He threw the original code away and started from scratch as a rough port of Servo's excellent html5ever Rust library.
  5. He built a custom profiler and new benchmark and let Gemini 3 Pro loose on it, finally achieving micro-optimizations to beat the existing Pure Python libraries.
  6. He used coverage to identify and remove unnecessary code.
  7. He had his agent build a custom fuzzer to generate vast numbers of invalid HTML documents and harden the parser against them.

This represents a lot of sophisticated development practices, tapping into Emil's deep experience as a software engineer. As described, this feels to me more like a lead architect role than a hands-on coder.

It perfectly fits what I was thinking about when I described vibe engineering.

Setting the coding agent up with the html5lib-tests suite is also a great example of designing an agentic loop.

"The agent did the typing"

Emil concluded his article like this:

JustHTML is about 3,000 lines of Python with 8,500+ tests passing. I couldn't have written it this quickly without the agent.

But "quickly" doesn't mean "without thinking." I spent a lot of time reviewing code, making design decisions, and steering the agent in the right direction. The agent did the typing; I did the thinking.

That's probably the right division of labor.

I couldn't agree more. Coding agents replace the part of my job that involves typing the code into a computer. I find what's left to be a much more valuable use of my time.

Tags: html, python, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, vibe-coding, coding-agents

Miguel Grinberg's Blog

How to Securely Store Secrets in Environment Variables

Miguel Grinberg
Updated

You may have seen the recent reports of a malware that stole API keys, tokens and other secrets from a large number of developers. Where were these secrets stolen from? You guessed it, they were mostly stolen from environment variables.

We use environment variables to configure information that processes need to run, but this type of storage was not designed for security, so using the environment for secrets always comes with risk. Given how serious this recent attack was, I thought it would be good to write a short article describing how I manage my secrets as part of my open source work.

Marginal Revolution

Growth Matters

Alex Tabarrok
Updated

Between 2011 and 2023 India’s GDP per capita grew at a rate of about 4.8% per year so in those 12 years GDP per capita, a good measure of the standard of living, nearly doubled (77%). Shamika Ravi and Sindhuja Penumarty look at what this means on the ground.

The percentage of the budget spent on food has declined–dropping below 50% for the first time ever–and that has enabled significant purchases of consumer durables.

It will perhaps not be surprising that mobile phones have become universal among both the poor and the rich but vehicle ownership is also converging with rural ownership of a vehicle (2 or 4 wheeler) nearly tripling from (19% to 59%).

Another standout is refrigerators which reflects growing income and reliable electricity. In the 12 years across the survey, refrigerator ownership in rural areas more than tripled from 9.4% circa 2011 to 33.2% in 2023. In urban areas refrigerator ownership went from less than half (43.8%) to more than two-thirds (68.1%) of urban households. Overall, only two states Bihar (37.1%) and Odisha (46.3%), had less than 50% of urban households owning a refrigerator in 2023-24.

Economists are often accused of “line go up” thinking but the truth is that line go up matters. The 4.8% annual growth matters because it shows up as a broad, visible upgrade in how people live.

The post Growth Matters appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Schneier on Security

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

Bruce Schneier
Updated

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

  • I’m speaking and signing books at the Chicago Public Library in Chicago, Illinois, USA, at 6:00 PM CT on February 5, 2026. Details to come.
  • I’m speaking at Capricon 44 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. The convention runs February 5-8, 2026. My speaking time is TBD.
  • I’m speaking at the Munich Cybersecurity Conference in Munich, Germany on February 12, 2026.
  • I’m speaking at Tech Live: Cybersecurity in New York City, USA on March 11, 2026.
  • I’m giving the Ross Anderson Lecture at the University of Cambridge’s Churchill College on March 19, 2026.
  • I’m speaking at RSAC 2026 in San Francisco, California, USA on March 25, 2026.

The list is maintained on this page.

Oklahoma Watch
Marginal Revolution

Cats, dogs, and babies, in Taiwan

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Using newly linked Taiwanese administrative datasets, including an annual census of dog and cat registrations from 1999 to 2020 matched to complete personal tax records from 2009 to 2020, we revisit the claim that “pets crowd out babies.” We exploit two quasi-experimental price shocks: a childbirth subsidy and large receipt lottery windfalls. These allow us to estimate cross elasticities between childbearing and pet ownership. The results reveal a Marshallian cross elasticity of −1.32: as the effective cost of children falls, pet ownership rises. Combined with income elasticity estimates, we recover a child price elasticity of fertility of −0.21, suggesting that pets and children are complements, not substitutes. Event study evidence reveals dynamic asymmetry. Acquiring a dog sharply increases subsequent births among previously childless adults (a “starter family” effect), while a new baby temporarily depresses further pet acquisitions, likely due to time constraints. Overall, our findings challenge popular narratives and suggest that pet ownership may support, rather than displace, fertility.

That is from an AEA session paper by Kuan-Ming Chen, Ming-Jen Lin, Hau-Hung Yang, and Shirley Yen, here is the online abstract.

The post Cats, dogs, and babies, in Taiwan appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Marginal Revolution

Is involuntary hospitalization working?

Tyler Cowen
Updated

From Natalia Emanuel, Valentin Bolotnyy, and Pim Welle:

The involuntary hospitalization of people experiencing a mental health crisis is a widespread practice, as common in the US as incarceration in state and federal prisons and 2.4 times as common as death from cancer. The intent of involuntary hospitalization is to prevent individuals from harming themselves or others through incapacitation, stabilization and medical treatment over a short period of time. Does involuntary hospitalization achieve its goals? We leverage quasi-random assignment of the evaluating physician and administrative data from Allegheny County, Pennsylvania to estimate the causal effects of involuntary hospitalization on harm to self (proxied by death by suicide or overdose) and harm to others (proxied by violent crime charges). For individuals whom some physicians would hospitalize but others would not, we find that hospitalization nearly doubles the probability of being charged with a violent crime and more than doubles the probability of dying by suicide or overdose in the three months after evaluation. We provide evidence of housing and earnings disruptions as potential mechanisms. Our results suggest that on the margin, the system we study is not achieving the intended effects of the policy.

Here is the abstract online at the AEA site.  I am looking forward to seeing more of this work.

The post Is involuntary hospitalization working? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Weather West

As warm atmospheric rivers slide gradually southward along Pacific Coast, a return to rain and end to tule fog in NorCal later this week–but don’t expect much mountain snow

Daniel Swain
Updated

An exceptional temperature inversion: Weeks of tule fog and damp chill in the Central Valley amid a record-warm airmass more broadly across American West and California Well, it sure has been another dramatic couple of weeks when it comes to Western U.S. weather! But exactly what the drama has been varies widely from place to […]

The post As warm atmospheric rivers slide gradually southward along Pacific Coast, a return to rain and end to tule fog in NorCal later this week–but don’t expect much mountain snow first appeared on Weather West.

The Diary of Samuel Pepys

Sunday 14 December 1662

Samuel Pepys
Updated

(Lord’s day). Lay with great content talking with my wife in bed, and so up and to church and then home, and had a neat dinner by ourselves, and after dinner walked to White Hall and my Lord’s, and up and down till chappell time, and then to the King’s chappell, where I heard the service, and so to my Lord’s, and there Mr. Howe and Pagett, the counsellor, an old lover of musique. We sang some Psalms of Mr. Lawes, and played some symphonys between till night, that I was sent for to Mr. Creed’s lodging, and there was Captain Ferrers and his lady and W. Howe and I; we supped very well and good sport in discourse. After supper I was sent for to my Lord, with whom I staid talking about his, and my owne, and the publique affairs, with great content, he advising me as to my owne choosing of Sir R. Bernard for umpire in the businesses between my uncle and us, that I would not trust to him upon his direction, for he did not think him a man to be trusted at all; and so bid him good night, and to Mr. Creed’s again; Mr. Moore, with whom I intended to have lain, lying physically without sheets; and there, after some discourse, to bed, and lay ill, though the bed good, my stomach being sicke all night with my too heavy supper.

Read the annotations

Calculated Risk

Sunday Night Futures

Calculated Risk
Updated
Weekend:
• Schedule for Week of December 14, 2025

Monday:
• At 8:30 AM ET, The New York Fed Empire State manufacturing survey for December. The consensus is for a reading of 10.8, down from 18.7.

• 10:00 AM, The December NAHB homebuilder survey.  The consensus is for a reading of 39, up from 38 the previous month. Any number below 50 indicates that more builders view sales conditions as poor than good.

From CNBC: Pre-Market Data and Bloomberg futures S&P 500 and DOW futures are little changed (fair value).

Oil prices were down over the last week with WTI futures at $57.44 per barrel and Brent at $61.12 per barrel. A year ago, WTI was at $71, and Brent was at $74 - so WTI oil prices are down about 20% year-over-year.

Here is a graph from Gasbuddy.com for nationwide gasoline prices. Nationally prices are at $2.87 per gallon. A year ago, prices were at $2.98 per gallon, so gasoline prices are down $0.11 year-over-year.
Marginal Revolution

“AI is everywhere but in the productivity statistics…”

Tyler Cowen
Updated

These people are saying it is there too.  Though I am not quite sure what they (or anyone, for that matter) mean by AI:

First, we argue that AI can already be seen in productivity statistics for the United States. The production and use effects of software and software R&D (alone) contributed (a) 50 percent of the 2 percent average rate of growth in US nonfarm business labor productivity from 2017 to 2024 and (a) 50 percent of its 1.2 percentage point acceleration relative to the pace from 2012 to 2017. Second, taking additional intangibles and data assets into account, we calculate a long-run contribution of AI to labor productivity growth based on assumptions that follow from the recent trajectories of investments in software, software R&D, other intangibles, and productivity growth in both US and Europe. Our central estimates are that AI will boost annual labor productivity growth by as much as 1 percentage point in the United States and about .3 percentage point in Europe.

That is from Bontadini, Corrado, Haskel, and Jona-Lasinio, here is the complete abstract online.

The post “AI is everywhere but in the productivity statistics…” appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Mike the Mad Biologist

Links 12/14/25

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

Links for you. Science:

After Trump cut the National Science Foundation by 56 percent, a venerable Arctic research center closes its doors
Texas Was Set to Create Its Largest Wildlife Refuge. Then the Feds Did Something They’d Seemingly Never Done Before.
In Northern Scotland, the Neolithic Age Never Ended
What doctors say about one of the biggest flu shot myths
A rare photosynthesizing sea slug has been found off N.S. Here’s why scientists are excited
Bird flu viruses are resistant to fever, making them a major threat to humans

Other:

The pro-Hitler problem with the American right: Antisemitism exists across the political spectrum, but the Nazi sentiment seeping into mainstream conservatism is especially troubling.
The Mar-a-Lago Party That Future Historians Will Never Forget
Silicon Valley’s Man in the White House Is Benefiting Himself and His Friends. David Sacks, the Trump administration’s A.I. and crypto czar, has helped formulate policies that aid his Silicon Valley friends and many of his own tech investments.
On the Internet No One Knows You’re a “MAGA patriot” in Lagos
The Class Anxieties Behind China’s Millions of Security Guards
China’s Security Guards Live Lives on the Margin
How A.I. Broke the Sound Barrier
South Carolina’s Measles Outbreak Shows Chilling Effect of Vaccine Misinformation
Candid Cameron: One of the greatest directors of all time offers a thoughtful assessment of his career evolution (“I was an asshole in the ‘80s”), why Netflix owning Warners would be “a disaster,” the “pure cinema” of performance capture, Bob Iger’s notes on ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash,’ the impact of A.I. on the business, and his friend Elon Musk.
FedEx laying off workers ahead of holiday season
Witkoff and Kushner’s Ukraine Turkey
Colleges Are Preparing to Self-Lobotomize
The Bros Fade on Trump
Trump’s Immigration Forces Deploy “Less Lethal” Weapons in Dangerous Ways, Skirting Rules and Maiming Protesters
Vaccines do more than improve our health
Missouri to enforce mandatory age verification today
Meet the neo-Nazi targeting kids online, teaching them to hate and to prepare to kill
Walking in Memphis Crime Data
Republicans’ health care homework is due — and they’re panicking
It’s a Racket!
Are You Going To Do Something
AI, ‘Populism’ and the Centibillionaire Shangri-La
Trump Grants Clemency To Private Equity Executive Who Defrauded Thousands
Suspect In National Guard Attack Struggled With ‘Dark Isolation’ As Community Raised Concerns
No, you can’t get your AI to ‘admit’ to being sexist, but it probably is anyway
In Houston suburbs, Abbott’s attacks on CAIR unnerve Muslim residents
Why is coffee so expensive? Boston coffee drinkers face growing sticker shock. (Trump take coffee)
DHS swept Chicago to get ‘the worst’ criminals. Many have no record.
What Is A “Professional Degree” And Why Does It Matter?
Who Is Really Running the Oval Office?

Phil Gyford’s writing

w/e 2025-12-14

phil@gyford.com (Phil Gyford)
Updated

Yesterday I thought, “Sunday I will spend relaxing, doing only things I want to do.” Today I have been constantly doing physical or digital tasks in an effort to clear the current to-do list, feeling stressed about everything.

§ Although I’m several months behind reading The Wire I browsed the end-of-year chart to find things to listen to that I’d missed, and so far have bought Disquiet by The Necks. I’ve listened to them occasionally in the past but I guess this album met me at the right moment to want to listen more. (Three hours more, repeatedly.)

It’s hard to tell whether I find this music kind of relaxing in its monotony, or really aggravating in its conflicting rhythms.

I do still have to think twice about their name. They’re not Swans or Geese, neither of whom I’ve heard, but Necks.

§ A photo from a muddy field. In the foreground are two long metal, rusty cattle troughs. Beyond them the field drops away into the distance where a valley is filled with fog, trees peeking out through it.
Saturday morning had some good photons
§ A photo of me, neck upwards, looking at the camera. I'm wearing roundish thin metal glasses.

I went to pick up my new spare/gym/alternative glasses this week, some spindly titanium-framed Lindberg specs that are incredibly light and very different from the brown acetate of my current main pair of Moscot frames. Nice to know I have a recent spare pair in case one breaks, given I’m a drive from getting anything fixed.

I also picked up some old Mykita frames that I’d had new “enhanced reader” lenses put in, for use at the computer: everything from close-up to somewhere just beyond my outstretched arm is in focus, and a bit blurry beyond that. Previously I’ve been leaning into my display slightly, looking through the lower “reading” part of my varifocal lenses, and still had to change the resolution down to 2560 × 1440. With these new lenses I can sit normally and am back to 3200 × 1800. So much space!

I was oddly stressed about going into town. I think that – like today – several brief and trivial tasks on top of the usually manageable undercurrent of bigger, weightier concerns all becomes too much. Of course, it was all fine: I didn’t get into an accident on the way there; I did, just about, find a parking space; I did get to the appointment on time; I did choose the correct amount of parking hours to get most of the errands done; I did successfully drive further through Hereford’s terrible traffic to complete the final missions; I did drive home without incident.

§ On Thursday Mum wasn’t up for going to folk music night at the pub and so, for the first time, I went on my own. We hadn’t been for a couple of weeks, we won’t be going for at least a couple more, and it’s pretty much the only socialising I have. I was mostly anxious about parking in the pub’s small, crowded space, but that went OK. Given Mum wasn’t there to sing I felt I should contribute something to the evening, so I read three poems by John Hegley: short and (mostly) funny, which all went smoothly. A lovely evening, as ever.

I am still practising acoustic guitar but avoiding giving any blow-by-blow updates here. Not every hobby needs to be shared constantly. So they say. I’m using the Justin Guitar app which is pretty good, pleasant, and encouraging. I’m definitely making more and faster progress than when I last tried, years ago, working from a book. It’ll be a while before I’m ready to make my performing debut though.

§ I finished reading The Shortest History of Europe by John Hirst this week which was excellent. The histories of England and Germany that I’ve read from that series were good but at times felt like a succession of the names of monarchs I’d never remember enough to differentiate. I was concerned a history of Europe would multiply this problem but in fact it mentions surprisingly few specific figures. It concentrates more on bigger changes, like language, religion, and systems of government, and shows how they spread and changed over time, telling the history of the continent more than once with different lenses. Really interesting. This approach also means it feels more about all the people as a whole (even if from a very high level) than only the ruling classes. It does very much focus on the bigger nations though; don’t expect many mentions of Belgium or Portugal.

§ A photo of a bare oak tree sitting on a hill of green grass. Behind is a clear blue sky above, and a layer of fog below.
More Saturday morning.

§ We watched the first six episodes of Pluribus so can now join the debate on what we think about Carol. Annoying, miserable, self-centred… With apologies to my US friends, she often feels like a stereotype of a particular kind of very entitled, blinkered American. It’s odd to watch a show in which I hope the protagonist doesn’t succeed.

(It’s possible that I am also annoying, miserable, self-centred, etc., but I am also not – yet! – the protagonist of an expensive TV show that you’re supposed to be interested in.)

It’s also odd that I’ve watched plenty of TV shows with really terrible people as protagonists – gangsters, law-breaking lawmen, murderous foreign spies, etc. – and yet, despite knowing they’re Bad People, at least part of me has enjoyed watching them succeed. I guess that’s a big part of what makes these anti-heroes interesting. But with Carol I don’t see anything in her except the aforementioned flaws. I don’t (yet) know what she liked or wanted before all this happened, for example, because she apparently didn’t like or want anything. Her character seems very thin. So I don’t care if she succeeds and that makes her quite tedious to watch.

§ I watched three films this week.

  • Mon Oncle (Jacques Tati, 1958). I said I wouldn’t watch any more Tati but a correspondent suggested the colour ones are worth a try, so I gave one a try. Still weirdly slow in a way I find very frustrating.
  • Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes, 2024). I liked this but can imagine trying it while in a different mood and thinking it pretentious, over-long nonsense. But I was in the mood for a mostly-black-and-white account of an English couple chasing each other across Asia in 1917, with some bits filmed in the modern day, with narration in different languages.
  • Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024). Conversely, it’s possible I might have enjoyed this more another time, although I did approach it thinking, “This might be weird, but I’m up for that!” I was not up for that. Really quite bad.

§ That is it. We’ve nearly made it through 2025. Hold on tight, we can do this.

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California
Boston Red Sox – MLB Trade Rumors
Spaceflight Now

Falcon 9 launch of 29 Starlink satellites from the Kennedy Space Center delayed to Wednesday

Will Robinson-Smith
Updated
File: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the first stage booster, 1067, stands at Launch Complex 39A on Aug. 27, 2025, ahead of the 30th flight of this booster. Image: SpaceX

Update Dec. 15, 4:45 p.m. EST (2145 UTC): SpaceX delayed the launch to NET Wednesday, Dec. 17

SpaceX delayed the launch of a Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center to Wednesday after originally targeting a liftoff on Monday. The Starlink 6-99 mission will add another 29 Starlink V2 Mini satellites to SpaceX’s broadband internet constellation in low Earth orbit.

SpaceX did not offer an explanation for the two days of delay. Liftoff winds were expected to be an issue at the opening of the original launch window on Monday. In addition, booster recovery weather was listed as a low to moderate risk. When it does launch, the Falcon 9 rocket will fly on a south-easterly trajectory upon leaving Florida’s Space Coast.

Liftoff is now planned for no sooner than 7:19 a.m. EST (1219 UTC) on Wednesday. Spaceflight Now will have live coverage beginning about an hour prior to liftoff.

SpaceX will launch the mission using the Falcon 9 booster with the tail number 1094. This will be its sixth flight following the launches of missions like Crew-11, Ax-4 and Cygnus NG-23. 

Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1094 will target an autonomous landing on the drone ship, ‘Just Read the Instructions,’ positioned in the Atlantic Ocean to the east of the Bahamas. This will be the 146th landing on this vessel and the 552nd booster landing to date for SpaceX.

Calculated Risk

Realtor.com Reports Median Listing Prices Down 1.2% Year-over-year

Calculated Risk
Updated
What this means: On a weekly basis, Realtor.com reports the year-over-year change in active inventory, new listings and median prices. On a monthly basis, they report total inventory. For November, Realtor.com reported active inventory was up 12.6% YoY, but still down 11.7% compared to the 2017 to 2019 same month levels. 

Here is their weekly report: Weekly Housing Trends: U.S. Market Update (Week Ending Dec. 6, 2025)
• Active inventory climbed 12.6% year over year

Inventory growth continues to be driven more by homes lingering on the market than by new listings. With roughly 1.01 million homes for sale last week, the 32nd consecutive week above the million-mark, buyers have a wider selection, while sellers face mounting competition. Importantly, this week bucked the recent trend of slowing inventory growth, and the annual increase in homes for sale was larger than the previous week.

• New listings—a measure of sellers putting homes up for sale—fell by 7.4% year over year

New listings fell again this week compared to the same week in 2024, accelerating from the previous week’s decline. New listings are up 5.5% year to date and have shown modest positive growth for most of the fall, suggesting that the overall trend toward more new listings coming on the market could be shifting this winter.

• The median listing price fell 1.2% year over year

The median list price dropped compared to the same week one year ago, though the retreat has moderated closer to year-long trends. Adjusting for home size, the price per square foot fell 1.1% year over year, dropping for the 14th consecutive week. The price per square foot grew steadily for almost two years, but the combination of slower sales, rising inventory, and increased price cuts is now clearly reflected in lower listing values, indicating that the market is rebalancing toward buyers.
Marginal Revolution

Sunday assorted links

Tyler Cowen
Updated

1. What Stanley Kubrick learned from chess.

2. Claims about Ukraine.

3. Rob Wiblin and Dean Ball podcast on AI.  And ChinaTalk surveys Chinese AI in 2025.

4. Stagnant construction productivity is a worldwide problem.

5. “Announcing Progress in Medicine, a high school summer career exploration program.”

6. How good is university teaching?

7. Rachel Maddow is returning to the Catholic Church.

The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

Comments

 
SpaceNews

Rocket Lab launches JAXA tech demo satellite

Jeff Foust
Updated
Electron launch of RAISE-4

A Rocket Lab Electron rocket successfully launched a technology demonstration satellite for JAXA Dec. 13 as the company reshuffles its launch manifest.

The post Rocket Lab launches JAXA tech demo satellite appeared first on SpaceNews.

Spaceflight Now

SpaceX launches 100th Falcon 9 rocket from Florida in 2025

Will Robinson-Smith
Updated
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasts off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to begin the Starlink 6-82 mission on Dec. 15, 2025. Image: Adam Bernstein / Spaceflight Now

Update Dec. 15, 10:20 a.m. EST (1520 UTC): Added quote about weather conditions.

Update Dec. 14, 1:40 a.m. EST (0640 UTC): SpaceX confirms deployment of the Starlink satellites.

SpaceX launched its 100th Falcon 9 rocket from Florida this year with a midnight-hour flight amid very windy conditions.

Among those hundred launches, 71 of them were SpaceX launching its own Starlink satellites. Monday morning’s launch of the Starlink 6-82 mission added another 29 Starlink V2 Mini satellites into the growing megaconstellation in low Earth orbit.

After pushing back the launch multiple times in the night, the nine Merlin 1D engines sprang to life at at 12:25 a.m. EST (0525 UTC). The rocket flew on a south-easterly trajectory upon leaving the launch pad at Space Launch Complex 40.

On Saturday, the 45th Weather Squadron forecast a 30 percent chance for favorable weather during the launch window. Meteorologists pointed to a cold front expected to move through the state on Sunday that would combine with an area of “strong, high pressure centered over the Ohio Valley” resulting in “a very tight pressure gradient behind the front.”

“This will bring a surge of northerly winds on Sunday evening near the opening of the window, with winds likely to increase as the night progresses,” launch weather officers wrote. “The main concern is the low-level winds violating liftoff constraints, along with the low risk of a coastal shower violating the flight through Cumulus Cloud Rule.”

In response to a question on social media, Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX’s vice president of launch, said the flight was among the windiest during which they were able to fly.

“We don’t actually abort on absolute wind speed but rather on how the integrated rocket and [transporter erector] respond to the wind (which is what you actually care about),”Dontchev wrote. “Wind direction also matters given the localized wind effects from the surrounding structures.”

SpaceX flew the mission using the Falcon 9 booster with the tail number, 1092. This was its ninth flight following missions like CRS-32, GPS III-7 and USSF 36.

A little more than eight minutes after liftoff, B1092 performed a landing on the drone ship, ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas.’ This was the 137th landing on this vessel and the 551st booster landing to date for SpaceX.

Market Design

Crypto has found a use, and it's money laundering

Al Roth
Updated
The NYT has the story:

How a Cryptocurrency Helps Criminals Launder Money and Evade Sanctions
Through layers of intermediaries, stablecoins can be moved, swapped and mixed into pools of other funds in ways that are difficult to trace, experts say.  By Aaron Krolik

"Smugglers, money launderers and people facing sanctions once relied on diamonds, gold and artwork to store illicit fortunes. The luxury goods could help hide wealth but were cumbersome to move and hard to spend.

"Now, criminals have a far more practical alternative: stablecoins, a cryptocurrency tied to the U.S. dollar that exists largely beyond traditional financial oversight.

"These digital tokens can be bought with a local currency and moved across borders almost instantly. Or they can be returned to the traditional banking system — including by converting funds into debit cards — often without detection, a New York Times review of corporate filings, online forum messages and blockchain data shows.

"A report released in February from Chainalysis, a blockchain analysis firm, estimated that up to $25 billion in illicit transactions involved stablecoins last year. And as more Russian oligarchs, Islamic State leaders and others have begun using the cryptocurrency, the rise of these dollar-linked tokens threatens to undermine one of America’s most potent foreign policy tools: cutting adversaries off from the dollar and the global banking system.
...

"To test just how easily crypto can slip between the cracks of banking controls, I found a crypto A.T.M. in Weehawken, N.J., to convert cash into stablecoins.

"Soon after I fed two $20 bills into the machine, I received a notification on my phone that crypto had arrived in my digital wallet. A Telegram bot then guided me through the next step: using the stablecoins to generate a Visa payment card number with a balance that I could spend anywhere.

"A payment card functions very much like a debit card, though it is not tied to any of my bank accounts. In this case, the card I was issued did not require me to provide an address or identity check of any kind — in effect creating a degree of anonymity for my spending. 

...

"Tether, which has over $180 billion worth of stablecoins in circulation, is based in El Salvador and would not be covered by the new rules. The company holds more than $112 billion in U.S. Treasuries, and any law enforcement action against Tether could potentially risk destabilizing important financial markets.

"The picture is further complicated by political and financial ties surrounding Tether. The company has close connections to the family of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who is responsible for restricting exports of sensitive U.S. technology — restrictions that people can try to sidestep by making transactions with stablecoins like Tether. 

"One of Mr. Lutnick’s sons, Brandon, is the chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald, which provides services to Tether, placing the family in a position where the company behind the world’s largest offshore dollar token intersects with a key federal enforcement role. Another son, Kyle, is executive vice chairman of the firm.

"Cantor Fitzgerald and the Commerce Department declined to comment." 

Noahpinion

The Trump presidency is still alive and kicking

Noah Smith
Updated
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons

A week ago, my friend Yaroslav requested that I write more about economics and less about politics. So I deeply and humbly apologize to Yaroslav for writing another politics post.

In the past week or so, some people have claimed that the wheels are coming off the Trump presidency. For example, here’s Max Burns, writing in The Hill:

It doesn’t take a political genius to recognize that things are in free fall over at the White House…Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is facing mounting Republican criticism over a potentially illegal order to kill the survivors of a Caribbean boat strike. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice is in disarray after three failed efforts to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James…Trump’s approval rating cratered to a new low of just 36 percent in late November following months of open-air dysfunction and his repeated failure to address fundamental problems like rising consumer prices.

It’s true that Trump has had a string of setbacks recently. Indiana rejected Trump’s proposed redistricting plan, which would have used gerrymandering to give the GOP 2 more seats in Congress. The GOP-dominated Indiana state legislature openly defied Trump’s threats to cut off the state’s infrastructure funding unless they accepted the gerrymandering plan. It was a pretty remarkable act of defiance from state-level Republicans, and could indicate that Trump’s power to bully his own party into line is eroding.

Meanwhile, Democrats have been performing strongly in off-year elections:

Democrats were declared winners of the Miami mayor’s race for the first time in nearly 30 years, winning the race easily by 18 points. And…the party also flipped a Georgia state House district that Trump had carried by double digits last year…The results in Miami and Georgia were merely the latest in a series of ominous signs for the GOP’s electoral picture…Democrats also flipped the mayor’s race in suburban Roswell…Democrats…continue to over-perform in special elections by more than they ever have in the Trump era…when the districts have been somewhat competitive, the results have been strong for Democrats. This year they’ve flipped four state legislative seats that had favored Trump by double digits a year ago…Democrats have now flipped more of these seats in special elections than in any year since 2020, when they won back the presidency.

This presages a potential blue wave in the 2026 midterm elections, which is undoubtedly why Trump is so desperate to push through state-level gerrymandering plans.

These concerns were bolstered by a recent AP-NORC poll that had some very poor numbers for Trump, including on the economy and on immigration — the two main issues that Trump won on in 2024:

Source: AP
Source: AP

These developments do seem to reinforce the notion that Trump’s post-election honeymoon is over. But I wouldn’t be too quick to label him a lame duck, or to conclude that his power over the GOP is breaking.

Americans are grumbling, but not yet raging

First of all, the AP poll is just one poll. Overall, Trump’s approval rating has drifted downward, and he had a bad November, possibly because of the government shutdown. But since the shutdown ended, his approval has rebounded somewhat, and is still above 40% in the poll averages:

Source: Nate Silver

And while it’s true that Democrats will probably do well in the midterms — as the opposition party often does — a Democratic victory in Congress would not make Trump a lame duck. Democrats will not get a two-thirds supermajority, so they will be unable to override Trump’s vetoes. This means their ability to curtail Trump’s power — for example, by revoking his tariff authority — will be limited. And Trump has mostly governed by executive order in any case; Congress can pass laws that supersede the EOs, but again, not without a supermajority.

As for immigration, it’s not clear how much Trump’s deteriorating approval rating on that issue will hurt him. Those lower numbers are probably a response to the steady drumbeat of stories and videos of ICE apprehending and detaining U.S. citizens, demanding that citizens carry “immigration papers”, and generally treating people badly. But there has been no wave of popular unrest in response to those abuses, as there was to videos of police shootings in the 2010s. Overall, Americans appear to still be exhausted from a decade of street conflict.

And Trump still gets decently high marks on border security, as distinct from immigration overall:

Source: AP-NORC

It’s not clear whether voters care about “immigration” or “border security” more; it’s possible that many voters view Trump’s ICE raids and illegal renditions with distaste, but are willing to forgive those excesses because Trump delivered on his core promise of securing the border:

Source: CBS via the White House

It’s possible that the racial profiling inherent in Trump’s ICE raids will drive away the Latino voters that began to join the Republican coalition in 2020 and 2024. In fact, Trump’s approval is slipping with Latinos. But for now, the immigration issue doesn’t seem to be a big liability for Trump.

And many of Trump’s other outrages, missteps, and bad policies simply don’t seem to be breaking through to the public consciousness. Avid news-readers might be aghast at Trump’s attempts to bully Ukraine into accepting an unfavorable peace deal, or at Pete Hegseth’s probably-illegal orders to massacre people on boats in the Caribbean. They might be disturbed by Trump’s plans to sell advanced Nvidia chips to China, or by rumors of an invasion of Venezuela. They might be outraged at any of the administration’s numerous corruption scandals. But a lot fewer Americans are reading the news:

Source: Pew

It seems to me that people can get mad about A) outrages they read about in the news, and/or B) bad stuff that happens to them in real life. With Americans tuning out the news after a turbulent decade, there is simply less scope for (A). That leaves (B). And most of the bad things Trump is doing have little or no immediate ramifications for the daily lives of average Americans.

I said “most”, but not “none”. One possible exception is the measles epidemic, which is now affecting thousands of people in South Carolina and causing hundreds more to be quarantined. This is a purely manmade epidemic; measles can be eliminated by widespread vaccination, and in fact was declared eliminated in the U.S. for many years. Now, because some Americans are choosing to forego the vaccine, the country is on track to lose its measles elimination status.

Source: Simon Kuestenmacher

RFK Jr., Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, has spread falsehoods about the measles vaccine, and even Fox News is blaming him for the outbreak. So if the disease keeps spreading, this is one thing that could disrupt normal Americans’ daily lives and cause them to sour further on Trump.

But by far the biggest thing that affects Americans’ daily lives — and where they seem to be souring on Trump’s rule — is the economy.

Trump’s economy

Americans are very, very unhappy with the state of their economy right now. Consumer sentiment is even worse now than at the lowest point in the Biden administration:

Source: UMich

Why are Americans upset about their economy right now? Because they feel like life is getting less affordable. Polls pretty consistently show that the cost of living tops all other concerns:

Source: Lakshya Jain

And Americans increasingly seem to blame Trump for this:

Source: Politico

Is the affordability crisis real? Well, it depends on your perspective. Real wages for production and nonsupervisory workers — i.e. wages adjusted for the cost of living — are a good measure of purchasing power. And these have been rising steadily since 2022, meaning that life in America has been getting more affordable — at least, on average.

And although inflation is a tiny bit above target and may be rising again, it’s still far lower than in 2021-22, and pretty low by historical standards:

Why are Americans so apocalyptically negative about affordability in the Trump economy, when the objective indicators seem fairly benign? There are lots of possibilities here. People might be mad about high mortgage rates that make it hard to buy a new home. They might be finally venting their rage over decades of rising costs for big-ticket service items like health care, college, and child care (even though many of those costs seem to have plateaued or even decreased in the last few years). They might simply be using inflation as a politically neutral-sounding way to express their disapproval of Trump on sociocultural issues.

One possibility is that Americans are mad that Trump just doesn’t seem to care about affordability. His tariffs are probably contributing a relatively modest but real amount to inflation:

Source: Econofact

And when confronted about rising prices from tariffs, Trump has responded by sneeringly telling Americans to be satisfied with less:

“Be satisfied with fewer toys for your kids” is not the kind of message Americans like to hear, especially from a guy who lives a lavish, super-rich lifestyle. Trump has also called the affordability crisis “a hoax.”

CNN has poll results showing that it may be Trump’s perceived inactivity and lack of sympathy on affordability that is angering some voters:

[I]mportantly, a large reason for that negativity [about the economy] appears to be not just the state of affairs, but Trump’s perceived neglect…Recent polling from CBS News and YouGov shows 75% of Americans and 57% of Republicans say the administration hasn’t focused enough on lowering prices. Again, that’s a clear majority … of Republicans.

And Trump’s macroeconomic policy threatens to make the situation even worse. He consistently calls for the Fed to cut interest rates more. Rate cuts would, of course, fuel inflation, especially if they convinced American business that Trump’s Federal Reserve no longer prioritizes price stability.

Why does Trump want rate cuts? Well, lower rates push up the value of stocks, bonds, and other financial assets, which Trump and his family own a lot of. This motivation might be why Trump’s Treasury Department is tweeting out charts touting bond price increases in 2025:

Of course, bond prices go up when interest rates go down. And interest rates typically go down when the economy is in distress. Just look at the chart and realize that the only other blue bar besides 2025 is 2020, when the pandemic was raging.

It’s possible that Trump’s macroeconomic team is just confused, and doesn’t know how any of this works. But it’s also possible that they value interest rate cuts as an inherently positive, good thing.

It’s also possible that Trump still views unemployment, rather than inflation, as the main threat to the U.S. economy. The labor market is still fairly strong, but deteriorating mildly, with rising layoffs. And right now the AI boom is propping up the macroeconomy; if that boom goes bust, the resulting financial and economic crisis could cause unemployment to soar. Trump may be trying to get ahead of that scenario. Or he may simply have an instinct that tells him that price hikes are less important than jobs.

Either way, Trump’s nonchalant attitude toward inflation could end up being his undoing. So far we haven’t seen any event that hurts lots of Americans and causes Trump to lose popular credibility, as Hurricane Katrina did to George W. Bush in 2005. A rise in inflation could be that event.

So while Trump’s presidency isn’t headed for the ash-heap of history just yet, it is showing major signs of strain. If Trump keeps abusing and hollowing out the economy, eventually some sort of strain or shock will be able to tip it into crisis.

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Paul Krugman

Affordability, Part III

Paul Krugman
Updated

A graph showing the growth of a consumer confidence AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Source: Conference Board via Haver Analytics

Americans are in a deep funk over the state of the economy. The chart above shows consumer confidence as estimated by The Conference Board from January 2022 to the end of October 2025. Early 2022 marked the beginning of the worst period of post-Covid inflation. Since then inflation has fallen dramatically -- from 9 percent in June 2022 to 3 percent now. But consumer sentiment fell sharply in late 2024, rose a bit during the summer, and is now falling sharply again. If one word can summarize Americans’ economic anxiety, it is “affordability.”

This is the third primer in a series on affordability. It was intended to be the last, but as I’ve discovered, there is so much to the topic that there will be a fourth installment next week. Much of the public’s concern about affordability stems from the simple fact that prices are considerably higher than they were 5 years ago. But that simple view obscures some important and subtle factors. In the first installment I discussed reasons why Americans are anxious about affordability even though conventional economic measures (such as real wages) indicate that most Americans’ purchasing power is higher now than it was before the pandemic. I also covered why conventional economic measures of purchasing power are probably deficient in capturing people’s economic reality.

In the second installment I argued that perceptions of affordability are shaped by considerations that go beyond purchasing power: economic inclusion, economic security, and perceptions of fairness.

In this third installment I will sketch out elements of a policy agenda to address Americans’ affordability concerns. Realistically, this can only be a Democratic agenda because Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans refuse to acknowledge that there is a problem. In his Tuesday speech, the kick-off event of his “Affordability Tour”, Trump declared that affordability is a “hoax” and that “prices are coming down very substantially.” On Thursday Republicans in Congress flatly rejected a proposal to extend federal subsidies for health insurance, which would have averted a severe shock to affordability that will hit tens of millions of Americans at the end of this month. And anyone who protests this denial, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, quickly finds a target on their backs. In lockstep with Trump, the G.O.P. is in denial over Americans’ affordability concerns.

So this raises the question: What can and should Democrats promise to do to address affordability?

Beyond the paywall I’ll address the following:

1. What policy can’t do: During the 2024 campaign Trump promised to bring the overall level of prices way down; now he’s falsely claiming that he is in fact doing so. In reality, overall prices can’t be reduced substantially, and it would be a big mistake to try.

2. Undoing Trump’s damage: Policy can’t achieve a large decline in overall prices. It can, however, limit and in some cases reduce individual prices. To an important extent this can be achieved simply by reversing destructive Trump policies.

3. Beyond Trump: Much of an effective affordability agenda can consist simply of ending Trump’s destructive policies. But there’s still a lot more that can and should be done.

This will be a sketch, not a detailed policy manifesto. The broad message is that we should accept the things we can’t change — prices are not going back to 2019 levels — but try to change the many things we can in ways that are positive for the American people.

And in the fourth and final entry in this series I’ll get into issues that go beyond prices and real wages: Social inclusion, economic security and fairness.

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Simon Willison's Weblog

Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry

Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry

Brian Merchant has been collecting personal stories for his series AI Killed My Job - previously covering tech workers, translators, and artists - and this latest piece includes anecdotes from 12 professional copywriters all of whom have had their careers devastated by the rise of AI-generated copywriting tools.

It's a tough read. Freelance copywriting does not look like a great place to be right now.

AI is really dehumanizing, and I am still working through issues of self-worth as a result of this experience. When you go from knowing you are valuable and valued, with all the hope in the world of a full career and the ability to provide other people with jobs... To being relegated to someone who edits AI drafts of copy at a steep discount because “most of the work is already done” ...

The big question for me is if a new AI-infested economy creates new jobs that are a great fit for people affected by this. I would hope that clear written communication skills are made even more valuable, but the people interviewed here don't appear to be finding that to be the case.

Tags: copywriting, careers, ai, ai-ethics

The Aviationist
Marginal Revolution

How bad was British “austerity” anyway?

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Chris Giles writes in the FT:

The main periods of measurement error came in the austerity years of 2012 to 2014, in 2017 during the early period after the Brexit referendum and in recent post-pandemic years. The truth is that a huge pessimistic bias in our national accounts has led us to be fed with contemporary reports of doom and gloom, which subsequently turn out to be nonsense.

But it is the first version of economic events that enters the national debate — and the national consciousness — for the entirely understandable reason that initial releases of economic data make news. You cannot expect people to care deeply about a revision to data that is three years old. Psychologically, they have made up their mind by then.

We are still told that 2010s austerity destroyed growth, but the data no longer supports that story: growth between David Cameron’s election victories of 2010 and 2015 now registers an annualised average of 2 per cent.

Somehow I am not seeing people jumping all over this story?  Is it even correct?  I have not seen anyone refute or counter it.  Here is the analysis from 5.2 Pro, largely confirming, though it suggests 1.8% to 1.9% is a better estimate than 2%.  I am very open to alternative points of view here, but at the moment it appears the correct stance was a) the British economic problems were largely structural and would not just be fixed by an aggregate demand boost, and b) fiscal consolidation was necessary, and while done imperfectly, not a disaster relative to the alternatives available.

The dust has not yet settled, but perhaps most of you were basically just wrong on this one?

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Marginal Revolution

Art as Data in Political History

Tyler Cowen
Updated

From Valentine Figuroa of MIT:

Ongoing advances in machine learning are expanding opportunities to analyze large-scale visual data. In historical political economy, paintings from museums and private collections represent an untapped source of information. Before computational methods can be applied, however, it is essential to establish a framework for assessing what information paintings encode and under what assumptions it can be interpreted. This article develops such a framework, drawing on the enduring concerns of the traditional humanities. I describe three applications using a database of 25,000 European paintings from 1000CE to the First World War. Each application targets a distinct type of information conveyed in paintings (depicted content, communicative intent, and incidental information) and a cultural transformation of the early-modern period. The first revisits the notion of a European “civilizing process”—the internalization of stricter norms of behavior that occurred in tandem with the growth of state power—by examining whether paintings of meals show increasingly complex etiquette. The second analyzes portraits to study how political elites shaped their public image, highlighting a long-term shift from chivalric to more rational-bureaucratic representations of men. The third documents a long-term process of secularization, measured by the share of religious paintings, which began prior to the Reformation and accelerated afterward.

Here is the link, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

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Marginal Revolution

China fertility facts of the day

Tyler Cowen
Updated

A Chinese billionaire was seeking parental rights to at least four unborn children, and the court’s additional research showed that he had already fathered or was in the process of fathering at least eight more—all through surrogates.

When Pellman called Xu Bo in for a confidential hearing in the summer of 2023, he never entered the courtroom, according to people who attended the hearing. The maker of fantasy videogames lived in China and appeared via video, speaking through an interpreter. He said he hoped to have 20 or so U.S.-born children through surrogacy—boys, because they’re superior to girls—to one day take over his business.

Several of his kids were being raised by nannies in nearby Irvine as they awaited paperwork to travel to China. He hadn’t yet met them, he told the judge, because work had been busy…

Some Chinese parents, inspired by Elon Musk’s 14 known children, pay millions in surrogacy fees to hire women in the U.S. to help them build families of jaw-dropping size. Xu calls himself “China’s first father” and is known in China as a vocal critic of feminism. On social media, his company said he has more than 100 children born through surrogacy in the U.S.

Another wealthy Chinese executive, Wang Huiwu, hired U.S. models and others as egg donors to have 10 girls, with the aim of one day marrying them off to powerful men, according to people close to the executive’s education company.

…“Elon Musk is becoming a role model now,” said Zhang. An increasing number of “crazy rich” clients are commissioning dozens, or even hundreds, of U.S.-born babies with the goal of “forging an unstoppable family dynasty,” he said.

Here is the full WSJ article.

Addendum: In the comments Gilligan writes: “On the positive side, we will be able to tax the heirs’ world wide income for the rest of their natural lives.”

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Astronomy Picture of the Day

Where are all of these meteors coming from? Where are all of these meteors coming from?


Daring Fireball

Jaho Coffee Roaster

John Gruber
Updated

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Jaho was kind enough to send me a few bags of their beans, and I can vouch that they roast excellent coffee — the kind of tasty beans where, when I finish my last morning cup, I’m tempted to brew a little more even though I know I’m fully caffeinated.

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Additional Storm Systems to Impact the Pacific Northwest; Lake Effect Snow Continues