Hanno Lustig and Romain Wacziarg now have a Substack
Self-recommending, here goes.
The post Hanno Lustig and Romain Wacziarg now have a Substack appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Self-recommending, here goes.
The post Hanno Lustig and Romain Wacziarg now have a Substack appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
On the heels of last weekend’s special election in Texas, President Donald J. Trump has called for his administration to take over the polls before the 2026 midterm elections. On Saturday, Democrat Taylor Rehmet flipped a state Senate seat in Texas that had been held by a Republican since the early 1990s, and he did so by a margin of 14.4 points in a district Trump won in 2024 by 17 points. The 32-point flip has Republicans “in full-out panic mode,” as reporter Liz Crampton put it in Politico yesterday.
Trump ally Steve Bannon said yesterday on his podcast: “You’re damn right, we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.”
Last week’s release of some of the Epstein files has shown just how thoroughly Bannon plays his audience for power. Even while he was portraying himself to his audience as a populist defender, he was working closely with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to launder his image and craft political messages.
On Tuesday, Bannon echoed Trump’s lie that undocumented immigrants corrupt the polls, saying that only about 20% of real voters select Democrats. This lie about undocumented immigrants voting has been part of the Republicans’ rhetoric since 1994, the year after Democrats under President Bill Clinton passed the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, the so-called Motor Voter Act, which made it easier to register to vote at certain state offices. In 1994, Republicans accused Democrats of winning elections by turning to “illegal,” usually immigrant, voters.
Republican candidates who lost in the 1994 midterm elections claimed that Democrats had won only through “voter fraud.” In 1996, Republicans in both the House and the Senate launched yearlong investigations into what they insisted were problematic elections, one in Louisiana and one in California. Ultimately, they turned up nothing, but keeping the cases in front of the media for a year helped to convince Americans that Democratic voter fraud was a serious issue.
Trump and his allies have put this political myth into hyperdrive. Political operative Roger Stone launched a “Stop the Steal” website during the 2016 Republican primaries to argue that a “Bush-Cruz-Kasich-Romney-Ryan-McConnell faction” intended to steal the Republican nomination from Trump. After Trump got the nomination, the Trump camp wheeled out the “Stop the Steal” idea for the 2016 race against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and have used it ever since to spread the idea that Trump, and other Republicans, can lose only if Democrats cheat.
House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is in on the game. In 2024 he told reporters, “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections.” Yesterday, defending Trump’s demand for federal control of elections, he went further: “We had three House Republican candidates who were ahead on Election Day in the last election cycle, and every time a new tranche of ballots came in, they just magically whittled away until their leads were lost…. It looks on its face to be fraudulent.” Then he added the same caveat Republicans have used since 1996: “Can I prove that? No.”
And there’s the rub: there is never any proof of such claims. In 2016, fact-checkers established that, for all of Trump’s insistence that the 2016 election was marred by voter fraud—he claimed “millions” of undocumented immigrants voted illegally—there was virtually no voting by undocumented immigrants in that election. Douglas Keith, Myrna Pérez, and Christopher Famighetti of the Brennan Center reached out to 42 jurisdictions across the nation with the highest population share of noncitizens in the states Trump claimed had returned fraudulent numbers.
Election officials in 40 of those jurisdictions told the journalists that they had had no instances of noncitizen voting. Two said they referred only about 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting. If all of those were, in fact, illegitimate votes, it means that out of 23.5 million votes cast in their jurisdictions in the 2016 general election, about 30—or 0.0001 percent—of those votes were problematic.
The MAGA furor over undocumented voting reflects something different than a genuine concern that undocumented immigrants are flooding into U.S. polling booths. It shows that MAGA leaders realize that the white nationalism they use to turn out their supporters is increasingly unpopular across the nation and that the only way to stay in power is to define those who vote for the other party as illegitimate voters.
For decades now, Republican politicians have used racism and sexism to turn out voters, claiming that the growing economic divisions in society were the fault of Democrats who wanted to redistribute the tax dollars of hardworking white Americans to undeserving Black Americans, people of color, and women. Once in power, those leaders rigged the economy to move money not downward but upward, moving nearly $80 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1% from 1975 to 2023.
But now the extremes of the racism that are driving raids by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol are horrifying most Americans, while the open looting of the system by a few very wealthy individuals, led by the president, at the same time Republican lawmakers are killing public programs has proved too much for all but the firmest MAGA supporters.
MAGA leaders’ solution is to reject the results of any election that doesn’t put them in charge.
In North Carolina in the 1890s, a fusion movement brought together members of the Populist Party, who tended to be white, and Republicans who, in that post–Civil War era, tended to be Black. While the two groups didn’t agree on everything, they did agree on economic reforms to address a growing concentration of wealth, investments in education, and protection of voting rights. In response, the Democrats in charge of the North Carolina legislature in that era tried to kill the movement by cracking down on voting rights and passing a law that gave the legislature more authority over local governments.
It didn’t work. In 1896 the Fusionists won control of the state legislature, the governorship, and statewide offices. Out of 120 House members, only 26 were Democrats. Out of 50 members of the state Senate, only 7 were Democrats.
In the 1898 elections, the Democrats ran a full-throated white supremacy campaign. “It is time for the oft quoted shotgun to play a part, and an active one,” one woman wrote, “in the elections.” They threatened Black voters to keep them away from the polls, and when even that wasn’t enough, they tampered with the election results.
Blocking Fusion voters from the polls and threatening them with guns gave the Democrats a victory, but in Wilmington the biracial city government had not been up for reelection and so remained in power. There, about two thousand armed white Democrats overthrew the Fusion government. They agreed that the town officials had been elected fairly, but they rejected the outcome of the election nonetheless, insisting that the men voters had put in charge had no idea how to run a government.
In a “White Declaration of Independence,” they announced that they would “never again be ruled, by men of African origin.” It was time, they said, “for the intelligent citizens of this community owning 95 percent of the property and paying taxes in proportion, to end the rule by [Black men].” They accused the white men who had worked with the Black Republicans of exploiting black voters “so they can dominate the intelligent and thrifty element in the community.” Indeed, the Democrats later maintained, they had not had to force the officials to leave their posts; the officials recognized that they were not up to the task and left of their own accord. As many as three hundred Black Americans were killed in this “reform” of the city government.
This coup made its way into American culture. Three years after it, North Carolina writer and Southern Baptist minister Thomas Dixon popularized this revision of the past with his book The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, which portrayed Black voters as tyrants out to redistribute all the wealth and power in the South from white landowners to themselves.
At the climax of the novel, a gathering of leading white men echoed the Wilmington coup when they issued “a second Declaration of Independence from the infamy of corrupt and degraded government. The day of [Black] domination over the Anglo-Saxon race shall close, now, once and forever.” The book sold more than 100,000 copies in its first few months. In 1905, Dixon published The Clansman, which was even more popular than its predecessor.
In 1915, film director D.W. Griffith turned The Clansman into The Birth of a Nation, and the recasting of a white nationalist coup as a heroic defense of the people of the United States was underway.
When Bannon says “we will never again allow an election to be stolen,” the echoes from the past are unmistakable. But it seems significant that the coup leaders in 1898 issued their declaration after they had already won. Issuing it ahead of time in 2026 seems more like an attempt to rally flagging supporters while terrorizing opponents to keep them from turning out to vote. It is one thing to overthrow a town government in a time before modern communications could organize resistance; it is quite another to overthrow a nation of 348 million people who are forewarned.
Today the Supreme Court ruled that California may use the new congressional maps voters adopted as a response to the Texas legislature’s partisan gerrymandering of that state to favor Republicans. The Trump administration pushed the Texas redistricting but opposed California’s. Now, based on the 2024 election results, the two states could cancel each other out, although the Republicans’ Texas gerrymander assumed that Latino voters who swung to Trump in 2024 would stay there.
Latino support fueled Rehmet’s win on Saturday, bringing that assumption into question.
—
Notes:
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/03/republicans-hispanic-voters-texas-special-00763560
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/30/jeffrey-epstein-files-bannon-musk-00758613
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/14/jeffrey-epstein-steve-bannon
B. Drummond Ayres, Jr., “Feinstein Opponent Hopes to Uncover Ballot Fraud,” New York Times, November 30, 1994, p. B11.
Michael Janofsky, “Loser for Maryland Governor Files Suit to Overturn Election,” New York Times, December 29, 1994, p. A16.
Lizette Alvarez, “Doubts Rising on Election in California, Gingrich Says,” New York Times, September 26, 1997, p. A23.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/13/business/stop-the-steal-disinformation-campaign-invs
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/noncitizen-voting-missing-millions
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-2.html
https://guides.lib.unc.edu/wilmington-1898/central-figures-resources
https://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/00ddd/id/173131
https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/connor/connor.html
https://northcarolinahistory.org/encyclopedia/fusion-politics/
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/when-white-supremacists-overthrew-government/
https://www.npr.org/2026/02/04/nx-s1-5691890/supreme-court-california-redistricting-map
YouTube:
watch?v=ENQaME6pkHM, 11:52–12:12, 14:03
Bluesky:
Beyond acceding to Donald Trump’s fondest dreams, what are we possibly to make of the FBI seizing 700 ballot boxes, voter machine tapes, digital data and voter rolls reflecting 2020 votes from a Fulton Country warehouse? How could we possibly not see this as Trump-fueled revenge and a blinking warning about the kind of challenges to expect in November’s elections?
Days later, the FBI’s execution last week of a judicially signed search warrant served by armor-clad agents clearly still feels extraordinary both politically and legally, and it represents a significant escalation in Trump’s breaking of democratic norms. It certainly reflects Trump’s obsession with having been declared a loser and a warning that he will do anything to influence this year’s elections.
But what exactly is supposed to happen with these ballots and tapes? What are they supposed to show? There still is no justification for what Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was doing at the search. Even if we accept that she has decided to worry about election “security,” nothing offers a reason to be present during the serving of a warrant to gather evidence.
Though even the optics of a seizure may appease Trump’s insistence that the 2020 election was stolen from him, what is the practical outcome here? Aren’t these the same votes and ballots recounted multiple times by the state officials responsible for them? Aren’t these the very results that were the arguments in Rudy Giuliani’s loss in court of a defamation suit worth $148 million charging fraud by two election mother and daughter election workers?
Trump blamed results in Georgia for his loss to Joe Biden, pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him 11,781 more votes. Recently, he promised anew to prosecute those responsible for rigging the election. Trump and his allies filed more than 60 legal cases across the nation seeking to overturn the 2020 election results — all of which failed, even those before Trump-appointed judges.
The warrant said the materials to be seized might be “evidence of the commission of a criminal offense.” It cited stiff criminal penalties related to “the procurement, casting, or tabulation” of fraudulent ballots. Weirdly, this material already had been requested in a state-federal lawsuit, but release was held up by court order.
We don’t know what evidence or argument was presented to the judge who signed the search warrant; only the FBI presented its reasons. There is no suggestion of new evidence emerging, so the timing is off. A search warrant does not mean a crime was committed or by whom. Rather it means that there is probably cause to look at these elements.
Even a cursory look at the seizure raises a host of questions.
The first is what does the FBI hope to find that no previous investigation or recounting determined? In 2023, Giuliani conceded that while acting as a lawyer for. Trump, he made false statements by asserting that two Atlanta election workers had mishandled ballots.
Then there is the timing. This is 2026, and the voting was in 2020. Most federal and state election laws seem to have a statue of limitations clause that expires after five years. Can any “evidence” unearthed here even be submitted to a court in a criminal trial?
Who is going to review these records, if not the state and county election officials? Is the FBI going to do its own recount, or perhaps hire an outside private company whose background and political lean will be put under endless scrutiny? Who designates that they are not altered once out of the hands of election officials?
How is anyone reviewing the ballots supposed to determine “intent” as required by fraud laws?
And, of course, if Trump’s FBI and Justice Department magically “find” 11,781 votes, do we replay the last six years and re-install Donald Trump as president. Or better yet, determine that he already has served twice as president and cannot Constitutionally finish this would-be third term?
We’re left with the other conclusion possible here. There is no practical way for Trump to un-rig the 2020 election, but he can use his Justice Department and FBI to harass those who dare to suggest that he lost.
While such dreams may serve the infantile Trump ego, the real value is in signaling to an already wary electorate that Trump, who is not on any ballot in November, still wants an outcome that will leave him with a Republican Congress that will stand down from oversight and questioning of his administration.
To that end, he has endorsed and promoted congressional gerrymandering changes in multiple states, he is threatening to outlaw mail ballots and voter machines that are state controlled, he is choosing candidates to primary any congress member who challenges him, and he is encouraging the social media doxing or prosecution of political enemies. He is pushing for closing of polling stations in Black districts believed to favor Democrats.
And the example of ICE armies and National Guard deployments in Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis and Washington show that he is willing to have the appearance of military law in place to squelch voter turn-out.
Of course, he wanted the FBI to seize ballots and tapes, even if there is no prosecution case to develop sufficiently in the months before the election. His own reputation as a constant winner and his hatred for those who stand up to him are way more important than retaining a democracy.
Happy 250th America.
IF YOU VALUE YOUR RIGHT, HELP US PROTECT THEM. PLEASE CONSIDER A DONATION TODAY.
The post Seizing 2020 Ballots in Georgia appeared first on DCReport.org.
Links for you. Science:
Key NIH review panels due to lose all members by the end of 2026
Scientists May Finally Know Why You Can’t Remember Being a Baby and The Answer Is Tiny Immune Cells Acting as Memory Janitors
Genomic resistance in historical clinical isolates increased in frequency and mobility after the age of antibiotics
NIH ends fetal tissue research. The National Institutes of Health’s move to end support for research using fetal human tissue is “clearly a political decision, not a scientific one,” one expert says
Senior CDC official: Loss of measles elimination status in U.S. would be ‘cost of doing business’
Top CDC vaccine adviser questions need for polio shot, other longstanding recommendations
Other:
We Are Witnessing the Self-Immolation of a Superpower
Epstein continues to explain everything about Trump
How D.C.’s Lack of Local Control Doomed a Petworth Playground. The National Park Service demolished an unsafe playground but then abandoned the little park near Grant Circle. Neighbors have been looking for a solution ever since.
Trump’s Norway Letter Proves This Isn’t Sustainable
Jewish Cross-Denominational Statement Against Violent Immigration Enforcement
Texas attorney general takes aim at pediatricians who vaccinate, claiming they are part of illegal scheme
Trump’s talk of canceling elections is a sign of desperation
Inside Minnesota Hospitals, ICE Agents Unnerve Staff. As federal agents swarm the Twin Cities, their presence has also grown in medical centers. Health care workers are pushing back.
If you don’t like traffic cameras, you’ll hate the police
Trump’s USDA Is Hiding the Data on Food Stamp Cuts
ICE may be tracking you via your cell phone. A Minnesota law can help.
The Justices Undermined the Federal Reserve’s Independence. Now They Want Backsies.
Musk’s Chatbot Flooded X With Millions of Sexualized Images in Days, New Estimates Show
Would You Like To Try That Again, James
The “But Muh Portfolio” carve-out
Trump’s Greenland ‘Deal’ Appears To Exist Only In His Head
Feds Create Drone No Fly Zone That Would Stop People Filming ICE
The slavery exhibits at the President’s House have been removed following Trump administration push
Gavin Newsom Has Nothing To Offer
Comic-Con Bans AI Art After Artist Pushback
Trump’s FCC goon demands talk shows give Republicans equal time
And They Can Do It To Her Again, Today
Copper thefts turned these upscale L.A. streets pitch dark. Frustrated residents are fighting back
Judge orders stop to FBI search of devices seized from Washington Post reporter
FBI’s Washington Post Investigation Shows How Your Printer Can Snitch on You
Five ways D.C.-area commutes have changed since the pandemic
Meet the Local Label Bringing Cassettes Back to D.C.
Our Narcissist in Chief Has Exceeded Putin’s Wildest Dreams
Now Everyone’s Saying ‘Oh, Good’: Trump told the media exactly how they’d cover his Greenland threats. They did it anyway.
Volunteers delivering groceries to families report being followed by ICE
1. Beijing enlists AI to bring traditional Chinese medicine into the future.
2. ChinaTalk podcast with Ed Luttwak.
3. Hidden Car Door Handles Are Officially Being Banned in China.
4. China’s disappearing generals (NYT).
5. China uses this map in (some of?) its schools.
6. Zvi on Kimi 2.5.
The post Thursday assorted China links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
In our latest developer productivity survey, our documentation was the area with the second most comments. This is a writeup of the concrete steps I took to see how much progress one person could make on improving the organization’s documentation while holding myself to a high standard for making changes that actually worked instead of optically sounding impressive.
There were a handful of issues we were running into:
We migrated from Confluence to Notion in January, 2025, which had left around a bunch of old pages that were “obviously wrong.”
These files created a bad smell around our other docs, as folks felt like things weren’t well maintained.
We had inconsistent approach to what we documented in Git-managed files versus managing in Notion. This led to duplication.
Duplication meant that it felt safer to create an N+1th version,
rather than debugging why N versions already existed.
We’ve had a bunch of new folks join over the past year, who weren’t sure if they were empowered to update documentation or if someone else was managing any given file
We started using Notion AI as the primary mechanism for exposing content, which meant that hierarchical organization was less important, and that having inaccurate snippets was harmful even if they were tucked away into a quiet corner
This was combined with a handful of interesting limitations in Notion itself:
The policy we adopted for addressing the above diagnosis was:
Then the specifics of implementing that policy were:
Create Scheduled to Archive and Archive teamspaces.
The Archive teamspace is a private teamspace, such that documents added there don’t pollute the search index.
Conversely, Scheduled to Archive is public, where anyone can add documents to its root document.
We have a weekly script that migrates everything from Scheduled to Archive to Archive.
This was the most effective mechanism we could find to implement archiving within Notion’s constraints.
Prune expired pages. Created a script which recursively builds hierarchy from a root page,
enriches each page with the last_edited_date for each child, and then prunes all pages
where it and all children were last edited more than N days ago.
Using this script on 3-4 most relevant top-level pages, we archived about 1,500 pages of expired documentation.
Compact stale hierarchies. Created a second script which identifies current pages deep in stale hierarchies,
e.g. the one updated page among 15 inaccurate docs. After finding a “buried current page”, promotes it to the grandparent page,
and move the parent page (and its stale children) to Scheduled to Archive.
This ended up as a script that found all the candidates, and then I worked through approving/rejecting each suggestion. The biggest issue being the lack of “verification” status within the API, such that there’s no way to bless given pages and their descendants.
Stale link finder. Created a third script which recursively works through a hierarchy and finds 404s.
It’s essential that this script does not have access to the Archive so those scripts show up as 404s,
otherwise you would have to scan through Archived to find things there. Both approaches would work,
just a bit of a matter of preference.
Ran this after the mass migrations to ensure we didn’t leave a “haunted forest” of links into archived documents that folks can’t see, which would make the documentation still feel bad even though much of the bad content was removed.
Manual review of key pages. After running all of the above steps, I then worked through all new-hire documentation to ensure it was linked to top-level onboarding guide, stated clear prerequisites, indicated the Slack channel to get help if folks ran into trouble, and ensured that instructions did not duplicate our Git-managed READMEs, instead linking to them where appropriate.
I did a lighter pass of this approach for our top-level engineering and technology pages, although those were generally in a good place.
Altogether, I think this was about eight hours of my time, but required zero hours of anyone else’s, and will have hopefully significantly improved the quality of our documentation. There’s still a lot more to be done in specific areas, but I’m optimistic that having far fewer duplicates, and more evidence that we’re actively maintaining the documentation, will make that easier as well.
My Harvard colleague Ken Rogoff, who is almost certainly undominated in the joint space of competitive chess and academic economics, reflects on the economy during his long career in a new book.
Kenneth Rogoff, Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider’s View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead. Yale 2025
It is reviewed on the website of the Institute for New Economic Thinking --
Education of a Grandmaster By Perry G. Mehrling
I was struck by these paragraphs comparing competitive chess to academic economics.
"As a sometime intellectual biographer myself, I note the repeated chess analogies sprinkled throughout the book, and take them more seriously than Rogoff himself does. Indeed I would suggest that his early chess career, starting in high school, is the important intellectual formation we need to have in mind as the lens for understanding the moves in his second career as an economist. I have already mentioned his self-proclaimed penchant for bucking consensus. In chess everyone knows the standard openings, so to win you need to come up with a new move (on offense) or find a way to defend against your opponent’s new move (on defense). If it works, everyone studies the game and adds it to their own chess repertoire.
"That’s apparently how he understands the academic game as well, albeit perhaps subconsciously, and he was good at playing that game as well. Tenure at Harvard is basically the academic equivalent of international grandmaster status in chess, a status he achieved in 1978 just as he was starting his academic career. In chess, tournaments are where you test your skills against your rivals. In academia, conferences and workshops play an analogous role, and we know who won by subsequent publication placement. (Not nearly as objective as checkmate!) Throughout the book, we hear repeatedly about some of these academic rivalries—versus Stiglitz, Greenspan, Dooley et al, Rey, Summers, Krugman—with brief summaries of the moves that Rogoff made in crucial games. Games with lower ranked players are relegated to footnotes..."
Logos Space Services has secured U.S. regulatory approval to deploy up to 4,178 low Earth orbit broadband satellites.
The post FCC clears Logos to deploy more than 4,000 broadband satellites appeared first on SpaceNews.
Pharmaceuticals have high fixed costs of R&D and low marginal costs. The first pill costs a billion dollars; the second costs 50 cents. That cost structure makes price discrimination—charging different customers different prices based on willingness to pay—common.
Price discrimination is why poorer countries get lower prices. Not because firms are charitable, but because a high price means poorer countries buy nothing, while any price above marginal cost is still profit. This type of price discrimination is good for poorer countries, good for pharma, and (indirectly) good for the United States: more profits mean more R&D and, over time, more drugs.
The political problem, however, is that Americans look abroad, see lower prices for branded drugs, and conclude that they’re being ripped off. Riding that grievance, Trump has demanded that U.S. prices be no higher than the lowest level paid in other developed countries.
One immediate effect is to help pharma in negotiations abroad: they can now credibly say, “We can’t sell to you at that discount, because you’ll export your price back into the U.S.” But two big issues follow.
First, this won’t lower U.S. prices on current drugs. Firms are already profit-maximizing in the U.S. If they manage to raise prices in France, they don’t then announce, “Great news—now we’ll charge less in America.” The potential upside of the Trump plan isn’t lower prices but higher pharma profits, which strengthens incentives to invest in R&D. If profits rise, we may get more drugs in the long run. But try telling the American voter that higher pharma profits are good.
The second issue is that the plan can backfire.
In our textbook, Modern Principles, Tyler and I discuss almost exactly this scenario: suppose policy effectively forces a single price across countries. Which price do firms choose—the low one abroad or the high one in the U.S.? Since a large share of profits comes from the U.S., they’re likely to choose the high price:
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla was even more direct, saying it is time for countries such as France to pay more or go without new drugs. If forced to choose between reducing U.S. prices to France’s level or stopping supply to France, Pfizer would choose the latter, Bourla told reporters at a pharma-industry conference.
So the real question is: will other countries pay?
If France tried to force Americans to pay more to subsidize French price controls, U.S. voters would explode. Yet that’s essentially what other countries are being told but in reverse: “You must pay more so Americans can pay less.” Other countries are already stingier than the U.S., and they already bear costs for it—new drugs arrive more slowly abroad than here. Some governments may decide—foolishly, but understandably—that paying U.S.-level prices is politically impossible. If so, they won’t “harmonize upward.” They’ll follow the European way: ration, delay and go without.
In that case, nobody wins. Pharma profits fall, R&D declines, U.S. prices don’t magically drop, and patients abroad get fewer new drugs and worse care. Lose-lose-lose.
We don’t know the equilibrium, but lose-lose-lose is entirely plausible. Switzerland, for example, does not seem willing to pay more:
Yet Switzerland has shown little political willingness to pay more—threatening both the availability of medications in the country and its role as a global leader in developing therapies. Drug prices are the primary driver of the increasing cost of mandatory health coverage, and the topic generates heated debate during the annual reappraisal of insurance rates. “The Swiss cannot and must not pay for price reductions in the USA with their health insurance premiums,” says Elisabeth Baume-Schneider, Switzerland’s home affairs minister.
If many countries respond like Switzerland—and Trump’s unpopularity abroad doesn’t help—the sector ends up less profitable and innovation slows. Voters may feel less “ripped off,” but they’ll be buying that feeling with fewer drugs and sicker bodies.
The post Trump’s Pharmaceutical Plan appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
AIs can now rent human labor.
The post Plug me back in! appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Light is the fastest phenomenon in the universe, clocking in at just under 300,000 kilometers per second. The telescopes that observe that light, from radio waves to gamma rays, are built at rather slower speeds. Take, as one example, the James Webb Space Telescope. NASA began feasibility studies for the mission in the mid-1990s and […]
The post Space telescopes at light speed appeared first on SpaceNews.
In the consumer electronics playbook, custom silicon is the final step in the marathon: you use off-the-shelf components to prove a product, achieve mass scale and only then invest in proprietary chips to create differentiation, improve operations, and optimize margins. In the modern satellite communications (SATCOM) ecosystem, this script has been flipped. For the industry’s […]
The post Silicon as strategy: the hidden battleground of the new space race appeared first on SpaceNews.
A Senate committee has delayed consideration of a bill intended to expedite Federal Communications Commission reviews of satellite license applications amid concerns that the proposal may be too permissive.
The post Senate committee delays consideration of bill to streamline FCC satellite licensing appeared first on SpaceNews.
After helping place proliferated LEO constellations at the center of U.S. military space planning, the SmallSat Alliance is now tackling how these networks can be used together as a unified system.
The post SmallSat Alliance shifts focus from proliferation to coordination appeared first on SpaceNews.
Gen. Shawn Bratton, the Space Force’s vice chief of space operations, spoke with SpaceNews’ Sandra Erwin as part of an event focused on the Space Force 2040 at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center on Jan. 21. Here are six takeaways from their conversation: Planning for 2040 means more space superiority A long-range planning initiative […]
The post As satellites become targets, Space Force plans a broader role appeared first on SpaceNews.
SAN FRANCISCO — Morpheus Space raised $15 million in a Series A+ funding round announced Feb. 5. “This funding is intended to accelerate our production as we focus on bringing our GO-2 Electric Propulsion System fully to market,” Morpheus CEO Kevin Lausten told SpaceNews. “It’s about getting the product in the hands of our customers.” […]
The post Morpheus raises $15 million in Series A+ round appeared first on SpaceNews.
The award was made under NGA’s Luno program.
The post Vantor wins $5.3 million NGA contract to spot terrain changes using commercial satellite data appeared first on SpaceNews.
The House Science Committee unanimously approved a NASA authorization bill Feb. 4 after adopting dozens of amendments.
The post House committee advances NASA authorization bill appeared first on SpaceNews.
SAN FRANCISCO — Viridian Space Corp. signed a cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) with the Air Force Research Laboratory. The five-year CRADA will provide the Southern California startup with access to testing facilities and satellite-operations expertise at AFRL’s Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico. “There seems to be a good collaborative opportunity for testing […]
The post Viridian inks cooperative agreement with Air Force Research Laboratory appeared first on SpaceNews.
ExoAnalytic tool aims to show when fire-monitoring satellites can actually see the ground
The post FireSat adds orbit-visualization software to help firefighters plan around satellite passes appeared first on SpaceNews.
The US National Reconnaissance Office has declassified information about a fleet of spy satellites operating between 1971 and 2006.
I’m actually impressed to see a declassification only two decades after decommission.
Rising far above the desert, the walls of these magnificent hills carry the ancient story of humanity’s creative spark
- by Aeon Video
In Japanese philosophy, unlike the atomised Western self, we are ‘ningen’ (人間), each enmeshed with other humans and nature
- by Takeshi Morisato
Few modern systems are as consequential — or as exposed — as the Global Positioning System. A temporary loss of access to its positioning, navigation and timing signals would ripple through the global economy and severely impair military operations. Yet despite repeated warnings that GPS signals can be jammed, spoofed or denied — often using […]
The post Space Force may be done with R-GPS, but Congress isn’t appeared first on SpaceNews.
This was great fun for me, here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Andrew debate whether those 1929 stock prices were justified, what Fed and policy choices might have prevented the Depression, whether Glass-Steagall was built on a flawed premises, what surprised Andrew most about the 1920s beyond the crash itself, how business leaders then would compare to today’s CEOs, whether US banks should consolidate, how Andrew would reform US banking regulation, what to make of narrow banking proposals and stablecoins, whether retail investors should get access to private equity and venture capital, why sports gambling and new financial regulations won’t make us much safer, how Andrew broke into the New York Times at age 18, how he manages his information diet, what he learned co-creating Billions, what he plans on learning about next, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: I have a few general questions about the 1920s. Obviously, you did an enormous amount of work for this book. Putting aside the great crash and the focus of your book, what is it you learned about the 1920s more generally that most surprised you? Because you learn all this collateral information when you write a book like this, right?
SORKIN: So many things. The book turned into a bit of a love letter to New York in terms of the architecture of New York. I don’t think I appreciated just how many buildings went up in New York and how they were constructed and what happened. That fascinated me. I think the story of John Raskob, actually, who was, to me, the Elon Musk of his time, somebody who ran General Motors, became a super influential investor. He was a philosopher king that everybody listened to at every given moment.
He ultimately constructs the Empire State Building, which was probably the equivalent of SpaceX at that time. He had written a paper about creating a five-day workweek back in 1929, November, as all of this is happening. Not because he wanted people to work less and be nice to them, but because he thought there was an economic argument that if people didn’t have to work on Saturdays, more people would buy cars and gardening equipment, and do all sorts of things on the weekends, and buy different outfits and clothing. There were so many little things.
Then, I would argue, actually, his role in taking his fortune — he got involved in politics. He was a Republican turned Democrat. He spent an extraordinary amount of money to secretly try to undermine the reputation of Hoover. I would say to you, today, I actually think that part of the reason that Hoover’s reputation is so dim, even today, is a result of this very influential, wealthy individual in America who spent two years paying off journalists and running this secret campaign to do such a thing. You go back and really read the press and try to understand why some of these views were espoused.
By the way, this was before the crash. He started this campaign effectively in May of 1929, just three months after Hoover took office.
COWEN: It’s striking to me how forgotten Raskob is today. There’s a lesson in there about people who think they’re doing something today that will be remembered in a hundred years’ time. It probably won’t be, even if you’re a big, big deal.
SORKIN: It’s remarkable. He was a very big deal. He famously used to tell everybody, “Everybody ought to be rich.” He was trying to develop, back then, what would have been something akin to one of the first mutual funds, levered mutual funds, in fact, because he also wanted to democratize finance.
COWEN: Let’s say you’re back in New York. It’s the 1920s; you’re you. Other than walking around and looking at buildings, what else would you do back then? I would go to jazz concerts. What would you do?
SORKIN: Oh my goodness. You know what I would do? But I’m a journalista, so you’ll appreciate this.
COWEN: Yes.
SORKIN: I would have been obsessed with magazines. This was really the first real era of magazines and newspapers and the transmission of media, the sort of mass media in this way. I would have been fascinated by radio. I think those things, for me, would have been super exciting.
The truth is, I imagine I would have gotten caught up in the pastime of stock trading. It is true that all these brokerage houses are just emerging everywhere, and people are going to play them as if it’s a pastime. I always wonder whether prohibition played a role in why so many people were speculating because instead of drinking, what did they do? They traded.
Some of the time he spent interviewing me…
The post My Conversation with Andrew Ross Sorkin appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
No Olympic competitions covers more ground than the 50-kilometer cross-country ski races. The grueling event takes more than 2 hours to complete, requiring competitors to ski a distance longer than a marathon. That’s still, however, less than an eighth of the distance between the two official host cities of the 2026 Winter Olympics and Paralympics—Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo.
With events spread across more than 22,000 square kilometers (8,500 square miles) and eight cities or towns in northern Italy, these are the most geographically dispersed Games in Olympic history. The decentralized design was intentional, allowing planners to control costs and make the event more sustainable by using existing venues rather than constructing several expensive new facilities. More than 90 percent of the venues are existing or temporary facilities, including some refurbished facilities that were used in the 1956 Cortina d’Ampezzo Games.
About 2,900 athletes will compete across 116 events over 19 days in 13 venues in what will be the third time Italy has hosted the Games. Several of the key event venues are visible in these satellite images of the two largest host cities—Milan and Verona. The OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 and 9 captured the images on December 8 and 9, 2025, respectively.
Olympic festivities will kick off officially on February 6 at San Siro Stadium with performances by pop star Mariah Carey, classical singer Andrea Bocelli, classical instrumentalist Lang Lang, and Italian singer-songwriter Laura Pausini. Built in 1925, San Siro is Italy’s largest stadium and the longtime home of renowned football clubs AC Milan and Inter Milan.
Milan will mostly host indoor ice events in several other venues around the city. Ice hockey will be spread across two venues, the Milano Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena and the temporary Milano Rho Ice Hockey Arena. The former, located east of the city in the green and residential Santa Giulia district, is the only new permanent venue constructed for the Games. The latter, in Milano Ice Park, is a temporary transformation of the Fiera Milano Rho exhibition center, a complex of pavilions and a convention center northwest of the city center.
Speed skating and figure skating will be in the Milano Ice Skating Arena, an 11,500-person stadium in Assago, a small town just outside of Milan. Outside of the Olympics, the multisport facility is used by a skating school and basketball team and as a venue for tennis, squash, swimming, and several other sports.
The February 22 closing ceremonies will take place in Verona, a city of about 250,000 people 150 kilometers east of Milan, in Verona Arena, an ancient Roman amphitheater that was built between the 1st and 3rd centuries. What was once used for animal hunts and gladiator battles will serve as the backdrop for musicians, dancers, and artists in a ceremony that organizers say will honor the spirit of athletics and Italy’s rich cultural heritage. The arena, with a seating capacity of about 22,000, is the third-largest surviving amphitheater in Europe and unusually well-preserved.
New events this year will include men’s and women’s ski mountaineering, skeleton mixed team relay, women’s doubles luge, freestyle skiing dual moguls, and women’s large hill ski jumping. The 2026 Olympic mascots are Tina and Milo, a brother-and-sister pair of cheerful, scarf-wearing animated stoats with names inspired by Milan and Cortina. Stoats, also called ermine, are fierce predators in the weasel family known for reportedly mesmerizing prey with energetic dances and for having fur that changes from dark brown in the summer to white in the winter. In Italy, stoats typically live in the mountains above 3,500 meters (11,500 feet).
NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
The Bear Gulch fire spread through dense forest and filled skies with smoke in northwestern Washington state.
Sea ice around the southernmost continent hit one of its lowest seasonal highs since the start of the satellite record.
Satellite data show that Arctic sea ice likely reached its annual minimum extent on September 10, 2025.
The post Milano Cortina 2026 appeared first on NASA Science.
A US House committee with oversight of NASA unanimously passed a "reauthorization" act for the space agency on Wednesday. The legislation must still be approved by the full House before being sent to the Senate, which may take up consideration later this month.
Congress passes such reauthorization bills every couple of years, providing the space agency with a general sense of the direction legislators want to see NASA go. They are distinct from appropriations bills, which provide actual funding for specific programs, but nonetheless play an important role in establishing space policy.
There weren't any huge surprises in the legislation, but there were some interesting amendments. Most notably among these was the Amendment No. 01, offered by the chair of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas), as well as its ranking member, Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), and three other legislators.
The Space Launch System rocket program is now a decade and a half old, and it continues to be dominated by two unfortunate traits: It is expensive, and it is slow.
The massive rocket and its convoluted ground systems, so necessary to baby and cajole the booster's prickly hydrogen propellant on board, have cost US taxpayers in excess of $30 billion to date. And even as it reaches maturity, the rocket is going nowhere fast.
You remember the last time NASA tried to launch the world's largest orange rocket, right? The space agency rolled the Space Launch System out of its hangar in March 2022. The first, second, and third attempts at a wet dress rehearsal—elaborate fueling tests—were scrubbed. The SLS rocket was slowly rolled back to its hangar for work in April before returning to the pad in June.
Date and time management libraries in many programming languages are famously bad. Python's datetime module comes to mind as one of the best (worst?) examples, and so does JavaScript's Date class. It feels like these libraries could not have been made worse on purpose, or so I thought until today, when I needed to implement some date calculations in a backup rotation script written in bash.
So, if you wanted to learn how to perform date and time arithmetic in your bash scripts, you've come to the right place. Just don't blame me for the nightmares.
Here is an appreciation, via Tyler McGraw. He was a true great of the guitar.
The post Kazuhito Yamashita, RIP appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The center of the universe has been born again. The most insufferable posters on our timeline, including myself, are enjoying the abundance found in San Francisco thanks to the AI boom lining the pockets of fresh college dropouts. The themed parties are bumping, the LLMs look good, the La Croix is flowing. There is much doom in this world, but not in this podcast.
On this episode of the Core Memory podcast, we’re joined by Jayden Clark. He’s the host of Members of Technical Staff, a podcast about niche San Francisco tech culture. He’s been featured in the New Yorker, The New York Times, and Business Insider. We discuss all the important parts of life in this new version of San Francisco: themed parties, online discourse, and the permanent underclass.
The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.
This podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.
We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.
The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.
Up early and to Mr. Moore, and thence to Mr. Lovell about my law business, and from him to Paul’s School, it being Apposition-day there. I heard some of their speeches, and they were just as schoolboys’ used to be, of the seven liberal sciences; but I think not so good as ours were in our time. Away thence and to Bow Church, to the Court of Arches, where a judge sits, and his proctors about him in their habits, and their pleadings all in Latin. Here I was sworn to give a true answer to my uncle’s libells, and so paid my fee for swearing, and back again to Paul’s School, and went up to see the head forms posed in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, but I think they did not answer in any so well as we did, only in geography they did pretty well: Dr. Wilkins and Outram were examiners. So down to the school, where Dr. Crumlum did me much honour by telling many what a present I had made to the school, shewing my Stephanus, in four volumes, cost me 4l. 10s. He also shewed us, upon my desire, an old edition of the the grammar of Colett’s, where his epistle to the children is very pretty; and in rehearsing the creed it is said “borne of the cleane Virgin Mary.” Thence with Mr. Elborough (he being all of my old acquaintance that I could meet with here) to a cook’s shop to dinner, but I found him a fool, as he ever was, or worse. Thence to my cozen Roger Pepys and Mr. Phillips about my law businesses, which stand very bad, and so home to the office, where after doing some business I went home, where I found our new mayde Mary, that is come in Jane’s place.
Source: HBS Pricing Lab
Donald Trump loves tariffs. Mainly, I believe, he loves them because they offer so much opportunity for dominance displays, allowing him to threaten other countries with economic ruin — usually via middle-of-the-night Truth Social posts — unless they bend to his whims. Economists may say that most of the damage inflicted by tariffs falls on American consumers and businesses, not foreigners, but Trump’s attachment to tariffs is doubtless strengthened by economists’ disapproval — he wants to show that he’s smarter than the so-called experts.
Furthermore, tariffs give him power without checks and balances. He can impose huge taxes on imports without having to go through annoying stuff like getting legislation through Congress.
Or can he? By any reasonable standard, most of Trump’s tariffs are plainly illegal. Two lower courts have ruled against them. The Trump administration appealed those decisions, and in early November the Supreme Court heard arguments on the case. Many businesses that have found it impossible to make long-term plans with the fate of the Trump tariffs in limbo eagerly awaited the Court’s ruling.
They’re still waiting. And I can’t see any plausible explanation for the delay other than Supreme cowardice.
Background: Most of Trump’s tariffs have been imposed by invoking a 1977 piece of legislation called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which the Congressional Research Service describes as giving the president “broad authority to regulate a variety of economic transactions following a declaration of national emergency.”
But we aren’t in an emergency. Trump himself keeps saying that everything is great — the economy is hot, there’s no inflation, we’re respected around the world. It’s not true, but that’s what he says. And he has been using IEEPA to impose or threaten to impose tariffs for many purposes that have nothing to do with economic policy. He imposed a 50 percent tariff on imports from Brazil to punish Brazil for pressing charges against Jair Bolsonaro, the Trump-like former president who tried to overturn an election loss. He threatened tariffs against European nations who stationed troops in Greenland as a precaution against a possible Trumpian attempt to seize the island from Denmark.
In the latter case Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury secretary, pressed on the nature of the emergency that would justify tariff threats, declared that “the national emergency is avoiding a national emergency.” Uh-huh.
I’m not a lawyer, but I talk to lawyers, and this isn’t a difficult case on the merits. Trump is clearly wrong on both the letter and the spirit of the law. And when the Supreme Court held its hearing, the tenor of the questions, even from conservative justices, suggested that they recognized that the administration had no case.
So why have we had three months of silence? Well, this isn’t a difficult case on the merits, but it puts the six right-wing members of the Court between a rock and hard place, not intellectually, but personally.
For a right-wing justice, ruling in the Trump administration’s favor in such an open-and-shut case would amount to admitting that you’re a pure partisan hack. And even the right-wing faction on the court is trying to maintain the fiction that it’s still a deliberative body, not a MAGA rubber stamp.
But to rule against the administration would be to hand Trump a humiliating defeat on one of his signature policy issues. It might also be very expensive. Tariffs aren’t the revenue gusher Trump and his minions like to claim: Even after the Trump hikes in tariff rates, customs receipts are small compared with other sources of revenue and have made only a modest dent in the U.S. budget deficit. But losing that revenue and, worse, having to give it back would be a financial embarrassment.
And it’s hard to see how, if the Supreme Court rules against Trump, the government can avoid paying back the money it has collected to companies like Costco, which has sued for a refund. If the Court rules that the tariffs weren’t legal, can the administration say, “No backsies” and refuse to refund money it collected illegally?
Right-wing justices don’t want to humiliate Trump, and they’re surely afraid of what will happen if they do. So they’re damned if they do the right thing, damned if they don’t.
When I’ve made this point in the past, some readers have asked why Supreme Court justices would be afraid of crossing Trump. After all, he can’t fire them, can he?
But to suggest that Supreme Court justices are insulated from pressure merely because they have job security is to misunderstand how power and influence work, especially within the modern right-wing movement.
Prominent figures on the right — and the Republican Six on the Supreme Court surely qualify for that definition — aren’t just members of a movement. They’re also part of a social scene — a scene shaped by the wealth and power of billionaires. They share in the privilege and glitter of that scene even if they aren’t outright corrupt — even if they aren’t all like Clarence Thomas, who, as ProPublica revealed, has taken multiple lavish vacations paid for by billionaire Harlan Crow.
To vote against Donald Trump’s beloved tariffs, delivering him both a policy and a political blow, would be to risk being ostracized and exiled from that milieu. If you don’t think that would matter a lot, you don’t understand human nature.
And more than social estrangement might be at stake. Violent threats against judges and other public officials, especially those denounced by Trump and other MAGA figures, have soared. Are you sure that a judge perceived as having betrayed Trump — and his or her family — would be safe? More to the point, are judges themselves sure?
So the right-wing majority on the Court is surely afraid to rule on tariffs — afraid to rule for Trump, because that would destroy what’s left of their credibility, afraid to rule against, because that would anger both the MAGA elite and the MAGA base.
So they’re procrastinating, even though the longer the tariffs stay in place, the more Trump is emboldened to tweet out bizarre, destructive and illegal policies and the more economic damage is done by uncertainty.
Their paralysis is understandable. But it’s also utterly shameful.
MUSICAL CODA
Voxtral transcribes at the speed of sound
Mistral just released Voxtral Transcribe 2 - a family of two new models, one open weights, for transcribing audio to text. This is the latest in their Whisper-like model family, and a sequel to the original Voxtral which they released in July 2025.Voxtral Realtime - official name Voxtral-Mini-4B-Realtime-2602 - is the open weights (Apache-2.0) model, available as a 8.87GB download from Hugging Face.
You can try it out in this live demo - don't be put off by the "No microphone found" message, clicking "Record" should have your browser request permission and then start the demo working. I was very impressed by the demo - I talked quickly and used jargon like Django and WebAssembly and it correctly transcribed my text within moments of me uttering each sound.
The closed weight model is called voxtral-mini-latest and can be accessed via the Mistral API, using calls that look something like this:
Market Design
curl -X POST "https://api.mistral.ai/v1/audio/transcriptions" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $MISTRAL_API_KEY" \
-F model="voxtral-mini-latest" \
-F file=@"Pelican talk at the library.m4a" \
-F diarize=true \
-F context_bias="Datasette" \
-F timestamp_granularities="segment"The Mistral API console now has a speech-to-text playground for exercising the new model and it is excellent. You can upload an audio file and promptly get a diarized transcript in a pleasant interface, with options to download the result in text, SRT or JSON format.
Via Hacker News
Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, hugging-face, mistral, speech-to-text
I've been exploring Go for building small, fast and self-contained binary applications recently. I'm enjoying how there's generally one obvious way to do things and the resulting code is boring and readable - and something that LLMs are very competent at writing. The one catch is distribution, but it turns out publishing Go binaries to PyPI means any Go binary can be just a uvx package-name call away.
sqlite-scanner is my new Go CLI tool for scanning a filesystem for SQLite database files.
It works by checking if the first 16 bytes of the file exactly match the SQLite magic number sequence SQLite format 3\x00. It can search one or more folders recursively, spinning up concurrent goroutines to accelerate the scan. It streams out results as it finds them in plain text, JSON or newline-delimited JSON. It can optionally display the file sizes as well.
To try it out you can download a release from the GitHub releases - and then jump through macOS hoops to execute an "unsafe" binary. Or you can clone the repo and compile it with Go. Or... you can run the binary like this:
uvx sqlite-scanner
By default this will search your current directory for SQLite databases. You can pass one or more directories as arguments:
uvx sqlite-scanner ~ /tmp
Add --json for JSON output, --size to include file sizes or --jsonl for newline-delimited JSON. Here's a demo:
uvx sqlite-scanner ~ --jsonl --size
If you haven't been uv-pilled yet you can instead install sqlite-scanner using pip install sqlite-scanner and then run sqlite-scanner.
To get a permanent copy with uv use uv tool install sqlite-scanner.
The reason this is worth doing is that pip, uv and PyPI will work together to identify the correct compiled binary for your operating system and architecture.
This is driven by file names. If you visit the PyPI downloads for sqlite-scanner you'll see the following files:
sqlite_scanner-0.1.1-py3-none-win_arm64.whlsqlite_scanner-0.1.1-py3-none-win_amd64.whlsqlite_scanner-0.1.1-py3-none-musllinux_1_2_x86_64.whlsqlite_scanner-0.1.1-py3-none-musllinux_1_2_aarch64.whlsqlite_scanner-0.1.1-py3-none-manylinux_2_17_x86_64.whlsqlite_scanner-0.1.1-py3-none-manylinux_2_17_aarch64.whlsqlite_scanner-0.1.1-py3-none-macosx_11_0_arm64.whlsqlite_scanner-0.1.1-py3-none-macosx_10_9_x86_64.whlWhen I run pip install sqlite-scanner or uvx sqlite-scanner on my Apple Silicon Mac laptop Python's packaging magic ensures I get that macosx_11_0_arm64.whl variant.
Here's what's in the wheel, which is a zip file with a .whl extension.
In addition to the bin/sqlite-scanner the most important file is sqlite_scanner/__init__.py which includes the following:
def get_binary_path(): """Return the path to the bundled binary.""" binary = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), "bin", "sqlite-scanner") # Ensure binary is executable on Unix if sys.platform != "win32": current_mode = os.stat(binary).st_mode if not (current_mode & stat.S_IXUSR): os.chmod(binary, current_mode | stat.S_IXUSR | stat.S_IXGRP | stat.S_IXOTH) return binary def main(): """Execute the bundled binary.""" binary = get_binary_path() if sys.platform == "win32": # On Windows, use subprocess to properly handle signals sys.exit(subprocess.call([binary] + sys.argv[1:])) else: # On Unix, exec replaces the process os.execvp(binary, [binary] + sys.argv[1:])
That main() method - also called from sqlite_scanner/__main__.py - locates the binary and executes it when the Python package itself is executed, using the sqlite-scanner = sqlite_scanner:main entry point defined in the wheel.
Using PyPI as a distribution platform for Go binaries feels a tiny bit abusive, albeit there is plenty of precedent.
I’ll justify it by pointing out that this means we can use Go binaries as dependencies for other Python packages now.
That's genuinely useful! It means that any functionality which is available in a cross-platform Go binary can now be subsumed into a Python package. Python is really good at running subprocesses so this opens up a whole world of useful tricks that we can bake into our Python tools.
To demonstrate this, I built datasette-scan - a new Datasette plugin which depends on sqlite-scanner and then uses that Go binary to scan a folder for SQLite databases and attach them to a Datasette instance.
Here's how to use that (without even installing anything first, thanks uv) to explore any SQLite databases in your Downloads folder:
uv run --with datasette-scan datasette scan ~/DownloadsIf you peek at the code you'll see it depends on sqlite-scanner in pyproject.toml and calls it using subprocess.run() against sqlite_scanner.get_binary_path() in its own scan_directories() function.
I've been exploring this pattern for other, non-Go binaries recently - here's a recent script that depends on static-ffmpeg to ensure that ffmpeg is available for the script to use.
After trying this pattern myself a couple of times I realized it would be useful to have a tool to automate the process.
I first brainstormed with Claude to check that there was no existing tool to do this. It pointed me to maturin bin which helps distribute Rust projects using Python wheels, and pip-binary-factory which bundles all sorts of other projects, but did not identify anything that addressed the exact problem I was looking to solve.
So I had Claude Code for web build the first version, then refined the code locally on my laptop with the help of more Claude Code and a little bit of OpenAI Codex too, just to mix things up.
The full documentation is in the simonw/go-to-wheel repository. I've published that tool to PyPI so now you can run it using:
uvx go-to-wheel --helpThe sqlite-scanner package you can see on PyPI was built using go-to-wheel like this:
uvx go-to-wheel ~/dev/sqlite-scanner \
--set-version-var main.version \
--version 0.1.1 \
--readme README.md \
--author 'Simon Willison' \
--url https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-scanner \
--description 'Scan directories for SQLite databases'This created a set of wheels in the dist/ folder. I tested one of them like this:
uv run --with dist/sqlite_scanner-0.1.1-py3-none-macosx_11_0_arm64.whl \
sqlite-scanner --versionWhen that spat out the correct version number I was confident everything had worked as planned, so I pushed the whole set of wheels to PyPI using twine upload like this:
uvx twine upload dist/*I had to paste in a PyPI API token I had saved previously and that was all it took.
sqlite-scanner is very clearly meant as a proof-of-concept for this wider pattern - Python is very much capable of recursively crawling a directory structure looking for files that start with a specific byte prefix on its own!
That said, I think there's a lot to be said for this pattern. Go is a great complement to Python - it's fast, compiles to small self-contained binaries, has excellent concurrency support and a rich ecosystem of libraries.
Go is similar to Python in that it has a strong standard library. Go is particularly good for HTTP tooling - I've built several HTTP proxies in the past using Go's excellent net/http/httputil.ReverseProxy handler.
I've also been experimenting with wazero, Go's robust and mature zero dependency WebAssembly runtime as part of my ongoing quest for the ideal sandbox for running untrusted code. Here's my latest experiment with that library.
Being able to seamlessly integrate Go binaries into Python projects without the end user having to think about Go at all - they pip install and everything Just Works - feels like a valuable addition to my toolbox.
Tags: go, packaging, projects, pypi, python, sqlite, datasette, ai-assisted-programming, uv
Oh what a
We study monopoly regulation under asymmetric information about costs when subsidies are infeasible. A monopolist with privately known marginal cost serves a single product market and sets a price. The regulator maximizes a weighted welfare function using unit taxes as sole policy instrument. We identify a sufficient and necessary condition for when laissez-faire is optimal. When intervention is desired, we provide simple sufficient conditions under which the optimal policy is a progressive price cap: prices below a benchmark face no tax, while higher prices are taxed at increasing and potentially prohibitive rates. This policy combines delegation at low prices with taxation at high prices, balancing access, affordability, and profitability. Our results clarify when taxes act as complements to subsidies and when they serve only as imperfect substitutes, illuminating how feasible policy instruments shape optimal regulatory design.
That is from a new paper by Jiaming Wei and Dihan Zou. Via the excellent Samir Varma.
The post Regulating a Monopolist without Subsidy appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Simon Willison:
OpenAI just released a new macOS app for their Codex coding agent. I’ve had a few days of preview access — it’s a solid app that provides a nice UI over the capabilities of the Codex CLI agent and adds some interesting new features, most notably first-class support for Skills, and Automations for running scheduled tasks.
Interesting, for sure. But super-duper interesting? I don’t know.
Josh Kovensky and I will be discussing NSPM-7, the Trump administration’s crackdown on its ideological enemies, and its novel use of “material support for terrorism” charges on Substack Live at 10:30 a.m. Join us here.
Last Friday, the Washington Post published an opinion piece by a GOP campaign consultant named Brad Todd. He says he’s the one who coined that phrase about taking Trump “literally but not seriously.” The big argument of the piece I think actually makes no sense or represents a kind of denial. But there are building blocks to it that capture key insights about immigration policy in the United States. The gist of Todd’s argument is that Trump’s immigration agenda was a big political winner in 2024 and has actually been very successful in practice — dramatically reducing the number of entries via the southern border. The problem is that it’s being overshadowed and the support for it is being wrecked by Trump sending ICE on these wilding sprees into blue cities.
My view is a bit different. I don’t know if Todd is in denial or willfully obtuse or maybe less than fully leveling with readers. But I don’t think this is actually what’s happening. Nobody foisted Stephen Miller or the whole “mass deportation” policy on Trump. Other than perhaps the concept of tariffs it’s the most organic and natural thing to him. It’s more accurate to say that the energy of MAGA is all about mass deportation and perhaps even more than mass deportation the assaultive cleansing of American society, of both those who are “illegal” and/or brown, but also white people whom through various forms of sexual license, gayness, uppity womenhood and non-traditionalism, are collectively standing in the way of Making America Great Again. “Closing the border” or “securing the border” is just the packaging the gets you electorally to 50%. Because that’s something quite a lot of Americans for a variety of reasons want to do. In other words, wilding sprees aren’t inadvertently driving down support for Trump immigration policies. The actual MAGA policy is “mass deportation” and ICE wilding sprees and it’s unpopular. The border rhetoric is popular but that’s neither here nor there.
But there’s a point about this that is pretty significant. Over the spring and summer there was a lot of confusion about Trump’s polling on immigration. On “immigration,” his support remained fairly robust even as the National Guard and ICE deployments in California were clearly unpopular. Things only clarified when pollsters started breaking the question down into “the border” and various questions which focused on ICE and mass deportation. ICE and the secret police-y wilding sprees are super unpopular. And by now Trump is underwater on “immigration” too. But when you look at the “border,” that’s now basically the only policy area in which Trump has net approval. Not economy, ICE, taxes, affordability, various social issues. Only the border. This is hardly surprising but it’s unsurprising in a way that can elude the conventional terms of our immigration policy discussions.
This brings me back to another point Todd makes which I strongly agree with and have been thinking about increasingly for the last couple years, though Todd and I probably support it for very different reasons. It can take four to six years for an asylum claim to be adjudicated in the United States today. (The time varies significantly depending on which path the claim is adjudicated through.) This is almost exclusively because the U.S. doesn’t have nearly enough immigration judges to adjudicate the large number of people presenting themselves at U.S. borders and making asylum claims — like maybe an order of magnitude too few. This creates a perverse situation in which an asylum seeker has likely put down significant roots in the community and perhaps had children who do not share citizenship with their parents during the time they are waiting to have their claim rejected or approved. So asylum is both a cornerstone of the post-war human rights world order as well as being a backdoor path to de facto medium-term residency in the United States. Those years-long wait times also attract more asylum claimants (with a mix of valid and insufficient claims) which add to the number of immigrants crossing U.S. borders and thus create political pressures within domestic politics.
I think we should have more legal immigration into the United States. But the lack of immigration judges to expeditiously adjudicate asylum claims brings the whole concept of asylum into ill-repute for much of the U.S. population. And in any case, U.S. immigration policy should be set by Congress and the democratic process and not an insufficiency of immigration judges and the vagaries of global instability. Todd says that rather than “surging” funding to ICE, Congress should have used those tens of billions or some part of those tens of billions into hiring enough immigration judges to adjudicate asylum claims in months rather than years, or at least much closer to months than it is now.
It’s not that this hasn’t occurred to anyone. Funding a sufficient number of immigration judges to adjudicate claims in a timely manner is one of many things that has been log-jammed in the partisan stalemate over immigration policy which goes back more than 20 years.
The simple reality is that we now live in a world with growing and chronic political and climate instability and one in which modern transportation allows people to move across the globe far more easily than they did in the past. U.S. economic growth under Joe Biden was likely as big a driver of greater migration flows during his administration as him dropping many of Trump’s harsh and inhumane border policies. It’s also true that U.S. economic growth requires substantial immigration, legal or undocumented — substantially more than current policy allows for. But a porous and chaotic border — or one that appears that way and which is not controlled by policy — is simply not compatible with political support over time.
Yesterday, the day before Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s termination of Haiti’s Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation, U.S. District Court Judge Ana C. Reyes stopped that termination until a pending court case worked its way through the courts.
At stake first of all were the lives of about 353,000 Haitians living legally in the United States since the catastrophic Haitian earthquake of 2010, whom the termination of that status would render undocumented overnight. The impact on their lives would also affect their families, friends, and employers. Also at stake, though, is Trump administration officials’ rejection of both facts and the rule of law on which the United States was founded in order to advance their white nationalist ideology.
As Judge Reyes explains, Congress established Temporary Protective Status in 1990 to change previously haphazard executive decisions about whether to receive immigrants from disaster-stricken countries that left recipients unclear about their immigration status. In its place, Congress created “a system of temporary status that was predictable, dependable, and insulated from electoral politics.” It established criteria and a process for designating a country under TPS, accepting applications for immigration under TPS, and reviewing that designation periodically to determine if that designation should be extended. The system leaves to the Secretary of Homeland Security the power to evaluate those extensions.
And yet, the judge explains, Secretary Noem ignored the process and the criteria, instead relying on ideology. On December 1, 2025, Noem posted: “I just met with the President. I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies. Our forefathers built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom—not for foreign invaders to slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS. WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.”
Noem’s statements echo those of President Donald J. Trump, who referred to Haiti as a “sh*thole” country and tried to end TPS for people from Haiti beginning in 2017. During the 2024 campaign, Trump falsely accused Haitian immigrants of “eating the dogs,” “eating the cats,” and “eating the pets” of people who live in Springfield, Ohio. He insisted he would revoke Haiti’s TPS designation and send immigrants “back to their country.”
Five Haitian TPS holders sued to stop the administration from ending their protected status, claiming Noem ignored the legal procedures because of her “hostility to nonwhite immigrants.” Reyes says Noem did indeed ignore the law and that it “seems substantially likely” she did so because of her white nationalist ideology, noting that Noem has terminated all twelve TPS designations that have reached her desk.
But, as Reyes points out, the facts simply don’t match their ideology. TPS holders participate in the workforce at the exceptionally high rate of 94.6%. Far from being “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies,” the plaintiffs in the case challenging Noem’s decision are a neuroscientist researching Alzheimer’s disease, a software engineer at a national bank, a toxicology lab assistant, a college economics major, and a registered nurse.
When Noem claimed that it was “contrary to the national interest” to permit about 350,000 Haitian immigrants to stay in the country until it is safe to go back to Haiti, Reyes noted, she characterized them as criminals without any actual evidence. She also ignored the public’s interest in the fact that Haitian TPS holders pay $1.3 billion a year in taxes, and that through their work in sectors that are desperate for laborers, they add about $3.4 billion to the U.S. economy annually. They are deeply embedded in their communities, and tearing them out would shatter families and worksites.
“There is an old adage among lawyers,” Reyes wrote as she decided against the Trump administration. “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither, pound the table. Secretary Noem, the record to-date shows, does not have the facts on her side—or at least has ignored them. Does not have the law on her side—or at least has ignored it. Having neither…, she pounds X ([formerly known as] Twitter). Kristi Noem has a First Amendment right to call immigrants killers, leeches, entitlement junkies, and any other inapt name she wants. Secretary Noem, however, is constrained by both our Constitution and the [Administrative Procedure Act] to apply faithfully the facts to the law in implementing the TPS program. The record to-date shows she has yet to do that.”
In the conflict between reality and white nationalist ideology, reality appears to be gaining ground. Americans do not like federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol terrorizing their streets, detaining children, and shooting American citizens. As G. Elliott Morris noted in Strength in Numbers on Sunday, a new Fox News poll shows that Americans support Democrats over Republicans on a generic ballot at higher percentages than they have since the survey began: 52% of the vote for Democrats to 46% for Republicans. That 52% for Democrats is the highest support recorded for either party; Democrats hit the poll’s previous high in October 2017 at 50%. Morris notes Democrats are “firmly in ‘wave’ territory” for November’s elections.
Republicans are trying to regain support by seeming to back off their extremism, although they are not backing far: not a single Republican showed up for a public forum held today in Washington, D.C., by Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Representative Robert Garcia (D-CA) and other Democrats on ICE violence. At the hearing, Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen shot five times by federal agents, told her story; so did Aliya Rahman, another U.S. citizen detained by ICE; and so did the brothers of U.S. citizen Renee Good, killed by federal agents.
Representative Garcia showed a picture of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who is a key instigator of the ICE attacks, and said: “There’s probably no single person in this government [who] has done more damage…and more harm to people across this country, immigrants and U.S. citizens…than this man right here, and it’s our job…to hold him responsible for the crimes that are happening to United States citizens.” A new Data For Progress poll shows that 51% of American voters think Miller should be removed, while only 33% think he should not.
But lawmakers have at least had to adjust their actions to acknowledge the fury of American voters at the behavior of federal agents.
Today the House passed the budget to fund the government except for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which was funded only for two more weeks to give Congress time to hash out terms for funding the department that Democrats will accept. Republicans had been clear they did not want to separate out DHS funding. Ultimately, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) had to accept the separation in order to prevent a long-term shutdown, and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) got enough Republicans to go along that the measure, without DHS funding, passed. Trump signed it later in the day.
As of yesterday, the head of the “Weaponization Working Group,” created in the Department of Justice on Attorney General Pam Bondi’s first day in office to punish the people Trump insisted had weaponized the legal system against him, has been removed. Right-wing lawyer Ed Martin had been a leader in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and had claimed those convicted for crimes relating to that attempt had been unfairly prosecuted. Once in power, he had turned the department’s resources toward prosecuting those Trump perceived to be enemies, including former Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
So unpopular has it become to be associated with Trump that an attempt to distract from plummeting ticket sales and artists’ boycotts after he took over the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and put his name on it may be behind Trump’s Sunday night announcement he is closing the venue, claiming it needs two years of renovations.
As voters turn against the administration, Trump is openly working to rig the 2026 election to guarantee Republicans win.
On Wednesday, January 28, FBI agents raided an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, walking away with 700 boxes of ballots, tabulation tapes, and other election-related material from the 2020 election. Marc Elias of Democracy Docket noted that the warrant came from Thomas Albus, whom Trump appointed U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri. Albus should not have had anything to do with a raid in Georgia, but Bloomberg reported that Attorney General Bondi appears to have appointed Albus a special assistant to the attorney general, giving him the ability to operate across the nation. Elias points out that this gives Albus dramatic power over future elections.
The raid was significant not just because the FBI took the ballots Trump has complained about for years—ballots that have been counted three times—but also because Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was there. The DNI has no law enforcement role in our system; she is supposed to coordinate and oversee the agencies in the U.S. intelligence community. At first, officials tried to suggest she was there by chance, but yesterday William K. Rashbaum, Devlin Barrett, and Julian E. Barnes of the New York Times reported that she met with some of the FBI agents who had conducted the raid. During the meeting, she reached Trump on her cell phone and he spoke to the agents himself.
David Laufman, who served in the Justice Department in both Democratic and Republican administrations, told the New York Times reporters: “It is extremely dangerous to our democracy and a shocking abandonment of years of sound policy for the president to be directly involved in the conduct of domestic criminal investigations, especially one that seeks to redress his personal grievances and to make the director of national intelligence an instrument of his political will.”
Then, yesterday, Trump told former deputy FBI director Dan Bongino, who has gone back to podcasting, that he loses elections only because Democrats import undocumented immigrants to vote. This is bonkers. Voting by undocumented immigrants, or any noncitizens, is both illegal and incredibly rare, but Trump has made it part of his standard rhetoric since 2016.
He said to Bongino: “These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally, and the, you know, amazing that the Republicans aren’t tougher on it. The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over, we should take over the voting, the voting in at least many, 15 places.’ The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting. We have states that are so crooked and the county votes, we have states that I won that show I didn’t win. Now you going to see something in Georgia where they were able to get with a court order, the ballots? You’re going to see some interesting things come in. But, you know, like the 2020 election. I won that election by so much.”
Although the Constitution gives control of elections exclusively to the states, at a bill signing in the Oval Office today, Trump doubled down on his call for Republicans to “nationalize” elections.
—
Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/02/02/us/haitians-tps-ruling.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/28/fbi-search-warrant-fulton-county-georgia
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/house-passes-budget-bill-to-end-partial-government-shutdown
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/01/29/us/trump-news#section-57076465
https://newrepublic.com/post/206100/republican-skip-hearing-renee-good-brothers-testify
https://capitolnewsillinois.com/news/my-own-government-attempted-to-execute-me/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/2026/02/02/trump-kennedy-center-closure-nso/
https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/03/politics/gabbard-fulton-county-trump-administration
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/why-myth-noncitizen-voting-persists
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/noncitizen-voting-missing-millions
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/02/us/politics/trump-fbi-phone-call-georgia-gabbard.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2026/02/04/victims-immigration-agent-violence/
Bluesky:
atrupar.com/post/3mdvglues2k2h
lynnf.bsky.social/post/3mdyrp5fcys24
acyn.bsky.social/post/3mdyhvqbv2n24
So, during the spring, I teach an intro to sports journalism class at Chapman University every Tuesday night. My first session of the semester was yesterday, which means—beforehand—I found myself roaming one of Orange County’s coolest old-school towns, basking in the warmth, sipping an iced coffee, enjoying the Orange Circle, feeling the oomph and bliss of SoCal at its finest.
That’s when I saw him.
This guy …
It was Batman. With a beard. And some quirky boots. And a suspect utility belt. But—still! Batman was in Orange, walking toward the famed Circle.
So I followed him, and (as always) following Batman always pays.
The Caped Crusader led me to an anti-ICE rally, which (unbeknownst to me) is held every Tuesday evening by Indivisible Orange. And while the turnout wasn’t enormous, in the we-have-2,000-fighters-in-our-midst way, the event felt surprisingly/importantly empowering. First, because this was Orange, a reliably red town in a reliably red district. Second, because the 50 (or so) marchers were loud, feisty, determined. And third, because, well, the honking. Soooooo much honking. Nonstop honking. Honks here, honks there, honks everywhere. Honks of support, honks of encouragement, honks of resilience.
Honks!
And when you combine the location, with the feistiness, with the noise—well, I dunno. It moved me. I spoke with Jana Anderson, one of the organizers. She felt the spirit, too …
Like many readers of this site, I am eternally looking for hope and reasons to believe democracy will survive this hellscape. And while nothing is guaranteed, there is something to be said for Tuesday nights in the Orange Circle, when people come together to dress as superheroes and stand for their beliefs.
When Batman leaves his bat cave to join the rally and when horns, muted in the past, come alive.
2. “Regulation as Pruning of the Adjacent Possible.“
3. Game theory with Iranian drones?
4. It’s happening. And an LLM trained on global art auctions.
5. Why is the Thai economy in decline? (FT)
6. Cato study on the fiscal impact of immigrants.
The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Focusing only on headcount reduction is like saying the only value of a car is that you don’t have to pay for a horse.
I’ve been listening to 20VC since it appeared. When I want to understand how venture capitalists are thinking, Harry Stebbings is my go-to source. He asks the questions I’d want to ask, and he’s not afraid to push back on his guests. I’ve learned a lot.
However.
In recent episodes, Harry made a claim that the path to AI profitability runs through labor replacement. “Stop paying $1M in salaries by paying $100K for this AI-based service.” Simple. Clean. Measurable.
And woefully incomplete.
Labor replacement looks at value creation through a tiny pinhole. Yes, cost reduction is one way AI creates value. But it’s not the only way, and I’m not even sure it’s the most important way. Focusing only on headcount reduction is like saying the only value of a car is that you don’t have to pay for a horse.
If we momentarily take the naive view that a company’s value equals its net present value—the sum of all future cash flows discounted to today—then there are four fundamental levers:
Smaller costs at the same time
Same costs but later
More revenue at the same time
Same revenue but sooner
Harry’s labor-replacement thesis focuses on the first lever alone. That ignores many sources of value.
And even NPV doesn’t capture the full picture. Company value also encodes optionality—how many ways exist to improve NPV in the future. A company with more options is worth more than one with the same cash flows but fewer options. (If you haven’t read my material on options and software, the short version is: flexibility has value, especially in uncertain environments. And what environment is more uncertain than one being transformed by AI?)
Let me give you examples of each strategy.
Expanded service capacity. Your support team of 10 people can now handle the inquiry volume that used to require 25. But here’s the thing—you don’t fire 15 people. You serve three times as many customers. Your addressable market just tripled without tripling your headcount. The humans are still there; they’re just handling the hard cases while AI handles the routine ones.
Personalization at scale. A human salesperson can deeply understand say 50 accounts. An AI-augmented salesperson can maintain genuine, contextual on several times that many. The genie remembers that this customer’s CFO cares about security compliance and that customer’s CTO is skeptical of vendor lock-in. Higher conversion, higher retention, higher revenue per rep.
Previously impossible features. Some product capabilities simply weren’t feasible before. Real-time translation. Intelligent search across unstructured data. Automated analysis of documents that would take humans hours. These aren’t cost savings—they’re new value propositions that customers will pay for.
Faster time to market. If your development team can ship features in two weeks that used to take six, you start earning revenue on those features four weeks earlier. That’s not a cost reduction. That’s the same revenue arriving sooner—which, thanks to the time value of money, is worth more.
Accelerated sales cycles. AI can generate proposals, customize demos, answer technical questions, and handle objections while the human salesperson is asleep. A deal that used to take 90 days now closes in 60. Same deal size, but you’re earning and compounding that revenue a month earlier.
Compressed customer onboarding. New customers who used to take three months to reach full productivity now get there in one. They start generating the usage (and the fees) that justify the relationship two months sooner. Meanwhile, your customer success team can take on the next cohort.
This one’s subtle, but it’s real.
Deferred hiring. Your current team is handling growth that would normally require two new hires. You’ll probably still make those hires eventually—but six months from now instead of today. Those six months of salary stay in your pocket, earning interest, available for other investments.
Delayed infrastructure. Better optimization and more efficient resource usage means you can push that major infrastructure investment into next year’s budget instead of this year’s. Even if the cost is the same it arrives later.
Extended training runway. AI-assisted onboarding means new employees become productive faster with less senior-employee time. The training cost is spread out, and some of it shifts from expensive human time today to cheaper AI time tomorrow.
Here’s where it gets interesting.
New markets become accessible. Real-time translation and localization used to require a dedicated team for each market. Now you can experiment with entering new geographies without committing the full resources. The option to expand exists where it didn’t before. Even if you never exercise that option, its existence has value.
New business models emerge. A professional services firm that couldn’t scale because every engagement required senior talent can now productize some of that expertise. A company that couldn’t offer a lower price tier because the unit economics didn’t work can now create an AI-assisted self-service option. These aren’t cost reductions—they’re entirely new ways to make money.
Faster experimentation. If you can prototype, test, and iterate three times faster, you can run three times as many experiments. Most experiments fail, of course. But the ones that succeed create options you wouldn’t have discovered otherwise. The ability to try more things is itself valuable.
I don’t want to be too hard on Harry here. The labor-replacement story is compelling because it’s legible. You can point at a budget line, point at an AI service, and do arithmetic. “We paid X, now we pay Y, the difference is Z.” Clean. Fundable.
But the other sources of value are just as real, even if they’re harder to measure. More revenue, earlier revenue, costs delayed, options created—these are all ways AI can make a company more valuable.
Software design is an exercise in human relationships. So is AI adoption. The question isn’t just “how do we do the same work with fewer people?” It’s “what can these people do now that they couldn’t do before? What becomes possible that wasn’t possible? What options do we create?”
The pinhole view sees one thing clearly. But there’s a whole landscape out there.
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I’m writing this in a creative storm, so it’s not polished. Thought it was worth getting out to y’all & getting your feedback.
The “natural” use of genies is to further isolate people who are already suffering (even if they enjoy it) from isolation. “Teams of one can now achieve infinite results!!!” Technical solution to a human problem. (There should be…
These observations by NASA’s SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) show the infrared light emitted by the dust, water, organic molecules, and carbon dioxide contained within comet 3I/ATLAS’s coma. The comet brightened significantly during the December 2025 period when SPHEREx made the observations — about two months after the icy body had passed its closest distance to the Sun in late October.
The space telescope has the singular capability of seeing the sky in 102 colors, each representing a wavelength of infrared light that provides unique information about galaxies, stars, planet-forming regions, or other cosmic features, including the various gases and dust seen in the coma of 3I/ATLAS. The information gathered by SPHEREx helps scientists better understand what materials 3I/ATLAS contains and how the interstellar object’s pristine ices react to the Sun’s heating as the comet journeys through the solar system.
The mission is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California for the agency’s Astrophysics Division within the Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The telescope and the spacecraft bus were built by BAE Systems. The science analysis of the SPHEREx data is being conducted by a team of scientists at 13 institutions across the U.S., and in South Korea and Taiwan, led by Principal Investigator Jamie Bock, based at Caltech with a joint JPL appointment, and by JPL Project Scientist Olivier Dore. Data is processed and archived at IPAC at Caltech in Pasadena, which manages JPL for NASA. The SPHEREx dataset is freely available to scientists and the public.
For more information about the SPHEREx mission visit: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/spherex/
The post NASA’s SPHEREx Examines Comet 3I/ATLAS’s Coma appeared first on NASA Science.
From testimony at a town meeting in Surprise, AZ, about a proposed ICE concentration camp:
I’d like to share a story from a local paper in Coldwater, Michigan dated to the 9th of April, 1945. It tells how the US Army, under General Patton–the US 3rd Army–came onto what you might call a detention center just outside the village of Ohrdruf, Germany.
The US Army brought the leading citizens of Ohrdruf to tour the facility, which turned out to be part of the Buchenwald network of concentration camps. A US Army colonel told the German civilians who viewed the scenes, without muttering a word, that they were to blame.
One of the Germans replied that what happened in the camp was “done by a few people, and you cannot blame us all.” And the American, who could have been any one of our grandfathers, said, “this was done by those that the German people chose to lead them, and all are responsible.”
The morning after the tour, the Mayor of Ohrdruf killed himself. And maybe he did not know the full extent of the outrages that were committed in his community, but he knew enough. And we don’t know exactly how ICE will use this warehouse. But we know enough.
I ask you to consider what the Mayor of Ohrdruf might have thought before he died. Maybe he felt like a victim. He might have thought, “how is this my fault? I have no jurisdiction over this.” Maybe he would have said, “this site was not subject to local zoning, what could I do?”
But I think, when he reflected on the suffering that occurred at this camp, just outside of town, that those words would have sounded hollow even to him. Because in his heart he knew–as we do–that we are all responsible for what happens in our community.
I urge the council to take action to stop, or stall, or at the barest minimum to think creatively about how to exercise oversight over this proposed ICE facility. Thank you.
We already know enough. The only question is how long will it take for all of us–and the left construed broadly can’t do this alone–to stop them.
Links for you. Science:
US science after a year of Trump
My son had rotavirus before he could get the vaccine. Ending universal rotavirus vaccination is a tragedy
Why did Jeffrey Epstein cultivate famous scientists?
After sowing distrust in fluoridated water, RFK Jr. and skeptics turn to obstructing other sources
Measles Surges In The U.S. As Public Health Systems Falter
Indonesian handprints are the oldest cave art found yet
Other:
“ICE 101” — How Trump changed ICE and CBP into a fascist secret police (excellent; must-read)
An Anonymous DC National Guardsman Tells All
‘I’m Witnessing a Lot of Emptiness’: How ICE Uprooted Normal Life in Minneapolis
Indict ICE Criminals At The State Level—Public Safety Requires It
How Trump Doomed the American Auto Industry
On His Way Out, New Jersey Democratic Governor Vetoes Legislation to Bar Local Assistance to ICE (BuT WhY DoN’T PeOpLe tRuSt dEmOcRaTs?)
Trump administration concedes DOGE team may have misused Social Security data
Trump And Miller Slashing Legal Immigration By 33% To 50%
They’ve bought themselves a Congress
Lehigh County exec says he’s evicting ICE agents from Allentown office, citing 3 years of unpaid rent
Trump is xenophobic and paranoid – and he’s too old to change his mind about anything
Passenger Says NYC-to-D.C. Bus Went Off Route After Driver Switch in Viral Thread Recounting Play-by-Play
Trump promised the ‘largest deportation operation.’ He brought chaos to American streets
Trump’s Attack on Democracy Is Faltering
‘What are Democrats doing?’: Political strategists break down where the resistance to Trump went wrong
Trump’s weird text to Norway’s prime minister renews 25th Amendment talk
Psychiatrists warned about Trump – and now we can see why
Scott Jennings Gets Very Upset When People Call Him Human Garbage To His Face!
The new Teflon Don: How Trump 2.0 has made reality optional
A cloud of fear hangs over Minnesota immigrant communities
Army veteran says ICE agents detained him for hours without access to phone or his attorney. A combat-wounded veteran’s eight-hour detention by federal agents in Minneapolis raises concerns about due process in ICE facilities.
Trump Is Obsessed With Oil, but Chinese Batteries Will Soon Run the World
Parents are letting teens ride in Waymos without an adult. That poses a dilemma for the company
We ran high-level US civil war simulations. Minnesota is exactly how they start
DOGE Employees Shared Social Security Data, Court Filing Shows
Immigration officers assert sweeping power to enter homes without a judge’s warrant, memo says
Many young Trump voters think women ‘should follow’ men, poll finds
The Line, a Saudi Megaproject, Is Dead. It was always doomed to unravel, but the firms who lent their name to this folly should be held accountable.
What Happened to the “Don’t Tread On Me” Conservatives?
Better
Trump’s team tries to ruin toy store after owners denounce ICE
But What About The Price Of Eggs, Mr. President
Dear GOP, you need to impeach Trump
One year ago, Donald Trump took an oath to serve the American people. Instead, he has focused on using the presidency to enrich himself.
Péter Biró writes with good news about kidney exchange in Hungary.
Here's the announcement from the University of Pécs, of the first kidney exchange performed in Hungary, following the first legislation passed to legalize kidney exchange in 2014. (And more details follow from a second announcement below.)
"The first cross-donation kidney transplant performed in Hungary a few days ago can be considered a new milestone in the history of organ transplantation in Hungary. Within the framework of the living donor kidney exchange program, two women received new kidneys at the Department of Surgery of the University of Pécs Clinical Center (PTE KK), which gives them the opportunity for a better quality of life. It is particularly interesting that in both cases the organ donor was a male member of the other couple.
...
"In his speech, Dr. Péter Szakály, Head of Department of the Department of Surgery of the University of Pécs, emphasized that: The establishment of a national pool was of fundamental importance in this program, and this program will be able to operate successfully in the future as well if there are as many such couples as possible. He also added that compared to traditional kidney transplantation, living donor transplantation is always a much greater challenge (...) Transplantation with a living donor comes with increased responsibility, as it involves a healthy donor. In this case, two surgeries were performed at the same time: Ádám Varga, assistant professor, and I simultaneously removed and replaced the organs between the two pairs from the adjacent operating room.
"Since 2014, the law allows this type of transplant, but no specific surgeries have been performed so far. Recognizing this shortcoming, at the initiative of the National Hospital Administration, the four kidney transplant centers in Hungary and the Regional Kidney Transplant Committees operating there, in cooperation with the National Blood Transfusion Service, have developed a nationally uniform program in accordance with the legislation in force, which ensures equal opportunities for all patients who voluntarily enter the program. This became the living donor kidney transplant exchange program, which was launched in Hungary on June 21, 2024. The search for optimally compatible pairings between the pairs applying for the program is carried out with the help of a software developed for this purpose."
#########
And here is the emailed announcement forwarded by Peter Biro, who has been a champion of kidney exchange in Europe for many years now:
Dear EURO-KEP Colleagues,
We are pleased to inform you that we have reached a significant milestone within the Hungarian Kidney Paired Kidney Exchange Program (HKEP), in line with the objectives of the EURO-KEP initiative.
On January 20, 2026, the first two kidney transplants were successfully performed in Hungary within the national living donor kidney exchange program. The surgeries took place at the University of Pécs Clinical Centre, marking the first realization of kidney cross-over donation in the country.
We believe that this milestone, supported by a well-structured professional and patient information campaign lasting more than a year and a half, will contribute to increasing the number of living donor kidney transplants and encourage more patients and voluntary donors to join kidney exchange programs. This, in turn, will support further kidney exchanges and improve equal access to transplantation.
We consider this achievement a significant milestone in Hungarian transplantation and a meaningful contribution to the shared European objectives of the EURO-KEP project. We remain committed to continuing this work in the service of saving lives.
Best regards,
Dr. Sándor Mihály, Ph.D
Director of transplantation
Honorary College Associate Professor at Semmelweis University
General Secretary of the Hungarian Transplant Society
EDTCO Past-Chair 2023-2025
Organ Coordination Office
Central Waiting List Office
National Organ and Tissue Donation Opting-out Registry
Hungarian Stem Cell Donor Registry
To master our own lives, we must venture beyond the rules and embrace risk – Heidegger’s philosophy grounded in real life
- by Aeon Video
NASA officials defended their preparations for the Artemis 2 mission after a fueling test experienced the same type of hydrogen leaks that bedeviled Artemis 1 more than three years ago.
The post NASA examining hydrogen leaks during Artemis 2 fueling test appeared first on SpaceNews.
In space procurement, there are few phrases that carry more weight than “flight heritage.” Once a supplier claims it, the rest of the room can relax. The hardware has flown, goes the thinking. It worked. The risk of using such hardware is vanishingly small, even absent. This is understandable. Space is famously unforgiving, and if […]
The post Flight heritage? It isn’t what you think appeared first on SpaceNews.
SpaceX is pausing Falcon 9 launches after an issue with the rocket’s upper stage encountered at the end of a launch Feb. 2.
The post SpaceX pauses Falcon 9 launches after upper stage anomaly appeared first on SpaceNews.
NASA is no longer planning a February launch of the Artemis 2 mission after encountering hydrogen leaks during a fueling test of the Space Launch System.
The post Artemis 2 slips to March appeared first on SpaceNews.
Microsoft gives the FBI the ability to decrypt BitLocker in response to court orders: about twenty times per year.
It’s possible for users to store those keys on a device they own, but Microsoft also recommends BitLocker users store their keys on its servers for convenience. While that means someone can access their data if they forget their password, or if repeated failed attempts to login lock the device, it also makes them vulnerable to law enforcement subpoenas and warrants.
I published three controversial articles on AI last year—and felt an intense backlash from the tech community.
On August 8, I asked “Is This is What a Bubble Looks Like at the Top?” Four days later, Meta stock hit its all-time high, and has fallen sharply since then—despite releasing strong earnings.
On September 2, I published “Is the Bubble Bursting?”
And, finally, on October 30, I announced “The Bubble Just Burst.” We now know that Nvidia reached its all-time high the day before. Its stock has also taken a huge hit since then.
The tech community is in a state of shock.
That’s because the cash flow numbers continue to look favorable for AI. Just a few days ago, Meta announced that it will invest a massive $125 billion this year—up sharply from $72 billion in 2025. They are pouring cash into AI data centers at an unprecedented rate.
No tech program in history has gotten more cash and support than AI. The total bill is likely to reach $5 trillion, and the richest people in the world are determined to spend it all.
But investors are still spooked.
They can see that something has changed in the last five months. Even good news fails to boost the share price.
What going on here? Even more important, what happens next?
It is about time:
US tech stocks fell sharply on Tuesday as fresh concerns about the impact of AI on software businesses swept across Wall Street.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell 1.4 per cent, while the broader S&P 500 was down 0.8 per cent. Markets were dragged lower by large declines for a host of analytics groups following AI company Anthropic’s launch of productivity tools for its Claude Cowork platform that can help automate legal work.
Analytics groups Gartner and S&P Global fell 21 per cent and 11 per cent, respectively, while Intuit and Equifax both declined more than 10 per cent. Moody’s fell 9 per cent and FactSet lost 11 per cent.
A JPMorgan index tracking US software stocks fell 7 per cent, taking its loss this year to 18 per cent.
Here is more from the FT.
The post Now we are getting serious… appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
In a TED Talk released on Monday, I describe a decadelong effort to measure hip hop’s impact. My research team and I assembled a data set tracking the genre’s diffusion from the late 1980s onward. We compiled exposure measures from virtually every U.S. radio station between 1985 and 2002 and from the Billboard Hot 100 from 2000 through 2024, then digitized station playlists using custom AI tools. The result is a detailed record of what different parts of the country heard in a given year. Using modern text analysis, we examined hundreds of thousands of songs and every word they contained.
We classify hip hop into four broad categories: street, conscious, mainstream and experimental…
Radio data also let us look inside the music. Over the past 40 years, hip-hop lyrics have grown substantially more explicit: profanity, violence and misogynistic language each increased roughly fivefold in our text-based measures, while references to drugs rose by approximately half as much. That growth in lyrical intensity helps explain why hip hop continues to provoke anxiety. But it also sharpens the question that matters most, at least to an economist: Does exposure to these lyrics have measurable effects on people’s lives?
To answer that, we looked at locations with varied hip-hop exposure—some places where it arrived early, others where it arrived later. Hip hop initially reached mass audiences through a subset of black radio stations, often those formatted as “urban contemporary.” Some cities gained early access through those stations. Others didn’t for reasons as mundane as geography, signal reach and local radio history.
That uneven rollout created natural variation in exposure.
Using radio data and decades of census records, we estimated how much hip hop was played on the radio in each county in the U.S. over time. We then tested whether increases in hip-hop penetration were linked to changes in crime—and whether people exposed to more hip hop in their formative years experienced worse outcomes in education, employment, earnings, teen births and single parenthood.
The answer was striking. In our estimates, the effects hovered around zero, sometimes even slightly positive. Places with heavier rap exposure didn’t experience higher crime, lower educational attainment or weaker labor-market outcomes relative to trends elsewhere.
Here is more from Roland Fryer, from the WSJ. Here is the TED talk.
The post The economics of hip hop appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The New York metropolitan area was showing the effects of a prolonged cold spell in late January 2026. During a stretch of frigid weather, ice choked the Hudson River along Manhattan’s western shore.
The OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 captured this image of the wintry landscape around midday on January 28. The image is false-color (bands 5-4-3) to distinguish ice (light blue) from open water and snow. Vegetation appears red. Ice is abundant in the Hudson River and visible in smaller amounts in the East River, the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir in Central Park, and waterways in New Jersey.
Temperatures in New York City dropped below freezing on January 24 and stayed there for over a week. The high on January 28, the date of the image, was 23 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 5 degrees Celsius). Low temperatures and harsh wind chills gripped much of eastern North America over this period amid a surge of Arctic air.
Much of the ice in the image likely floated there from farther upriver, where tidal currents are weaker and salinity is lower. These conditions allow water to freeze sooner and at higher temperatures than the faster-flowing, brackish water near the river’s mouth, shown here. A complete freeze of the Hudson around Manhattan is unlikely, experts say, although it did occur back in 1888. Still, the ice buildup was substantial enough for NYC Ferry to suspend services for several days.
Iced-up rivers can have other implications, from flooding and infrastructure damage to changes in hydrologic processes that affect water quality and aquatic habitats.
Scientists, government agencies, and emergency responders are increasingly turning to remote sensing technologies such as synthetic aperture radar and hyperspectral imaging to track river ice. Improved monitoring can aid in water resource management and mitigate ice’s effects on infrastructure and ecosystems.
In addition to the river ice, other signs of winter were visible across New York. A fresh layer of snow coated the landscape following a winter storm, in which a weather station in Central Park recorded nearly 12 inches (30 centimeters) of accumulation on January 25. And the low angle of the midwinter Sun caused the tall buildings in Midtown and Lower Manhattan to cast long shadows.
In a neighboring borough on February 2, a shorter shadow was cast—this one by the weather-prognosticating groundhog known as Staten Island Chuck. Folklore holds that the sighting signals six more weeks of winter. When compared with data from NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, the New York rodent was deemed the most accurate of his peer weather “forecasters.” This year, Chuck might be right, at least in the near term: the National Weather Service forecast called for below-average temperatures to persist, with Arctic air returning to the city by the weekend.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Lindsey Doermann.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
Satellite data show that Arctic sea ice likely reached its annual minimum extent on September 10, 2025.
A moderately intense season of surface melting left part of the ice sheet dirty gray in summer 2025, but snowfall…
Sea ice around the southernmost continent hit one of its lowest seasonal highs since the start of the satellite record.
The post Chilled New York City appeared first on NASA Science.
Bangkok-bound caviar spread in Emirates first class. An extravagant use of some SkyWards miles, but too much fun to refuse.
When the cabin crew offered me a second course, I assumed they’d just swap out the silver bowl for a fresh one. Instead they re-did the entire place setting, silverware and all.
The post Feburary 3, 2026. First Class Flex appeared first on AskThePilot.com.
Via David Crespo, I got into Greet Death, a band that's been hustling since 2011. It's great in a simultaneously familiar and innovative way. The album has a great amount of variety: Small Town Cemetery is a really effective quiet, acoustic track whereas Die in Love reminds me of classic shoegaze or, ahem, my old band, Teen Mom. We put out some good music.
Earlier today I decided to look up Happy Apple on Wikipedia. They're one of my favorite bands of all time, sharing a drummer with The Bad Plus but with a very different songwriting approach. Their new-to-me-as-of-looking-it-up-this-morning album (released in 2020), "New York CD" immediately clicked, it's just as good if not better than their older stuff. The grooves on the new stuff feel a little more sinister in a very very good way.
Some of the complaining sounds like “Oh no, I’m such an undisciplined feral beast for enjoying my interests for hours!�
From Ava's blog, which I really enjoy reading, even when it makes me question how I spend my time. Recently I've had phases of social burnout, then loneliness, working a lot, then balance, and I feel exactly what she's writing about, the feeling of having free time and then beating myself up for not using it 'productively' enough. In part this is a continuity thing: I've had so many hobbies and commitments that at I'm always dropping the ball in some way, letting something wilt. I just try to remember the evergreen Louise Miller tweet: No love, however brief, is wasted.
Saying that a social-media feed is the product of users is like saying that a hot dog is the product of cattle.
From The "User-Generated Content" Ruse, about how recommendation systems and algorithmic feeds make all modern 'social media' more of a produced set of preferences than a person-to-person communication mechanism. I like my RSS feeds and chronological timelines.
A Donor Advised Fund sounds all high-falutin’ but it’s basically just a financial instrument that decouples the timing of a donation’s tax event (when money leaves your account) from the actual granting (when money goes to the charity).
From Michael Gris, writing about how bunching donations and donating stock can be a win-win. This overlaps with another article that made the rounds this month - What if we stopped paying taxes? - about how states could attempt to stop paying taxes to the federal government (summary: hard, dangerous, barely possible). But anyway, I rethought my 'giving' strategy this year for two reasons:
It was pretty quick and easy. I'm using it as a pass-through: immediately granting out the money that I put into it, just taking advantage of how DAFs make stock donations a little easier and simplify the paperwork.
The gist: if you think you have these problems, it is likely that the correct solution is to do nothing, to not manage, and to go back to building product and talking to users.
I enjoyed, and feared this blog post about early-stage engineering management. I've been a very early stage engineer or an early-stage manager for my entire career, and it more or less mirrors what I do now. Which is good, because it confirms that what I'm doing makes some sense, but bad, because I still always have the feeling that someone, somewhere, knows how to do everything better.
I didn't mention Hundreds of Beavers. It is a revelation. It's brilliant and dumb at the same time. It's silent, in black and white, low-budget, endlessly endearing. Absolutely hilarious. I highly recommend seeing it in a theater for the full experience. One of the best movie experiences I've had in years. (via Leanne Abraham)
This video from Jamelle Bouie, whose channel I highly recommend, is of a piece with this crossover episode of the Volts podcast about "Reactionary Centrism", with Michael Hobbes. As Michael Hobbes puts it, we live in a basic, one-dimensional reality where there is an obvious evil. People are tempted to dress it up or to find similarities, but the truth is that there's a clear problem and it's the Republican party.
I have been enjoying some manufactured goods. In particular, I got a letter opener for the first time in my life, and it makes my brain happier to open letters neatly. JetPens in general is lovely. I just got some Bronson t-shirts (via Justin Duke) because my American Giant ones are starting to fray, and they look like a good next step. But props to American Giant, because I've gotten a full decade out of some of their stuff. I switched to Comply foam tips for my AirPods and they make then work with my apparently non-standard ear canals.
The launch of NASA's Artemis II mission, the first flight of astronauts to the Moon in more than 53 years, will have to wait another month after a fueling test Monday uncovered hydrogen leaks in the connection between the rocket and its launch platform at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
"Engineers pushed through several challenges during the two-day test and met many of the planned objectives," NASA said in a statement following the conclusion of the mock countdown, or wet dress rehearsal (WDR), early Tuesday morning. "To allow teams to review data and conduct a second Wet Dress Rehearsal, NASA now will target March as the earliest possible launch opportunity for the flight test."
The practice countdown was designed to identify problems and provide NASA an opportunity to fix them before launch. Most importantly, the test revealed NASA still has not fully resolved recurring hydrogen leaks that delayed the launch of the unpiloted Artemis I test flight by several months in 2022. Artemis I finally launched successfully after engineers revised their hydrogen loading procedures to overcome the leak.
[Nothing new here for long time readers, but a more compact way of characterizing my views.]
While I was getting ready for a recent podcast interview with David Beckworth, I started thinking about how I would describe my approach to monetary economics. What distinguishes my framework from that of the mainstream? In the end, I decided that my approach is best characterized as simplify, simplify, simplify.
Here are three examples:
Many of the most important macro issues can be explained by a simple model of nominal GDP (NGDP) growth.
Monetary policy is the only important determinant of NGDP in a fiat money regime.
We should return to the simple pre-2008 regime, where 98% of the monetary base was currency.
Simplify macro: Macroeconomics focuses on three primary issues: long run economic growth, the business cycle, and inflation. In the US, the business cycle and inflation are mostly determined by changes in NGDP. Unstable NGDP causes business cycles because hourly nominal wages are sticky in the short run. When NGDP changes, companies initially respond by adjusting their demand for labor.
In my view, most economists overrate the importance of other determinants of the business cycle. With the notable exception of Covid, supply shocks rarely play an important direct role in the business cycle. At best, supply shocks occasionally cause monetary policymakers to misjudge the situation, leading to monetary policy errors (as in 2008.) Fiscal policy also plays very little role in the business cycle. And financial crises are mostly a symptom of falling NGDP, not a cause.
The IS-LM and AS/AD models are not particularly useful, unless one follows the monetarist approach of defining aggregate demand as nominal GDP. Unfortunately, most economists approach aggregate demand from a more Keynesian perspective, occasionally conflating aggregate demand with real expenditure. This is an example of reasoning from a quantity change. Real expenditure can just as well rise from a positive supply shock as from a positive demand shock. Aggregate demand means nominal spending, or it has no coherent meaning at all. Similarly, the IS-LM approach leads many economists to engage in the fallacy of reasoning from an interest rate change.
Simplify NGDP determination: When I wrote a book on the Great Depression, I looked at a wide variety of factors that influenced nominal output. That’s because under the international gold standard no single central bank could control the global price level and/or NGDP. But once the world shifted to fiat money, it because very easy to model changes in NGDP. Central banks now had unlimited ability to offset changes in money demand (and velocity), and hence it made sense to view monetary policy in terms of outcomes. Easy money was excessive NGDP growth and tight money was inadequate NGDP growth. What could be simpler?
Again, mainstream economists make things much more complicated, examining how things like financial shocks, consumer sentiment, trade shocks and fiscal policy might affect NGDP growth. But fiat money central banks try to offset those changes, so in the end an NGDP shock is nothing more than a monetary policy error.
Simplify monetary policy: After 2008, monetary policy was made much more complex. Instead of controlling the path of NGDP by adjusting the supply of base money, the Fed also began trying to manipulate the demand for base money by paying interest on bank reserves. This led to much larger central bank balance sheets, and many central banks began to engage in complex credit policies, buying assets other than risk-free Treasury securities.
Complexity leads to confusion:
In my view, most of the monetary policy errors that we see in the real world occur due to needless complexity being added to monetary theory and policy. Consider the big inflation overshoot of 2021-22. Some prominent economists argued that supply shocks were largely to blame for the inflation spike. That’s because they were fooled by things like bottlenecks at the ports, which pushed up prices. But that’s another example of the fallacy of reasoning from a quantity change. In fact, the flow of goods through our ports increased sharply during this supposed “supply shock”.
The actual problem was that a highly expansionary monetary policy caused rapid NGDP growth. This increased the demand for imported goods, straining our ability to handle the increased flow of imports.
If economists had single-mindedly focused on NGDP growth rates, they would have seen that the overshoot of NGDP growth was roughly the same size as the overshoot of the price level, meaning that virtually all the excess inflation of 2021-23 was caused by monetary stimulus. K.I.S.S.
The opposite error occurred in late 2008, when economists were so obsessed with the financial turmoil that they failed to notice that NGDP was falling sharply. Throughout history, falling NGDP generally causes or at least worsens financial crises. (In the 1930s, falling NGDP was the sole cause of the multiple financial crises, whereas in 2008 it dramatically worsened what had until then been a very mild financial crisis.)
Monetary policy and NGDP have almost no effect on long run economic growth. But for the macroeconomic events that make the headlines (business cycles and inflation), it’s almost all about monetary policy and NGDP. Monetary policy drives NGDP, and everything else is downstream of NGDP shocks.
In a perfect world, we would not have intro courses in both micro and macro. We’d have an economics textbook with about 30 chapters, including one chapter on long run economic growth, then a chapter on inflation/NGDP, and then a chapter on the business cycle. That’s right, macro should be treated relegated to at most 10% of economics, not 50%. I’d rather have students actually understand 3 chapters on macro, rather than be hopelessly confused by 15 chapters on macro:
AD = C + I + G = GDP = M*V = P*Y
LOL, do you think one student in a thousand understands the equation I just wrote?
ICE’s brutality is souring much of the electorate on the Trump administration. The Democrats look increasingly likely to win at least the House of Representatives in the midterms — so likely that Trump is now panicking and starting his election denial routine early. But Trump shows signs of realizing that he overreached, demoting the head of the Border Patrol and making some other halting moves toward de-escalation.
This is progress (at least if you dislike unaccountable secret police, race wars, warrantless searches, summary executions of protesters, and so on…which I do). But it’s possible that Democrats — and especially progressives — will take the wrong message from their first small victories in the battle against autocracy.
For one thing, the Minnesota anti-ICE protests are starting to show some signs of being taken over by the same kind of radicals who made the 2020 BLM protests go overboard in Seattle, Portland, and a few other cities. Some protesters in Minneapolis are setting up illegal checkpoints to stop vehicles and screen them for ICE. Others have been harassing various people. Some leftist protesters have even denounced progressive activist Will Stancil, who was recently punched in the face.
Obviously, if this kind of thing continues, all Trump and Stephen Miller and ICE will have to do is to back off and not kill any protesters for a while, and watch as the more extreme street activists reenact the ill-fated CHAZ from Seattle 2020. That would sap some (but not all) of the momentum from the backlash to the recent ICE killings.
But the other danger is that Dems will take a midterm victory as a sign that they don’t need to recalibrate their position on the immigration issue. In a post two weeks ago, I pointed out that although they hate Trump’s heavy-handed tactics, Americans still don’t support the permissive immigration policies of the Biden years.
Recent polls confirm this. For example, a recent Fox News poll found that Americans still favor the Republican Party over the Democratic Party on immigration in general, and on border security in particular:
The same poll found that although the public now disapproves of Trump’s overall immigration approach by a substantial margin, he’s at +5 on border security specifically.
Other polls find much the same, as Eric Levitz reports:
In a Wall Street Journal poll taken after Good’s killing, voters said that the Republican Party was “better equipped” to handle immigration than the Democrats by an 11-point margin…Apparently, the only thing more unpopular than a nakedly authoritarian immigration policy is a Democratic one.
This is a big red flashing warning sign for Dems. Watching Trump’s ICE in action has reminded Americans of the danger of authoritarianism, but it hasn’t changed their basic idea of what immigration policy ought to be.
Right now, Democrats and progressives are primarily reacting to ICE’s brutality and Trump’s authoritarianism. That’s fine, but it’s not enough. Democrats need to proactively think about what kind of immigration policy they want — not just because they’ll need a plan if and when they get back into power, but because they need to credibly promise the American public that they’re going to do something about the public’s legitimate concerns. If voters think Dems are just going to snap right back to the permissive Biden-era immigration policies that everyone hated, it will be a lot harder for Dems to win in 2028 — and it’ll give Trump much more of a free hand to pursue his authoritarian policies.
Thus, Dems should be thinking about what a liberal immigration policy would look like. Here are some of my own suggestions.
Donald Trump and the MAGA movement want to delegitimize immigrants as a group — to say that people who choose America are fundamentally less American than those who have ancestral blood ties to the land. It’s natural to sort of kick out against that idea by trying to turn the tables, and delegitimize the MAGA people themselves. This, I think, is why progressives often respond to anti-immigrant movements by saying that America itself is “stolen land”:
The idea here is that if America itself has no rightful claim to the land on which it sits, then the claim of any MAGA supporter to belong on this land is no better than the claim of any immigrant — legal or otherwise.
There are three problems with this. The first is that no one cares. Those who are inclined to welcome immigrants will become no more welcoming upon hearing that “no one is illegal on stolen land”. And those who believe that America is the legitimate owner of its land will not be persuaded to change their beliefs simply by a reminder that the land once belonged to Native Americans. Trust me, they already know.
The second and bigger problem is that “stolen land” rhetoric makes it look as if progressives don’t believe that America is a legitimate country at all. If you don’t think that American citizens have the right to collectively, democratically decide who gets into the country and who doesn’t, you’re telling American voters that their democratic will is illegitimate. And that’s not going to sit well with voters outside of the most progressive circles. Matt Yglesias makes this argument succinctly and powerfully:
The third problem with “stolen land” rhetoric is that it’s immoral. It’s an attempt to counter blood-and-soil racial nationalism with an invocation of another kind of blood-and-soil racial nationalism:
The Democratic Party shouldn’t go anywhere near this sort of atavistic moral reasoning. The land acknowledgements need to disappear from the Democratic Party platform, from Democratic Party events, and from progressive rhetoric and culture in general.
Instead, Democrats and progressives should focus exclusively on rhetoric that stresses the ways that immigrants contribute to the United States, and on the American culture that unifies us all as a nation. This sort of rhetoric makes it extremely explicit that Democrats see the U.S. as a legitimate entity, worthy of enhancing and strengthening. It rules out the possibility that progressives see immigration as an act of “decolonization”. And it emphasizes that the purpose of immigration is to benefit American citizens.
When criticizing ICE’s raids, many Democrats and progressives complain that ICE is arresting people with no criminal records in the U.S.:
And Democratic proposals on the topic of illegal immigration center on refocusing enforcement on those who commit crimes in America.
It’s true that Americans would probably like to see more of ICE’s focus on illegal immigrants who commit crimes. But Democrats need to acknowledge that criminality isn’t the only reason that Americans don’t like illegal immigration. Some polls still show majority support for deporting all illegal immigrants, not just those with criminal records. Here’s a recent example:
Other polls show only a substantial minority in support. But these results suggest that criminal behavior isn’t the only concern that Americans have about illegal immigration. Some are undoubtedly worried about the strains on local government finances, others think immigrants compete with locals for jobs and housing, and still others are fearful of the cultural changes that immigration brings. But after years of reading the polls, I think many Americans are simply mad at the act of illegal immigration itself. When people cross the border illegally, they may not have hurt anyone, but they have flouted the American people’s democratic will:
If anyone on the planet is allowed to enter America and remain here as long as they don’t commit any other crimes, that is an open borders policy. And most Americans do not want open borders. Nor, I think, would most Democrats like to be associated with the idea of open borders. And yet that is exactly where the rhetoric of deporting only criminal illegal immigrants immediately leads.
Thus, Democrats need to remind the American public that illegal immigration is not to be tolerated, even when the people who come illegally are well-behaved. Bill Clinton did this in 1995:
But at the same time, Americans don’t support a policy of forcible mass deportation, of the type ICE is currently trying to do. Nor should they. So Democrats need to come up with a humane alternative for getting illegal immigrants out of the country.
There are basically two ways to do this:
Enforce laws against companies hiring undocumented workers.
Change the law on asylum-seeking.
We know that almost all illegal immigrants come to America for job opportunities — even those who try to stay in the country by claiming asylum. It’s natural to want to come work in a rich country! When there are few or no jobs to be had, illegal immigrants leave, as they did during the Great Recession:
Obviously we don’t want to create a recession just to make undocumented immigrants leave! But if we have the government investigate and fine companies that employ them, then companies will become much more averse to hiring people who are in the country illegally. That will decimate demand for undocumented labor, and there will be a big flood of illegal immigrants out of the country — without any detention centers, arrests, etc.1
The second thing Democrats can do is to close the asylum loophole that allows illegal immigrants to become legal residents simply by requesting asylum. Recently, Boston’s Mayor Michelle Wu took some heat for saying that “Every single human being has the legal right to come to the United States and seek shelter”. But in fact, she’s correct. Anyone on the planet can show up at a U.S. port of entry and request asylum. That’s a good law, and we should keep it. In addition, anyone who simply takes a plane to America on a tourist visa can request asylum once inside the country. That’s fine.
What’s far more problematic is that anyone who crosses the border illegally is entitled to request asylum without any discrimination against their application due to the fact that they entered illegally! I explained this back in 2024, and argued that we should change the law so that this is no longer possible:
[T]he U.S. wrote its asylum law to follow the 1967 version of the UN Convention on the Status of Refugees, which states that people who cross the border illegally are entitled to asylum hearings. These asylum seekers exist in a gray zone between “legal” and “illegal” immigration — they’re illegal when they cross the border and turn themselves in, then they’re legal while they await their asylum hearing, then if they get denied asylum (as most do) and stay in the country anyway they’re illegal again.
Most Americans simply do not understand how that system works. If they did understand, they’d probably vote to change the asylum law to deny hearings to — or at least penalize — people who crossed illegally. Meanwhile, among the few Americans who do understand how this system works — lawyers, policymakers, and various NGOs — there’s little appetite to reform the system. As a result, the American public sort of vaguely senses that its democratic will is being violated, but doesn’t exactly know how. And so general anger builds…
The solution, of course, is for Democrats — and responsible conservatives, and political leaders in general — to change America’s immigration system to make it more congruent with the democratic will. The asylum loophole should be abolished — crossing the border illegally should not be rewarded with the chance to stay in the country while awaiting an asylum hearing. Accepting lots of people into the country legally is fine — I will continue [to] support that, and I think Americans in general will agree with me. But if the American people have decreed that a person should not get in, they should not get in. And Democrats should make it clear to the public, with loud and certain rhetoric, that this is being done.
Enforcing laws against hiring undocumented labor on the corporate side, and changing our asylum law to penalize those who entered illegally, would send illegal immigration into reverse — all without the brutality of ICE.
Critics of Trump’s immigration crackdown often note that Barack Obama deported large numbers of illegal immigrants, especially during his first term. And this is true — by some measures, Obama deported people at an even faster pace than Trump has. And yes, one of the ways he did it was by focusing deportation efforts on illegal immigrants who commit crimes — just as many Democrats are now promising to do.
But the people who tout this record need to think a little harder about how Obama accomplished this. Much of it was done through ICE’s Secure Communities Program, which was established during the waning days of the Bush administration. Under this program, whenever state and local cops arrested someone, they would send their fingerprints to ICE to check their immigration status. ICE could then deport them if they were in the country illegally.
This program was extremely effective in deporting large numbers of illegal immigrants — who also happened to mostly be people who had committed crimes. But many progressive cities decided that programs like this were bad, and became “sanctuary cities”. Sanctuary cities enacted policies that made it difficult to transfer illegal immigrants from local custody to ICE custody, and which limited cooperation between local law enforcement and ICE in various other ways. This undermined the program. The Trump administration has spent a lot of effort trying to force cities to stop concealing illegal immigrants, and progressives have strongly resisted these efforts.
And yet if Democrats really do want to deport criminal illegal immigrants en masse, it will require cooperation between local law enforcement and ICE in blue cities. That means efforts like the Secure Communities Program under Obama, and it means not using local obstructionism to foil the federal government’s efforts to deport criminal illegal immigrants.
The problem here appears to be that while many Democrats pay lip service to the idea of deporting criminal illegal immigrants, they are unwilling to challenge progressive activists who thwart those efforts. At the grassroots level, many progressives see protecting the undocumented from deportation by hook or by crook, regardless of their criminal status, as a sort of crusade. Democrats at the national level need to tamp down this behavior by condemning this behavior. And Democrats at the local level need to understand that this “crusade” hurts the national party.
So combining all of these elements, we can see the overall contours of a liberal approach to immigration enforcement. It would concentrate on replacing violence and brutality with impersonal economic incentives, while making sure to deport criminals who are in the country illegally. And it would be animated by the idea that America is a good and legitimate country, and that welcoming immigrants is something Americans choose to do for their own benefit.
That, I think, is the kind of program that could present a durable, workable, favorable alternative to Trumpism, and help the Democrats win back power.
As Matt Yglesias explains, you can’t just do this by forcing employers to sign up for an “e-verify” system, because those who employ illegal immigrants simply won’t enter them in the system. But what you can do is investigate, prosecute, and fine companies that hire undocumented workers. This will exert quite a chilling effect.
Apple Newsroom:
Xcode 26.3 introduces support for agentic coding, a new way in Xcode for developers to build apps using coding agents such as Anthropic’s Claude Agent and OpenAI’s Codex. With agentic coding, Xcode can work with greater autonomy toward a developer’s goals — from breaking down tasks to making decisions based on the project architecture and using built-in tools.
I don’t know if this is super-duper interesting news, but I think it’s super-duper interesting that Apple saw the need to release this now, not at WWDC in June.
Flying from Bangkok to Hong Kong the other day, I had the pleasure of sampling one of Cathay Pacific’s new “Aria” suites on the Boeing 777-300. This is Cathay’s swanky new business class product, currently available on a limited number of routes. A shame it was only a two-hour flight.
The food and wine were excellent — the service expedited for such a short ride. Find me a two-hour flight in the U.S. with a meal like the one below.
The “hard product,” to borrow industry parlance for the suite itself, was comfy and spacious. The layout is the common 1-2-1 herringbone, each seat with an oversized tray table and 24-inch video screen. (And I love the way Cathay’s headsets, while not bluetooth, are pre-plugged, with the attachment point hidden neatly away in a small amenities closet.)
What impressed me most, though, was the level of privacy. If you’re in the center section, as I was, a moveable panel closes you off from your neighbor, while on the aisle side your upper body sits deep within the sculpted shoulder wing.
It wasn’t until halfway through the flight that I realized there also was a sliding door. And I had to wonder, why bother? There was more than ample privacy as it was. With the seat in the bed position, there was barely two feet of open space, roughly at the position of your knees or mid-thigh. From Cathay’s point of view, is installing doors really worth the extra weight and mechanical complexity?
Looks like they’ve been bullied into it. For better or worse, doors are the industry standard these days. Indeed, airlines have gone sliding-door crazy. It’s become an arms race of sorts, and your first or biz class seat can’t be considered world class unless it comes with one, no matter how needless the amenity might be.
In some cases it makes sense. The geometry of a suite can be such that the lack of a door leaves you feeling exposed. The photo above, for example, shows the inside of an Emirates first class suite with its doors closed to the aisle (there are two that slide together). Without them, there’d be too much openness, too much clatter from outside.
But many are cozy enough to begin with, and the presence of a door feels gratuitous — even a little silly. They’re simply not needed.
If you insist, consider the way Air France does it, with a floor-to-ceiling curtain ensconcing each first class occupant. This is a simpler, less expensive, and much more elegant concept than the clunkiness of a door. (A curtain needs to be hung, however, which presents a problem for most cabin designs.)
How to define and quantify comfort? I reckon there are smarter ways for airlines to invest. We’re talking now about “soft product” enhancements, like better food or more gracious service. The worst thing a carrier can do is become hyper-focused on material aspects while the rest of its product deteriorates. I’d rather have a more attentive crew, a better meal presentation, or a less chaotic boarding experience, than some flimsy door.
Photos by the Author.
The post What’s the Big Obsession With Doors? appeared first on AskThePilot.com.
This past week, over a series of events, the New York tech community celebrated the 30th anniversary of a nebulous idea described as “Silicon Alley”, the catch-all term for our greater collective of creators and collaborators, founders and funders, inventors and investors, educators and entrepreneurs and electeds, activists and architects and artists. Some of the parties or mixers have been typical industry affairs, the usual glad-handing about deal-making and pleasantries. But a lot have been deeper, reflecting on what’s special and meaningful about the community we’ve built in New York. Steven Rosenbaum’s reflection on the anniversary captures this well from someone who’s been there, and Leo Schwartz’s piece for Fortune covers the more conventional business angle.
Beyond the celebrations, though, I wanted to reflect on a number of the deeper conversations I’ve had over these last few days. These are conversations grounded in the reality of where our country and city are today, far beyond spaces where wealthy techies are going to parties and celebrating each other. The hard questions raised in these conversations are the ones that determine where this community goes in the future, and they’re the ones that every tech community is going to face in the current moment.
I know what the New York City tech community has been; there was a time when I was one of its most prominent voices. The question now is what it will be in the future. Because we are at a profound crossroads.
Nobody better exemplifies the best of what New York tech has been than Aaron Swartz. As I’d written about recently, he was brilliant and delightfully impossible. At an incredibly young age, he led our community in the battle to push back against a pair of ill-considered bills that threatened free expression on the Internet. (These bills would have done to the web what the current administration has done to broadcast television, having a chilling effect on free speech and putting large swaths of content under government control.) As we stood outside Chuck Schumer’s office and demanded that big business take their hands off our internet, we got our first glimpse of the immense power that our community could wield. And we won, at least for a while.
My own path within the New York tech community was nowhere near as dramatic, but I was just as motivated in wanting to serve the community. When I became the first person elected to the board of the New York Tech Meetup (later the New York Tech Alliance), it was the largest member-led organization of tech industry workers in the country. By the time it reached its peak, we were over 100,000 members strong, and could sell out one of our monthly events (at a venue of over 1000 attendees) in minutes. The collective power and impact of that cohort was immense. So, when I say “community”, I mean community. I’m not talking about the contemporary usage of the word, when people call their TikTok followers a “community”. I mean people who care about each other and show up for each other so that they can achieve meaningful things.
New York tech demonstrated its values time and again, and not just in organizing around policy that served its self-interest. When the city was still reeling from 9/11, these were people who not only chose to stay in the city, or who simply talked about how New York ought to rebuild, but actually took the risk and rebuilt the economy of the city — the majority of the economic regrowth and new jobs in New York City in the quarter-century since the attacks of 9/11 have happened thanks to the technology sector.
When Hurricane Sandy hit, these were people who were amongst the first to step up to help their neighbors dig out. When our city began to open up its data, the community responded in kind by building an entire ecosystem of new tools that laid the groundwork for the tech we now take for granted when navigating around our neighborhoods. There was no reluctance to talk about the importance of diversity and inclusion, and no apology in saying that tech was failing to do its job in hiring and promoting equitably, because we know how much talent is available in our city. Hackers would come to meetups to show off their startups, sure, but just as often to show off how they’d built cool new technology to help make sure our neighbors in public housing had heat in the winter. This was New York-style tech.
What’s more, the work of this community happened with remarkable solidarity; the SOPA/PIPA protests that Aaron Swartz spoke at had him standing next to some of the most powerful venture capitalists in the city. When it was time to take action, a number of the most influential tech CEOs in New York took Amtrak down to Washington, D.C. to talk to elected officials and their staffers about the importance of defending free expression online, advocating for the same issue that had been so important to the broke college kids who’d been at the rally just a few days earlier. People had actually gathered around principles. I don’t say this as a Pollyanna who thinks everything was perfect, or that things would have always stayed so idealistically aligned, but simply to point out that this did happen. I don’t have to assert that it is theoretically possible, because I have already seen a community which functions in this way.
But things have changed in recent years for New York’s tech community. What used to often be about extending a hand to neighbors has, much of the time, become about simply focusing on who’s getting funded to chase the trends defined by Silicon Valley. The vibrancy of the New York Tech Meetup took a huge hit from covid, preventing the ability for the community to gather in person, and the organization’s evolution from a Meetup to an Alliance to being part of Civic Hall shifted its focus in recent years, though there has been a recent push to revitalize its signature events. In its place, much of the public narrative for the community is led by Tech:NYC, which has active and able leadership, but is a far more conventional trade group. There's a focus on pragmatic tools like job listings (their email newsletter is excellent), but they're unlikely to lead a rally in front of a Senator's office. An organization whose founding members include Google and Meta is necessarily going to be different than one with 100,000 individual members.
When I spoke to the Wall Street Journal back in 2013 about the political and social power of our community, at a far different time, I called out the breadth of who our community includes:
The tech constituency encompasses a range of potential voters who remain unlikely to behave as a traditional bloc. "It's venture capitalists and 23-year-old graphic designers in Bushwick," Mr. Dash said. "It's labor and management. It's not traditional allies."
I wanted to make sure people understood that tech in New York is much broader than just, well, what the bosses and the big companies want. It is important to understand that New York is about founders, not just funders.
The distinction between these groups and their goals was never clearer to me than in the 2017 battle around Amazon’s proposed HQ2 headquarters. The public narrative was that Amazon was trying to make a few cities jump through hoops to make the best possible set of bribes to the company so that they would build a new headquarters complex in the host city. The reality was, New York City offered $1.5 billion dollars to the richest man in the world in order to open up an office in a city where the company was inevitably going to do business regardless, and the contract that Amazon would have to sign in exchange only obligated them to hire 500 new workers in the city — fewer people than their typical hiring plan would expect in that timeframe. In addition, the proposed plan would have taken over land intended for 6,000 homes, including 1500 affordable units, would have defunded the mass transit system through years of tax breaks for the company while putting massive additional burden on the transit system, and raised housing prices. (Amazon has since signed a lease for 335,000 square feet and hired over 1000 employees, without any subsidies.)
At the time, I was CEO of a company that two entrepreneurs had founded in 2000 and bootstrapped to success, leading to them spinning out multiple companies which would go on to exit for over $2.2 billion, providing over 500 jobs and creating dozens of millionaires out of the workers who joined the companies over the years. Several of the people who had worked at those companies went on to form their own companies, and those companies are now collectively worth over $5 billion. All of these companies, combined, have gotten a total of zero billion dollars from the state and city of New York. In addition, none of those companies have ever had working conditions anywhere close to those Amazon has been criticized for.
But the story of the time was that “New York tech wants HQ2!” Media like newspapers and TV were firmly convinced that techies were in support of Amazon getting a massive unnecessary handout, and I had genuinely struggled to figure out why for a long time. After a while, it became obvious. Everyone that they had spoken to, and all the voices that were considered canonical and credible when talking about “New York tech”, were investors or giant publicly-traded companies.
People who actually built things were no longer the voice of the community. Those who showed up when the power was out, or when the community was hurting, or when there was an issue that called for someone to bravely stand up and lead the crowd even if there was some social or political risk — they were not considered valid. People liked the myth of Aaron Swartz by then, but they would have ignored the fact that he almost certainly would have objected to corporate subsidy for the company.
I am still proud of the New York tech community. But that’s because I get to see what happens in person. Last week, I was reminded at every one of the in-person commemorations of the community that there are so many generous, kind-hearted, thoughtful people who will fight to do the right thing. The challenge today, though, is that those are no longer the people who define the story of the community. That’s not who a new person thinks of when they’re introduced to our community.
When I talk to young people who are new to the industry, or people who are changing careers who are curious about tech, they have heard of things like Tech Week, or they read trade press. In those venues, a big name is generally not our home-grown founders, or even the “big” success stories of New York tech. That’s especially true as once high-flying New York tech companies like Tumblr and Foursquare and Kickstarter and Etsy and Buzzfeed either faded or got acquired, and newer successful startups are more prosaic and less attention-grabbing. Who’s left to tell them a story of what “tech” means in New York? Where will they find community?
One possible future is that they try to build a startup, doing everything you’re “supposed” to do. They pitch the VC firms in town, and the big name firms that they’ve heard of. If they’re looking for community, they go to the events that get the most promotion, which might be Tech Week events. And all of these paths lead the same way — the most prominent VC firm is Andreessen Horowitz, and they run Tech Week too, even though they’re not from NYC.
On that path, New York tech puts you across the table from the man who strangled my neighbor to death.
Another possible future is that we rebuild the kind of community that we used to have. We start to get together the people who actually make things, and show off what we’ve built for one another. It’s going to require re-centering the hundreds of thousands of people who create and invent, rather than the dozens of people who write checks. It’s going to mean that the stories start with New York City (and maybe even… in the outer boroughs!), rather than taking dictation from those in Silicon Valley who hate our city. And it’s going to require understanding that technology is a set of tools and tactics we can use in service of goals — ideally positive social goals — and not just an economic opportunity to be extracted from.
We would never talk about education by only talking to those who invest in making pencils. We’d never consider a story about a new movie to be complete if we only talked to those who funded the film. And certainly our policymakers would balk if we skipped speaking with them and instead aimed our policy questions directly at their financial backers, though that might result in more accurate responses. Yet somehow, with technology, we’ve given over the narrative entirely to the money men.
In New York, we’ve borne the brunt of that error. A tech community with heart and soul is in danger of being snuffed out by those who will only let its most base instincts survive. Even our investors here are more thoughtful than these stories would make it seem! But we can change it, and maybe even change the larger tech story, if we’re diligent in never letting the bad actors control the narrative of what tech is in the world.
Like so many good things, it can all start with New York City.
He’s Amplified Faked Porn of Real People, and Cutting Him off Is $Imple
Fake pictures of women nude or in pornographic situations have been around for a while. Elon Musk’s AI program Grok, and it’s easy connection to his X social media, have exponentially amplified and simplified that. He could easily choose not to.
Why should he? There was an interview recently that spells it all out very well. It was on the NPR show Science Friday. The interview was with Hany Farid, professor at UC Berkeley School of Information who has studied related issues for decades. Here I quote both his interview and his message to me when I asked more about all this.
One problem is the volume of abusively fake images. Just in recent weeks it has exploded as people unskilled in making them have discovered that with a few clicks and prompts they can make excellent ones in seconds using Grok.
Another problem is the quality. You can grab any image you have or off the net and tell Grok to put the person in some pornographic situation and it will perfectly put their face on a AI generated image while maintaining the background. So it looks like that person is in a setting they would know while doing whatever. They are so good that, in testing, people have little better odds than simply guessing whether it’s real or not.
A third problem is what it does to people. Did you have some social awkwardness in high school? Imagine if, back then, someone made a horribly embarrassing fake picture, put it on social media bound to be seen by many, and now you have to spend the day in school, while trying to deny it’s real. All while you don’t know if it was some of them who made it. And in adult life, with that kind of picture out there, will you get the job offer? The rental you’re applying for? The date through the dating app you’re trying for?
A fourth problem is it’s sometimes images of children, as reported by The Verge.
And fifth is sometimes such images of teenagers aren’t just for posting, they’re sent to the victims to extort them.
The New York Times just reported that the European Union is investigating the X platform for possible violation of their regulations on these issues. In response they say, “X limited Grok’s A.I. image creation to users who paid for premium features” and, “later expanded those guardrails, saying that it would no longer allow anyone to prompt Grok’s X account for ‘images of real people in revealing clothing such as bikinis.’ That sounds like a loophole. As if people who pay, and people who use Grok directly then post either on X or other social media can continue. Unclear but the European Union is not satisfied and is proceeding with their investigation.
The thing is there are simple fixes for this. I love when big problems have simple fixes. Those are called elegant solutions.
One of those solutions would be as simple as Elon Musk deciding he’s rich enough that he doesn’t have to allow this to happen. As Mr. Farid pointed out, “take many of the prompts that you’re seeing people put into Grok AI and try to put them into OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, and it won’t work” because those companies have simply programmed filters into their AI to refuse such requests. Obviously Grok could be programmed the same. As Mr. Farid pointed out though we need to stop simply appealing to media CEOs and hope they’ll play nice when there are solutions with more clout.
Along those lines he had several other solutions that don’t depend on Musk or media CEOs. They are conceptually simple. They’re not easy because they all have to do with money, but they are doable.
One: Apple and Google could easily declare the app a violation of their app store policies because of it being used for so much abuse, and they could refuse to carry the app. Boom! Suddenly step one, get the app, is blocked.
Two: Stop the advertising that goes with it. When these images are posted on social media a great deal of them are shown next to ads. If many of the biggest advertisers were shamed into demanding that their ads not be shown next to such images, the profit behind it would take a huge hit. In his message he noted about the advertisers, “they hold the power to effect change.”
Three: Mr. Farid noted that there are also websites, separate from Grok or X, that offer making such images as a service. Upload a picture, ask what you want it turned into, pay a fee, and they’ll make the fake for you. But did you notice a little phrase in there, “pay a fee”? How is that fee paid? Often such sites accept standard credit cards and common online payment systems. Shame those big banks and financial companies into refusing to process for such sites and there goes that system. Mr. Farid noted in his message this has actually been done before, when PornHub lost the ability to accept payments after revelations of child pornography. Fake image sites could get around the ban by accepting payment in crypto but most novices don’t know how to make raw crypto transactions. They only do it through some financial service that handles it for them. Same thing. Shame those financial services into refusing those sites. The beauty of this solution is it even applies to sites hosted in countries where there is no law or enforcement that would otherwise stop it.
So, there are simple solutions to a big problem, a serious problem that does serious damage to many people, where the only issue is a small hit to the money some big companies make. If it’s the big companies and the profits that decide the end result and the damage to people is allowed to continue, doesn’t that perfectly fit the definition of an oligarchy? Seriously, how else can one explain such a result? Bernie Sanders is being right on target.
The post Musk, Horrific Abuse, Simple Fix appeared first on DCReport.org.
To the office all the morning, at noon to dinner, where Mr. Creed dined with me, and Mr. Ashwell, with whom after dinner I discoursed concerning his daughter coming to live with us. I find that his daughter will be very fit, I think, as any for our turn, but the conditions I know not what they will be, he leaving it wholly to her, which will be agreed on a while hence when my wife sees her. After an hour’s discourse after dinner with them, I to my office again, and there about business of the office till late, and then home to supper and to bed.
export DENO_DEPLOY_TOKEN="... API token ..."
uv run --with deno-sandbox pythonThen:
from deno_sandbox import DenoDeploy sdk = DenoDeploy() with sdk.sandbox.create() as sb: # Run a shell command process = sb.spawn( "echo", args=["Hello from the sandbox!"] ) process.wait() # Write and read files sb.fs.write_text_file( "/tmp/example.txt", "Hello, World!" ) print(sb.fs.read_text_file( "/tmp/example.txt" ))
There’s a JavaScript client library as well. The underlying API isn’t documented yet but appears to use WebSockets.
There’s a lot to like about this system. Sandboxe instances can have up to 4GB of RAM, get 2 vCPUs, 10GB of ephemeral storage, can mount persistent volumes and can use snapshots to boot pre-configured custom images quickly. Sessions can last up to 30 minutes and are billed by CPU time, GB-h of memory and volume storage usage.
When you create a sandbox you can configure network domains it’s allowed to access.
My favorite feature is the way it handles API secrets.
with sdk.sandboxes.create( allowNet=["api.openai.com"], secrets={ "OPENAI_API_KEY": { "hosts": ["api.openai.com"], "value": os.environ.get("OPENAI_API_KEY"), } }, ) as sandbox: # ... $OPENAI_API_KEY is available
Within the container that $OPENAI_API_KEY value is set to something like this:
DENO_SECRET_PLACEHOLDER_b14043a2f578cba...
Outbound API calls to api.openai.com run through a proxy which is aware of those placeholders and replaces them with the original secret.
In this way the secret itself is not available to code within the sandbox, which limits the ability for malicious code (e.g. from a prompt injection) to exfiltrate those secrets.
From a comment on Hacker News I learned that Fly have a project called tokenizer that implements the same pattern. Adding this to my list of tricks to use with sandoxed environments!
Via Hacker News
Tags: python, sandboxing, security, deno, fly
I just sent the January edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. In the newsletter for January:
Here's a copy of the December newsletter as a preview of what you'll get. Pay $10/month to stay a month ahead of the free copy!
Tags: newsletter
This is the difference between Data and a large language model, at least the ones operating right now. Data created art because he wanted to grow. He wanted to become something. He wanted to understand. Art is the means by which we become what we want to be. [...]
The book, the painting, the film script is not the only art. It's important, but in a way it's a receipt. It's a diploma. The book you write, the painting you create, the music you compose is important and artistic, but it's also a mark of proof that you have done the work to learn, because in the end of it all, you are the art. The most important change made by an artistic endeavor is the change it makes in you. The most important emotions are the ones you feel when writing that story and holding the completed work. I don't care if the AI can create something that is better than what we can create, because it cannot be changed by that creation.
— Brandon Sanderson, via Guido van Rossum
Tags: ai-ethics, generative-ai, art, ai, llms, guido-van-rossum
Winter had begun to consume Boise, Idaho a few weeks earlier. A constant drizzle of rain blanketed the region. If you’re a plant aficionado like Martin DeVido, you know this is not the ideal time to start growing summery treats like tomatoes and melons. Unless, perhaps, artificial intelligence could devise a way to defy the conditions.
It was this very idea that hit DeVido one day, as he wandered around his house, avoiding the dreary situation outdoors. “I wonder if Claude could take care of a plant.”
A year ago, a few things happened in DeVido’s life to prepare him for this moment. The 36-year-old California native moved to Idaho with his wife, discovered AI, and launched his AI-assisted manufacturing startup Autoncorp. “I was like, okay, this is my calling. This is my passion. I’m all in,” DeVido said. “I couldn’t sleep. It was crazy. I mean, I was just LLM psychosis to the max.”
For the last few years I’ve been helping run Edinburgh Gravel Cycling Club, a large ish community for folks into gravel cycling. It’s been a lot of fun, very rewarding and I’ve made many, many wonderful friends through it.
I was asked if I’d like speak about it at a monthly event called Towpath Talks. This is the audio of that talk. And because I refer to lots of photos and slides, here are the slides to tap along to if you like. (One day someone will work out how to bring these two things together and they will make a fortune.)
It was fun! It’s been a while since I spoke about anything, let alone something that wasn’t computers or work. Maybe I’ll do it again in a decade when I’ve got something else to say.
Broad daylight, actually
The Washington Post adopted the slogan “Democracy dies in darkness” in February 2017. Some found it pompous, but it reflected a widespread theory about how authoritarianism could come to America. This theory, based on the experience of democratic erosion in nations like Hungary and the work of scholars like Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, argued that autocracy wouldn’t be imposed by armed men beating and killing the regime’s opponents.
Authoritarian rule, would, instead, be installed through a gradual process of subversion. Key institutions, especially the news media, would be coopted or deprived of financing. Businesses would knuckle under so as not to be shut out of crony capitalism. Dissenters would be marginalized rather than sent to gulags.
The trajectory of the Post itself shows how that could work. The newspaper that broke the story of Watergate and brought down Richard Nixon has been Bezosified, its editorial independence destroyed and its newsroom increasingly eviscerated. Many other institutions, from other media organizations to some universities to law firms, have also become enablers of the regime. Big business has caved almost completely.
But it turns out that predictions of creeping authoritarianism both underestimated and overestimated MAGA. Almost everyone, myself included, underestimated how far MAGA would go in engaging in open violence and abuse of power against those it considers enemies. On the other hand, we overestimated the movement’s impulse control, its ability to mask its tyrannical goals until its power was fully consolidated.
As Steven Levitsky said in a recent interview, comparing Donald Trump with Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban,
Orbán doesn’t arrest journalists. And in Hungary if you walk the streets of Budapest or other Hungarian cities, you will not find heavily armed masked men abducting people. That doesn’t happen in Hungary.
The startling extremism of the Trump regime, even compared with other modern wannabe dictatorships, is obvious to the naked eye. But I always find quantification useful. So I was very pleased to see that the estimable John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times has risen to the occasion, producing an index of democratic backsliding that lets us compare the trajectory of the United States under Trump with those of other nations we used to view as cautionary tales. (I’ve looked at how the index is constructed, and it’s reasonable.) We’re on a uniquely steep descent, at least for modern times:
It’s a horrifying picture. Yet the flip side of the naked extremism of the MAGA power grab is that it has produced a remarkably strong backlash. The size and determination of civil resistance to ICE has been incredible and inspiring, like nothing we’ve seen since the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. Republicans are being punished at the polls: On Saturday a deep-red Texas Senate district that went Trump +17 in 2024 voted in a Democrat with a 15-point margin.
I keep asking two questions as ICE runs wild. First, what is the strategy here? How do Trump, Stephen Miller, etc. think this is going to work for them? Maybe their initial belief was that a display of force would shock and awe their opponents into submission. It’s not happening, yet they just keep ramping up the threats and violence, apparently not knowing how to do anything else.
The obvious answer is that there isn’t any strategy. These people aren’t evil masterminds — evil, yes, but masterminds, no. They’re just thugs too crude and undisciplined to control their own thuggishness. They were caught off guard by the strength of the resistance because the very concept of citizens standing up for their principles is alien to them, and they still can’t believe it’s real.
The second question is, how does this end? Most immediately, what will happen during and after the midterm elections? Everything points to a blue wave in November. Yet many people in MAGA simply can’t accept losing power — among other things, their actions over the past year mean that if they lose power, many of them will go to jail.
Trump is now calling for “nationalizing” the midterms, meaning to put voting and the counting of votes under his administration’s control. He can’t do that, but his demand is a clear sign that he will not accept the public’ s verdict in November.
So it’s just being realistic to say that MAGA will try, somehow, to prevent voters from having their say. Will ICE try to prevent blue districts from voting? If that fails, will they reject the results, in a midterm version of Jan. 6? Call me alarmist, but remember: The alarmists have been right, and the people telling us to calm down have been wrong, every step of the way.
MUSICAL CODA
A few commenters on this video called it “woke propaganda.” And it’s true that it offers a vision of multi-cultural, multiracial harmony (literally.) I think it’s beautiful.
Here is the tweet, here is the source data.
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1. The discourse is getting both smarter and dumber.
2. Seb Krier.
3. New report on economics of human longevity.
4. Alex Ross on the great Morton Feldman (New Yorker).
5. The case for optimism in South Africa (The Economist).
7. Latin American modernism, Caracas edition 1960s.
The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
It has been a very long time since we took the night off.
I hate to do it because there is so much to record, but it appears that if we wait for a slow day to take a rest there will be no days off at all.
So let’s take a breather and come back to it fresh tomorrow.
[This was January's full moon, and here we are in February's already.]
American troops held on grimly at Bastogne, slowing the German advance toward Antwerp.
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him. He is a Professor of History at Northwestern, specializing in Mexico and to some extent the Caribbean. He has translated a Mexican book on Edgar Allan Poe. I am learning a good deal from his new 700 pp. book Mexico: A 500-Year History, and I very much like his earlier work on Mexico and violence. Here is an NYT review of the new book.
So what should I ask him?
The post What should I ask Paul Gillingham? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
‘Tis the season for long and ruler-straight cracks in McMurdo Sound’s sea ice. Though natural breaks in sea ice are called leads, the better term for the human-made fracture seen in these satellite images is a ship channel.
In the austral summer, usually in January, an icebreaker rams a path through the fast ice—a type of sea ice that is anchored to the shore—that often covers McMurdo Sound. This annual effort allows cargo ships to reach McMurdo Station, a research base operated by the United States Antarctic Program. The U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Polar Star completed the task in January 2026, arriving after breaking a path through several miles of ice between the Ross Sea and an ice pier at McMurdo. Most of the channel was cut between January 19 and 20.
The animation above, made of images captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 and 9, offers satellite views of the icebreaker’s work. Images were captured on January 2, 7, 19, 20, 23, 25, and 27. The nearly 120-meter (400-foot) vessel weighs 13,500 tons and has thick steel-plated hulls. With 75,000 shaft horsepower, it’s the world’s most powerful non-nuclear icebreaker.
The ship sometimes conducts search-and-rescue missions as well. On January 17, the day marking its 50th year of service, the Polar Star responded to a call from an Australian cruise ship in the Ross Sea hampered by thick, pack ice—a type of sea ice unattached to the shoreline that drifts. After making two close passes to break up the ice and clear a path, the Polar Star escorted the cruise ship 4 nautical miles (7 kilometers) to open water in the Ross Sea, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.
Established in 1955, McMurdo Station is the southernmost point on Earth accessible by ship. With a population that swells to 1,200 in the summer, it is the largest research station in Antarctica, hosting a harbor, two airfields, and a helicopter pad. Though once powered by a portable nuclear reactor known as “Nukey Poo,” the base now runs on energy from diesel electric generators and a wind farm on Crater Hill.
With the ship passage open, McMurdo Station is slated to receive two large deliveries this summer. The Stena Polaris, a tanker, arrived on January 20 with 5 million gallons of diesel fuel. Plantijngracht, a cargo ship, will arrive later with food, supplies, and parts of a new floating pier that will replace the traditional ice pier that military engineers have constructed each winter to give ships somewhere to unload cargo.
The U.S. National Science Foundation manages McMurdo Station and much of the science conducted there. NASA has also been involved in several projects at the base over the years. For instance, NASA’s McMurdo Ground Station, a Near Space Network facility, is used to download data from polar-orbiting satellites such as Landsat 9 and SMAP. The agency also flew its Operation Ice Bridge airborne campaign from McMurdo in 2013 and regularly launches research balloons from the station as part of its scientific ballooning program.
The Polar Star typically remains at McMurdo through March to keep the ship passage clear and returns to its home port of Seattle in April.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
Sea ice around the southernmost continent hit one of its lowest seasonal highs since the start of the satellite record.
Satellite data show that Arctic sea ice likely reached its annual minimum extent on September 10, 2025.
A moderately intense season of surface melting left part of the ice sheet dirty gray in summer 2025, but snowfall…
The post Cracking Antarctic Sea Ice appeared first on NASA Science.
A really bad one (boldface mine):
In a post that included a stylized graphic of a presumed federal officer holding a gun to someone’s head, Illini Republicans stated that they “stand with ICE” amid the killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota.
The RSO referred to Pretti and Good, two United States citizens who were both killed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in the past month, as “traitors.”
…The graphic, however, seems to match a still photo from a video of Pretti’s killing. The man depicted also appears to bear a physical resemblance to Pretti.
The group stated it does not “endorse violence nor discrimination towards anyone based on their identification with a specific protected group,” and that the groups message is that it supports “the enforcement of the law and those who enforce it.”
If a college Democrats group did this, everyone from Chuck Schumer on down would be forced to disavow this. But what is obviously a celebration of Pretti’s murder by college Republicans? Crickets.
Remember that these misanthropic fascists are the supposed future of the Republican Party. There is no balm in Gilead to heal these sin sick souls.
As the author of a forthcoming book (Moral Economics) I now get book-related emails from publicists, podcasters and others. But I suspect I was the first human to see the email below, inviting me to be featured in a book club, which began with this sentence:
"I’m writing because "The Nash solution and the utility of bargaining" has stayed with me, thoughtful, layered, and resonant in a way that invites real conversation. It felt like the kind of book our readers would want to spend time with."
It purported to come from the organizer of an apparently real book club (Bellatrist), but alas the return email didn't pass the smell test (despite coming from such a perceptive reader of the paper below...)
Roth, Alvin E. "The Nash solution and the utility of bargaining." Econometrica (1978)
Abstract: "It has recently been shown that the utility of playing a game with side payments depends on a parameter called strategic risk posture. The Shapley value is the risk neutral utility function for games with side payments. In this paper, utility functions are derived for bargaining games without side payments, and it is shown that these functions are also determined by the strategic risk posture. The Nash solution is the risk neutral utility function for bargaining games without side payments."
Thoughtful, layered and resonant.
The metaphor of rewiring offers an ideal of engineered precision. But the brain is more like a forest than a circuit board
- by Peter Lukacs
Finance theory is in even more trouble than we had thought:
Mining 29,000 accounting ratios for t-statistics > 2.0 leads to cross-sectional return predictability similar to the peer review process. For both, ≈ 50% of predictability remains after the original sample periods. This finding holds for many categories of research, including research with risk or equilibrium foundations. Only research agnostic about the theoretical explanation for predictability shows signs of outperformance. Our results imply that inferences about post-sample performance depend little on whether the predictor is peer-reviewed or data mined. They also have implications for the importance of empirical vs theoretical evidence, investors’ learning from academic research, and the effectiveness of data mining.
That is from a new paper by Andrew Y. Chen, Alejandro Lopez-Lira, and Tom Zimmermann. Via KingoftheCoast.
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From Michael Coren at The Washington Post:
The child development researchers I spoke to about it? Practically blasé. They saw screens as a valuable tool — overused but useful — that can help families when handled well.
What I didn’t hear: bans, panic or moral judgments. It was framed as a choice — one you can make better or worse. Researchers expressed a lot of compassion for parents squaring off against massive technology companies whose profit models aren’t always aligned with what’s best for children’s health.
“I am just a lot more concerned about how we design the digital landscape for kids than I am about whether we allow kids to use screens or not,” said Heather Kirkorian, an early childhood development researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I haven’t seen concrete evidence that convinces me that screen use itself is creating problematic behavior.”
And for older age groups, there is a new NBER working paper by David G. Blanchflower and Alex Bryson, excerpt:
The change in the age profile of workers’ wellbeing may reflect changes in selection into (out of) employment by age, changes in job quality, or changes in young workers’ orientation to similar jobs over time. But changes in smartphone usage – often the focus of debate regarding declining young peoples’ wellbeing – are unlikely to be the main culprit unless there are sizeable differences in smartphone usage across young workers and non-workers, which appears unlikely.
I am a great believer in work as a way to help improve mental health problems. Here is a quick discussion of media bias on the screens issue. I would stress that none of what I am citing here is at variance with mainstream perspectives on these issues.
The post Mainstream research views on kids, teens, and screens appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
A dress rehearsal countdown for NASA’s Artemis 2 moon rocket, intended to clear the way for a possible February launch, ran into a variety of problems and ultimately was called off early Tuesday because of an out-of-limits hydrogen leak. Shortly after, NASA announced the long awaited flight to send four astronauts on a trip around the moon, was being delayed to March at the earliest.
“With the conclusion of the wet dress rehearsal today, we are moving off the February launch window and targeting March for the earliest possible launch of Artemis 2,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a post on X.
“We fully anticipated encountering challenges,” he said. “That is precisely why we conduct a wet dress rehearsal. These tests are designed to surface issues before flight and set up launch day with the highest probability of success.”
Artemis 2 commander Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, in pre-flight medical quarantine at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, had hope to fly to Florida Tuesday to begin final preparations for launch. Instead, they will remain in Houston and rejoin family, friends and co-workers.
The practice countdown began Saturday evening — two days late because of frigid weather along Florida’s Space Coast — and after a meeting Monday morning to assess the weather and the team’s readiness to proceed, Launch Director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson cleared engineers to begin the remotely-controlled fueling operation.
The test got underway about 45 minutes later than planned, but it initially appeared to be proceeding smoothly as supercold liquid oxygen and hydrogen fuel were pumped into the Space Launch System rocket’s first stage tanks. Shortly after, hydrogen began flowing into the rocket’s upper stage as planned.
But after the first stage hydrogen tank was about 55 percent full, a leak was detected at an umbilical plate where a fuel line from the launch pad is connected to the base of the SLS rocket’s first stage. After a brief pause, engineers resumed fuel flow but again cut it off with the tank about 77 percent full.
After more discussion, engineers were able to press ahead by stopping the flow of hydrogen, “allowing the interface to warm up for the seals to reseat, and adjusting the flow of propellant,” NASA said in a blog post.
With all the rocket’s tanks full and in “stable replenish,” a five-member closeout team was dispatched to the pad to ready the Orion crew capsule for a simulated crew arrival and then to close and test the two hatches leading into the spacecraft.
The countdown was originally timed for a simulated launch at 9 p.m. EST, But troubleshooting the hydrogen leak, communications dropouts and other issues caused the test to run longer than planned. As of 10 p.m., the countdown was in an extended hold at the T-minus 10-minute mark.
The count finally resumed just after midnight only to be stopped a final time at T-minus five minutes and 15 seconds when the automated Ground Launch Sequencer detected an increase in the leak seen earlier and stopped the clock for good.
“The team will fully review the data, troubleshoot each issue encountered during WDR, make the necessary repairs, and return to testing,” Isaacman said. “We expect to conduct an additional wet dress rehearsal and then target the March window.”
Five launch opportunities are available next month, beginning March 6 and ending on March 11.
The SLS is the rocket NASA plans to use to send Artemis astronauts to the moon aboard Orion crew capsules. It is the most powerful operational launcher in the world, a towering 332-foot-tall rocket powered by two strap-on solid fuel boosters and four main engines burning liquid oxygen and hydrogen fuel that generate 8.8 million pounds of thrust at liftoff.
The SLS rocket’s first and so far only mission came in 2022 when it was launched on an unpiloted test flight. In the campaign leading up to launch, engineers ran into a variety of problems ranging from fuel leaks to unexpected propellant flow behavior in the launch pad’s plumbing. Launch was delayed for months while engineers worked to resolve the problems.
For the rocket’s second launch, multiple upgrades and improvements were implemented and Blackwell-Thompson said last week she was optimistic the fueling test would go well.
“Why do we think that we’ll be successful? It’s the lessons that we learned,” she said.
“Artemis I was the test flight, and we learned a lot during that campaign, getting to launch,” she said. “And the things that we learned relative to how to go load this vehicle, how to load LOX (liquid oxygen), how to load hydrogen, have all been rolled in to the way in which we intend to load the Artemis II vehicle.”
Most of the fixes and upgrades appeared to work as planned. But leakage at the tail service mast umbilical, a problem during the first Artemis flight in 2022, cropped up again the second time around.
Most galaxies don't have any rings -- why does this galaxy have three?
