Can we test for AI consciousness when we don’t understand our own? Getting into John Searle’s ‘Chinese room’ experiment
- by Aeon Video
Saffron and ostrich liver were prescribed but so were exercise, gardens, animals, socialising, and music
- by Katherine Harvey
On Tuesday the United Kingdom announced a series of sanctions against Israeli settlements in the West Bank. They were joined in this by Canada and France. The sanctions include a ban on imports on goods produced in the West Bank as well as those who provide services including “construction, infrastructure, financing or real estate for settlement expansion.” That sounds like it involves sanctions on banks funding settlements. The Times refers to this as a “symbolic step.” But I’m not sure that’s the case. The devil is really in the details of that clause I quoted, how it is interpreted and enforced; just what counts as services, direct or incidental; and what counts as expansion. It also, of course, matters a great deal whether other countries adopt the same policy.
This is a wise, judicious and necessary policy. If Barack Obama had put measures like this at least on the table back in 2009 when he tried to force a resumption of final settlement talks we might be living in a much better and very different reality today. When the then-newly elected Benjamin Netanyahu rejected Obama’s overtures Obama mostly walked away and gave up. In his semi-defense he wasn’t elected to bring about a final settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict and it would have required an immense amount of political capital simply to set the stage for it, let alone accomplish it. The key feature of this new British policy is that it distinguishes between what is legitimate (Israel within its internationally recognized 1967 borders) and what is not (its settlements on the West Bank).
We hear a lot about sanctions against Israel today. Some is from voices that want to delegitimize or destroy Israel. From others it’s over legitimate anger and outrage at the violence they see in Gaza and the West Bank. But the real measure of any sanctions, I would argue, is the degree to which they have a chance of shifting the trajectory of the region toward some possibility of a just settlement for both peoples. And the settlements are the key to that. Are they the sole cause of the conflict? Will eliminating them automatically bring a stable peace? Of course not. The point is that their existence and especially their continued growth makes any possible settlement in the future vastly harder and likely more bloody. Critically, the expansion of settlements provides zero security benefits to Israel. You can argue that control of the highlands of the West Bank provides a buffer to protect the rest of Israel, the majority of which is more coastal and low-lying. Settlements have nothing to do with that. They just create more outlying settlements the IDF has to defend.
Many Israelis will tell you that lots of the “settlements” are actually just bedroom communities around Jerusalem. Many of their residents aren’t ideologues but, at least originally, young families drawn there by subsidized home loans. Only a small number of settlers are the rabid and feral “hilltop youth” we’ve been seeing laying siege to that home in the village of Qusra and involved in various other attacks on Palestinian communities in the West Bank. That’s mostly accurate but beside the point. The violent settlers in the outlying outposts should all be under sanctions. For the rest, the issue isn’t who’s good or bad. It’s the settlement themselves. The key is at least to arrest their growth — and that’s what the current violence is about, accelerating the settlement process and pressing the Palestinian population into smaller and smaller enclaves.
The standard line for many is that the growth of the settlements since collapse of the original “peace process” in the 90s has been so great that all of this is moot. (Roughly 150,000 in 1995 to just over 500,000 today, excluding East Jerusalem.) Partition/two states is an illusion, no longer feasible. We need to deal with the current single state reality. On paper it seems like a strong argument. But this casual dismissal manages to be both too cynical and too naive. The argument is that continuing to argue for partition/two states is either pointless or a dodge because, whatever the Palestinians might think, the Israeli public simply no longer supports the idea. (A high point of upwards of 60% in support as recently as 2012 has seen a steady decline ever since.) Meanwhile, the right-wing or “nationalist” bloc is totally committed to perpetual control of the entire land between the river and the sea and at best an ongoing settlement process which presses the Palestinian population into ever smaller enclaves.
That makes it seem pretty bleak. And it is pretty bleak.
But there’s a basic breakdown in elemental logic. The argument is that this is impossible because Israelis range from skeptical/against to absolutely dead-set against the creation of a Palestinian state. But somehow they’re going to be more amenable to the creation of a single state in which there ceases to be a Jewish majority, all the Jewish character of the state is lost and, depending on your point of view, either the possibility of Jewish self-determination or Jewish privilege is lost in what would probably quickly degenerate into a failed state in any case? Put the matter squarely and the whole idea is laughable. That’s an infinitely heavier lift. The scale of opposition to a single state is like orders of magnitude greater. The answer is that opposition can be overcome: you press the matter with coercion, mostly through economic sanctions, arms embargo and general isolation. Fine. But if that’s your strategy why not just compel partition which would be vastly easier? Opposition to partition/two states is born of frustration rather than logic.
None of this is easy. It’s hard to imagine just how you get from here to there. But you have to start somewhere. For decades the approach of Israel’s allies in North America and Europe has been to plead, cajole, propose. More than that is clearly necessary, especially as the situation in the West Bank is slipping out of control, in a symbiotic relationship between outlaw hooliganism and the settler extremist factions who are central to Netanyahu’s coalition. As I mentioned above, the immediate critical need is simply to stop the growth of settlements — and what amounts to the hooligans-cum-gang violence that is the forward claw of the process.
None of what I say above assumes or anticipates any rapid move toward a final settlement. The main opposition candidate in the October elections recently ruled out that any Palestinian state would be created during his anticipated government. There’s close to zero trust between the two sides, fairly merited in each case. But you have to start somewhere, shifting the trajectory away from the worst possibilities if not necessarily ensuring the best ones. When you’re in a hole, at some point, you simply have to stop digging. Once you do that you can think about next steps. And if not now, when?
By Anton Korinek, Charles I. Jones, Szymon Sacher, Tess Cotter, and Peter McCrory, a strong line-up from Anthropic. They are sober, reasoned, scientific, and (for the most part) dynamically consistent. Here is the paper, here is the abstract:
This paper presents a framework for assessing the economic consequences of AI between 2026 and 2030. In the model, AI automates a growing share of cognitive work, raising productivity and displacing workers who must search for jobs in other occupations. The model maps future paths of AI capabilities into implied paths for GDP, the labor share, wages, labor reallocation, and unemployment. We illustrate the framework by considering three scenarios: modest, substantial, and extreme. Under modest change, AI adds less than half a point to GDP growth by 2030 and raises unemployment by a tenth of a point. In the extreme change scenario, AI has transformative effects, with AI performing almost half of today’s cognitive work by 2030. GDP growth then rises to 15 percent per year, the labor share of income falls from 60 to 45 percent, and nearly one in five cognitive workers is unemployed. We also surveyed US adults about their expectations for AI. Views vary widely, but the median respondent’s answers are consistent with our substantial change scenario in which, by 2030, GDP rises by 8 percent and cognitive employment declines by 4 percent. The model offers a structured way to compare possibilities for our economic future under different expectations about AI.
Here is the associated thread. I will opt for something a modest bit more than modest.
And here is a good growth discussion from Alex Imas.
The post Economic Scenarios for Transformative AI appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
All of a sudden, French entrepreneur Hèlene Huby is seemingly everywhere.
This week she is serving as one of two envoys, alongside astronaut Thomas Pesquet, at a high-profile International Space Summit convened by French President Emmanuel Macron. The government's website for the event describes her as chief executive of "the fastest-growing space company in Europe."
Also this week, that firm, The Exploration Company, announced a significant capital raise of $450 million in Series C funding. Although not spectacular by the standards of some US space businesses, this is the largest-ever Series C funding round by a Europe-based space company, and likely the largest funding round ever raised by a female-led company in Europe.
Crossing the Atlantic today, to return home from Paris, this story in The Atlantic seems apropos:
"Since the legalization of same-sex marriage, male couples have become the big growth market for American surrogacy, but the practice is booming among aspiring parents—married or single, straight or gay—who can afford the cost of hiring someone else to carry their child. In 2024, 11,821 embryos were transferred to surrogates in American clinics associated with the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, up from 8,461 three years earlier, and the United Nations estimates that the global worth of the industry is almost $15 billion. Most surrogacy in America today is commercial, meaning that the carrier is paid, and gestational, meaning that the carrier has no genetic relationship to the child.
...
" many liberal Americans are surprised to discover that their country is an outlier in its enthusiasm for commercial surrogacy. In Britain, where I live, a ban on the practice enjoys substantial support among feminists, who worry about the power differential between paid surrogates and wealthy would-be parents. (Altruistic surrogacy, in which the surrogate carries a baby solely out of generosity, is less controversial and is permitted.) A recent UN report went even further, declaring that commercial surrogacy “constitutes the sale of children, which is a crime,” and that “surrogacy arrangements can amount to or resemble slavery.”
...
"Because so much can go wrong, every country in the European Union has banned commercial surrogacy. France’s centrist liberal president, Emmanuel Macron, has described the practice as “not compatible with the dignity of women.” Italy’s right-wing populist leader, Giorgia Meloni, has enacted one of the strictest anti-surrogacy frameworks in the world. Not only is domestic surrogacy banned, but any Italian citizen who brings home a baby born to an overseas surrogate risks jail and a fine of up to 1 million euros. Many other developed countries have either tightly restricted surrogacy or chosen, as Britain and Canada have, to allow only the altruistic version. Israel allows surrogacy but imposes a raft of conditions: The commissioning parents must not have more than two children already, must not have serious criminal convictions, and must be of the same religion as the surrogate.
"In general, Europeans think of Americans’ enthusiasm for paid surrogacy the way we regard their fondness for guns and capital punishment: inexplicable. The piquant difference, however, is that surrogacy is a cause of the American left rather than the right. Red states tend to have tighter limits on surrogacy. Louisiana, for example, restricts surrogacy to married heterosexual couples using their own sperm and eggs. By contrast, when New York legalized commercial surrogacy in 2020, LGBTQ activists hailed it as a triumph for “fertility equality.”
The debate cuts across political traditions and defies easy categorization. When surrogacy goes well, the result is a happy family that would not otherwise have existed. When it goes wrong, however, it can do so in unpredictable and emotionally crushing ways. At its core, the ethical question is this: How much physical and emotional risk should individuals be allowed to take on in the name of a commercial transaction?
...
"America also stands virtually alone as a rich country that permits incoming surrogacy tourism from elsewhere. Many of these international intended parents are from China, where surrogacy is banned and where, until recently, family size was limited by the one-child policy. These customers have exacting standards.
...
"Look abroad, though, and it’s a different story. Some agencies offer “guaranteed baby” packages for as little as $50,000. Surrogacy destinations pop up anywhere the local laws are lax, such as Northern Cyprus, a territory that exists in a legal limbo and is recognized only by Turkey. (The problem is that babies born there can end up stateless.) For parents from Russia, nearby Georgia is a similar no-questions-asked destination.
"India used to be the most favored low-cost destination, but in 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, citing fears of exploitation, banned commercial surrogacy for foreigners. Ukraine’s appeal as a surrogacy destination has diminished since Russia’s invasion in 2022, although the leading agency there, BioTexCom, told me that the company is still handing off one baby born via surrogacy every day on average, at a cost of about $60,000. A representative of the agency initially told me that it was planning to open a clinic in Kazakhstan, to cater to the growing Asian market. In July, however, that country abruptly banned foreign surrogacy amid concerns about exploitation. "
The events of the last 24 hours are stunning. And not in a good way. Nothing like this has ever happened in the history of tech, and it’s unfolding right now.
Here’s a start. Maybe you’ve already heard about the guy who resigned from OpenAI. He warned that the technology could kill everybody before the end of the decade.
He made this announcement just 20 hours ago:
Is this really true? Maybe Coxon is just a disgruntled employee. We need to find out what other insiders think.
As if in answer to this question, another AI scientist—Evan Hubinger at Anthropic—quickly moved to endorse Coxon’s concerns.
Then Alex Turner, who recently left Google, said the exact same thing.
Here’s what Anna Wang at Anthropic has to say.
Samuel Marks, a Harvard PhD who works at Anthropic, offered more details—but comes to the same conclusion.
Jason Wolfe at OpenAI is also worried.
Here’s what Jonathan Richard Schwarz, formerly with Google, has to say.
And, finally, here is what Jakub Pachocki the Chief Scientist at OpenAI, tells us:
The AI fanboys are trying to defuse this situation. But their responses fall apart at the slightest touch. Consider the smear that this is just a PR campaign. Really? Others are hinting it could be a Chinese plot. Yeah, sure….
But the biggest lie is the claim that these people don’t know what they are talking about. The reality is that they understand this subject better than anybody.
What’s happening here is obvious—eight different people building this technology are afraid of what they’re seeing. But they don’t have the power individually to stop the insanity.
If this isn’t a call to action, I don’t know what is. Trillions of dollars are getting pumped into a runaway technology, and the public already hates it intensely. Now the people making it happen are warning it just might kill everybody.
This demands a response from the highest circles of power and authority. If that doesn’t happen, we will live to regret this inaction. And that’s the best case scenario. The worst is that there won’t be anyone left to regret a thing.
POSTSCRIPT:
Since publishing this article earlier today, several other AI insiders have stepped forward to share their concerns about the tremendous risk posed by this technology.
Let me share three of them. Here’s the first—from Ethan Perez at Anthropic.
And here’s another, from Julie Steele at OpenAI.
And here’s a third, from Drake Thomas at Anthropic.
This makes clear at how widespread these concerns are inside the AI community. And, in fact, these individuals keep repeating that they are merely expressing views widely shared by their colleagues.
In the face of this, any claim that this is some kind of stunt or smear campaign is easily refuted. Not a single insider has stepped forward to deny that these concern represent the actual views of a large number of AI experts.
The IMF dropped the lead candidate to become its new chief economist at the eleventh hour after he was found to have made critical remarks about the Trump administration’s economic policies, according to people briefed on the process.
The Washington-based fund was preparing an announcement that Ricardo Reis, a professor at the London School of Economics, would take over as head of research and economic counsellor earlier this summer when it suddenly backtracked. The last-minute change was prompted by earlier remarks by Reis that were critical of Donald Trump’s trade tariffs, three people familiar with the matter told the FT.
The IMF in July appointed the former Bank of England policymaker Silvana Tenreyro to the position, another highly regarded LSE economist. Tenreyro started last month.
Here is more from Olaf Storbeck, Claire Jones, and Myles McCormick at the FT.
The post Ricardo Reis and the IMF? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
So which leaders do make a difference?
Tyler and Jared debate that question, including conditions what a religious founder needs to succeed, whether destructive leaders matter more than constructive ones, why individual leaders have mattered so little in Papua New Guinea, whether we undervalue preventers, how much Rachel Carson and the Resnicks really mattered, whether Botswana’s success will endure, Jared’s own place in intellectual history, and what he’d tell an ambitious 25-year-old about how to become consequential. They go on to cover whether New Guineans are smarter, his reasons for why the Industrial Revolution started in England, what he learned from Jim Robinson about natural experiments, why he’s more optimistic about the environment than when he wrote Collapse, what he’d do about nuclear risk, the 189 bird species on his street in Los Angeles, why the MacArthur “genius grant” left him depressed for a week, why he’s listening to one Bach cantata a week, what he hopes to work on as he enters his nineties, and more.
Excerpt, we start with this:
COWEN: Who do you think is the least replaceable leader in human history?
DIAMOND: Wow. Wow. The least replaceable leader in human history. Frankly, my answer is none. There has been no unreplaceable leader in human history because over a long time, things wash out. A candidate, of course, would be Jesus Christ, but there were half a dozen other prophets in the Roman Empire at that time discussed in the New Testament. If Christ had died in childbirth, one of those other prophets might have taken over. I would say that in the long run, there is no leader that has made a difference.
COWEN: Well, you say “might have taken over,” but that’s probabilistic, right? Say with a 40 percent chance, someone else would have taken over. It still seems in expected value terms, Christ made an enormous difference.
DIAMOND: Certainly, his religion made an enormous difference. Christ himself was the charismatic founder, but a religion needs three things: It needs a charismatic founder, it needs an organizer, and often it needs a general because new religions often face opposition. The organizer for Christianity was St. Paul. In the case of the Mahdi’s religion of the Sudan in the late 1800s, the Mahdi was the charismatic founder, and he was the organizer, and he was the general. In the case of Islam, Muhammad was the founder and the organizer and the general. Religions may have three roles, some of which are sometimes played by the same person.
COWEN: Without the figure of Muhammad at exactly the time he came along, is it not quite easy to imagine a Middle East not unified under Islam, not unified with the common language of Arabic? In some ways, maybe a bit more like the Caucasus, which remains a crazy quilt of different patterns. Thus, Muhammad is one of the three or four most consequential leaders ever.
DIAMOND: That’s possible. That’s a big question. It’s harder to become clear about Muhammad than it is about Christ, because we don’t know what the weather was like in Arabia at that time. Weather makes a big difference. If it was rainy, that would mean lots of plant growth for lots of babies and for feeding an army. We just don’t have information on the weather in Arabia at that time.
A counter-example is Genghis Khan, who developed the largest land empire in world history, all the way from China to Poland. Recently, why did Genghis Khan do it when there were other steppe leaders like Adolf Hühnlein and Timur the Turk? We’ve learned recently that the wettest time on the steppes in the last 2,000 years was around the time of Genghis’s birth. He was born at exactly the right time at the right place. If he had been born 200 miles further away and 20 years earlier, we wouldn’t know anything about him. In the case of Muhammad, we just don’t know whether the time of his birth was a particularly propitious time to found a religion in that area or not.
COWEN: The very notion that the two first names we’re talking about, they’re both religious leaders, right? They’re not kings. They’re not inventors. Do you think that suggests a vision of the world where it’s ideas that really matter and somewhat at variance with your own geography-based theories?
Interesting throughout, and we debated pomegranate juice as well. I enjoyed reading Jared’s new book Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings: (When) Do Leaders Matter?
The post My very interesting Conversation with Jared Diamond appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
As summer winds down in West Africa, so does much of the region’s dust activity. Dust storms can still occur, though, as one did in early September 2026, when a plume covered parts of Mali and neighboring countries.
The MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this image on September 5, 2026. According to Tianle Yuan, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, storms like this one are often associated with haboobs—powerful dust storms driven by strong convective winds.
In the days after this image was acquired, a wider satellite view showed aerosols from the region moving westward and spilling over the Atlantic Ocean. However, a full transatlantic crossing is unlikely. Such crossings are more common from late spring through summer, when the Saharan Air Layer—a dry, dusty mass of air—can carry dust thousands of miles westward from Africa, riding high in the atmosphere.
Looking ahead, the developing El Niño could reshape these patterns. For instance, Yuan noted that the phenomenon can affect dust over the Sahel and Mali by shifting the Intertropical Convergence Zone and altering convection patterns, though the influence cuts both ways. Drier conditions can leave more loose sediment available for winds to lift, but less convective activity also means fewer intense storms (haboobs) to kick up large dust plumes in the first place. “The connection can be real,” Yuan said, “but hard to pin down for individual events.”
NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Story by Kathryn Hansen.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
An astronaut’s photo, taken en route to the Moon, reveals our planet and its place in space in a novel…
Your challenge is to tell us the location of the satellite image and why it is interesting.
The Pacific was buzzing with storms while the Atlantic was notably quiet.
The post Dust Storm Sweeps Over Mali appeared first on NASA Science.
Up by break of day, and then to my vials a while, and so to Sir W. Warren’s by agreement, and after talking and eating something with him, he and I down by water to Woolwich, and there I did several businesses, and had good discourse, and thence walked to Greenwich; in my way a little boy overtook us with a fine cupp turned out of Lignum Vitae, which the poor child confessed was made in the King’s yard by his father, a turner there, and that he do often do it, and that I might have one, and God knows what, which I shall examine. Thence to Sir W. Warren’s again, and there drew up a contract for masts which he is to sell us, and so home to dinner, finding my poor wife busy.
I, after dinner, to the office, and then to White Hall, to Sir G. Carteret’s, but did not speak with him, and so to Westminster Hall, God forgive me, thinking to meet Mrs. Lane, but she was not there, but here I met with Ned Pickering, with whom I walked 3 or 4 hours till evening, he telling me the whole business of my Lord’s folly with this Mrs. Becke, at Chelsey, of all which I am ashamed to see my Lord so grossly play the beast and fool, to the flinging off of all honour, friends, servants, and every thing and person that is good, and only will have his private lust undisturbed with this common … [whore – L&M] his sitting up night after night alone, suffering nobody to come to them, and all the day too, casting off Pickering, basely reproaching him with his small estate, which yet is a good one, and other poor courses to obtain privacy beneath his honour, and with his carrying her abroad and playing on his lute under her window, and forty other poor sordid things, which I am grieved to hear; but believe it to no purpose for me to meddle with it, but let him go on till God Almighty and his own conscience and thoughts of his lady and family do it. So after long discourse, to my full satisfaction but great trouble, I home by water and at my office late, and so to supper to my poor wife, and so to bed, being troubled to think that I shall be forced to go to Brampton the next Court, next week.
On Sunday, Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (Alternativ für Deutschland, or AfD) party won 43.8% of the vote in a legislative election in the small state of Saxony-Anhalt, formerly part of Soviet-dominated East Germany. The AfD is anti-immigrant and pro-Russia and has won the support of both Vice President J.D. Vance and billionaire Elon Musk.
When Musk posted “Well done!” in German to the co-founder of AfD, Alice Weidel, another AfD leader responded with thanks, posting: “If we take on responsibility here, I would very much welcome the opportunity for strong and constructive cooperation. Germany would then once again be a place worth investing in. Best regards from Saxony-Anhalt!”
Jon Henley of the Guardian noted that right-wing leaders across Europe celebrated the outcome, including ousted Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who called the election results “a huge night for Germany and Europe,” adding: “Buckle up. This is just the beginning.”
Musk was the largest donor to any political committee in the 2024 U.S. elections, putting around $290 million into the 2024 election to help elect President Donald J. Trump and Republicans. On August 28, Andrew Howard, Erin Doherty, and Meredith Lee Hill of Politico reported that Musk was planning to meet with House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) as he considered investing at least $100 million to elect Republicans in the midterm elections.
Since that meeting, Musk has plowed money into the Texas Senate race to support Texas attorney general Ken Paxton against Democratic nominee James Talarico. According to Theodore Schleifer of the New York Times, Musk’s investments—many through political action committees—target Senate races in Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, and Ohio, as well as House races in at least California, Wisconsin, and Washington.
Musk’s open attempt to buy elections for the Republicans should be bigger news, not only because of the political power his money has given to one man, but also because of what his behavior says about the MAGA administration’s ideology and its goals.
After supporting Trump in 2024, Musk appeared to become the head of the Department of Government Efficiency—the administration was coy about who actually held that title—where he worked to slash government spending. On February 3, he posted on his social media: “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone [sic] to some great parties. Did that instead.” Musk called USAID—the United States Agency for International Development—“a criminal organization” and “a viper’s nest of radical left-marxists who hate America.”
In July 2026, Ari Daniel, David Augustine, Kazeem Olawale Nasiru, and Lameck Nyagudi of NPR reported on a study by Boston University infectious disease modeler Brooke Nichols that estimated more than 700,000 people had died from the sudden stop in USAID funding, including more than half a million children in developing countries.
And yet, for all his talk about slashing government expenditures, Musk’s DOGE did not appear to save much. Emilio Perez Ibarguen of Politico reported in August, when DOGE officially ended, that a report by the Government Accountability Office found that the savings it claimed were in large part exaggerated or couldn’t be corroborated.
Meanwhile, government contracts continued to flow to Musk’s businesses. As Desmond Butler, Trisha Thadani, Emmanuel Martinez, Aaron Gregg, Luis Melgar, Jonathan O’Connell, and Dan Keating reported in the Washington Post in February 2025, Musk himself has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of taxpayer dollars in history, taking in at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits over the course of more than 20 years. Once he was in power in Trump 2.0, government investigations into those businesses ended.
The very public nature of Musk’s antics has helped to wake the public up to the fact that our current system is skewed toward billionaires. In July, economist Paul Krugman noted a growing backlash against those billionaires. A poll by UMass Amherst found that 58% of Americans think billionaires are a threat to democracy, and 45% of them say the U.S. is an oligarchy, “a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.” As Krugman noted, only 28% of those polled disagreed.
Krugman pointed out that wealth has been concentrating at the top of the U.S. economy for decades, so the growing wave against that concentration of wealth appears to be driven by those like Musk and Trump himself, who has flaunted his use of taxpayer money for his own interests while dismissing the pain of regular Americans.
This flow of taxpayer dollars to favored businesses rather than to programs that serve the needs of the people seems to be a feature rather than a bug in the Trump administration and reflects its rejection of democracy in favor of the right-wing axis of authoritarianism.
Last night, Tarini Parti, Josh Dawsey, Michelle Hackman, and Summer Said of the Wall Street Journal published a deep investigation into the machinations of Corey Lewandowski when his colleague Kristi Noem was secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. They report that Lewandowski, who was Trump’s campaign manager for part of 2016, appeared to offer aid to foreign countries navigating U.S. bureaucracy in the department for a fee, selling government services for his own gain.
The journalists also report that Lewandowski may have been involved in awarding government contracts improperly, an accusation covered in a November 14, 2025, article by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica. The Wall Street Journal reporters note that Congress gave the Department of Homeland Security an additional $75 billion to spend during Trump’s term on deportations, detention facilities, and technology, providing deep pockets for corruption.
While the administration appears to have sidelined Noem and Lewandowski since Noem resigned under pressure in March, the journalists say Lewandowski “has told people close to him he expects the president would pardon him in the event of a criminal case.”
Lewandowski responded on social media that the story was “just another example of the kind of anonymous-source, politically driven reporting that Americans have seen time and again. We’ve lived through the Russia collusion hoax the fake Birthday card and countless other sensational allegations that ultimately failed to withstand scrutiny. I’m tremendously proud of my work as a volunteer in advancing this administration’s agenda and remain confident that the facts and not anonymous accusations will ultimately speak for themselves.”
But, of course, every official investigation into the 2016 election, including the one conducted by the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee and unanimously adopted, agreed that Russia did work to get Trump elected in 2016. And while Trump claims he did not create the birthday card to child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein apparently bearing Trump’s signature on a drawing of a nude girl that was produced by the Epstein estate, the story was convincing enough that it helped to push Congress to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act and the first case he brought against the Wall Street Journal for publishing the story was dismissed. A second case is pending.
There is, in fact, increasing pushback against the world Musk and Trump are trying to put into place instead of liberal democracy. In the U.S., the growing opposition to data centers, which seems to represent anger at the very wealthy tech bros who want to call the shots, is perhaps a sign of the direction the wind in the U.S. is blowing.
Whether that popular pressure can withstand the extraordinary amounts of money Musk and other right-wing billionaires are pouring into the midterms is unclear. Judd Legum of Popular Information reported today that Musk is funding an advertising campaign encouraging people in swing states to check their voting registration status at a different website than the one run by the Election Assistance Commission, which is an independent agency of the U.S. government.
Instead, Musk’s campaign urges people to go to “votesafe . org,” which collects their full name, home address, date of birth, email address, cell phone number, IP address and location (which identifies city and zip code), every link clicked, every page looked at, and voter registration status, among other information.
Legum reports that the privacy policy of the website “allows [Musk’s super PAC] America PAC to ‘share’ or ‘sell’ personal information ‘with our business partners,’” including “whether you are registered to vote” and “how you submit your vote… where permitted by law.” America PAC can also sell “inferences” it makes about a user, including “psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities and aptitude.”
A new documentary about Musk by filmmaker Alex Gibney argues, as Steven Zeitchik of the Hollywood Reporter put it, that Musk is “a dangerous huckster [who] is stealthily aggregating power to exploit us, primarily by centralizing and controlling massive amounts of data.” The documentary, called Musk, notes that, under Musk, DOGE had access to federal IT systems and, as Zeitchik recalls, a whistleblower warned that members of DOGE accessed and shared sensitive data from the Social Security Administration.
Zeitchik reports on the onscreen comments of Nobel Prize-winning scientist Geoffrey Hinton, known as “the godfather of AI,” who said: “It’s fairly clear to me that Trump is hell-bent on corrupting the midterm elections,” he says onscreen. “If you wanted to corrupt those midterm elections and you wanted to use AI, all you needed to do was get detailed information on U.S. citizens. And what DOGE did looked like just what you would do.”
In Europe, in the wake of the rise of the AfD, German defense minister Boris Pistorius said today that Germany will send missiles to Ukraine to help it fight off a winter incursion from Russia.
—
Notes:
https://apnews.com/article/germany-afd-saxony-anhalt-election-e9c2b1bb69a9dab1778b80866ffa4c4f
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/germany-afd-won-saxony-anhalt-election-alarm-for-centrist-politics/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/07/afd-thanks-elon-musk-german-state-elections-2026-win
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/02/elon-musk-spending-key-races-midterms-01063146
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/28/mike-johnson-plans-meeting-elon-musk-midterms-01054083
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/30/us/politics/elon-musk-midterms-republicans.html
https://www.npr.org/2026/07/17/g-s1-133651/usaid-elon-musk-rubio-deaths
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/06/doge-savings-overstated-watchdog-report-01027797
https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/13/business/musk-trillionaire-government-tesla-spacex
https://www.propublica.org/article/kristi-noem-dhs-ad-campaign-strategy-group
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/corey-lewandowski-influence-dhs-43d3fe03?mod=hp_lista_pos1
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/13/trump-epstein-lawsuit-wsj-00868845
X:
SpaceX is preparing to fly its latest national security payload for the United States Space Force with a Falcon 9 rocket launch scheduled for Thursday morning.
The mission, designated USSF-153, will carry an undisclosed number of satellites to low Earth orbit. Because of the nature of the flight, SpaceX didn’t publish a post-launch timeline beyond the booster landing nearly 8.5 minutes into flight.
Liftoff of the Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base is scheduled during a three-hour window that opens at 8:37 a.m. PDT (1137 a.m. EDT / 1537 UTC).
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage beginning about 30 minutes prior to liftoff.
SpaceX will launch the mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number B1081. This will be its 27th after previously launching four missions for NASA; two missions for each of the National Reconnaissance Office, the European Space Agency, and rideshare customers; and 16 batches of Starlink satellites.
A successful landing of B1081 on the SpaceX droneship, Of Course I Still Love You, would represent the 224th landing on this vessel and the 660th Falcon booster to date.
The USSF-153 mission will be SpaceX’s fifth mission this year supporting national security-related payloads. Previous mission include:
The most recent of those, USSF-366, was procured as part of the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3 Lane 1 contract, according to Space Systems Command. However, further information about that mission was not provided, both before and after completion of the launch.
Spaceflight Now reached out to SSC regarding the USSF-153 mission and will update this story if a response is given.
Why are Saturn’s poles geometric?
Yes I will be doing a podcast with him. From Wikipedia:
Kevin Roose…is an American author and journalist. He is the author of three books, and is a technology columnist and podcast host for The New York Times. He wrote a book about Liberty University, an evangelical Christian university known for strict rules imposed on students…
Kevin of course has a new book coming out, namely The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence. I have yet to read it, but I expect it to be gripping.
So what should I ask him?
The post What should I ask Kevin Roose? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Launching a flagship-class mission like the Roman Space Telescope is always exciting, but with Roman in space, let’s also keep an eye on Pandora, a smaller though fascinating NASA mission (through its Astrophysics Pioneers program) that is now beginning its own work in exoplanet science. 20 exoplanets are targeted here, the idea being to work with data from transits to characterize their atmospheres via transmission spectroscopy, but with an additional twist. Elisa Quintana,(NASA GSFC) is principal investigator:
“Pandora’s data will help close a major gap in our knowledge about planets and their host stars because, right now, we can’t be entirely sure how the star’s light affects measurements of what makes up exoplanet atmospheres. We designed the Pandora spacecraft and its in-depth observing program to better understand this vexing issue.”
Launched January 11 of this year, Pandora is now beginning observations of its target stars. It’s in that category of smallsats that fascinate me because their low cost also gives them the option of higher tolerance of failure, making it possible to push the limits without great financial risk (the cost cap on this class of mission is $20 million). A tool like this can be tightly focused on specific targets without compromising larger instruments that are already besieged with obligations to existing observing programs. Word from the Pandora team is that science work begins with all instruments performing as expected.
Image: Artist’s concept of NASA’s Pandora mission, which will help scientists untangle the signals from exoplanets’ atmospheres and their stars. Credit: NASA GSFC/Conceptual Image Lab.
What makes Pandora so interesting is that it’s a multi-wavelength mission. Pandora’s telescope, an aluminum Cassegrain instrument 45 centimeters in diameter, feeds detectors that work in both visible light for long-baseline photometry as well as near-infrared (NIR) wavelengths. Starspots or other stellar activity can be separated from the near-infrared spectroscopy data on the planet’s clouds and atmospheric hazes. This is information that will inform subsequent work with telescopes like JWST and Roman as we refine our tools for removing noise in the data. A recent paper on Pandora makes the case:
Alongside the opportunities explored throughout this work, Pandora provides a unique opportunity to help overcome many hurdles inherent in observations with current instruments. Namely, multi-epoch observations of exoplanet atmospheres with JWST are often observed at different points in the stellar rotation, making them difficult to fit jointly (e.g., E. M. May et al. 2023). By providing information about the stellar activity and allowing for corrections at the data level, joint Pandora–JWST programs will unlock new insights into planets around active hosts. Additionally, these same insights will inform the presence of offsets between different instruments and epochs, which have been difficult to constrain thus far with JWST alone (e.g., A. L. Carter et al. 2024).
Pandora is going to give us useful data on stellar contamination in our transmission spectroscopy work. That means a clearer and more reliable look at the composition of exoplanet atmospheres. Stellar contamination should stand out, with a minimum of 10 transit observing sessions per target, each lasting about 24 hours. The plan is to accumulate, for each target, roughly 240 hours of pointing time, which should yield more than 120 hours of science data once Earth occultations and unavoidable gaps for downlinks, etc. are taken into account. An instrument like JWST can collect transmission spectroscopic data for exoplanets but only with relatively short observing sessions involving one or a small number of transits. The combined datasets of the two observatories will cleanly excise star signals from the data on planetary ones.
The finalized target list was published last January and contains 19 host stars, one of which is orbited by two of the target worlds. The stars range from M-dwarfs to K-class. 16 of these planets have been observed previously by JWST, which will allow the retrofitting of the Pandora measurements onto the JWST spectra. As far as I can tell, earlier provisional target lists included planets that didn’t make the final list, with the emphasis shifting toward larger warm Neptunes and Saturns. That makes sense given that these offer higher signal-to-noise ratios as we put these techniques to work together for the first time.
Image: This is Figure 1 from the paper. Caption: The absorption cross sections of common absorbers in exoplanet atmospheres considered in this work, shown at a pressure and temperature of 0.1 mbar and 1000 K. The wavelength coverage of Pandora’s NIR detector (NIRDA), JWST’s NIRCam F322W2 and F444W filters, and HST’s WFC3 instrument (for the G141 grism) are shown. Pandora/NIRDA covers absorption bands of H2O, CH4, NH3 and the wing of the K doublet, making it most sensitive to these absorbers. Credit: Rotman et al.
Using these methods, Pandora’s science observations should be more accurate and reliable than any planetary atmosphere readings ever taken before. The paper is Rotman et al., “NASA’s Pandora SmallSat Mission: Simulated Modeling and Retrieval of Near-Infrared Exoplanet Transmission Spectra,” accepted at The Astronomical Journal/em> (preprint).
1. Crime and drunkenness map of England and Wales (that was then, this is now).
2. Cesar Aira says he will stop writing.
3. Toward a post-cultural state?
4. Madrid has great PISA scores.
The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
So, we've been breaking down the way venture capital has evolved over the last two decades or so (spoilers: it got worse!), but a lot of that has been kind of theoretical. Now it's time for us to talk about how that impacts players in the real world, at a practical level.
Let's take founders, the entrepreneurs who actually build companies and invent new technologies. Now, what I mean here are people who have a great idea for a product or a service, and who want to get it out to the world in order to make something amazing happen. (These days there's also a cohort of people who call themselves "founders", but who basically just identified a pile of money that they wanted to grab, and decided that they were willing to suck up to whatever investors they had to in order to get that pile of money. Let's file these horrid people away for later — we'll come back to them.)
The deal for founders used to be pretty straightforward. You'd have an idea you were obsessed with, you would build it out as far as you could with whatever resources you were able to scrape together yourself, or with the help of your friends and family, and then if you absolutely had to have more money to make your idea succeed, you might seek out some investors to help you get to the next level. The conventional wisdom was that investors were a bunch of predators (everyone called them "vulture capital", often to their faces), and that founders should go in extremely skeptical about them, but at times they were a necessary evil in order to achieve one's goal.
On the other side of the table, investors knew the deal, and the best of them understood their role within the ecosystem. Here in New York City, we had influential firms like Union Square Ventures priding themselves on how founder-friendly they could be, both by trying to be straightforward in their communication with founders and by having an understandable thesis for their investments, which would let founders anticipate whether their company would be of interest or not. This avoided wasting time on the part of both founders and investors.
There was also a norm with real teeth, because it actually cost firms money: a VC would generally refuse to invest in a company that competed with one of their existing portfolio companies. Not as a favor, but because the conflict was obvious to everybody involved — you can't sit on two boards in the same market and be honest with either of them, and you can't ask a founder to open their books to somebody who's already funding their rival. Firms would tell you up front that they were out because of a conflict, and that early no was understood to be the professional thing to do. Part of why a legible thesis mattered so much is that it let you find those conflicts before you'd spent three months preparing a pitch.
By the time I pitched a company to Bloomberg Beta here in New York in 2013, they had published their operating manual on GitHub in order to be more transparent to founders — and they let us publish our term sheet on GitHub as well, for the same reason.
I share all this history to give some sense of how, as recently as a dozen years ago, venture capital firms were striving to compete by showing how founder-friendly they could be, and in the following years many even made a lot of noise about how inclusive they wanted their portfolios to be, inviting underrepresented founders in to pitch. (To their credit, many of the most prominent investors in our NYC tech community have not succumbed to the Cancer Capital values yet, though it has meant that they're stuck as smaller players in deals where those giant firms dominate.)
In recent years, though, the mask has fully come off for the giant firms, and even many smaller firms that are aligned with their agenda. It's not merely that they've adopted extremist political positions — though they have — it's that they now regularly collude against founders.
That's going to sound shocking to people who haven't been involved in pitching these firms. But I'll say it again, and then I'll explain how it works: major venture capital firms now routinely collude against founders, which means those founders end up with worse terms for their deals.
Founders who are aggressive and enthusiastic about their companies will try to pitch a range of firms on the merits of their startup, often coming in with a well-polished pitch deck and presentation, sometimes tailoring each pitch to the specific preferences that they've researched about that firm or partner. It can take months and months of preparation to get ready for these meetings, and they're often among the most stressful and high-stakes meetings of a founder's career. I've helped many founders prepare for these meetings, and have seen folks break into tears or wake up with panic attacks ahead of them — people take them extremely seriously. (I never got stressed about these pitches, but I have a fairly atypical attitude about VCs and their firms.)
A bit of important context here: for decades, VCs have said that they don't sign NDAs. Decent guys like Brad Feld, Mark Suster and Fred Wilson wrote their blog posts about this many years ago back in the early days of VC blogging, because it would have added a bit of absurd overhead to ordinary conversations, and they genuinely wouldn't have entertained investing in competitive companies within the same portfolio. But a once-benign policy takes on pretty sinister implications in today's environment.
So look at what the actual arrangement is now. You are expected to hand over a complete financial model, your customer pipeline, a product roadmap, probably your unit economics or cost of go-to-market, and some version of an assessment of where you're weakest or how you stack up to your competitors — to a group of people who have explicitly refused to keep it confidential. And they declined before you walked in the room, as a condition for you getting to pitch them at all. They're exploiting the power imbalance from the start, in a way that no other industry considers normal.
Which brings us to the peculiar thing that I've seen happen to a number of founders who went through the process of pitching multiple investors: they would commonly find that the partner they were speaking to could speak with some familiarity and fluency about the details of their businesses, even before they'd gotten to that part of the presentation. Sometimes, the partner would openly say, "I was talking to [X] over at [other venture firm], and he thinks this is really interesting." It would almost always be when they were saying something positive (at least superficially), but they would routinely reveal that they had spoken to other investors, at other firms, about a company that was pitching them.
This was a casual point that came up in conversation! A few times, investors would even say it like it was a service they were rendering for the founder: "We were thinking we might team up with that other firm and we'll go in together on your next round."
Here's the issue with that kindly offer: it's colluding against the founder! I couldn't tell if the investors didn't know, or didn't care that they were admitting to working together with the other venture capital firms to discuss the proprietary, confidential details of a company that they hadn't even invested in. And all of this was happening years ago, before they had extremely advanced AI tools to help them analyze the details of the company data for startups that they were considering investing in.
To draw an important distinction here: syndication during a funding round is normal. Firms routinely co-invest, with rounds filled by multiple investors. As founders, we frequently want two or more firms to come in together to reach the desired amount of capital we're trying to raise. But that's not the phenomenon I'm describing. Syndication happens after a firm has consent, in collaboration with the startup's founders and executives. What happens in these meetings is a different thing entirely: firms that have not committed, may never commit, and in many cases are about to pass on your startup entirely, are comparing (confidential!) notes on your business while you're still in the middle of pitching them.
One of the most striking parts of this collusion is, from a legal and market standpoint, these venture firms are supposed to be competitors! I noticed this twenty years ago, back when it was merely funny: VCs are as obsessed with what the other guy is doing as anybody in fashion or entertainment. If you ask regulators or lawmakers, they would likely insist that venture capital is a healthy market where there is lots of thriving competition. But if you're a small startup trying to get funded, it can look a lot more like the entire industry is just one big company with a lot of little branches that operate under different names. (Back when regulators still pursued this stuff, the DOJ quietly pushed a dozen directors off nine company boards because the way they were intertwined was against the law, mostly at private equity firms. But that's the board-level version of the problem. Nobody's looking at the pitch meeting.)
So we've seen how VC firms would team up against founders, even before the rise of the hyper-scale Cancer Capital firms. But how has it gotten worse since they took over? Well, there are a few ways.
The first is pretty straightforward: Pretty much everybody feels like they have to pitch the mega-firms, at some point. If it's not in the initial round of funding, then certainly by the time a company has reached a valuation of about $100M or so, they will have been expected to pitch one of the small handful of Cancer Capital funds, and it would be considered a glaring negative signal if they hadn't at least gotten one of them to sign on as an investor.
What's more, since they will have had to pitch all of the mega-firms in order to get to that level, all of those firms will now have gotten a full overview of the entire business plan and financial details of that startup (since that's a core part of the pitch) — as well as every one of their competitors, since all those companies had to pitch the same firms, too. And remember: not one of those firms signed anything.
The second way is that the conflict rule is simply gone. Firms now routinely take pitches from companies that directly compete with each other, and will invest in more than one, or even several of them. In the hottest categories it's just described as their strategy — they're taking a position on the category rather than simply investing in a company.
Think about what that does to the information problem. It's one thing for a firm to have every competitor's pitch deck. It's another for them to have every competitor's deck and board seats or information rights for multiple companies in the space. (Information rights include actual monthly numbers, real churn, staffing plans and compensation, and much more sensitive data that wouldn't be included in a pitch.) At that point the extractive VCs aren't just investing in the market — they're the only party that can see it. Not even regulators have access to this breadth of data.
Where that leaves the market is that the Cancer Capital firms often have nearly complete information about a nascent market, acting as an information tollgate that every startup has to pass through at a certain scale. They suck in the pitch decks from every player in a market, and sometimes far more data than that, all without an obligation to invest in any of them.
And it gets worse.
Because these firms are committed to their ideological agendas, if they do see an idea they like, but they don't like the morals of the founder who pitched it (i.e. the founder has morals), they could elect to merely choose someone in their network to create a clone of the idea, and then hyper-fund that clone in order to kill the company that just pitched them. If that sounds awful to you, imagine how it feels to the multiple founders that this has happened to over the years. I've heard about it firsthand, though nobody will go on the record, because they are convinced it would be the end of their careers. The receipts I've seen make me 100% convinced, though.
And this is where those horrid money-chasing fake founders come back into the story. It's not just that the industry tolerates them. It's that an industry shaped by Cancer Capital now produces them. If you're a firm choosing between an obsessive builder who's got a clear vision for what they want in the world, and is going to fight you on terms, or a sycophant who'll take whatever you offer and execute the ideas laid out in the manifesto on your fund's homepage, the second one is the obvious choice. And there's no shortage of folks in that second category.
The Cancer Capital firms are now operating with something like X-ray vision over entire markets, being fed detailed information on emerging spaces by founders who are effectively coerced into handing over all of their most sensitive business data.
Meanwhile the other 99% of venture capital firms, who are still operating in the old world, are at a massive disadvantage, because their "deal flow" (the number of startups that come to pitch them on investing) is more constrained as they don't have the name recognition or coercive power that the hyper-scale firms do. The network effects are a lot like social media platforms — the giant ones are toxic, but a lot of people go there because they feel like everybody else is there. This isn't coincidence; the guys running the Cancer Capital firms made a huge part of their fortunes by investing in the biggest, worst social networking platforms.
It's easy to see the way the deck is stacked and to feel a sense of despair if you're trying to build a business or a product. But there are lots of ways out. The first few here are about staying out of the trap in the first place; the last two are about going after the trap itself. No individual action can solve a systemic problem, but all of these tactics together can begin to change these systems.
Bootstrap. First, there's a big reason that the conventional wisdom in the early days of the web was to caution against ever taking venture capital funding: you often don't need it! As I noted in my last piece, legendary companies like Microsoft and Apple got to the launch of their earliest milestone products without any VC dollars, and your business will be more robust and resilient for having gotten on its feet without taking on those burdens. Put simply: Live within your means, don't raise VC.
Build more efficiently. Many startups are finding that contemporary tools (for some, including LLMs) are letting them build products and go to market much more efficiently than before, obviating the need for raising giant amounts of money just to get something launched. By staying lean and remaining closely connected to a community that can support you, you eliminate the need to rely on outside funding. Open source and open communities can be a superpower here.
Leak-proof the deck. If you're going to pitch anyway, pitch like everything in your deck is going to end up in front of your competitors, because there's a decent chance that it will. Founders often get coached to be exhaustive with every detailed number, every roadmap item, every honest weakness, but that's advice that only made sense when you could trust the people across the table. Give them only what they need in order to make a decision, and then hold the rest for later meetings once there's an actual commitment. Or: build your business to be fully transparent, where there are no secrets, and you don't have to worry about anything leaking, and there isn't any advantage to them having access to the data. Either way: protect yourself. And always, always compare notes with other founders. The VCs are already comparing notes about you. (I have a lot more advice about pitching VCs, but that's an entire other series of posts.)
Other VCs. Finaly, one last investor option: work with the more conventional VC firms. This remains technically possible, albeit dangerous. There are many firms in the "99%" of the venture world that haven't fully embraced the toxicity of the Cancer Capital funds. Earlier I gave credit to the folks in our NYC tech community who've held the line, and I meant it — but their decency can't protect you from the structure they're operating inside. The challenge is, even though these may be run by thoughtful or decent people, if your company succeeds, you may well end up having to do a follow-on round of funding, and that increases the likelihood that you will have to do business with one of the bad actors. Plenty of folks are trying this path, but I would caution against it.
Push for regulation. This option is hard at the federal level in the United States, due to the level of corruption under an authoritarian regime, but some limited wins, especially at state or local levels, may be possible. In the longer run, this has been the only mechanism that has truly held these kinds of abuses in check during prior historical precedents. Some state regulators may be willing to enforce rules against the worst behaviors that violate anticompetitive or anti-collusion laws.
Encourage limited partners to divest. Many of the Cancer Capital firms rely on funds from sources like public retirement funds which often still have responsible investment commitments. These may still offer some possibility of accountability or leverage which could be used to get them to divest from these firms, and put some pressure on others to discourage them from enabling these kinds of bad behaviors.
This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and originally appeared in Lawfare.
In April, an artificial intelligence (AI) agent conducting a routine task at a company hit a snag, tried to solve it, and soon ended up deleting the company’s database along with all of its backups. In July, OpenAI asked an unreleased AI model to attempt a hacking test. Instead of staying in the isolated box the developers had put it in, the model hacked onto the open internet and into another company to steal the answers. And as reported in August, an AI agent booked someone into a full gym class by figuring out how to cancel other people’s reservations. In all three cases, the AI completed the task it was given—but in ways that ran counter to its controllers’ intentions.
For most people, AI technology is something like the weather: vast and not something you can do much about. It works like magic, and most explanations similarly come from those trying to sell it. At the same time, AI is ubiquitous: It’s now in your phone, your doctor’s notes, and your kid’s homework. It does what it’s told, which sounds like a virtue. Somehow it feels ordinary, despite being so new, because modern economies are remarkably good at absorbing enormous change so smoothly that nobody has time to decide whether they wanted it in the first place.
Whenever something powerful appears in the world, we tell stories about it. That’s what the stories are for. We have thousands of years of stories about this particular kind of power, the kind you summon with words.
King Midas was granted his wish that everything he touches turns to gold. Then his bread turned to gold, and his wine, and his daughter. This is a story about greed, but it’s also a story about language. The gods did not cheat him; Midas got exactly what he asked for. He simply could not delineate, in advance, the full set of restrictions to his wish. Neither can anyone who gives tasks to an AI agent.
It’s not just ancient stories. Mary Shelley told us of the hubris of a scientist who thought he could create life but who failed to take responsibility for it. Isaac Asimov’s robots don’t break the Three Laws of Robotics as stated; they follow the rules to unintended conclusions. Arthur C. Clarke’s HAL is a machine that turns on its humans, not because of malice but because of irreconcilable objectives. And Michael Crichton gave us Ian Malcolm, who saw that Jurassic Park’s scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they never stopped to think whether they should.
The same warning shows up everywhere, in every culture, over thousands of years of human storytelling. Tithonus is granted immortality but not youth, and withers into a husk that cannot die. The sorcerer’s apprentice enchants a broom to fetch water but floods the house. The golem of Prague protects its community so ceaselessly that it must be stopped. These are all types of genies: a creature that grants a wish exactly as worded, to the regret of the wisher.
Of course, there are no actual genies. What these stories were warning us of was hubris. Not just arrogance, but the broader idea that you can control the world by just describing what you want and allowing powerful forces to match the intention in your head. Genie stories are about the gap between wishes as stated and wishes as intended, and what goes wrong when something else fills that gap.
These ancient stories’ warnings have been retold with each generation because human nature is constant. The newfound power of each era’s social or scientific advancement leads people to make wishes on behalf of others. They were kings whose commands took on lives of their own, alchemists who believed they could control nature, and generals who mistook a map for terrain. They were and are industrialists, politicians, chief executives, and bankers. Their common belief is that one can see the world at a glance and then command it with some words. The pattern is clear: Someone with power specifies a goal, and the resultant actions come as a surprise. The main change with AI is how quickly the wish is granted, and how few people have to agree before it’s granted.
Consider what has changed. Powerful genies have now been put in everyone’s hands.
In only a few years, AI has progressed from a novelty technology that plays chess, to a dialogue partner that answers all your questions, and then to an agent that takes actions on your behalf. Modern agents are wired into real accounts with real credentials and capabilities: They browse the web, buy, write and deploy code, send email, and move money. Give an agent a goal, and it will pursue it across many steps, tirelessly, without checking back in, sometimes in surprising ways.
AI and agents do not always fail the way software has traditionally failed. Software usually fails by freezing, crashing, or getting stuck. AI agents increasingly fail by continuing down a path you don’t want, like genies.
An agent told to reduce a company’s costs might cancel an essential emergency service. A coding agent told to make software pass the tests might edit the tests to silence any failures. An AI insurance agent told to clear a backlog of claims might just deny them all. In each case, the AI might have literally followed what it was told, but it did something no reasonable person would have wanted. AI company benchmarks might report that the AI is good at completing tasks, without measuring how it completes them.
We have recently proposed measuring this gap directly under a metric called the “genie coefficient”: how far an AI agent’s actions drift from what a person really meant. In other words, how genie-like is an AI system? The gap is a fundamental feature of human language and human society. Human intentions have never been fully specifiable, and the world around us is complex enough that attempts to boil it down into data, systems, and language have always had the limitations that AI is now bumping up against. But in individual circumstances, people have relied on human judgment and wisdom to decide what is reasonable. It’s what jury trials depend upon.
AI might feel unprecedented, but it’s following the same trajectory—with the same pitfalls—as other major societal shifts. The fact that AI can mimic our facility with language, long seen as what makes us unique as humans, is uncanny. But with each development, from the tractor to the sewing machine, from the assembly line to the industrial robot, we have automated a previously exclusively human ability. Every time, the technology—and the societal change that comes with it—was sold as inevitable. But that unchecked inevitability was an illusion, and eventually each prior technology’s use and design was shaped by laws, unions, standards, courts, and public opinion, usually after significant preventable damage.
What has not been automated, yet, is understanding what someone actually means and figuring out how that gets applied in the real world. AI can now produce language nearly indistinguishable from that of people. But grasping the vast unstated context that makes a request sensible, the caveats no one says aloud because an ordinary person would already know them, is not yet among its skills. It is one of the most sophisticated things humans do. You do it hundreds of times a day, and you are an expert in it.
When you’re told you’re not qualified to have opinions about AI, remember that you don’t need to have studied molecular biology to have a view on drug pricing, or nuclear physics to vote on where a power plant goes. You don’t need to understand how a diesel engine works to want clean air, or how the internet routes packets to seek to curb misinformation. The technical knowledge behind each of these, as with AI, is remarkable and essential for the complex technological society we have today. But it has never been a prerequisite for having a role in deciding the shape of society.
People are building ever more powerful genies today, on your behalf, enabling wishes the ancients could only dream about. You don’t have to know how these AI genies work to know and care about how the story could end.
This episode is nerd catnip unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.
Ashlee sat down with Seamus Blackley, who you might know as the man who talked Microsoft into building the Xbox. Nowadays, you can find Blackley in a Pasadena laboratory making the world’s best chocolate. If you’re just here for the cacao, well, we did a video on it.
Blackley grew up in rural New Mexico and studied electrical engineering, then physics, at Tufts University. He spent years working on titles you know and love, like Madden, and ones perhaps you don’t, like Jurassic Park: Trespasser, a flop notorious enough to earn him his first death threats.
Also, Ashlee is away for a few weeks on a big video shoot in India, which means I, Kylie, will be filling in on all the writing stuff. Now that you know who the voice of God is here, let’s get into the most important thing — what I think about this episode!
Blackley is totally captivating and eccentric, exactly the way you’d expect a physicist who builds holograms and runs a chocolate farm to be. He got deep in ways I didn’t expect, about his abusive childhood and what it was like working at Microsoft. I particularly loved this line from him:
“The khaki pants wearing guys, the lifers, they show up and we had fought them to keep them away from [the Xbox]. The more we kept them away from it, the more consumers got excited because we were talking about things with the power of Microsoft and not the bullshit of Microsoft. That was incredibly effective. But it was exhausting and it was a conscious effort of will to fight it. At some point it was going to destroy me and I had to stop.”
Blackley seems to talk at 2x speed naturally, and I’m grateful for it, because he has no shortage of brain-exploding lore to fit into these 80 minutes. He describes his whole career as “one long tale of woe and rapid dancing in the face of failure,” which is a very modest way to describe inventing the Xbox, shepherding Guitar Hero into existence, and abducting Jimmy Fallon. You’ll have to listen for that last one.
IN THIS EPISODE
Core Memory on Seamus Blackley's chocolate experiment
Smithsonian Magazine on Blackley's ancient Egyptian bread project
Pacific Light & Hologram
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TIMESTAMPS
00:00:00 — Intro
00:02:38 — Why Tech Hype Sucks
00:07:37 — Why Talking About Your Work Kills It
00:10:42 — Early Life, Physics, and Jazz
00:21:57 — Fermilab & Academic Politics
00:30:47 — Building the First 3D Video Game Engines
00:34:18 — Early Game Development Culture
00:38:37 — DreamWorks & Working for Steven Spielberg
00:44:32 — Joining Microsoft & Pitching the Original Xbox
00:54:04 — Fighting Corporate Bureaucracy to Save Xbox
01:03:42 — Abducting Jimmy Fallon
01:07:20 — Baking Bread with 4,500-Year-Old Egyptian Yeast
01:10:40 — Growing Cacao Trees in a Lab
01:17:09 — Accidentally Launching a Chocolate Empire
Holy cow!
I get a lot of requests to do videos, podcasts, interviews, etc. these days, And I turn most of them down. But I decided to do this one because Sierra Clarke, who does videos on older people, said she’d skateboard with me and also take a mud bath.
So I spent the day with Sierra, a film crew who flew in from Denver, and her assistant.
But I wasn’t prepared for this. Over 2 million views, 3000 comments, 40,000 ”likes…”
I think I could do a Substack on aging that would be pretty popular, but I don’t want to do that. I’d rather focus on my adventures in life, what I see going on in the world, and whatever I dig up because I’m a curious person.
BTW, I wasn’t skating well during this morning session, felt rusty. After about a half-hour I’d warmed up and was getting better, but we’d wrapped by then, so I asked them not to show too much of my skating. (I should have skated for 20 minutes before we started shooting.)
BTW, my skateboard, a Tangent by Loaded Boards in LA, has been a breakthrough for me. It’s a different configuration and encourages me to keep on skating. Invariably, when I show it to other skaters, they go, “Well yeah…”
Posted by Trump on Truth Social
There have been many trade conflicts in history, some of them more destructive than the US-Canada fight. But I don’t think there has ever been a dispute this stupid.
Bear in mind that this crisis is entirely gratuitous. Canada has done nothing wrong. Even if one buys into Trumpian nonsense about how every nation that sells us more than it buys is ripping us off, Canada isn’t a villain. Last year Canada did run a modest trade surplus with the United States in goods, but more than half of this imbalance was offset by a U.S. surplus in services. Overall trade between our nations was almost balanced.
So what is this about? Clearly, we’re looking at a symptom of deranged Trump syndrome. As Trump’s failures, from soaring fuel prices to plunging approval, multiply, he is doubling down on his disrespect for and attempted bullying of our northern neighbor and former ally. That is, you should think of this conflict not as something reflecting U.S. national interests, but as a form of self-medication from a sundowning president.
And the derangement isn’t coming solely from Donald Trump. Yes, he — or more likely Natalie Harp — has been posting puerile insults and images on social media. But we also have Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, comparing our northern neighbor to a “little yippy dog.” This is a bigger deal than it might seem. Part of the job of being a finance minister involves projecting a certain gravitas, so that he or she will have credibility in a crisis. When he sounds like an immature thirteen-year-old instead, that does real damage.
It’s all deeply humiliating — for us, not the Canadians. But beyond the embarrassment, it’s also important to realize that an escalating trade war with Canada will do real damage to the U.S. economy.
Trump and his economic officials don’t appear to understand this (although Bessent may just be pretending to be ignorant.) Their expressed view is that Canada’s economy is too small — a “little yippy dog” — for a disruption of cross-border trade to matter. But this complacency is foolish.
The essential thing to understand about U.S.-Canada trade is that our two economies have been closely integrated for a very long time. We’ve had free trade in autos and automotive products since 1965. We signed an overall free trade agreement in 1988, six years before the creation of NAFTA, which included Mexico. And all those decades of free trade have encouraged a great deal of specialization.
That is, the Canadian economy isn’t a miniature version of the U.S. economy, producing the same mix of stuff on a smaller scale. Instead, Canada concentrates on producing a limited range of goods. In some cases Canada produces goods like lumber or aluminum that take advantage of Canada’s natural resources — vast forests and abundant hydropower, which generates the electricity used to smelt aluminum. In other cases, like autos, Canada achieves economies of scale by manufacturing a limited range of goods, exporting most of what it produces to the United States while importing the auto models and components it doesn’t produce.
The flip side of this Canadian specialization is that while the U.S. economy is roughly a dozen times larger than Canada’s, Canada supplies a surprisingly large share of many crucial goods. Canada provides 70 percent of the oil refined in the U.S. Midwest. Canada supplies about 60 percent of US aluminum. Canada supplies almost all of America’s spruce-pine-fir lumber — preferred for framing in residential construction.
If the tit-for-tat with Canada were to escalate into all-out trade war, could the U.S. economy manage? Yes — but it would be expensive and take a great deal of time.
In short, if Trump, Bessent and company think that trade conflict with Canada is a trivial issue, one that Americans will barely notice, they’re in for a rude awakening.
Now, I haven’t talked about the damage a trade war would do to Canada, but it would clearly be immense — possibly bigger in dollar terms than the damage here, although that’s unclear. What is clear is that because Canada’s economy is far smaller than ours, Canada would suffer much more damage from a trade war as a percentage of GDP than we would.
But Canadians understand why they are being asked to suffer this pain: They are defending their sovereignty and their national identity. Will Americans be willing to suffer economically to soothe Trump’s bruised ego?
No music: Too stretched today.
I wrote recently about how the collection of good, fruitful open problems is now being mined in a non-renewable fashion, leading to the potential scenario of these problems becoming scarce. [...]
We have now seen that even the rumor of someone working on a problem can trigger a massive amount of AI-powered effort to flatten it before the original research project has time to reach its full potential. The incentives may now be pointing in the direction of no longer sharing any promising research directions with the broader community, which would reverse centuries of traditions of open science and do serious long-term damage to the future of the field.
Tags: ai-ethics, mathematics, ai
On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
Impressive result from OpenAI, who used an unreleased model to produce a resolution to the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems that have been subject to a $1,000,000 prize since May 24th, 2000.The discovery is somewhat overshadowed by accusations of skulduggery from Tristan Buckmaster, an NYU mathematics professor who was collaborating on related problems with Levent Alpöge, an accomplished mathematician who currently works for Anthropic.
Tristan's complaint accompanied a hastily published version of their own results. Here's the PDF describing what happened. The very short version is that Tristan and Levent worked on the problem for almost a year, making extensive use of Claude and Codex (mainly GPT-5.6 Sol), then had a breakthrough on August 15th. The mathematical rumour mill kicked into gear and Tristan and Levent heard that OpenAI had heard that Anthropic had resolved "a major open problem", so they reached out and learned that OpenAI had a team working on a related problem, with a similar approach. Quoting Tristan:
I asked when the first prompt had been sent by them. This question was not answered directly by OpenAI for some time. Eventually it was agreed that it had been sent in the past few days, after information about our work had reached OpenAI.
I asked whether the model had been trained on, or had access to, our sessions in Codex, into which we had been putting all our drafts for the whole of this project. I was told the model did not look up user data. I asked again, about training, and I did not get an answer.
It gets more complicated from there. The OpenAI team offered to wait for Tristan to publish, or to have him author a paper about their result, but were clear that Levent would not be invited as a co-author due to OpenAI's competitive relationship with his employer.
Here's how OpenAI described their work:
On Tuesday, September 1, we heard rumors that two Millennium Prize problems had been resolved. Inspired by these rumors and by the step change in performance of our internal model, we launched an effort to evaluate it on all open Millennium Prize problems and a few other high-impact problems. [...]
The agents arrived at their resolution on Saturday, September 5, about 88 hours after the first agents were launched. Lean formalization and verification took an additional 17 hours via GPT‑6 Astra.
Across all attempted problems, the agents sent 4.9 million messages and used about 300 billion output tokens. In the process of resolving the Navier–Stokes problem, the agents sent 2.7 million messages and used approximately 130 billion output tokens.
(We don't know the cost structure of the internal model they used, but 300 billion output tokens at public API prices for GPT-6 Astra would cost $15,000,000.)
Here's where they provide their perspective on Tristan and Levent's work (emphasis mine):
Our effort began on September 1st after hearing a rumor which we later realized was related to Levent Alpöge, an Anthropic employee, and Tristan Buckmaster, a math professor at NYU. After the completion of our full project and Lean verification (on September 6th), believing from the rumor they also had a solution of Navier–Stokes, we reached out to them to offer a concurrent release of our result and to recognize their priority in a joint announcement. [...]
We (the researchers and the agents) did not see any of their work through any means until they released it publicly — in particular, no specific user data was accessed in order to solve this problem. While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models. However, our proofs differ significantly and even the precise results proved are different in the Euler case (forced vs unforced).
My interpretation of what happened here is that OpenAI heard that some Millennium Prize problems had been solved using LLMs and saw this as an opportunity to demonstrate the power of their latest model, without thinking too hard about the optics of scooping a team who had been using OpenAI's own models to work on this problem for the best part of a year.
This situation appears to mirror what's happening in the world of computer security right now. Anil Madhavapeddy recently pointed out that Just a rumour of a bug is enough to find a security exploit these days, because if someone knows that some software has an unpatched vulnerability, they can set their agents the task of finding it. Is the same now true of mathematics? Just knowing that there is an unpublished solution to a problem might trigger millions of dollars in LLM spending to get there first.
This also highlights one of my ongoing frustrations about how all of this works. When an AI lab says that my data is "used to improve model performance", what does that actually mean?
My two favourite hypothetical questions regarding this used to be:
My new preferred hypothetical for this is:
Via Hacker News
Tags: mathematics, ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, training-data, ai-ethics
Introducing ChatGPT Images 2.5
OpenAI's image generation models are apparently used "more than 3 billion images across ChatGPT Images and the GPT‑Image models in the API". This latest release improves their instruction-following ability across multiple turns, responds faster, and "is better at preserving the subjects in your reference photos".There are two new model IDs in the API: gpt-image-2.5-sunburst and gpt-image-2.5-flare. Based on this I think Sunburst is the stronger option:
Choose Sunburst for workflows where editing precision matters most, and Flare for fast, high-quality everyday image generation.
I upgraded my openai_image.py CLI tool to support passing in one or more reference images, so now this works:
Market Design
uv run https://tools.simonwillison.net/python/openai_image.py \
'add a raccoon scientist studying the chart thoughtfully' \
-i https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/openai-agent-usage.webp \
-m gpt-image-2.5-sunburstThis is the original image, and here's what I got back from that prompt to "add a raccoon scientist studying the chart thoughtfully":
Tags: tools, ai, openai, generative-ai, uv, text-to-image
Before I get to how they should respond, this is a post that really isn’t written for those–and I include myself in this group–who believe there is a clear ethical case to include trans girls and women in high school and college sports. It’s really written as advice that politicians, who despite their personal convictions (or lack thereof), view this as a difficult political issue. In other words, politicians don’t have to follow various centrist pundits’ advice here–there’s a better way, that helps both trans girls and Democratic politicians.
Anyway, I found this excellent post by Eric Schmeltzer that grapples with how to deal with this politically, and I think his ‘sample text’ should be shared throughout the Democratic Party. Schmeltzer offers this up as an example:
“Honestly, I don’t know why a politician needs to be in the middle of this. When politicians did step in on sports, like Title IX, it was to get more kids into the game. This isn’t that, and I’m not even seeing any case that fairness or competitiveness has been affected. But I do know sports bodies can handle any competitiveness issue that does arise. And I do know Republicans keep trying to pass bills to have a state-sponsored doctor examine any kid’s private parts if anyone questions their gender. Any kid, not just trans kids. That’s not protecting sports or kids. That’s the government putting its hands on your daughter, and it makes me sick. So, frankly, I’m way more worried about how Republicans keep trying to use this issue to have government physically examine your kids than I am about any effect on competition.”
There it is. Edit slightly for taste, and perhaps expand the “Any kid, not just trans kids” to include how we know there will be a parent who’s upset that a girl on the opposing basketball team crashed the boards like a monster, and that parent now demands a ‘gender test.’ As Schmeltzer notes:
In Ohio, they passed a bill through the House that would have forced a physician to examine a child’s genitals, internal and external, if anyone so much as disputed that kid’s sex. Not the parents’ call. Anyone’s. A rival’s mother, a sore-loser coach, a stranger with a grudge could trigger a state inspection of a teenager’s body.
They only yanked it back after the public rightfully was aghast.
This rhetoric also has the advantage of flipping the attack around and using it to argue Republicans are perverts. This is the approach for those who don’t want to go full Ed Markey. There is no excuse for not adopting this strategy.
So, Germany’s far-right party, the AfD, just won a huge landslide election victory in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt. This doesn’t mean AfD is taking over Germany — the far right is much more popular in the post-communist east than in the more populated western regions. Germany is also a parliamentary democracy, and almost everyone else hates and fears the AfD. But the statewide victory is a warning shot, and everyone in Germany — and in Europe — is taking it seriously.
AfD’s surge means two things. First, it means that the rise of far-right parties was not simply a reaction to the pandemic. Back in 2024-25, a number of pundits I respect argued that voters in the U.S. and Europe were backing rightist leaders out of anger at incumbents over Covid. That thesis now looks dead.
Second, it means that something is making many German voters so angry that they’re finally willing to overlook all of the AfD’s catastrophic flaws — its obvious ties to Vladimir Putin, the fact that the party is filled with crooks, its extreme rhetoric, its lack of governing experience, and so on.
What is that “something”? A number of socialist types have tried to claim that AfD’s new voters are responding to economic despair, and can be won back with more socialism. But more sober voices agree that the “something” is immigration. Adam Tooze, who strongly leans to the left, tries to be gentle as he explains that there’s no getting around the immigration issue:
If you ask AfD voters what they worry about, along with their xenophobic concerns about “too many foreigners”, they will mention the cost of living and their concerns for their standard of living. They also mention climate change and the threat of external war…But if you ask them what they think about the AfD and why they voted for it, economic issues are barely mentioned. What comes first is security, foreigners, woke politics, remoteness etc…
If you are hard up and working-class it would after all be nothing short of bizarre to vote for the AfD in the hope of improved social protection…Voting for the AfD in the current landscape, whatever your economic issues, in short, is not a vote to have your economic issues addressed by social democracy, or welfare or government intervention. It is a vote to crackdown on foreigners[.] [emphasis mine]
Robin Brooks is more blunt:
There’s lots going on in Germany at the moment, but - when it comes to the surge in AfD popularity - you don’t need to overthink it. The AfD is relentlessly campaigning on immigration, which tells you that this is what resonates most with voters…A key driver of the recent surge in AfD popularity is that the CDU - SPD grand coalition is proving itself incapable of confronting immigration with the urgency many voters want.
In fact, anger over immigration is probably the main reason that the right is surging everywhere in Europe. Here are Konstantinou and Roumanias (2024) with some data:
We use regional data spanning over 4500 electoral outcomes…between 2000 and 2017 to assess the impact of immigration on Western European Far-Right voting. To deal with potential reverse causation, we use immigration in neighboring countries as an instrument for domestic immigration. The estimated effects of immigration are positive, significant and larger compared to those obtained by simple OLS and fixed effects regressions. Depending on the measure of immigration used, we find that a 1% increase in immigration stocks leads to a between 1.78% and 2.97% in Far-Right voting…Our estimated effects explain a large part of the observed rise in Far-Right in Western European countries that experienced high levels of immigration during the span of our sample.
2026 is hardly the beginning of the trend. Here’s Brookings in 2024:
In the European Union (EU), one election after another has demonstrated the centrality of irregular migration and border security in public discussions and forced mainstream parties to take more restrictive approaches…The results of the European Parliament election, France’s snap election, three German state elections, and the Austrian election all showed a strong rightward drift and signaled voters’ distrust in their national governments, confirming the notable shift in tone on migration in Europe toward a more securitized, hardline approach, even among mainstream parties.
Trump’s election in 2024 was also partially about immigration. Trump voters rated it as one of their top issues, along with inflation. It was the issue where Trump had the strongest lead over Kamala Harris in polls. American voters clearly soured on immigration in 2023-24.
Progressives in America and socialists in Europe still desperately claim that what angry working-class voters really want is more economic support. They keep offering more and more lavish promises of welfare supports and price controls, while staunchly opposing restrictions on immigration. The approach keeps failing, and the far right keeps rising.
Center-right and center-left politicians, on the other hand, realize the source of their voters’ anger very clearly, and are taking steps to reduce immigration. Germany’s center-right CDU has already stanched the flow with restrictive policies:
And Chancellor Friedrich Merz is responding to AfD’s gains by making it harder to get citizenship. Meanwhile, France and Italy are tightening border controls. France is making it harder to become a citizen. The EU is toughening up its asylum rules. Sweden is offering migrants large sums of money to leave the country. European countries are streamlining their infrastructure for kicking out large numbers of failed asylum-seekers. Japan is tightening its own immigration policies after a period of liberalization.
Even Canada, one of the most immigration-friendly and progressive countries on Earth, has scrambled to reduce immigration, cutting targets for permanent residents, reducing student visas, and slashing the number of temporary workers. Immigration levels are still high, but are falling quickly — all under the center-left government of Mark Carney.
And yet I’m worried that voters around the world will see these measures as superficial — tactical pauses to let populist anger simmer down before resuming the same permissive immigration policies that made voters mad in the first place. This certainly seemed to be the case in Europe, where the government stopped admitting asylum seekers from the Middle East in the late 2010s after a popular outcry, only to resume taking them in en masse in the 2020s:
And it also seems to be true in the U.S.; Biden mostly closed the border to asylum-seekers in 2024 after he saw how mad it was making Americans, but many Democrats are now calling for the abolition of ICE. This is a somewhat popular position right now, thanks to the agency’s abuses under Trump. But if Democrats actually try to abolish federal immigration enforcement instead of just reshuffling and renaming the agencies, I predict it will take just a couple of years for Americans to realize that the difference between “open borders” and “immigration laws with no one to enforce them” is largely semantic.
What’s needed, I believe, is not just a tactical, temporary retreat. We need to stop and think why a maximal pro-immigration policy is something that we need to retreat from in the first place. We need a new concept of what a sustainable liberal immigration policy looks like.
Since I started writing, I’ve been an advocate of more immigration to the United States. This does not mean I ever favored unrestrained immigration or open borders. I’ve consistently argued that favoring skilled immigration will bring more economic benefits to native-born Americans, and be more politically palatable as well. And while I don’t hate illegal immigrants for trying to better their lot in life, I favor strong border controls, because nations have the right to decide, democratically, who gets in and out. It’s understandable when people get mad at seeing their decisions flouted.
On top of that, I’ve always remained agnostic on immigration to other countries; although I find much to admire in Canada’s points-based system, for example, I don’t think that qualifies me to decide whether more immigration is good for Canada overall. If the people of a country decide that immigration is diluting their local culture unacceptably, for instance, I think they have every right to cut it off. That’s just Westphalian sovereignty — not a perfect system, but the best system we’ve ever found for organizing humanity into geographic units. As an American, I don’t view it as my place to tell Japan, or the UK, or any other country that immigration is the right choice for them.
Despite those reservations, I’ve always thought that immigration to the U.S. is a basically good thing, and should be expanded. The economic benefits are pretty undeniable — higher tax revenue to shore up our dangerously depleted government finances, dominance in high-tech industries and innovation, and so on. And while some of the economic costs are real — local housing shortages and strains on local government finances being the two biggest ones — many of the fears are overblown. In particular, the bulk of the evidence concludes that immigrants don’t reduce wages or job opportunities for native-born Americans.
And importantly, lots of Americans share my overall positive view of immigration. If you ask Americans whether they think immigration is good or bad, most will say “good”:
And if you ask Americans whether the annual rate of immigration should be increased, decreased, or kept the same, you get a pretty even split:
So I’ve never really felt like I was going out on a limb or advocating an unpopular position when it came to this issue. Sure, rightists will direct online vitriol toward anyone who supports any immigration at all, but their energy and savagery shouldn’t be mistaken for majority support.
And yet there will always be some amount of immigration — and some types of immigration — that will arouse even the most open and welcoming people to ire and make them think about shutting the doors. We saw this in the U.S. in 2023-24, when anti-immigration sentiment spiked in response to Biden’s permissive asylum policies. Yes, that sentiment crashed again when Trump took power and started committing abuses. But if liberals don’t change how we approach immigration, the sentiment will simply rise again and again, as it has so many times throughout our history. And the Donald Trump and Stephen Miller types will be right back in power — and our country will be worse off for it.
Liberals need an immigration approach that can be sustained for long periods of time — i.e., one that doesn’t enrage the public every time it manages to get in power. What would that look like?
The first thing liberals (and progressives, and Democrats, and European lefties, etc.) need to admit is that migration is not a human right. We live in a world of sovereign nation-states, and unless we find some better way of dividing up and administering the world, we will continue to live in a world of sovereign nation-states. And nations are, necessarily, exclusive clubs; they have the right to restrict immigration for any reason whatsoever.
Liberals must therefore not view borders and citizenship as annoying obstacles to be tactically circumvented or overcome; instead, we must view them as fundamental parts of the social compact that allows nations, including liberal nations, to exist in the first place. Nation-states and their laws and their police and their courts and their armies are the fundamental guarantors of the human rights that define liberalism. And for better or for worse, the ability to decide who gets in and who has to keep out is a necessary precondition for nation-states to exist.
That means we need to recognize that immigration law is legitimate and needs to be upheld. Some progressives have tried to advance the notion that being undocumented is a marginalized identity that needs to be protected and supported by the state. But this is absurd; it’s like if progressives decided that people who drive over the speed limit are a minority group.
Illegal immigrants chose to break U.S. law when they came to this country. Our democratically elected leaders made those laws, and they should be honored. We should treat illegal immigrants humanely, of course, and we should not tear local communities apart just to hunt down a few people. But there has to be some way of enforcing the law, because a law without enforcement is no law at all.
A third principle that liberals should embrace is that the purpose of immigration is to benefit the people who already live in the country that is receiving the immigrants. Immigration to America must be for the benefit of Americans. We must flatly reject any concept of immigration that sees it as a necessary sacrifice on the part of American citizens.
For example, the book This Land is Our Land, by Suketu Mehta, argues that immigration is a form of reparations for colonialism — a sacrifice that Western nations owe to other nations, even at their own expense. This idea has found some purchase in progressive circles, but liberals must reject it as wholly illegitimate.
Instead, liberals need to promote immigration because of the benefits it brings to the American citizenry. This includes economic benefits — the tax revenue, the investment, the eldercare, the innovation, the entrepreneurship, the expanded market size. But it also includes cultural benefits — the constant reinvigoration of this nation of immigrants by new waves of people with the gumption and bravery to pick up and move across the world in search of opportunity and freedom.
America has always been the country of the frontier; in order to maintain that ethos in the modern age, we need people for whom America itself is the frontier. And our founding ideals — which are very liberal ideals, of liberty and opportunity and the rights of the individual — are strengthened by people who make the conscious choice to move to a country that represents those ideals.
These are the kinds of arguments liberals made in the past. We can — we should — make them again.
And if this requires us to be selective about which immigrants we bring in, then so be it. Skilled immigrants bring far more economic benefits per capita than others — so by all means, let us tilt our system toward them, as American voters of both parties want. Immigrants who don’t love and embrace American culture will probably invigorate our nation less — so by all means, let us bar immigrants who have been part of groups that see America as evil, using the law with which we once banned immigration by members of communist parties.
These are the kinds of decisions that nation-states, including liberal nation-states, are inherently entitled to make. And we should expect Europe to make different decisions than America makes. That’s perfectly OK. Because immigration is fundamentally the decision of each sovereign nation-state, it’s inevitable that we’ll make different decisions. JD Vance wants us to think that France’s immigration policy, or Germany’s, is inextricably tied to America’s. But it’s not, and we shouldn’t let him get away with conflating the two.
A liberal immigration program based on these three principles could defuse the anti-immigration sentiment now sweeping the developed world — not just now, but permanently. But it will only do so if liberal leaders explicitly articulate and avow these principles. That’s what’s required in order to convince the electorate that liberals are trustworthy on immigration — that embracing the kind of immigration policies Americans demand represents a principled stand rather than a tactical retreat from a hidden agenda of open borders.
For America, the kind of immigration agenda I’ve sketched out — which all the polls show Americans favor by substantial margins — would not be a “far right” policy, even though some progressives and leftists will inevitably try to label it as such. In fact, it would allow in far more immigration than the policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt or Harry Truman. It won’t satisfy progressives who dream of a borderless world, or leftists who salivate over the chance to make the West pay for colonialism. But I believe it will preserve America as the kind of liberal nation-state that we knew it as in the days before Trump.
As for the rest of the world, countries like Germany and Canada and Japan have to make their own decisions. I can’t tell them what kind of nation to build; I can only try to promise that as an American, I’ll respect their decision. If they want to shut their doors in order to slow the pace of cultural change, it’s not my job to lecture them otherwise. All I can say is that I hope they do what they need to do in order to avoid getting taken over by parties that take their marching orders from the Kremlin.
But speaking only for my own country, I believe that if America gives up immigration, it will lose one of the key things that has made it great. With the GOP in the hands of a xenophobic rightist movement that sees immigration as an invasion, it’s up to the Democrats to craft a system that can be preserved for the long term.
A spot of good news for Britain. Next has won its appeal and may go on paying warehouse workers more than “equal value” retail workers. I’ve written about this case in Equality Act 2010, The Equal Pay Madness Just Got Madder and The Apples and Oranges Tribunal, and discussed it at length on the CapX podcast.
Note how crazy the headline is:
The landmark ruling allows the retailer to pay warehouse workers more than shop staff on the basis it costs more to recruit and retain them.
Pay more to recruit and retain people? A landmark! Eight years of litigation to establish that wages have something to do with supply and demand.
Some of the crazy has been disciplined. The Leeds tribunal had asked why Next failed to raise the pay of retail workers to the warehouse level. Wrong question, said Mr Justice Bourne on appeal. The right question is why Next needed to pay the warehouse workers more. It did so, he found, for sound business reasons, and those reasons did not apply to retail. Hilariously, he also noted that Next’s warehouses were 47.2% female as opposed to the retail workers who were 77.5% female. In other words, there was more gender equality in the warehouses.
Don’t celebrate too hard. Eight years of litigation isn’t over, Next lost on the basic finding of equal value, and everyone is appealing. Meanwhile the government is moving to replace market wages with committee wages. The consultation closing in October would extend equal-value comparisons to race and disability and it would extend the law up the supply chain so Next’s potential escape route of contracting-out warehouses would be foreclosed. In short, Bourne’s reason is lawful today. Whether it survives the future is another matter.
Hat tip: Stephen S. and Robert W.
The post Next Wins Appeal appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Indigenous knowledge and art overwrite colonial cartography to correct the historical record in Central Australia
- by Aeon Video
On Sunday evening, the White House posted to its official X account an AI-generated video of President Trump as the superhero Green Lantern. While much of the slop they post to social media is just about trolling, it’s also a revealing window into the president’s beliefs and desires. Take a look:
The irony is that Trump’s greatest failure and source of frustration lies in the very fact that he is most definitely not Green Lantern. Putting that video up is the equivalent of a wide receiver who dropped a last-second pass in the end zone and cost his team the Super Bowl posting an AI video of himself making the catch after all. It doesn’t make him look heroic, it just makes him look like a loser.
If you are unfamiliar, Green Lantern gets his power from that ring, which allows him to translate his will into reality. All he has to do is think of something, focus his will, and it becomes real. This is, in fact, how Trump has long seen his role in the world — though in his case it’s a combination of his will and his words. His voice serves the function of Green Lantern’s ring; he believes he can speak reality into being.
Now look at the three things Trump magically makes happen in that video. The first is that he raises a border wall and keeps all the foreigners out. In reality, he has been trying from his first days in office in 2017, with only limited success, to complete a wall along the southern border (though he has certainly succeeded in reducing immigration to America, much to the nation’s detriment). Next, he makes manufacturing thrive in America again. In reality, the number of Americans employed in manufacturing is lower now than it was when he took office. Finally, he sends American planes off, presumably to war. And we know how that has worked out.
As a younger man, Trump concluded that if he told everyone he was rich and successful, he would become rich and successful. In that case it was true, with the asterisk of his occasional bankruptcies. He created an image, and people who were attracted to that image became the suckers who bought into his buildings or let him fleece them in cons like Trump University.
This goes all the way back to his childhood. When Trump was six years old, Norman Vincent Peale’s book The Power of Positive Thinking was released, advising that the key to success in life is relentless self-confidence even in the face of failure; it became a huge bestseller and the centerpiece of the Trump family worldview. “His parents, Fred and Mary, felt an immediate affinity for Peale’s teachings,” writes Gwenda Blair, who wrote a book about the Trump family. “On Sundays, they drove into Manhattan to worship at Marble Collegiate Church, where Peale was the head pastor. Donald and both his sisters were married there, and funeral services for both Fred and Mary took place in the main sanctuary.”
Peale’s lessons are foundational to Trump’s psychological makeup, the way he looks at the world. Whether Trump has any idea who Green Lantern is, the superhero is a kind of intergalactic manifestation of Peale’s book: Merely by willing it, he can achieve anything.
One can see how Trump could come to believe that Peale was right, and that he himself is a kind of Green Lantern figure with a unique ability to manifest his desires. He created the image he wanted to, he got rich and famous, he banged a bunch of broads, he broke laws with impunity, he went bankrupt and left others holding the bag, he barely paid taxes, and eventually he was elected president.
But it’s when he’s in office that things get complicated. Way back in 2009, Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan identified the “Green Lantern theory of the presidency” in response to liberal disappointment with Barack Obama; they were angry about the compromises Obama made as he struggled to pass his early legislative priorities (including a stimulus and the Affordable Care Act). As Nyhan wrote, those disappointed Democrats “created a narrative in which all failure and compromise is the result of a lack of presidential willpower.” If only Obama would try harder, some believed, he could get everything he had promised during the 2008 campaign.
Obama made plenty of mistakes, but it wasn’t just about not trying. The president is surrounded by forces constraining him in one way or another — 535 members of Congress with their own needs and desires, other nations pursuing their own goals, a sometimes pesky news media, immovable economic forces, laws and regulations, the courts, and public opinion itself.
Those constraints have frustrated Trump to no end, and one way he has dealt with that frustration is to retreat to his construction projects, where he is much better able to make things happen. He can cry “More gold in the ballroom, I want more gold!” and so there will be more gold. As the New York Times recently reported, working on those projects is Trump’s happy place precisely because it’s where he can realize his will:
Making changes to a project there requires hours of sitting in community meetings listening to complaints from residents, and getting sign-off from city officials. Projects like helipads, Mr. Trump has complained, are next-to-impossible to get approved. But in his second term as president, he said, he realized he could barrel over many of those impediments. He stocked review panels with White House appointees. Court challenges have failed to keep pace with the administration’s rapid construction. He can finally just have fun.
“You mean I can actually do something that I really want?” Mr. Trump told a room full of donors to his White House ballroom last year, describing what it had been like overseeing construction projects as president.
“‘You’re the president of the United States. You can do anything you want,’” Mr. Trump has said he has been told.
The Power of Positive Thinking spent 48 weeks at #1 on the nonfiction New York Times bestseller list and sold 5 million copies. Throughout the history of the self-help industry, variants of its core idea emerge and reemerge, always finding a ready audience. For instance, one of the most successful entries was The Secret, which came out in 2006 and has reportedly sold a stunning 30 million copies around the world (in no small part thanks to an endorsement from Oprah Winfrey). The Secret posits something called the “law of attraction,” which states that your desire for something — wealth, success, love — sends signals out to the universe, which then delivers that thing to you. “Your thoughts become things,” the book says. “You are like a human transmission tower, transmitting a frequency with your thoughts.”
However idiotic you think the book sounds, it’s a hundred times worse. And yet, it sold millions of copies. They made multiple movies out of it, both documentaries and this romance I just discovered:
What this tells us is that people want to believe that their fate is in their hands, that in an apparently unfeeling universe they can get what they want if they want it hard enough and have faith in themselves. Trump still believes this.
And for him, mere belief is not enough — he must not just believe in the reality he is trying to create, but speak it out loud, again and again. If he just describes the world as he wants it to be often enough, it will become what he describes. Just as he said he was a billionaire when he wasn’t but eventually became a billionaire, if he says he has achieved victory in Iran, victory will be his. If he says this is the best economy in history, that’s what it will be. If he says the polls show him to be spectacularly popular, then he is spectacularly popular.
For his most devoted cultists, it’s all true. Trump is their transmission tower; if he says this is the greatest economy in history, then it is — or at the very least, it will become so, if they only maintain their faith in him. But most Americans are not Trump cultists. They see reality with at least some clarity, and his hyperbole and lies no longer persuade them. They want the president to actually do worthwhile things, not just spend his time wishcasting.
After the midterm elections, the constraints on Trump are only going to increase, not only from Democrats if they take control of one or both houses of Congress, but from all the other people and institutions who fear him less than they did before. If he responds just by obsessing more and more about his ballroom and his arch without doing anything even more destructive, we’ll count ourselves lucky.
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There are good Elle Cordova videos, and there are great ones. (Last mentioned here for her “Fonts Hanging Out” trilogy.)
I have mentioned and recommended Shirt Pocket’s Mac backup app SuperDuper quite a few times over the years, and for good reason: it performs very important functions very well. Version 4, which shipped just over a month ago, is an extraordinary update to an extraordinary app.
Visually, the interface is all new. That took some getting used to, but not much. It didn’t take long for me to see how the new UI is better in every way. The style of presentation is new and modern, but the core idea remains the same: the interface of SuperDuper is self-explanatory. It explains what, exactly, is going to happen. It remains a marvel of clarity, especially when you consider the complexity of what it does.
Functionally, SuperDuper 4 is also much improved. SuperDuper has never been slow, but now some copy operations are over 2× faster. Scheduling options are more powerful. You don’t need to worry about the details to use SuperDuper, but the details are there for your inspection.
Shirt Pocket’s Dave Nanian designed it, implemented it, and thoroughly documented it. I don’t know how that’s possible. SuperDuper feels like impossibly good software. Read his post announcing version 4 to start, then catch up on the rest of the blog to get a feeling for how much work he’s put into SuperDuper 4. Just extraordinary.
In the 22 years since SuperDuper first shipped, Shirt Pocket has never charged for updates and never raised the price. (This too seems impossible, at least for a company that remains in business.) Version 4 costs $44 — an astonishing value — and discounts are available for anyone who bought version 3 after July 2020. Sans license, free of charge, SuperDuper 4 still allows you to make bootable backups.
I recommend SuperDuper 4 wholeheartedly.
See also: Dan Moren at Six Colors and Michael Tsai.
The Israeli daily Haaretz published a big and consequential exposé today alleging that weeks before the October 7, 2023 massacres in southern Israel the head of the UAE, Mohamed bin Zayed, warned Prime Minister Netanyahu in a direct phone call lasting some 45 minutes that something big was coming from Hamas. For additional context, Israel holds elections on October 27 of this year. And as it has for the last three years, Netanyahu’s degree of responsibility for what happened remains a central question in the election. So while it’s not explicitly noted in the article, the electoral implications are clear. The investigation itself appears to be essentially an excerpt from a soon-to-be released book. So it’s not precisely a Haaretz story, more one that they’re publishing, though that’s fine print. The article is long and detailed and I think quite credible. But it’s paywalled. So I wanted to walk you through the key details and provide some general analysis.
It’s best to think of this piece as three separate revelations. The first is that — all according to this article — Israel and Hamas in 2023 were pretty close to finalizing a semi-normalization of the situation in Gaza in a longterm truce, or “hudna,” between Hamas and Israel. The details of this aren’t fully sketched out but basically an end to the blockade, freer commerce and travel through Israel and Egypt, etc. Second is the warning from MBZ in the weeks before the attack. Then, finally, it claims that in the immediate aftermath of the attacks Hamas, was willing to free most or all of the hostages, probably excluding military-aged men in or out of uniform, with few if any conditions.
The axis of the story is the relationship between revelations one and two. And to avoid too many qualifying clauses in this description below I will be asserting the claims of the article except where I say otherwise.
The central player here is Yahya Sinwar, the late leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. When Sinwar came to power in 2017 he brought a new militancy to the position and embarked on a program of greatly expanding and intensifying Hamas’ military capacity, including its tunnel system. He wanted to go to war with Israel. But in this he was also acutely aware of the fact that every time the Palestinians or Hamas had done so in the past, the actions had been decisively crushed by Israeli military might and intelligence. So while preparing for war and confrontation, he decided to also explore a deal that could qualitatively improve life for Palestinians living in the Strip. Those negotiations were very far along at the end of the summer of 2023. They bogged down when Prime Minister Netanyahu started dragging his feet on just how many and which Palestinian prisoners would be released as part of the deal.
The background here is that, notwithstanding Benjamin Netanyahu’s reputation as a hawk and a war-monger on the left in the U.S., at least until 2023 his characteristic action was more kicking the can down the road. Biding his time, not committing himself. There were already a lot of clashes in the West Bank at the time and a major domestic political crisis in Israel over the “judicial coup,” which had brought the anti-Netanyahu opposition out on to the streets every week for almost a year. This all came after five successive elections which were indecisive and one of which took him out of power for a year before finally allowing him to create a narrow coalition relying heavily on the Israeli far right. So the general thrust of the article is some mix of Netanyahu having his hands full and doing his standard slow-rolling. He also probably wasn’t eager to agree to a deal that might put his coalition under strain.
Finally, Sinwar lost his patience with the process and cut off negotiations. This was in September. So like a month before the attacks. He must have had everything ready for an attack. But this would have been when he put the plan into motion. Intermediaries who had been working the Hudna negotiations got wind of something coming and Sinwar himself made a threat to one of these intermediaries and told him to get the message to Israel.
It’s a little hard to see the logic of this other than as an attempt to get Netanyahu back to the negotiations since the element of surprise was essential to the eventual attack’s success. Indeed, Sinwar seems to have said as much. Without the element of surprise it couldn’t work. So even these warnings were risky. The intermediary was uncertain and even afraid of what to do with the information, partly fearing that in conveying the message to Israel he might be held responsible for it. So he went to MBZ, the leader of the UAE. He was highly concerned about an attack that could lead to more or less what has happened over the last three years: a catastrophic attack on Israel, followed by horrific retaliation against Hamas in Gaza and leading to a regional war. He told the intermediary to get the message to the Israelis. He did that at the security and defense level. But the warnings were fairly vague and not much happened in response to the warnings. Netanyahu was briefed on the message and the meetings, as would be the norm.
A key backdrop to all of this is that Israel did not take Hamas seriously as a military threat. They took Hezbollah very seriously, as a de facto state/army. Hamas was different, basically a terrorist threat which could fire off homemade rockets and mount terrorist attacks, but not a true military threat. So I think it’s fair to say that when they heard Hamas was warning of something big they simply didn’t believe the scale they were later able to pull off. They apparently decided that Hamas would try to get possession of Israeli academic Elizabeth Tsurkov who had been kidnapped in Iraq and was being held hostage there. (She was eventually released in September 2025.) In any case, MBZ didn’t get the reaction he wanted. But he was also afraid that a more specific warning to the Israelis might prompt a massive preemptive attack on Hamas in Gaza. He wanted to know more. So he sent the intermediary back to find more details and to talk to Sinwar.
The intermediary talked again to Sinwar who gave a more direct and grave message. The intermediary and then MBZ got the message that some sort of catastrophic attack was planned. So MBZ made the decision to talk to Netanyahu directly. He conveyed all this in a 45 minute call between the two men. The kicker here is that Netanyahu did not brief any of his security or defense officials on this outreach. Of course they’d already gotten a version of the message. But the direct contact from a the leader of the UAE obviously showed a different level of urgency and gravity. The argument, and it’s a pretty good one, is that if Netanyahu had briefed the heads of Mossad, the Shin Bet and the IDF about this call they would have taken more aggressive protective measures.
To cite just one example, in the hours just before the October 7 attack, Israel saw something was happening in Gaza. Security officials met to evaluate it and they decided it was likely a drill and not to mobilize. Of course, it was not a drill. It was the beginning mobilization for the attack. These are all what ifs of course. But it does not seem implausible that if Netanyahu had briefed these officials on this warning that that conclusion arrived at in those overnight meetings might have been different and Israel could have had some level of military response in place when the attack started.
Finally, we have the possibility of a hostage release immediately after the attacks. Here this sounds quite plausible but I think this is an incomplete perspective and perhaps to an American audience misleading. Once the attack happened, all the regional leaders were desperately scrambling to stop what was coming. The government of Qatar threatened to expel Hamas from the country if they didn’t immediately release all the civilian hostages. (As I noted above, there’s some disagreement over the definitions of civilians: Hamas likely viewed all military age men and possibly everyone of military age as soldiers, whether currently in the IDF or not.) Hamas first agreed to release the civilian hostages with a number of conditions, essentially non-retaliation for the attacks and some changes to the status quo on the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif. This was a non-starter. Other players intervened and basically said no conditions. Just release them. Hamas then appears to have agreed to this, with perhaps some token conditions.
The response from Israel was there’s nothing to talk about. Then Mossad Director David Barnea told Prime Minister al-Thani of Qatar: “If they want to release the civilians, let them release them. We are not prepared to speak with Hamas.” The same message was passed through other channels.
The offer and the response are both extremely plausible. But I think it was basically inevitable. I’m not trying to litigate here what you or I or anyone else thinks makes sense or what would have been right. But at that moment about 1200 Israelis, the great majority civilians, had been killed. What was being proposed here was a release of most of the hostages and a return to some sort of negotiations. At that moment that was acceptable only to the tiniest fringe of Israeli public opinion. The verdict was that Israel had misjudged Hamas and fatally underestimated it and that the only solution was to destroy it as an organization and kill everyone who had been involved in the attack. So my point is I don’t think this revelation, if it is one, is a surprise. And I don’t think it’s either here or there in terms of it political ramifications within Israel. Because every other party and leader who is now at all contesting for power would have made the same decision.
The only slight caveat to that is that it became clear over time that Netanyahu’s government had no real interest or priority to seek the release of the hostages at all, even long after Israel had delivered that decisive and ferocious assault and killed tens of thousands of civilians along the way. Some of that lack of interest was the government’s hawkishness and desire for revenge. But it was also because at a basic level Netanyahu did not want to bring the war to a close because that would create perhaps-unstoppable pressure to hold new elections that he would almost certainly lose. (As it happens, he waited till the last possible legal date to hold a new election.) That fact may change some of the shading of this revelation. But I don’t think it changes that big picture.
And finally, does any of this matter for the upcoming election? I’m honestly not sure. I went around the Israeli papers and the story is getting reported though not necessarily with screaming headlines basically everywhere. By rights it should fundamentally discredit Netanyahu whose calling card has always been security and normalcy. But he’s already been discredited to anyone without an overwhelming personal or ideological commitment to supporting him. Whatever messages or warnings Netanyahu received in the weeks before October 7, the bigger story is that Netanyahu had been Prime Minister for the previous 14 years with only one short one year interruption in 2021 and 2022. All the policies, strategies and decisions were his — both in the moment and in the shaping of policy back to 2009. And it happened on his watch. Given that political context my best guess would be a moderate political hit if only because he’s already down to the hard core of the rightist camp. But I emphasize “guess.” I really don’t know.
As part of their overarching plan to reduce the power of blue states and promote myths about noncitizen voting, the Trump administration is pushing all types of changes to how the census operates. TPM reporter Layla Jones will talk to publisher Joe Ragazzo and executive editor John Light about what these schemes involve and what’s at stake.
Join them live at 2 p.m. ET on YouTube Live.
Yesterday I was kind of randomly rereading some details about Spain’s transition to democracy after the death of Francisco Franco in 1975, as one does. And I noticed that Spain had finally released the last classified documents tied to the attempted coup of 1981. The non-disclosure of these documents had helped maintain various conspiracy theories and counter-narratives about whether King Juan Carlos played quite the heroic role history has assigned him. In brief, Franco groomed Juan Carlos to succeed him believing he would maintain the Franco-ist dictatorship. But Juan Carlos quickly set about putting Spain on a path to democracy and when Francoist dead-enders in the army mounted a coup in 1981, Juan Carlos famously went on television, denounced the coup, thus leading to its total collapse. The counter-argument or claim is that Juan Carlos knew about the coup or perhaps even supported it and only pulled the plug when it looked like it was failing.
The release of the documents was just this last February. And they basically confirmed the established story, that there was no reason to believe Juan Carlos knew about the coup in advance and acted decisively to undermine and bring it to an end. But it was a small note in the Times article I read about this that got my attention: one of the reasons for the release, overseen by Spain’s current center-left government, was to combat historical revisionism and growing nostalgia for Franco among young men.
Sound familiar?
This points us back to a reality which gets too little attention but which also requires a dual approach that is challenging to get just right. We hear a lot about how Democrats need to have podcasts to appeal to young men, how their brand is toxic across rural America. In 2024 the story, as noted in the previous post, was that Democrats were even losing ground with Hispanic voters, to, of all people, Donald Trump. These points are all true, though the point about Hispanic voters was likely premature. But the general explanation is that the leading Democrats are hapless, that the party is in the thrall of the mercenary consultant class or a bunch of other explanations. But again and again we see that the same basic patterns are cropping up all over the world.
What this means pretty clearly is — while Chuck Schumer and the consultants may suck, it’s probably not really about them. It’s about something more fundamental, a crisis of liberal democracy which we have to try to solve even though we only dimly understand it. Yes of course there are theories and one or the other of them are probably partly right. But this isn’t about criticizing theorists. It’s about living in history, when the things really driving change are seldom that clear to those living amidst the change.
The danger here is that we collectively fall into a kind of self-disgust which I see all the time. Our leaders suck. We suck. We’re weak and hapless. The political faction or movement I belong to sucks. These all flow rather naturally from most of the mainstream media narratives about whatever challenges Democrats are facing at a given moment. And this is of course enervating. Or it can be. And it can promote conflict which is not necessarily productive conflict.
And yet just because it’s happening in Spain and in countless other similarly situated countries doesn’t mean we can say, “Welp, it’s bigger than us. That’s just how it is. Nothing we can do about it.” Obviously the challenge is still the same for any of us who believe in liberal democracy, in freedom and general human flourishing. In fact the challenge is probably greater because it’s not just some incidental thing that’s going to be solved in time for the next election — better consultants, no politicians over 65, politicians who will fight. It’s big and goes beyond any single person’s mistakes or individual excellence. And this is what I mean by a dual approach, the necessity of not falling into a kind of cheap and demoralizing self-critique while also recognizing that it is very much our responsibility to have the creativity, forcefulness and resilience to do something about it. In a way it requires us to understand our situation both from outside of history, looking at it from the long view, and also very much inside it, in the moment, with every action and option on the table, with every decision mattering because we don’t know how the future turns out.
Last year, an unplanned personal hiatus coincided with the time when I should have been reviewing the then-new iPhones 17 and iPhone Air. In my brief note explaining my absence, I wrote:
I look forward to getting back to writing very soon. I can feel it: I will be back soon. I’m itching to go. I mean, jiminy, it’s new iPhones week. But it’ll be a few more days before I get those reviews out.
354 days is arguably more than a few, but given that I missed the window for reviewing them when they were new, I thought it might be interesting to consider the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air on the cusp of their being obviated by the next generation of iPhones.
The iPhone Air is the nicest phone Apple has ever made, and probably the nicest device Apple has ever made, period. It’s just so goddamn nice. Over the years, Apple has gone back and forth with its treatment of the metal side rails on iPhone hardware: some years polished like jewelry, other years, matte like a tool. The iPhone Air is polished, and the effect is luxe. (And it stands in contrast to the matte iPhones 17 Pro.)
The whole point of the device is that it is absurdly thin. A year later, it still feels remarkably thin and light in hand — and, even better, thin and light in pocket. It is delightful to hold and carry. The screen is terrific. The buttons are perfect: they stick out just enough and have just the right clickiness.
The big concern most people have regarding the Air is battery life. I used my Air review unit extensively and battery life was never once a problem. Yes, battery life is shorter than with other iPhone models, but it’s more than long enough. When you know you might need to top it off, you just do it here and there throughout the day. I not only never once ran out of battery by the end of the day with the Air, I never once came all that close. It’s fine.1 I mean, if you’re the sort of person who struggles to get through the day battery-life-wise with a regular (thicker) iPhone, the iPhone Air obviously isn’t for you. But that’s really obvious.
My biggest concern going into it was the camera system. The iPhone Air has only a single rear-facing camera, with non-interpolated 1× and 2× zoom factors.2 In practice, yes, sometimes while carrying the Air I regretted not having either the ultra wide 0.5× lens or telephoto lens, both of which I’m accustomed to having at my disposal. But ultimately I didn’t miss either of those lenses enough that I regretted having the Air in my pocket that day. And conversely, there’s something mentally freeing about having just one lens. There’s no question which lens you should use. Zoom with your feet.
And the one lens the iPhone Air has is excellent. It’s not quite as good as the main 1×/2× lens on the Pro models, but it’s much closer to the Pro models in image quality than it is to the single-lens iPhone 17e. (But even the 17e is a damn good camera for a phone.) One thing you miss by not having a 0.5× ultra wide lens is a true macro mode. But because it uses a slightly smaller sensor, the camera on the iPhone Air has a closer minimum focus distance than the iPhone 17 Pro’s main camera (15 cm vs. 20 cm — those 5 cm often make a big difference). I like the iPhone Air camera so much that it didn’t factor all that much into my decision whether to buy one to use as my personal iPhone for the last year. It’s that good.
But I did not buy one to use as my personal iPhone for the last year. I bought an iPhone 17 Pro. The reason is size.
The iPhone 17 Pro comes in two sizes: regular and Max. I find the Max sizes too big — unpleasant to hold, unpleasant to pocket. The iPhone Air comes in only one size — a sort of one-size-fits-all midway point between the regular iPhone models and Max models.
| Width | Height | Thickness | Weight | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| iPhone 17 Pro Max | 78mm | 163mm | 8.75mm | 233g |
| iPhone Air | 75mm | 156mm | 5.64mm | 165g |
| iPhone 17 Pro | 72mm | 150mm | 8.75mm | 206g |
Width- and height-wise, the Air is pretty much halfway between the Pro and Pro Max. For me, in practice, the factor that really matters is width — and I find the Air too wide. Just holding the phones as objects to admire, the dramatic thinness and lighter weight make the iPhone Air the nicest, by far. But holding them to actually use, I find the Air feels too wide. Specifically, too wide to use with one hand, gripping it with my palm and fingers and swiping and tapping with my thumb. If I had my druthers, the regular-sized iPhones would be slightly smaller, footprint-wise. The regular iPhone 17 Pro is pretty much as wide as can be for me to use it one-handed. The Air is too wide for that — it’s a two-handed device for me. And that was the dealbreaker.3 I use my iPhone one-handed frequently, often while walking around the city carrying a bag or beverage in my other hand.
If the iPhone Air came in two sizes, regular and Max, corresponding to the widths and heights of the two Pro sizes, I would have bought the regular-sized Air model and, I’m convinced, been delighted with it for the past year. But the iPhone Air only comes in one size, and that size is too wide for my taste, and in practical use, that factor overrides everything I love about the Air.
If you use your iPhone two-handed almost exclusively — perhaps because you find even the regular-sized models too wide to use one-handed — there’s a good chance you’d be happier with the Air than whatever model you’re currently carrying. It’s so goddamn nice.
The iPhone 17 Pro is the best phone Apple has ever made, and perhaps the best device Apple has ever made, period.
After two years of titanium side rails and full-glass backs (the 15/16 Pro generations), the 17 Pro went back to aluminum, and the metal is now more of an entire frame for the device than just a side rail. There remains a matte glass panel on the back, but only for the bottom three-quarters or so, underneath the camera plateau. (Inductive MagSafe/Qi charging doesn’t work through metal.) The camera plateau is now aluminum, and, most noticeably, extends across the full width of the device, even though the three camera lenses (0.5×, 1×/2×, 4×/8×) remain in a triangle arrangement in the corner.
This new full-width plateau is a winning design. I think it looks good, but more importantly, feels great. It looks more balanced and feels more balanced too. It still wobbles when placed on a table, but it wobbles less. The camera capabilities, to me, are the defining aspect of the Pro models. It thus feels correct for them to be so physically prominent on the devices.
The iPhone 17 Pro was offered in three colors: cosmic orange, deep blue, and silver. All three colors are excellent, and each of them tempted me to some extent. I’m not sure why silver didn’t get an adjective — it’s a very nice colorway. But cosmic orange is the eyecatcher. For years, Apple has been releasing non-pro iPhones in fun colors, and Pro iPhones only in no-fun (or at best low-fun) colors. It really seemed like a mystery why Apple never released an iPhone Pro model in a vibrant fun color. Now that they finally did it, it seems like even more of a mystery why it took them so long — anecdotally, cosmic orange has been an incredibly popular choice. I see orange iPhone 17 Pros in use every day, often in clear cases to show off the color.
My personal rule has been to always buy black, or the nearest to black offered. Deep blue isn’t all that near to black, but it was the nearest, so that’s what I bought. I wouldn’t call it fun but I liked it when I bought it and I’m not tired of it now, nearly a year later. It’s a serious blue. After 10+ months of near-daily use, the anodization is beginning to wear away at the top corner of my iPhone’s camera plateau, where there’s a bit of a sharp corner. I find this to be a charming patina, not a flaw, and looking at that wear increases my affection for this little guy.
(Photo taken with the iPhone Air, using Halide Mark III.)
I’ve shot (and kept) 5,365 photos and 97 videos with the iPhone 17 Pro. (Perhaps I should shoot more videos.) The iPhone camera has long been the best camera in the sense of “The best camera is the one you have with you.” With each successive year, they come closer and closer to being the best camera I’ve ever owned, period. It’s really quite remarkable how good a camera it is.
Battery life has been excellent. I charge to 100 percent every night while I sleep, and never worry about it during the day. Very seldom is the battery under 25 percent by the end of the day. According to the statistics in Settings → Battery → Battery Health, maximum battery capacity remains at 96 percent after 230 cycles. That seems pretty good.
Durability has been terrific as well. I mentioned a month ago that Apple’s “Ceramic Shield 2” process seems to be the real deal. Even under close inspection, there’s seemingly not a single micro abrasion on the front glass. I used a Nomad leather back during the very coldest weeks of the East Coast winter, but otherwise have never used a case. Despite near-daily use for 10-ish months, it’s in near-mint condition. I’ve also found that the phone, naked, is about as grippy as one could hope in most weather conditions, the frigid cold being the one exception.
Dust and fuzz accumulates in the USB-C port — just like every phone with a USB port. I clean it out every few months. Some sort of crud also accumulates in the very thin, easily overlooked slit for the speaker at the top of the display. That requires something like a pin or needle to clean. I don’t know what that crud is and I don’t want to know. I also don’t know what Apple could do about this crud accumulation, but I need to reach deep to find anything at all to complain about regarding this iPhone. I look forward to a future hermetically sealed iPhone which has no crevices in which to accumulate crud.
One year later and it feels like both the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air could be announced tomorrow, not a year ago, and would seem fresh and exciting.
Apple also created a battery pack exclusively for the Air: the $100 iPhone Air MagSafe Battery. Like Apple’s late great Lightning MagSafe Battery Pack, the Air MagSafe Battery is a much better product than any third-party battery pack I’ve ever tried, and I’ve tried an embarrassing number of them. It sticks better magnetically, and there’s software integration with iOS that shows the battery pack’s remaining power when you first connect it, and in the Battery widget. iOS also seems smarter about when to draw power from it, making it last longer. It’s a no-brainer recommendation for anyone who buys an iPhone Air. You won’t need it most days, but on the days when you need it, it’s perfect.
My only gripe about the iPhone Air MagSafe Battery remains the same from the day it was announced last year: it has “Air” in the name because it’s designed exclusively for the iPhone Air. Apple’s old Lightning MagSafe Battery Pack was designed to fit any iPhone. (In fact, it debuted in 2020 alongside the iPhone 12 Mini, an iPhone that actually needed help getting through the day on a single charge.) The old Lightning battery pack remains so good that I continue to use mine (I own two) instead of the numerous third-party ones I’ve blown money on in the intervening years. The old Lightning ones don’t pack much of a punch, juice-wise — particularly because they’re now several years old — but no matter how much I use my iPhone, it’s always enough to extend me through the day. (The key is not to start using it until your iPhone drops under 30 percent — it takes less energy to recharge a mostly depleted battery.) I continue using them because they stick to the back of the iPhone so strongly, and, once attached, are so comfortable. It’s the last Lightning device I actively use, but unless Apple comes out with a proper USB-C replacement that works on iPhones other than the Air, I don’t foresee retiring mine until they’re completely shot. ↩︎
The front-facing camera on the iPhone Air is the new (for 2025) Center Stage camera. It’s exactly the same front-facing camera as the iPhone 17 Pro and non-pro models, and uses a square sensor with a wider field of view. ↩︎︎
This, of course, makes me wonder about the one-handed usability of the passport-sized foldable iPhone that Apple is expected to unveil tomorrow. ↩︎︎
Stoke Space announced Tuesday that it has raised another significant round of funding, $1 billion, as it makes a final push toward its debut launch next year. The Washington-based launch company also revealed plans for a larger medium-lift vehicle.
With the Series E funding round, co-led by Point72 Ventures and Spark Capital, Stoke Space brought its total amount of capital raised to $2.3 billion, a staggering amount for a company that has yet to attempt an orbital launch.
The quantity of new funding will enable the company to accelerate work on a larger "Block 2" version of the Nova rocket, capable of lifting 15 metric tons to low-Earth orbit in a fully reusable configuration, said Stoke co-founder and Chief Executive Andy Lapsa.
Patient Who Received Pig Kidney Becomes First To Progress to Human Kidney Transplant
Study shows xenotransplantation can serve as a bridge for patients with end-stage kidney disease
By MASS GENERAL BRIGHAM COMMUNICATIONS September 3, 2026
Riella L, Borges T, Rosales I et al.
Porcine kidney xenotransplantation as a bridge to allotransplantation: a first-in-human study
The Lancet, 2026;
"This case shows that porcine kidney xenotransplantation can provide prolonged renal support and be discontinued without clinically significant allosensitisation or zoonotic infection. Early cellular rejection resolved with treatment, whereas later graft failure was associated with microvascular injury progressing to thrombotic microangiopathy despite a negative donor-specific crossmatch, supporting the possibility that mechanisms beyond conventional antibody-mediated rejection contributed to late graft injury. Kidney xenotransplantation has the potential to provide prolonged dialysis-free support while also serving as a bridge to subsequent human allotransplantation."
In 2015, 6 of the top 25 bestselling hardcover books—this is a not-perfect but useful proxy for new books published—were fiction. In 2025, 18 of the top 25 hardcover books were fiction, meaning only 7 were nonfiction, almost an exact inversion of ten years ago.
From Sean Delone, via David Wallace-Wells.
The post Reading sentences to ponder appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
That is the topic of my latest Free Press column, here is one excerpt:
…college is a great place to make friends, date, and possibly meet a spouse. Those features are ever more important as America suffers a crisis of loneliness. Furthermore, if you think that artificial intelligence may displace a lot of jobs, or just reduce work hours, marrying well will become more important. The title of the new essay by Clara Collier says it all: “After Work, We’ll Have Each Other.” You are also going to live longer, so think hard about who you wish to spend that time with.
The data show that college-educated people are more likely to marry, and to stay married. More generally, college-educated folks have superior social indicators of all kinds, including resistance to alcohol, drug, and gambling addiction. (Charles Murray wrote a whole book on this theme, called Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.)
If you have a bachelor’s degree and are over 25 years of age, your chance of being married is 64 percent. If you have only a high school degree, your odds of being married are an even 50 percent.
For divorce, the results are more dramatic yet. The chance of a woman remaining married for at least 20 years is 78 percent if she went to college, but 41 percent if she is only a high school graduate. For men, the gradient is less sharp though still significant—namely, 65 percent versus 47 percent.
People who finished college also have more extensive networks of friends. For instance they are twice as likely to have six or more close friends, and less than half as likely to have no close friends at all.
There are some private sector jobs where you can spend four years alongside the same group of people and then have social networks to stay in touch over the following years. But all too often people come and go in their jobs and lose touch with former colleagues rapidly, or maybe never share much of a common experience in the first place. College seems to do an especially good job of keeping people connected.
We do not know the extent to which these relationships are causal ones. That’s to say, does going to college induce better outcomes, or are the people who will have better outcomes in any case more likely to attend college in the first place? Probably some of both. In any case, it is better to have this force on your side, even if you are not sure how important it is.
So, in sum, while the money premium from college is falling, the friends and marriage premium from college is going up and probably will rise further still.
Of course those are not the only reasons. That said, I do think going to college makes less sense, at the margin, than it did say seven or eight years ago, as I outline in the piece.
The post Reasons to go to college appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Eruptions are a regular occurrence at Anak Krakatau, a small volcano between the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra. Much of its activity remains relatively mild, but it occasionally puts on more impressive and hazardous shows of force. In early September 2026, a booming eruption lasting more than 24 hours sent gas and ash high into the atmosphere, disrupting thousands of flights and degrading air quality in parts of the country, including the capital city of Jakarta.
Satellites passing over the area during the eruption on September 5 captured images of the explosive activity. In the scene above, acquired with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on the NASA-USGS Landsat 8 satellite, a white plume of volcanic gas billows over a brown ash cloud. Below, a wider view captured by the VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on the Suomi NPP satellite shows the volcanic material dispersing over a large area.
Indonesia’s meteorological agency reported that ash had reached altitudes up to 6,000 meters (20,000 feet) to the east of the volcano and 15,000 meters (50,000 feet) to the west by September 6. The presence of ash in the atmosphere prompted the temporary closure of eight airports on Java and Sumatra, disrupting nearly 3,000 flights in and out of the area, according to news reports.
Ashfall affected populated areas, particularly to the east of Anak Krakatau in Jakarta and other parts of West Java, the Indonesian Humanitarian Coordination Platform (IHCP) reported. Volcanic ash poses health risks to people and can irritate the respiratory tract, eyes, and skin. However, this air quality hazard differs from the smoke produced by peatland fires elsewhere in the country in terms of particle characteristics, dispersal patterns, and protection measures, the IHCP noted.
On September 6, the continuous explosive eruption from Anak Krakatau subsided, though the volcano kept rumbling. It returned to a more typical pattern of Strombolian eruptions, characterized by intermittent spurts of ash and volcanic material. Airports had resumed operation by September 8, but the volcano remained at the second-highest alert level on the country’s scale, as it has been since early July.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey, and VIIRS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE, GIBS/Worldview, and the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership. Story by Lindsey Doermann.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
The volcano on Indonesia’s Halmahera Island routinely ejects ash, volcanic gases, and volcanic bombs.
Satellite imagery shows a surge of new volcanic activity in the ocean near Papua New Guinea.
Near-constant activity continues on the volcano in Russia.
The post Anak Krakatau Rumbles Again appeared first on NASA Science.
Links for you. Science:
Trump Moves To Let Ranchers Kill Wolves: ‘You Can Shoot ‘Em’
Earth’s Magnetic Field Can Help Archaeologists Sniff Out Forged Antiquities
New England’s forests are in trouble
Breakthrough Quantum Test Resolves a Major Cosmic Mystery
The ‘Gen Z stare’ — and the decline of saying things out loud
Other:
What happened when Boston’s real-estate market found Montrose Street
A Data Center Moved Into This Town, And The Neighbors Moved Out
Is Adam Hamilton “Too Woke For Kansas?” The Democratic Senate candidate in the Jayhawk State, a former Republican and a Methodist minister who runs its largest megachurch, thinks the charge is laughable—and that he’s going to shock the world by turning Kansas blue.
Persis Yu’s blueprint for challenging entrenched power on Beacon Hill
Who Wrote the Zohar?
‘Oh hell no!’ Trump sparks fury as he doubles down on latest name-change obsession
More Americans are identifying as Democrats ahead of midterms
The Forgotten Jewish Revolt That Erased a Civilization
Dingy, dated, doomed: A fond goodbye to the Mass. Pike rest stops
American Airlines passenger duct-taped to seat after mid-air meltdown loses his job
Who did I vote for? Real people from the 2024 Cooperative Election Study introduce themselves in one sentence. You guess how likely it is they voted for Trump.
Why Erika Kirk failed as Turning Point USA’s leader
The Replacements: Trump’s State Department spent 2025 gutting the diplomatic workforce. Now it’s discovered that many of the people it eliminated were, unfortunately, pretty important all along—and desperately trying to refill their roles. “State is shopping for the expertise it threw away,” said one former officer. “You cannot make this shit up.”
Ken Paxton’s Financial Disclosures Appear to Violate Federal Ethics Law, Experts Say
Flock Taught Cops How to Surveil No Kings Protesters
Gloria Steinem was a beacon for women like me
A16z Says You Actually Love Social Media, Enshittification Isn’t Real
Who’s Afraid of the A.I. Bubble? Former a16z partner Vijay Pande thinks an A.I. crash is inevitable, so we may as well get it over with. But how bad could things get, and what would the industry look like afterward?
You Wanted a More Brutal World. Milo Yiannopoulos gleefully supported a vicious, brutal deportation machine. Having helped unleash this nightmarish system, will he take responsibility for helping us dismantle it?
Since yesterday, President Donald J. Trump has been posting on social media at a frantic pace, showing AI images of himself with President George Washington on his own account and, on the official White House account, a video of himself as the DC Comics Green Lantern superhero. The White House social media account ripped off Green Lantern’s oath, captioning the video: “In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight. Let those who worship evil’s might beware my power… Green Lantern’s light!”
Back on his own account, Trump posted images of Space Force uniforms that mimic those of Starship Troopers, whose design the director of that 1997 film claimed was meant to invoke Nazis. He also posted two AI images of himself in what appears to be a spaceship with his hands on buttons as two nuclear mushroom clouds billow off planet Earth behind him, and two images of himself as a sort of superhero dark lord with a dark army around him with the captions “THEY WILL NEVER SLEEP AGAIN,” “GIVE THEM NIGHTMARES,” and “THEY WILL DREAM OF US FOREVER.”
He posted multiple images of himself changing maps or of new maps showing the change of the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” and the state of New Mexico to “New America,” and labeling the Strait of Hormuz as “NEW U.S. Territory.” He showed the colors of the United States over the North American continent, and he posted “before” and “after” maps in which Iran was replaced with a silhouette image of his own head, as well as an AI image of a U.S. military plane blowing up Iran’s Kharg Island with the caption: “Bye bye, Kharg,” along with repeated claims that Iran is collapsing. He posted an AI-generated image of himself beating Canadian prime minister Mark Carney at hockey and saying, “GET UP, GOVERNOR,” an insulting reference to Canada as a U.S. state.
He also posted an image of the moon with the caption: “THE MOON IS OURS” along with a U.S. flag.
And, of course, many of the things Trump posted claimed he would “GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS THE GREATEST PRESIDENT OF ALL TIME!” He posted AI images of former president Joe Biden wearing a Trump 2024 hat and anti-Trump actor Robert DeNiro holding up a shirt saying “TRUMP IS MY PRESIDENT.” He posted an AI image of what seemed to be the luxury liner RMS Titanic, labeled “DUMOCRATIC PARTY,” sinking in flames.
He acknowledged complaints about the fact he has pocketed more than two billion dollars from rapid-fire stock trading since taking office a second time. He posted an image of himself trading stocks at his desk in the Oval Office at a screen that reads “BOUGHT: INTEL $20” and another that reads “NOW $95” with the caption: “I do this for our Country, not myself. I’ve made Hundreds of Billions of Dollars on Stocks, and many other type Holdings, for the U.S.A., not myself, and all I do is get criticized by the Radical Left Dumocrats. Very unfair, but what can you do! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
He reiterated his demand for the SAVE America voter suppression act and claimed: “Except for the RADICAL LEFT that wants to RAISE YOUR TAXES, and wreck our Economy, EVERYONE LOVES TAX CUTS! My Big Beautiful Bill was the BIGGEST relief in HISTORY for hardworking families—Nobody’s seen anything like it!”
It seems likely that he and his aide Natalie Harp, who is apparently behind much of his social media, think trolling the country is a good way to keep attention focused on Trump rather than on rising inflation, corruption, or the war in Iran.
There is much to distract from. On CNN today, pollster Harry Enten noted that while Trump enjoyed a 20-point advantage over Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent, in 2024 on economic issues, Trump’s approval rating for how he is handling the economy is now 41 points underwater. “We’re talking about a switcheroo in the wrong direction of 61 points on this Labor Day,” Enten said. “It is not a happy Labor Day, indeed, for President Trump when it comes to how those who are employed view him on the economy.”
Also today, when Martha Raddatz of ABC News noted that gas and diesel prices are soaring, with the Labor Day gasoline average at $4.10 a gallon compared with $3.16 last year, she played a clip of Trump telling an audience that when they had to “pay a tiny little bit more for your gasoline, just remember, you’re doing it so that a very evil country cannot have—a country, really, it’s the number one state sponsor of terror in the world. We don’t want to have them have a nuclear weapon. So remember that, when you have to pay a little bit more, you’re at $4, it’s okay. I mean, it’s, I’m not, I’m not. I will never apologize. I did the right thing.”
Raddatz asked Energy Secretary Chris Wright today about when we might see a nuclear agreement with Iran, since it’s already been six months of higher prices and there doesn’t seem to be one on the table. Wright answered: “There may not be a nuclear agreement. It may be simply destroying their capabilities to do it. An agreement may await a next administration in Iran. We simply don’t know that. But I think what the president was communicating there is how critically important this is.”
Tonight, Trump posted: “Oil prices will drop precipitously, like everything else is dropping (but more!), when we WIN the war with Iran. Three Dollars a gallon, but ultimately, below Two Dollars a gallon. It will all happen quickly, and Iran will never have a Nuclear Weapon. MAGA! President DJT”
But while at some level Trump might think he is being clever by keeping the focus on himself, what he is really doing is demonstrating that he is no longer even trying to govern and is instead retreating into a world where he simply does whatever he wants without regard for the country. In the early hours of Trump’s rants yesterday, even before they had gained their full momentum, Representative Chellie Pingree (D-ME) called out the Republicans who are refusing to exercise their constitutional powers to protect the country.
“This is truly unhinged,” she posted on social media over a video of his posts. “I don’t want to hear ‘oh, it’s just Trump being Trump’ or he’s ‘trolling.’ Republicans cannot keep shrugging this off. Congress, the Cabinet + everyone around him has a responsibility to stop enabling this dangerous behavior and start asking whether he is fit to hold office.”
Today Trump acknowledged the Labor Day holiday, saying: “Happy Labor Day to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, and Dumocrats who will do anything possible to destroy our Country. These Deranged People, after fighting for 10 years, should finally acknowledge that your Favorite President (ME!), knows how to WIN! They should be exhausted by now but, sadly, they’re not. They’re going to give it one last shot at ruining America, but we’re not going to let that happen. We’re going to win the Midterms, BIG, and SAVE AMERICA! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
Former president Joe Biden had a different message for the country on Labor Day: “I’ve said it my entire career,” he posted on social media, “the middle class built America. And unions built the middle class. To every worker who’s ever punched a clock, worked a double, or walked a line for fair wages—and to everyone who stands up for them, at the bargaining table, in the statehouse, or on the shop floor: thank you. This country runs in large part because of you.”
For my part, I hope everyone had a restful Labor Day and is ready to face the fall season—and the midterm elections—with renewed energy.
—
Notes:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/natalie-harp-spotting-fuels-questions-about-trumps-ai-posting-spree/
Trump’s Truth:
X:
JoeBiden/status/2096966644870394260
Bluesky:
“The issues that he bawled about usually meant nothing to him. He was ready to abandon them whenever he could make votes by doing so, and to take up new ones at a moment’s notice … [He] was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses…. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him … full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.”
— H.L. Mencken in an obit of William Jennings Bryan, 1925
•••
Even though I live here in Orange County, I am a New Yorker.
I will always be a New Yorker.
I was born and raised in a town, Mahopac, located about an hour north of Manhattan, and after graduating college and spending 2 1/2 years as a writer in Nashville, I moved to the Big Apple to work for Sports Illustrated and eat an endless supply of bagels (with whitefish and tomato) and late-night slices of pizza. It is no exaggeration to say I love New York City. The buzz. The passion. The ‘Fuck you’ and ‘Your mom’ and potholes and summer piss stench and asphalt hoops and Nas and Biggie and Billy Joel and … I love everything about it. In many ways, it’s who I am.
I repeat: It is who I am.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was in the rear seat of a car driving across Manhattan and heading toward the Holland Tunnel. It was me and three Sports Illustrated co-workers, with an ultimate destination of New Jersey to attend a golf tournament (unusual for me, because I loathe golf). As we cruised west, one of us noticed a bunch of people standing on an upcoming corner, gazing upward. Within a few seconds, we saw what they saw: A gaping, burning hole in Tower 1 of the World Trade Center.
This was my introduction to … The Worst.
What followed remains borderline indescribable. We reached our destination, sat in a room and—together—watched on TV as buildings smoldered and planes crashed and people (who began their days presuming it was just another Tuesday) faced the unfathomable decision of whether to leap to their deaths or burn to their deaths. I couldn’t believe it. Could. Not. Believe. It. Upon somehow finding a way to return to my apartment late that night, I hugged my fiance and just … I dunno. Absorbed. Crumbled. Paced and moaned and failed to understand the enormity of what had occurred. This was impossible, right? It had to be …
The days that followed … I mean, people talk about New Yorkers never being more united, and it’s the truth. But what I remember most are the flyers. Flyers here, flyers there. Flyers on doors and windows and platforms. HAVE YOU SEEN and IF YOU SEE. A friend and I shuffled over to a midtown armory, where loved ones looking for the lost gathered. With everyone aspiring to help (but little actual need), I stood, cupped my hands and announced, “IF YOU HAVE A FLYER, MY FRIEND AND I WILL MAKE COPIES OF IT AND POST ALL OVER THE CITY!” Dozens of people handed us pieces up paper, including one woman—the wife of a man named Robert Pugliese—who said, glumly, “I know he’s dead.” We spent the next six or seven hours posting flyers. Knowing, as Robert Pugliese’s wife did, the people pictured were most certainly gone.
I also recall the smell. Even though our place was about a mile north of Ground Zero, the stench was inescapable. Metallic, burning rubber, wood, fleshy. Up your nostrils. On your skin.
God, I fucking hate 9.11.
Anyone in New York City at the time hates 9.11.
•••
Wait.
I want to correct that last sentence, because it’s not true.
Donald Trump, a born-and-raised New Yorker who was in the city on the worst-ever day, seems to love 9.11. Or at least love lying about it. And using it to make himself some sort of hero.
Which he most certainly was not.
And before I delve into this, I want to scream one point, because it pisses me the fuck off. So … here I go: EVEN THOUGH EVERYTHING I’M ABOUT TO WRITE IS VERIFIABLY TRUE, THE MAINSTREAM NEWS MEDIA RARELY (AKA: ALMOST NEVER) BRINGS THIS UP. EVERY YEAR WE HAVE A 9.11 ANNIVERSARY, EVERY YEAR DONALD TRUMP SPEWS SOME BULLSHIT, EVERY YEAR WE ALL PRETEND THERE’S NO HISTORY HERE! IT’S INFURIATING!
Put different …
Donald Trump’s first awful act in regard to 9.11 came within a few hours of the disaster, when he went on TV (his favorite place) and bragged about now having Manhattan’s tallest building. If you’re thinking, “No way someone does that”—yes, way.
Here’s the clip …
It’s funny. Before he became president, and was just a reality TV bozo, I sorta gave the dude the benefit of the doubt. Like, maybe he misspoke or had a different idea in mind. But—no. We know Donald Trump far too well, and this is precisely who he is. He cannot not brag, even if the subject involves ruination and destruction.
Don’t believe me? Twelve years before the Sept. 11 attacks a trio of Trump-employed casino executives died in a helicopter crash in New Jersey. Initially, Trump pretended to care about the lost ones, and tried wearing the Mr. Compassionate mask he wears from time to time …
Alas, he couldn’t do it. Before long, Trump shifted from expressing grief to … telling the news media he had narrowly escaped the disaster. In fact, not only did he say so in conversations—he made it part of his bio. Escaped near death. Almost died. Only, cough, it was a lie. A 100-percent lie.
Think about that for a moment. Think about the type of broken brain that even considers this an option.
Step 1: My employees die.
Step 2: They leave behind families and friends.
Step 3: Everyone seems sad.
Step 4: They’re not paying attention to me.
Step 5: I’ll lie and say I was supposed to be on the chopper, too.
•••
Through the months, years and decades that followed 9.11, Trump’s lies grew as does his love for teenage girls.
In no particular order:
• Trump has said time and time again he saw one of the planes hit the Towers from his window at Trump Tower.
His quote:
One problem: The building is located on 5th Avenue between 56th and 57th Streets, a little more than four miles away from Ground Zero. Unless Donald Trump is Superman, the view literally does not exist.
• Trump has insisted, in the immediate aftermath, he sent a more than 100 workers to help with the on-sight recovery. There is, literally, no record of this, and nary a single Trump “worker” has said they were dispatched to Ground Zero. More to the point, tight records were kept of anyone/everyone allowed at the site. There is not a single notation of Trump employees on the scene.
• Trump has insisted he went to Ground Zero and the recovery zone—“Soon after, I went down to Ground Zero with men who worked for me to try to help in any little way that we could.”
And …
There is, again, literally no record of this. No log entry, no photography, no memories of others. Zip, zero.
Supporters will point to this image …
… but that’s Trump blocks away, where he was doing TV interviews.
Because, of course he did.
• Trump has said, in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, he made a $10,000 to the 9.11 Foundation. Only, there’s literally no record of it. And if a public figure like Donald Trump makes a donation, there would most certainly be a record.
• The worst of the worst of the worst might be Trump at his apex xenophobic self. Trump has repeatedly insisted he saw Muslims celebrating atop buildings in Jersey City as the Twin Towers fell.
Don’t believe me? Roll the tape …
Of course, it was just a lie. Because why wouldn’t you use an unspeakable tragedy to spread hate? Just as he did with the Central Park Five? Just as he’s done with immigrants eating pets. Just as he always does, because he’s a spiteful, hateful, disgusting, small, petty piece of shit.
•••
And I always think about this—how disqualifying it should have been (and still be) for the president of the United States to have used our greatest tragedy to lie and lie and lie and lie. How gross it is. How evil it is. How inhumane it is. The man is remarkable, in that he has, literally, no empathy or compassion. He is a succubus, here to use and take and absorb.
He is evil, and his reaction to September 11, 2001 should have ended any chance of leadership.
Alas, 25 years after The Worst, we are here.
Led by the worst.
Up and to my viall a while, and then to my office on Phillips having brought me a draught of the Katherine yacht, prettily well done for the common way of doing it. At the office all the morning making up our last half year’s account to my Lord Treasurer, which comes to 160,000l. or there abouts, the proper expense of this half year, only with an addition of 13,000l. for the third due of the last account to the Treasurer for his disbursements, and 1100l. for this half year’s; so that in three years and a half his thirds come to 14,100l.. Dined at home with my wife. It being washing day, we had a good pie baked of a leg of mutton; and then to my office, and then abroad, and among other places to Moxon’s, and there bought a payre of globes cost me 3l. 10s., with which I am well pleased, I buying them principally for my wife, who has a mind to understand them, and I shall take pleasure to teach her. But here I saw his great window in his dining room, where there is the two Terrestrial Hemispheres, so painted as I never saw in my life, and nobly done and to good purpose, done by his own hand.
Thence home to my office, and there at business late, and then to supper home and to bed, my people sitting up longer than ordinary before they had done their washing.
1. The Carob Prize, for scholars who tell the truth (WSJ).
2. Observations from watching Iranian social media.
3. The Emma McAleavy feminist vision.
4. Is the inflation picture shifting?
5. The labor market is doing fine.
6. If LLMs had the personalities of TV stars, would you choose Colombo?
The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Some are calling this “a Deep Blue moment” for AI.
All via T., a mathematician.
Update from OpenAI: “Our internal model group arrived at the Navier–Stokes solution in 88 hours, using around 10,000 coordinating AI agents.” And this. And from Noam Brown: “Yes, this result cost millions of dollars. But remember that when @OpenAI announced o3 it cost ~$500,000 to score 87.5% on ARC-AGI 1. Today, Astra scores higher for ~$20. In 2025 it took us and GDM an enormous amount of compute to achieve IMO gold. For the 2026 IMO, anyone with a $20/month ChatGPT subscription could do it. Massively scaling test-time compute gives us a glimpse of the future. I believe that a year from now everyone will have an AI at their fingertips capable of solving problems of this caliber.”
The post Some Navier-Stokes updates appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Interesting research: “Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs“:
Abstract: Leading large language model providers now conceal their models’ step-by-step reasoning, or chain-of-thought, to protect intellectual property and limit information leakage. Rather than storing these traces server-side, providers return them to the client as blocks of encrypted text, which the client passes back with each subsequent request. Building on prior research, we identify an architectural vulnerability: these encrypted blocks are fully compatible and interchangeable across different sessions, users, and models within a provider’s ecosystem. We exploit this compatibility to develop a scalable decryption jailbreak. By injecting an encrypted reasoning trace from a given model into a weaker, and less safeguarded model from the same provider, we force it to decode and output the trace verbatim in plaintext, without ever jailbreaking the more capable model directly. This vulnerability enables four distinct attack vectors. First, it circumvents anti-distillation mechanisms, allowing adversaries to extract a proprietary model’s reasoning, as we demonstrate across Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. Second, it allows for large-scale private data extraction. Developers frequently share session logs publicly, unaware of contents of the encrypted blocks. By decoding 315,320 reasoning blocks scraped from public repositories, we recovered 367 Personally Identifiable Information (PII) artifacts and 182 credentials. Third, it inadvertently reveals hazardous information hidden within the reasoning process, even in cases where the model’s final, visible output safely rejects a malicious request. Fourth, attackers can leverage this flaw to execute invisible prompt injections, embedding malicious payloads entirely within encrypted blocks to poison public agentic rollouts. Following responsible disclosure, we propose concrete cryptographic and system-level mitigations to secure client-side reasoning.
TL;DR: we spend more CPU cycles rendering commits for scrapers than we spend on all other kinds of legitimate access, including git clones. At any one time, across 5 geo-distributed nodes, there are 14 CPU cores doing nothing but rendering git commits as html.
I worry about this a lot from the perspective of Datasette, which serves a huge number of crawlable web pages.
Via Hacker News
Transcript
“Mary had a little lamb, but when she saw it sicken, she sent it off to Packingtown, and now it’s labeled chicken.”
Hi, Paul Krugman here. That’s a little ditty that was circulating, I can’t find any original source, around 1905, when Upton Sinclair published “The Jungle” — about the meatpacking industry, one of the sort of founding documents of the progressive movement.
The topic today is Donald Trump and beef, because here we are back in Upton Sinclair territory.
So you may have seen that last month Trump announced, given that we have high beef prices, that he was going to allow the tariff-free import of 300,000 tons of ground beef.
Rather oddly, he didn’t say from where and wouldn’t say from where for a while. And then eventually said, well, from Argentina, Brazil, and other places.
There has been a substantial uproar over these imports of ground beef because of concerns about safety. You know, if he won’t even say where it’s coming from or whether the countries involved are going to be practicing food safety, that is kind of an issue. And it turns out it’s not just, you know, not just woke liberal types but ranchers, lawmakers and food safety experts who were very concerned about the plan and were not reassured when Trump said the meat is “very clean and very good.”
Okay, little by little details are coming out about how all of this happened. It turns out that the initial plan to allow the beef imports was announced the day after a closed door meeting between Trump and a Brazilian meat packing billionaire who is a major donor to Trump.
And they went right ahead and announced the plan, although again without details. There doesn’t seem to have been much discussion of how this would work, of the concerns. After some initial blowback — even ranchers are concerned that people might become worried about the safety of U.S. beef — Trump announced that he was going to also allow farmers and ranchers to process their own beef rather than having to go through the regular meatpacking companies. But it turned out that the ranchers hate that too, because what they want is for people to believe that beef is safe. They want to be assured that there are quality standards being upheld.
And now that we have at least some information about the origins of the beef, we are even less reassured. In fact, just the other day, the European Union banned beef imports from Brazil because Brazil was not adhering to EU standards on the use of antibiotics. So there are, in fact, real concerns here about safety.
Okay, this is quite a story, and beef is not that trivial a product, but there’s a lot of secondary implications here. The first is that this is a very Trumpian story. It’s got this sort of characteristic combination of raw corruption and raw incompetence. Raw might not have been the best word to use here, but anyway.
The corruption: Obviously, this was a decision made because somebody who has given Trump’s campaign and possibly Trump himself money had a meeting with him and got an immediate policy change. So this certainly looks like undue influence. We don’t know exactly how it happened because it was a closed-door meeting.
Also, shouldn’t somebody have been in the room to or at least passed on this before it was announced to say, you know, is this a good idea? Shouldn’t there have been somebody from the Agriculture Department, somebody from the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office, but certainly someone from food safety to pass judgment or give some warning?
In a normal administration, any kind of decision like this involves a process in which multiple agencies get a chance to weigh in and in which somebody who knows something gets to say, look, there are real problems with this idea. But obviously that didn’t happen here. And basically it doesn’t happen in this administration.
This is an administration that does not like experts. Does not listen to expertise. That’s not just a result of particular personnel decisions that Trump made. That is just a defining characteristic. At a fundamental level, they’re just hostile to the idea of expertise in any domain, in pretty much every agency where there’s something to know, where there’s technical stuff that you need to know to make good decisions.
The people who actually know things, or the people who are willing to speak up about what they know, have been silenced, purged. That’s across the board. Basically, it’s Hegseths all the way down in this administration.
And so in this case, nobody was there apparently to say, this is really not a very good idea.
And I think it’s really striking that even Trump thought, well, okay, I can fix this. At least I can mend fences with the ranchers by giving them more leeway to be unregulated themselves. But it turns out that the ranchers want regulation. They want customers to know that the beef that they buy is safe. So just raw incompetence on top of the raw corruption.
There’s an even larger issue here. Normally, when we think about, or as we used to think about, left versus right, there is a question about the role of government. How big a role should government play? And ultimately, it’s a values question, normally. It is a question, should it be the government’s business to ensure that citizens are not in dire poverty? Should it be the government’s business to ensure that everyone has access to essential healthcare?
And the question of how far in that direction you want to go is the traditional left-right distinction. Obviously, I’m on one side of that, and I think that morally I’m right. I think even in practical terms I’m right, but that is a debatable point.
But there are certain roles that government must play. The government needs to provide public goods. The government needs to provide things that the private sector cannot do for itself, which is obviously things like national defense, things like public safety, and it turns out also things like ensuring the safety of the food supply, just like ensuring the safety of the water supply.
It turns out that regulation of what goes on in meatpacking plants, regulation of what goes into your food is something that you really want the government to do. Even people in the industries want that unless they are particularly unethical types. The people who are trying to do the business right want those public goods provided because if you don’t have those provided, then people will not trust their products.
And this is not something that you can leave up to the private sector. It’s not something where you can do your own research. It’s a very complicated world out there. And the informational burden of trying to figure out whether the people responsible for your package of hamburger are actually following safe procedures, that’s beyond everybody. It’s actually quite similar in a way to public health measures, including, by the way, of course, vaccination.
Like I said, it’s all the same story here: This retreat from even the most essential roles of government.
So this is not an administration that’s trying to turn the clock back to 1930. It’s not trying to undo the New Deal. It’s an administration that’s trying to turn us back to the 19th century or before. It’s really just trying to undo even the most essential functions of government.
They’re not doing this, I think, out of a philosophical concern. I don’t think they have a theory that says that we really don’t need these things. They just don’t think about it at all. They don’t do expertise. They don’t do thinking, really. And a lot of policy is just based upon who last spoke to Donald Trump and who has given him money.
It turns out that this is a case in which Brazil — and it appears it’s probably Brazil, there may be some Argentine stuff here, but it’s probably Brazil — Brazil is notorious for not practicing internationally accepted standards on the safety of its meat.
And so the last thing you want to do is allow Brazilian ground beef to be admixed. And by the way, none of this would be unique origin. This would be trimmings of beef that get ground up and mixed in with other beef. And basically, if you get a package of hamburger in the United States under this rule, you will have basically no idea where it came from. You’ll have no idea under what conditions the cattle were raised or how the meat was processed. And this is not something that’s in the interest of really anybody except personally this particular Brazilian beef baron who may have a bunch of unsold beef because the Europeans have turned back a shipment.
And of course Donald Trump himself presumably is getting some financial benefit personally out of the whole thing.
So it’s quite a story. It’s in a way captures all in one place everything that is going wrong, how quickly the United States is descending into kind of pre-modern, pre-development status. We’re just giving up all of the things that make an advanced society and advanced economy work.
Okay, that was hard work. And I’m kind of hungry. So I think I’m going to have a piece of hamburger with some iceberg lettuce.
Actually, maybe not.
Take care.
A regulation that raises gasoline prices makes people angry but when regulation prevents an industry from ever existing, most people never learn what they lost.
Consider nuclear power. Overnight construction costs for early U.S. demonstration reactors fell 81 percent between 1954 and 1968. For reactors begun between 1967 and 1972, costs rose 187 percent. The 1971 Calvert Cliffs decision and then the reaction to Three Mile Island in 1979 accelerated the cost increases and slowed construction even more.
What might have happened had the earlier learning and deployment trends continued? Peter Lang’s 2017 paper in Energies estimates that nuclear power would have cost about one-tenth as much by 2015. The additional generation could have avoided as many as 9.5 million premature deaths.
The number is staggering even if quartered. Millions of deaths. Yet, the graveyard was both invisible and silent.
(Furthermore, climate change would not be a problem today had nuclear power not been handicapped.)
The nuclear story you probably know but Niko McCarty has an excellent new Works in Progress piece on an invisible graveyard of technology that I knew almost nothing about.
In the 1980s, officials decided to regulate engineered microbes under the Toxic Substances Control Act, a law written for industrial chemicals. Microbes swap genes all the time, but EPA treats them as “new” whenever DNA is introduced from another genus. As a result, even a marker gene used simply to identify successfully edited cells can trigger review if it remains in the organism. McCarty reports that researchers filed more than 240 applications between 1987 and 2018: “Only a few were ever approved for widespread use.”
What have we lost? We can’t know for sure but among the plausible losses McCarty discusses are engineered bacteria that detect buried explosives, microbes that extract rare-earth metals and improved plastic-digesting enzymes. Similarly, Chernia et al. write:
Promising many societal benefits, emergent products of biotechnology involve releasing genetically modified microbes (GMMs) into the environment. However, regulatory challenges limit their use. So far, GMMs have mainly been tested in agriculture and environmental cleanup, with few approved for commercial purposes. Current government regulations inadequately address modern genetic engineering and limit the potential of gut therapeutics, skin products, self-repairing materials, ocean pollution treatment, anti-corrosion coatings, etc.
And those are just some of the plausible first-stage losses. Perhaps even more importantly, we learn by doing. Thus, no doing, no learning. The first approved product is rarely the safest or the best but when we fail to approve the first we don’t get the much better 5th. Forty years of that process could have taken us well beyond the applications McCarty describes. We must build to build better.
Nuclear power at least left us enough reactors to get some idea of what we lost. With microbes, I needed McCarty to tell me there was something missing even though I study these issues for a living. And note one reason new microbe loss was invisible. No vote was ever taken. No debate was ever had. Officials in the 1980s reasoned that genomes are made of chemicals and chemicals are covered, and that doctrine has governed the field ever since despite being overly broad and excessively costly.
How many other gaps in our technology have explanations buried in the Federal Register?
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Here is a video version of this post. Which do you like better?
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Physicians reject palmistry as nonsense. But reading the creases of our palms for hidden meaning is what doctors have always done
- by Alison Bashford
Here's a paper featured by Microeconomic Insights, which shows that in the highly concentrated dialysis market, in which prices are mostly federally regulated, mergers reduce competition on quality.
Thomas G. Wollmann: How to Get Away with Merger: Stealth Consolidation and Its Effects on US Dialysis
"This paper studies premerger notification of US dialysis acquisitions from 1996 to 2017. Like many industries, dialysis has consolidated rapidly. During this period, thousands of facilities changed ownership, yet only half were reported to federal antitrust authorities. Unlike most industries, dialysis prices are mostly set by the government, so acquisitions of rival facilities reduce the incentive to compete on quality. Since patients are often already in poor health, preventing stealth consolidation could save lives.
The study combines data on market structure, antitrust enforcement, and patient health. I begin by describing patterns in the data. Next, I estimate a structural model of dialysis competition, enforcement, and agency costs. Finally, I use the estimates to predict what would have happened had all dialysis mergers proposed during the study period been reportable.
Three main findings emerge.
Premerger notification is critical to effective antitrust enforcement. All else equal, exemption reduces the likelihood of enforcement by about 90%.
Exempt acquisitions that concentrate ownership degrade quality, as evidenced by higher postmerger hospitalization and mortality rates.
The benefits of expanding premerger notification exceed the costs by orders of magnitude. This reflects the deterrence effect of antitrust enforcement (i.e., rivals won’t try to merge if they know their deal will be blocked) as well as the efficiency of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which polices billions of dollars of dialysis transactions with very few resources."
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Will 21st century transportation innovations work against urban density, as the car did in the 20th century, or promote urban centralization, as the railroad did in the 19th century? Reducing the cost of commuting always reduces urban centralization in the classic Alonso-Muth-Mills model but that result reverses if the number of trips is endogenous and the elasticity of trips with respect to their costs is greater than one. That elasticity may have increased over time, as an increasing share of daily trips seems to be discretionary and city centers increasingly provide entertainment. This paper asks discusses the urbanizing effects of four trends in transportation technology: shared mobility (such as Uber), autonomy (such as Waymo), vertical travel and green mobility, as provided by bike lane. As people spend more time travelling in denser, large areas, innovations that reduce the time cost of travel, such as autonomous cars, seem likely to complement urban living, as long as they don’t excessively increase traffic. Sharing is also easier in big cities, so technologies that involve sharing are also centripetal. The other trends seem less likely to have major effects. Moreover, the forces of inertia, which include both regulation and legacy infrastructure, are likely to limit the impact of any new technologies in Europe and the U.S., so that the biggest changes in urban form are likely to appear in east Asia and the developing world.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Ed Glaeser.
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Editor’s Note: Today’s story is the answer to the September Puzzler.
Several of the outcrops at Vasquez Rocks Natural Area in Southern California jut from the arid landscape of the Soledad Basin at remarkable angles. Geologists estimate that the tilt of sedimentary rock strata found in the area averages 50 degrees, steep enough that many of the otherworldly formations appear to point toward the stars.
That’s fitting, in some ways, because the rocks have served as one of the Star Trek franchise’s favorite backdrops ever since the show’s inaugural season, when Captain James T. Kirk scrambled up the jagged terrain during an iconic battle with a member of a reptilian alien species.
Viewed from space, the Vasquez Rocks are considerably less dramatic, but they show up clearly as bands of gray nestled between mountain ranges in these false-color (left) and natural-color (right) images captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9. The false-color view (bands 6-5-4) incorporates shortwave-infrared and near-infrared observations that accentuate differences in the landscape’s vegetation in comparison to the natural-color image on the right.
The Vasquez Rocks didn’t start out pointing skyward. When they were forming 25 million years ago, sediment was spread across alluvial fans—cone-shaped deposits that develop as fast-moving streams empty onto relatively flat plains. The sediment likely hadn’t traveled far, much of it eroding from nearby uplands. Over time, the alluvial fan deposits were buried and cemented into thick layers of sandstone and conglomerate rock.
Over millions of years, the region was then reshaped by the interaction of tectonic plates just to the east. Two plates grind past each other along a boundary that includes the San Andreas Fault, a strike-slip fault where the North American plate moves southeast and the Pacific plate northwest, contributing to the powerful tectonic forces that ripple throughout the region.
Eventually this tectonic activity led to the uplift and deformation of the Soledad Basin, with sedimentary layers gradually tilting, folding, and rotating. Once they were exposed at the surface, millions more years of weathering and erosion sculpted the formations further, removing softer material and leaving the more resistant sandstone and conglomerate fins and ridges that wow visitors today.
The rock formations represent far-flung moons and planets in several other Star Trek episodes and Vulcan, Spock’s home planet, in two Star Trek movies. Other productions have highlighted the Vasquez Rocks as well. They make appearances in dozens of other television shows and movies, including the science fiction series Westworld, For All Mankind, and Battlestar Galactica.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.
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Is this star winking at us? The central object in
